Posts Tagged ‘london’

The Crappy Job Chronicles

Thursday, February 7th, 2008


There are certain jobs where there’s a good camaraderie with your colleagues. Nightclub coat check girls form a bond, a code of ethics, a sense of loyalty not unlike that of say, the marines. When you go to work each night, you’re preparing for battle.

 

Oh sure, the beginning of the night is all air-kisses and pleasantries, but the end is a complete clusterfuck of cokeheads, drunks, lost tickets, screaming matches, ultimate fighting championships and police cars.

 

The club where I worked, in Ladbroke Grove, had previously been quite a hovel, notorious for drugs and violence. Then it was shut down and bought out by people who owned a chic hipster hangout, not far away, in Notting Hill. They gave it a makeover and it attracted a new, more up market crowd (read: hardcore cokeheads).

 

There were usually two or three of us working the coat check and a small army of security working the front of the club. They were there as much to protect us, as they were anything else. (That’s when they weren’t too preoccupied sexually harassing us.)

 

The majority of the night would be pretty fun. People would arrive within in a two-hour or so time span. Once all their coats had been hung, the rest of the night was spent horsing around, shooting the shit with security or sneaking into the club for a quick boogie.

 

Yep, it was all fun and games until the clock struck (the dreaded) 3am.

 

At 2.55am, my fellow coat check comrades and I would suit up and ready ourselves for war. At 3am, the music died, club doors flung open and a few hundred club goers descended on the coat check en masse.

 

They’d charge at us waving tickets, complaining they’d lost theirs or sometimes just wanted to engage you with their drunken tale of how they just broke up with their girlfriend.

 

Our job was to deal with all this as quickly as possible. The coat check was a pretty confined area so we were falling over ourselves and each other, digging through mounds of coats while trying to keep people calm and get the security guards hands off our asses.

 

People who’d lost their ticket had to wait till the end and that never went down well. They’d insist on holding everyone up while they drunkenly explain to you theirs is the black jacket with three buttons down the front, or was it four? No, wait, three. Maybe, two?

 

On one particularly busy night, a woman gave us her ticket and we looked for her coat. Try as we might, we couldn’t find it anywhere. She was out of it and extremely annoying. She kept screaming the description of the coat and as I waded through the 700 or so jackets, 699 of them seemed to match the description. I guess her last hit of coke was wearing off because her nagging had reached a whole new level. She had all three of us ready to drop kick her in the face or pay security to do it.

 

We combed every inch of the coat check while she screamed about how she’d make sure we paid for it if we’d lost it.

 

Eventually, I found it. It was a hideous little number that couldn’t have cost more than £29.99 from New Look. I held it up.

 

“This is it? This?! I would have done you a favor losing this piece of crap, you wanker. Take your shitty jacket and piss off.”

 

The one and only time we did actually lost someone’s jacket was not pleasant. Apparently he was a semi-big drug dealer in the area (he didn’t seem to be following the golden ‘never get high on your own supply’ rule though). He threatened to come back and kill us. A little extreme maybe, but there are certain jackets in my collection that would totally warrant a death threat if they were lost. So, I can’t say I blame him. But I did high tail it out of there like my ass was on fire that night.

 

Usually one of the bouncers would drive me home. Sometimes we’d stop at the all night bagel place in Shepherd’s Bush for a bite. I’d be at home tucked up in bed by 5am, ready to get up and do it all over again the next night. Ahh, all this talk of cokeheads and bagels is making me all misty eyed and homesick.

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Posted in fashion | 2 Comments »

From Russia With Love

Thursday, December 20th, 2007


I had a blast living in Spanish Harlem. I was pretty much the only white person in a 10-block radius, but that never bothered me. The UK tends to be much more liberal in terms of race relations and with upwards of 60 million people living on that tiny island, you live side by side and on top of people from all corners of the world. But even in the melting pot that is New York, it’s incredibly segregated by comparison, which kind of freaked me out. Whenever I told people where I lived, they’d always say ‘Oh, so you’re looking for a new place right?’ I had a great apartment in a cool neighborhood with very little trouble (well, there was that one guy who got killed in the bodega across the street, but apart from that…)

 

When I first moved there, the locals were very wary of me, pegging me as an undercover cop. If the police department ever sent someone as pale as me undercover in that part of town, I don’t think it would be a very successful rouse.

 

Over time, I got to know a girl in my building. Fatima was a 250 pound black girl. Her entire bottom row of teeth were gold and she looked like if she blew on me hard enough, she could knock me out. Obviously, this was someone I should be friends with.

 

No matter what time of day or night I got home, Fatima was always outside the building talking on her cell phone. The more we saw each other, the more we’d exchange a word or two.

 

“Hey mama, how you doin’?” She’d ask when she’d see me crossing the street. “Oh, yo outfit so cute! Yo accent so cute too! Listen to her talk,” she’s say, nudging whoever was standing next to her.

 

Arriving home one night in the wee hours to see Fatima outside on her phone (I don’t get why none of her phone calls could be conducted in her apartment, but whatever). She hung up and we engaged in our usual banter. There was a group of guys outside, all eyeing me skeptically. I said goodnight to Fatima and walked past the guys, their eyes burning through me, to get into the building.

 

The next day, I saw Fatima. She approached me, wide-grinned.

 

“Ooooh girl, all the boys be askin’ ‘bout you. They be all ‘yo, who that Russian chick?’”

 

I got a good laugh out of that one. Luckily, my gold-toothed amigo set them straight on my origin.

 

From that point onwards, the locals couldn’t have been friendlier. They’d find any excuse to talk to me just to hear this accent they’d heard so much about. I did half consider playing along with the Russian thing for a while. I think everyone was so happy I wasn’t an undercover cop, I might just have pulled it off.

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Posted in life | 2 Comments »