The Workaholic Hostess

There are so many hostesses. So many girls in heels and makeup and fancy hair.

On my way to work I see them on their cell phones, on the arms of guys that pay for them, following the young slick men who manage them, or buying a snack at the convenience store before work. On my way home I see them staggering around, halfway dressed out of their work gear into casual clothes (stockings and funky shorts, or in my case tonight, a sweat suit and Patsy Stone hair and face), alcohol breath and perfume wafting out of them. One girl kept drunkenly dropping the rice ball she was trying to buy.

Two girls came into the club while I was opening it up. They wanted an interview. They'd never worked as hostesses before, but they wanted to give it a try.

Where do they keep coming from?

What am I doing with my life!?

I'm gonna flip out when I quit. But I just can't keep doing this.

I don't know how this happened, but me and Mama are suddenly kind of friends. I used to just hate her so much! Now I feel like my hatred for her was a bit unreasonable. But she just seemed like such a lazy rude bitch, and I think I had a lot of issues of my own.

There's a new Family Mart convenience store that happily opened right above our club. There's a convenience store across the busy intersection, around the corner, and also diagonally across from us. But I can't stress to you how excited a convenience store DIRECTLY ABOVE THE CLUB makes all of us girls.

Since the convenience store just opened, they're selling a whole bunch of stuff for cheap. So after closing the club, me and Mama went to look around and buy some stuff. I kept saying things like "Mama look over here, these are all 50yen off," and stuff like that. Then I realized that we might possibly look like an actual mother and daughter pair. Which slightly freaked me out.

I got an obnoxious email from a customer. After I sent him a slang-ridden email (it wasn't even that bad), he told me that he doesn't like that type of language. I immediately apologized. I know that I'm just like a flavor of ice cream or whatever, and he's telling me to not do something that irks him, the way you might ask for your banana split with no sprinkles. But it still kind of pissed me off. I'm not a banana split, I'm a human being! But not to him, I'm just a hostess.

So after work, I went on my own to Slugger's bar, and he made me feel better.

I can't wait to pass out in my messy bed right now.

おやすみ

Since I became a hostess/as I approach 30:

-I spend more and more on maintaining my skin. Guess how much these four bottles cost, combined? I feel ridiculous telling you, but they cost about 700 dollars! I'm so stupid! And this isn't even all of the stuff I have. I highly recommend the purple bottle though, it's called Moisture Liposome by Cosme Decorte. It costs 150~200 dollars, but it's actually worth it.

skincare

ab fab

So are all of the above things I'm doing to fight off the inevitable Big Three Oh that's rapidly approaching? Would I be doing all this even if I just worked in an office? I may never know...

I gave Dancer Girl a Santa Clause bag full of dresses. She wore a puffy strapless short princess dress and it looked so cute on her. For a split second I thought about taking it back, but then realized that I just never ever wore it and that my room is a closet and I can't keep excess stuff in it.

Right after putting on the dress and looking awesome, she lifted her leg up to show me something on her knee. "Look!" she said, pointing at a...bruise! "And look!" she said, sticking her elbow up to reveal a pretty nasty welt. She doesn't remember how she got those bruises, but she has been drunk, and she's a Japanese girl, which seems to be reason enough to have mystery bruises.

Had another date with my tall, handsome gay friend Shia.

When he first immigrated to Canada from the war-torn European country he comes from, he lived across the hall from a countryman. He was delighted to be so near someone from his home country, and they became really good friends. Shia told him he was gay, and the guy was cool with it, but made it clear that he wasn't. The guy across the hall started dating a girl, things got serious, and the three of them would sometimes go out together.

Shia sometimes asked the guy if he wanted to go with him to a gay club, just to have some fun. The guy always said something to the effect of "noooooo no no no, hells to the hell no." One day the guy's girlfriend said she'd go with Shia to the gay club, and the guy hell-to-the-no-ed it back home and left them to it.

That night, she came on to Shia, and next thing you know, they had sex. My mind just about exploded. To me, Shia isn't the type of guy to sleep with a good friend's partner. And he definitely isn't the type to sleep with women. Then again, this was a few years ago.

He brought this story up today because the straight friend who lived across the hall, who's girlfriend Shia slept with even though he's gay -- suddenly realized that he was also gay! And he just got married to his boyfriend!

Apparently nobody's ever been more in love or as committed to each other as these two are. Ugh. I don't want to hear about people getting married anymore.

Shia also told me about undercover brothers (I think that's the term for dudes who sort of act and live straight, but then hook up on the down low) who go out and find chicks to have threesomes with because they're kind of insecure and can't relate to each other without a third party there. Kind of confusing, but he talked about it like it was the most normal, logical thing in the world.

So this is normal in his world, but he's still shocked to hear about groups of salarymen going out and expensing a night out at a sleazy club and getting blow jobs in VIP rooms from working girls. He thinks the group mentality is kind of freaky.

Check this link out y'all. And that one.

Who knew? Strippers and hostesses aren't even CLOSE to the top of the high-earners list. I know for sure I don't make a whole lot for a hostess, but I also know that I could make more if I really wanted to. Anyways, I hate it when dudes act like I'm making bank when all I got was like 4,000yen in tips from some stinky customer. BTW, that's on top of my salary, boys and girls. If the pay was that crap, I wouldn't be doing this!

I feel a little bad about saying this, but Dancer Girl is just annoying the hell out of me right now. She gets really obnoxious and loud and crazy when she's drunk, and she's always drunk. How come drunks always need to be the center of attention?

And she does this annoying thing my mother used to always do, where she just doesn't have a filter between her brain and her mouth. Like when she told me the Handsome Dentist was an Aquarius, I quietly said "oh that's not so good, my last two Aquarius boyfriends ended up hitting me." Before I knew what was happening, she turns around and shouts so everyone can hear, "You don't hit your girlfriends, do you!?" Making it look like I said he looks like someone who did.

She does this type of thing ALL THE TIME. I'm almost scared to open my mouth.

I think that wonderfully talented chick Lea Jacobson -- who wrote a memoir about her crazy days as a Tokyo nightclub hostess -- is a little mortified about this Cleveland morning radio interview she gave last week. But guess what? It kicks ass. Have a listen here and you'll see what I mean.

You have to fast forward halfway into it past the first call-in interview they have with some airline security person though.

Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess

Lea Jacobson

If you're anywhere near my age, then maybe you remember falling in love with Alicia Silverstone when she was in all those Aerosmith videos back in the 90s.

I thought she was just the most amazing thing in the world. And this photo shows that she still is!

You can't beat a girl in a red dress. I have at least four in my closet (and by closet, I mean room).

First of all, I want that dress. Second of all, I want this moment distilled and bottled.

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