A show put on for the customer, by the staff-for the sole purpose of separating you from your money as expeditiously and efficiently as we can suck it out of your pockets. Trust us, you're not cool. We're all so thoroughly jaded by this business that we legitimately dislike you as soon as you strut through our doors. You prance past in your silk shirt, give us your ultracool handshake and slip me a twenty, and you won't get five paces into the VIP room before I'm rolling my eyes at Johnny and shaking my head in disgust.

We're selling you a dream, albeit an unhealthy, distorted, delusional one bereft of any redeeming value whatsoever, rotting from the inside out. The bouncers don't like you, those gorgeous female bartenders think you're a tool, and we all want 4 AM to come around as quickly and painlessly as possible so we can get our little envelopes full of cash and go the fuck home.

This artificiality extends a surprisingly far distance past the act put on by the staff. Beneath our disingenuous little veneer of trendy coolness, far removed from the club's visible commerce -- the buying of drinks, shot and rose girls plying their wares, and the culture of tipping -- a sizable black market exists out there on the floor. There are people doing business -- making money -- who aren't employed by the club.

Suffice it to say that as a customer, one can never be certain as to whom one is dealing with at a nightclub in New York.

Sure, she's hot. And that outfit is un-fucking-believeable. She moves on the dance floor like nothing you've ever seen, and she's actually listening to all the bullshit you're laying on her about what an important fucking guy you are at work. And the body language -- everybody sees it. She wants you, my brother. You're gonna take this one back to the hotel and throw her one like she's not even gonna believe.

It'll cost you, though. Whether it's straight-up cash, or a bag of coke, or some pills, or whatever, she's not in this for the scintillating conversation you've been providing. This is a straightforward business transaction, and with those, in swinger clubs like mine, the time eventually comes where one must watch one's ass.

Call me naive, but I was completely ignorant of the presence of actual, no-shit, working prostitutes in the club until last week. Evidently, I've been innocent enough, all this time, to have dimly watched all the people filing into the club, mistakenly believing they're all just there simply to dance, drink and have fun. I suppose I'm a bouncer-idealist. No guy is there to deal drugs -- they just want to get out on the dance floor and meet women, don't they? No woman is there to solicit -- they're there because it's fun to get all dolled up and unwind from a difficult week on the job, right?

Even my jaded sense of class envy -- "She won't even look at you unless she sees a roll of hundreds" -- hadn't yet made the valiant leap to what now, in retrospect, seems the perfectly logical assumption that prostitutes would frequent New York nightclubs.