The New Kids on the Block

Apparently, when it comes to bar reps, wholesome is the new sexy. 

As I entered the bar street in Kos Town, I was greeted in English by some very friendly British kids. They were club reps, but they looked like they were just tourists like me; they didn’t have the jaded air of nightlife veterans. One of them, Zac, looked like he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, although he was actually twenty-one. He and his co-worker, an 18-year old girl named Lauren, approached me so casually I wasn’t even sure they were working for a bar.  Zac had his hair spiked in that quaint 1997 way, and Lauren was dressed like Lizzy McGuire; was something friendly and non-threatening about them. They weren’t luring us, they were inviting us. Zac and Lauren are not club reps: they’re professional new friends. 

It’s not a job for seasoned pros or predatory nightcrawlers. It’s just a sweet gig for kids who are lucky enough and friendly enough to ask for a job in a Kos club. “It’s the best job in the world,” Zac told me. “I get free drinks all night, plus I get paid for going out and touching chicks.” By “touching chicks,” he means putting his arm around girls’ shoulders and gently steering them in the right direction. His girlfriend works at a bar down the street. “She says to me all the time, ‘Babe, you touch some girls tonight, and I’ll touch some boys, and then we’ll get lots of tips and go out for dinner tomorrow night.’” Zac and his girlfriend get a free apartment with the job, and get paid 30 euro a night on top of that. The downside is that he’s hasn’t gone to sleep before dawn in two months. Tough life. 

I realized I was witnessing a new generation of club reps. These fresh-faced kids in tee shirts and sundresses were replacing the older, greasier reps in tight polyester and G-strings. They’re appealing because they seem like they only arrived a few hours before you did; they don’t look like they’ve been up and down bar street enough to have some nasty diseases. They’re not selling sex: they’re selling fun. It’s as if clubs suddenly decided that Miley Cyrus is the new Britney Spears, at least until you get inside.

When we left, this new species of club reps didn’t whine after us, “Where you going, baby?” Instead, they called out, “Facebook me!”