Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City

Table of Contents

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

GIRL, UNDRESSED

Ruth Fowler was raised in North Wales and graduated from Cambridge University. She has written for
The Village Voice, The Observer
(London),
The Guardian, The New York Post, Wired,
and other publications. She currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a journalist and screenwriter.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America under the title
No Man’s Land
by
Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2008
Published in Penguin Books 2009

Copyright © Ruth Fowler, 2008

All rights reserved

 

The experiences recounted in this book are true. However, names and descriptive
details have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals involved.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-05717-9

1. Fowler, Ruth. 2. Sex-oriented businesses—New York (State)—New York—Employees—
Biography. 3. Stripteasers—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 4. Women—New York
(State)—New York—Biography. 5. English—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 6. New
York (N.Y.)—Biography. 7. Sex-oriented businesses—Social aspects—New York (State)—New
York—Case studies. 8. Striptease—Social aspects—New York (State)—New York—Case
studies. 9. Marginality, Social—New York (State)—New York—Case studies.
10. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions—Case studies. I. Title.
HQ146.N7F64 2008
306.7092—dc22 [B] 2007040509

 

 

 

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without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only
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—HUMBERT HUMBERT

THIS WORLD YOU’LL GLEAN
from scraps of words, debris of the past carefully gathered, lovingly preserved in whimsical gauzes of tissue-paper memory torn up and painfully re-created on these pages—this world won’t feature the New York you all know and love, vacuum-packed and delivered to your tastefully decorated abodes via HBO. It’ll slip in shockingly few apple martinis at Pravda while eye-fucking the male model at the next table. And there’ll be a sad lack of shopping expeditions to Bergdorf’s to punctuate each chapter’s end (though not through want of desire). It’ll make you reevaluate everything you ever learned about New York, for while Manolos may be featured, they’re certainly not the star attraction, and while there
is
sex, it’s not on the third date. Yes, there’s at least one millionaire, but his obsession with toilet paper and strip-joints ensures that he’s no one’s Mr. Big—except, perhaps, mine. You see, while I spend quite a few hours frittering away the time with my bourgeois English friends in Marquee, rubbing shoulders with Manhattan’s A-list crowd, I also hang out with those people you just don’t listen to very often: the illegals, the immigrants, the people in low-paid, cash-in-hand jobs.

 

I’m one of them.

1

IT SOUNDS LIKE
an obvious statement when I say that girls don’t grow up wanting to be strippers, but you’d be surprised. Most people—civilians, that is—seem to think that even in the cradle we were wrapping ourselves around a greasy pole and grinding our hips to Britney Spears, while our crack-addicted Mothers painted on their faces prior to standing on the corner of the highway trying to pick up new Daddies for us.

No, the truth, the reason
why
we’re strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like money—and pragmatic concerns, like money. It’s all about the quick fix of money, like that hasty illicit cigarette outside when the boss isn’t watching, covered up with a gargle of mouthwash. Our mouthwash is our own mantra, repeated over and over in our heads,
It’s not forever.
I think we keep coming back because standing on that stage, posing and preening in the mirror, turning and arching so the light strikes our luminous, smooth skin, is the only time we don’t think of things. You know—
things.
Guilt things. Hopelessness. Boredom. The fact that Old Venus in the corner always says, “It’s easy to get into, impossible to get out,” nods her head, looks down at her breasts, like two bizarre antennae placed upon a sagging thirty-five-year-old body, and you’re thinking, is that
me?
Does that refer to
me?
So we don’t think. I know I don’t. I put every effort into making my movements deliberate, controlled, seductive, self-absorbed . . . and on the rare occasion I do catch my own eyes in the mirror onstage, I don’t even recognize them, encased in pandalike makeup, huge, defiant, ferocious, daring my other self, the self I was before all this, before Mimi, to argue back, to walk offstage, to have the confidence to say,
That’s not me anymore,
and mean it.

When we get drunk, the regrets come out, the dreams and ambitions cloaked in cheap polyester, stretched taut against skin hidden beneath layers of Mystic Tan. “I’m a good girl, really I am,” sighs one. “I’m a good Jewish girl. I’ll make a good wife.” She takes a drag of her cigarette and I think to myself,
I’m not a good girl. Not really. Not anymore.
But I sure as hell would like to be.

I was always the boring, studious, well-behaved child. Quietly ambitious, personality the ghost of good grades, my rebellion was confined to the occasional cussword and a failed drug deal (age sixteen) that resulted in the purchase of dehydrated morels and the contents of a Tetley tea bag. At Cambridge University I was one of a minority of students who attended what was known as a comprehensive school—government-funded state education—and as part of an even smaller minority from the wilds of North Wales, I was a certified novelty. People noted with amusement my short, accented vowels, and my impressive capacity for gin with respect. Cambridge is flat and barren, set in the bleak Fen District of East Anglia, and the absence of the mountains I’d known all my life left me with a hollow feeling, a sense of being exposed, naked in that bitter northeasterly wind that always seemed to blow no matter what the weather. I believed them—the university—in their glossy prospectus that claimed poor kids went there from state schools, and Northerners, and even brown kids. But to be honest, most of the people I made friends with sounded like the Queen, had gone to the same boarding school, and all fucked off to London every weekend to go clubbing and avoid the bad assortment of student DJ’s mixing drum-and-bass music in seventeenth-century cellars. Pubs. Cambridge has a lot of pubs.

I was one of those types who always wrote for the student newspaper, whose plays were put on in the local theater, who was on every committee, who left with a first—the UK equivalent of a 4.0, a magna cum laude—because the token minorities must get firsts or thirds; there’s no acceptable in-between for us dilettantes of suffering.

The day after graduation I left the country, driven onward and outward by a fire in my belly, a consumptive hemorrhag ing passion in my soul. Something deep inside was longing to get out, far away, see it all, live, breathe, be different, make a difference, eat to excess, drink to excess, love, fuck, scream, cry, hate—to excess. I think I surprised even myself when I didn’t sign up at the corporate milkround and get a job with Merrill Lynch, or go to law school, or work for the government, or do any of the things that good Cambridge graduates are meant to do.

I went to Argentina. Got a job as an English teacher in a private school, taught Shakespeare to squat hairy teenage boys sporting masturbatory sneers upon their spotty features. I hated the work, was frankly confused by polo, loved the country, was paid next to nothing. I would take the train from the suburb of Hurlingham, the apex of English expatriate existence, into the center of Buenos Aires every weekend, bypassing the dusty, empty stations whizzing past. In one a llama was tethered to a post, nibbling at the dirt ground, the legend TIERRA DE NADIE scrawled above it across the exterior of what seemed to be a decrepit public convenience.
Tierra de Nadie
—“No Man’s Land.” Land of Nobody. Land of Nothing.

We were all so hyperbolic in those days. We were Cathy from
Wuthering Heights,
impassioned and annoying and always right, by turns tragic and ecstatic, riding the peaks and scoffing at the troughs of living. A friend from university who lived off espresso and Marlboros, her huge, beautiful eyes bloodshot and yellowed with adrenaline and nicotine, would stare at my sensible well-fed demeanor with incomprehension when I’d knock on her door to deliver some essential nutrients. “You need to sleep, Sarah,” I’d murmur, glancing around at the pages of writing littering her floor, the dog-eared books, two smoldering cigarettes upended in a moldy piece of toast. “I don’t sleep,” she’d correct me. “I can’t
sleep
when I have so much going
on.
” She’d wave her hand around the filthy room, a slim, pale, manicured hand clutching a cigarette. We had nothing “going on,” but we expended our energy and our higher-than-average IQs into whipping our intelligent little minds into a state of excitement and expectation and drama and tragedy in order to make our normal, dull lives a little more worthwhile, a little more suitable for writers and ac tresses and famous people. Fame. We wanted to be paid for fucking around all day drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and typing one-fingered sentences about ourselves in our thinly veiled autobiographical novels.

Leafing through old journals and postcards preceding my arrival at that stage, what I notice in the empty words scrawled on onionskin paper, e-mails polluted with mistypes, is that this time was driven by a fierce, defiant passion. The correspondence from this time are coruscating in their heartfelt naïveté, their devotion to “having the guts to follow one’s heart” (although being a Northerner I did not, I assure you, use the third-person singular in speech). Examples: Kathmandu, Nepal—e-mail home revealing to my resigned parents that I wasn’t going to do the PhD, instead was going to travel more, do some humanitarian work, become a political activist, write a novel and a play, live in the Himalayas, and campaign to free the Panchen Lama:
“I’m staying longer and sneaking over the border posing as a tourist. I plan to wear my ‘Save Tibet’ T-shirt in Lhasa.”
Alpe d’Huez, France—postcard to a friend in London:
“I’ve never drunk so much beer in my life. Snowboarding is awesome and the guys are hot! Is Dave still seeing that American bitch with the big tits?”
Antibes, Côte d’Azur—quick e-mail littered with the typos of the alcoholically depraved:
“i knwo nothig about boatts but the crew ive met donr seem to either so ive takenthe job sailing across te atlantic”

A chance encounter in a bar in the South of France, too many beers imbibed, too few people to make me stay behind. The bar was empty, the air thick and warm, intoxicating after the thin, calloused atmosphere of the ski resort. He sat in a corner, caught my eye, and laughed along with me when a drunk Australian fell over a bulldog belonging to the bartender. He bought me a pint, said he was a captain. More likely he was just another ski bum making money by cleaning rich people’s boats. Friends from Alpe d’Huez had told me Antibes was the place to be, that now was the time to get the best jobs, the best boats, the best money. Antibes—the European center of the luxury yacht industry; a small, cobbled gray-stone town with winding streets leading to secretive courtyards surrounded by tall, pastel-colored shuttered buildings, airy, expansive views of the glittering Côte d’Azur. The port dominated the pretty resort with its rude display of grotesque wealth: huge sailboats and yachts owned by rich people, chartered by rich people, an industry fed by rich people as they flitted around the world on tax-evasion schemes, paying sunburned hobos posing as professionals too much money to drive their boats, scrub the decks, lay their leopard-print pillows out in feng shui order on the mezzanine, prepare five-star cuisine, and (in some cases, literally) wipe their arses.