Birdie? Oh yeah, she’s fantastic. There was this one time, when she first came through in ‘95 and she managed to hold the whole place together for us.
It’s never that much of an issue for us, you know, keeping a business running one way or another. The things we do and don’t do, we can keep it afloat. We can keep the money moving in and out, but we can’t always make it look more legitimate.
Restaurants and laundromats had been our thing for the longest time. Plain, simple, we know how to make the money look right if anyone decided to start looking too close. We got good herds from ‘em for the most part, too. Regulars, nothing too unseemly.
Then Diego wanted expand, he wanted a club. A bar, and music and shows and all that shit. The bar part was fine, it was like a restaurant but with only a burger and a lot of booze. Fudging the numbers there was old hat, but tickets? Cover charges? Dealing with the goddamn acts?
That shithole was the worst reviewed place in town. Some punk kid for that local culture paper put us on the front page for being so bad. I’m talkin’ “Food’s fine but the rest of this place is a disaster” kinda thing, and I didn’t realize how much that mattered until it happened. Apparently the acts we were getting all sucked, didn’t match the atmosphere or something? No one buying tickets, and obvious enough that our numbers didn’t look passable no matter what we did.
For a while we tried to get better acts, see if that would fix it. The ones that actually showed up were nightmares, and the other ones knew the rep and wouldn’t set foot in the place.
One night, this kid comes in. She’s gorgeous, looks a little dippy, and first thing she did was find out who owned the joint. Talked to my guys on top, worked her way down to me and Diego, asked us if we know what the fuck we were doing. I think it was, “Do you know how to run that place at all? Because if you don’t, I can give you some pointers.”
All she wanted in return was a spot, the stage some nights, and access. Real clear she didn’t want anything permanent, didn’t want to run the place or anything like that. Called it a place to land, and she’d make it work.
Five months in we had goddamn crowds in the place. Making money and faking money all at the same time, even got a new front page from that goddamn punk at the entertainment paper.
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someone describing a time your OC helped them
Birdie? Oh yeah, she’s fantastic. There was this one time, when she first came through in ‘95 and she managed to hold the whole place together for us.
It’s never that much of an issue for us, you know, keeping a business running one way or another. The things we do and don’t do, we can keep it afloat. We can keep the money moving in and out, but we can’t always make it look more legitimate.
Restaurants and laundromats had been our thing for the longest time. Plain, simple, we know how to make the money look right if anyone decided to start looking too close. We got good herds from ‘em for the most part, too. Regulars, nothing too unseemly.
Then Diego wanted expand, he wanted a club. A bar, and music and shows and all that shit. The bar part was fine, it was like a restaurant but with only a burger and a lot of booze. Fudging the numbers there was old hat, but tickets? Cover charges? Dealing with the goddamn acts?
That shithole was the worst reviewed place in town. Some punk kid for that local culture paper put us on the front page for being so bad. I’m talkin’ “Food’s fine but the rest of this place is a disaster” kinda thing, and I didn’t realize how much that mattered until it happened. Apparently the acts we were getting all sucked, didn’t match the atmosphere or something? No one buying tickets, and obvious enough that our numbers didn’t look passable no matter what we did.
For a while we tried to get better acts, see if that would fix it. The ones that actually showed up were nightmares, and the other ones knew the rep and wouldn’t set foot in the place.
One night, this kid comes in. She’s gorgeous, looks a little dippy, and first thing she did was find out who owned the joint. Talked to my guys on top, worked her way down to me and Diego, asked us if we know what the fuck we were doing. I think it was, “Do you know how to run that place at all? Because if you don’t, I can give you some pointers.”
All she wanted in return was a spot, the stage some nights, and access. Real clear she didn’t want anything permanent, didn’t want to run the place or anything like that. Called it a place to land, and she’d make it work.
Five months in we had goddamn crowds in the place. Making money and faking money all at the same time, even got a new front page from that goddamn punk at the entertainment paper.