Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (10 page)

I watch and watch. I absorb it all, the skank, the sleaze, the excitement, the boredom, the stink of money. Is it all so shocking, really, this titillation, this flash of a boob, titties-and-ass, bored girls writhing over sex-starved bankers? In a world where A can explain to B that monogamy doesn’t exist, except in his girlfriend’s head, which is why he can happily fuck C up the ass (“. . . and that girl’s a
real
goer—first time we had sex, she grabbed my dick, pulled it outta her pussy, jammed it right up her fuckin’
asshole
”), is it so shocking? Gently, gently, her fuckin’ asshole expanded like a warm mouth and swallowed him up, and he was lost, forever, to the old ways of “being faithful” and “nights in with the woman,” because he was initiated into the new order now, the twenty-first century, New York City, where everyone’s fucking everyone, a hyper-sexualized semitic city of lights, a pornographic light show, in the midst of which the stripclub seems actually,
really,
quite tame.

I go quietly home at eight o’clock with a hundred bucks in tips. No one really notices me that day. It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t that different. After the initial wince of disgust, I was easing into it. It wasn’t that bad, really. I could imagine being part of it, more so now, than I could imagine being an editor on a magazine, or a lawyer, or something that gave me my 401(k). My respectability, my health insurance, my sanity. Nice Cambridge girl, will say the headlines, turned STRIPPER! But to be honest, you sell what you have, what you know, and however it’s packaged, you had that crack, that flaw, that fucked-up genetic blip in you from something, from somewhere. You didn’t just turn up in this place
by accident.
No way.

After a week it’s normal. I can outstare even the Colombian’s tits. It’s become routine—sighs, gasps, loneliness. It’s something I feel like I’ve known my whole life. I guess I have, in a different guise, in a more acceptable guise, a more secretive guise, a more normal.

 

“Hanging out with you is like hanging out in a concentration camp,” I tell Raoul, as he lies silently on my bed emitting indolent puffs of smoke into the air.

“Have you ever been in a concentration camp?” he snarls back.

“Yes. I went to Belsen on a school trip.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like hanging out with you.”

“When you gonna get a real job?” he snaps, suddenly hu morless.

“When my visa comes through and I have real papers,” I reply calmly.

“I don’t like you working in that place, English girl. It ain’t good for you seeing that shit. You’re gonna end up like those whores.”

I shrug, roll over, lick his stomach, feel him grow hard beneath me. My tongue traces down to the top of his pants, a small damp patch spreads through the fabric. I roll over and reach for a magazine. Raoul looks annoyed. He’s annoyed because I walk away before he can walk away from me. I keep doing it. It’s one of my talents, leaving, a talent he thought, wrongly, that he had mastered. It torments him, niggles at him, gnaws at his hard, pebbly heart. Sex was clinical, adequate, rough. It would do, a distraction. I never sought out distractions, they came to me, like the Cuban musician who had accompanied me home last week. Raoul had been furious when he found us in the morning drinking coffee, me wrapped in the Cuban’s leather jacket. I had laughed at his anger, humiliated him, and he hated me for it, even as it made him want me more. The more I reveal my disdain, my independence, my complete absence of need, desire, want, dependency, the more furious he becomes. I enjoy tormenting him, I’m good at it, I’ve had enough practice. And he deserves it.

Raoul sits up, reaches over, grabs my breast roughly in one hand and with the other pushes me down onto my back and tries to kiss me. I wriggle out of his grasp and glower at him. He slaps me hard. I cry out. My mouth starts to bleed from where I bit the inside of my cheek. I smile at him, coldly, with hate.

“You’re not my boyfriend, Raoul,” I murmur quietly, and in response he says something very strange, very odd, rude even, not a little out of place. He says my real name.

I walked through Central Park one morning, before I went into work at twelve. There was a tramp—a “bum,” you Americans would say—lying on a park bench. He was cooking in the heat of a May afternoon, stewing in ammoniac shit and fecal sweat, in excretions and deletions and pure, apoplectic filth. But what struck me most was the wrinkled dick sticking out of his pants like a dehydrated mollusk, the crusted, oozing lesions it hosted.

 

Day eight. Around six P.M., when businessmen leak in from canned fluorescent lights and masturbatory deals to get their dicks ground and their egos petted. I knew the score by now.
Hank was the floor manager; you went to Hank with any problems. That girl you didn’t talk to; the other dancers were OK. Don’t talk to the House Mom when she’s doing the makeup. Always make sure you have a pedicure in case Kim, the other manager, catches you. Don’t mention plastic surgery to Dolores. Act dumb. Flirt. Flirt. Flirt.
I knew the score. I know the score. I’m walking through the club, and I’ve replaced the dowdy flats from two weeks ago with six-inch wooden platform heels and the blond hair is blonder, straightened, and the face doesn’t look like a face I’ve ever seen in a mirror before, and this girl fit in OK, fit in like a Paula would fit in, this girl called “Mimi” with no last name and no Social Security number and no one to ask.

This time some young guys come in from Boston—bachelor party, bankers. And this girl is standing by the Funny Money machine—the machine right by the cash desk where Dolores sits unmoving, like a boiled crustacean. There are no ATMs in the club, just these machines that swallow your card and vomit out pink pussy Cash laced with naked ladies at a 10 percent surcharge, which can be redeemed by us for real money, minus 20 percent for the house.

So she’s standing there, right by the Funny Money machine, this girl, this waitress, I forget her name now—her real name, anyway—but I could have told you the one she goes by. And the guy rolls up and she ignores him—she’s a good waitress, not one of those girls who go in the Champagne Room and fuck up the dancers’ trade and whom they hate, because if you want to be a dancer,
be
a fucking dancer, pay your rent money to the house, and earn it back onstage; don’t be a fucking waitress, a weasel server stealing clients, pretending to be pure. But he’s offering her a drink, and she’s taking it—hell,
I’d
take it too, standing on your feet all day for dollar tips
sucks,
and they encourage us to drink because then the guys are going to spend twice as much,
capiche?
I watch because I’m still in watching mode, and there aren’t that many of us, waitresses I mean, who
do
sit down, despite its being preferential to working your ass off with a fucking drinks tray. Lily sat with a guy the other day for a half hour, Russian guy, mob they said. He gave her a hundred bucks for talking to him. So I watch, and what’s going on is this guy starts talking real loud about wanting to go in the room, and then it’s like this little light goes off in the girl’s head, and she’s purring. Yes, the bitch is purring, and from then on it’s plain sailing. Knee between thighs, looking demure, sip of Corona, makes the guys laugh. She has personality this one, and it’s refreshing to laugh with a waitress instead of a stripper. Strippers are easy, but everyone knows to score a waitress in the Champagne Room is the triple word score, the double twenty, the full fucking house. Not long now, she’s reeling him in, a nod to Hank and he slides over unobtrusive as chlamydia, and before you know it, those two are in the private room.

I go away for a while this afternoon, so I can’t tell you all that occurs, and after all, it’s between the dancer and the client. But when I come back, she’s there too, and it all makes sense. I could tell you her name, see, her real name. Or I could tell you the name she goes by. But you probably know by now. You probably know.

There’s no sex in the Champagne Room. “There’s no touching, you see?” says Lily when she sees me afterward. In the room I had seen a dancer, a real dancer, and her eyes looked through his and I could see distinctly the hand burrowed into the warren of his flies, rehydrating whatever was within, and you couldn’t tell from her eyes what she thought, but in my corner of the room I heard and felt the wet gloss of shame and the guttural wrench of instinct and training, pleasure and sickness, the little death of release, relief—the wet, slick orgasm of money, the security it brings.

“You know, you should think about auditioning, Mimi.”

Hank, ectothermic, never blinks.

“Auditioning?” I say, slugging back a Corona, pretending it had never occurred to me before.

“Yeah, as a dancer. I can tell you’d make money. You’d make some good money for us.” His smile is sly, fond, his hand reaches instinctively for his bow tie, the arms thin in the drooping black-and-white checkered jacket.

“Hey, you gonna audition?” asks a redhead built on longitude and nicotine and handjob expertise. “I can hook you up with a bachelor party Saturday if you want. Good practice. I can’t do it, gotta go see my boyfriend DJ in a club in Chelsea. You up for it? Easy money.”

“
There’s no touching
you see?” says Lily unconvincingly. “If I didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d do it. Easy money. You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

5

WE ARE, IF ONE ADHERES
to traditional, Middle American, conservative (and probably liberal) standards, deviants of the first order by the time we grasp that stinking brass pole, perspiring gently with baby oil and gray smudges of dead skin sliced off greased-up thighs. We’re there because we have indulged in fucking, have been fucked indiscriminately, have had our legs opened by a rough hand, probing fingers, have gently guided a thousand and one pricks into the dripping crevasse within. We have fucked when drunk, on drugs, when sober. We have fucked without guilt, without enjoyment, with pain and pleasure and the accompanying regrets. We have had our hair pulled until tears welled out of eyes so sodden with ecstasy and coke that they can barely focus, rag doll bodies pulled up, pushed down, fucked hard, slapped harder. The bruise of men’s kisses has stained our breasts like crushed berries, fading gently into the sickly olive of a memory. Fucking is something that has guided us gently to that stage, so that the pornographers we are in the bedroom have found their rabid release in ghastly makeup, a calculated touch, lascivious glares. And somehow it impeded our growth as human beings, started to act on us in reverse, so that the longer we stayed in the business, the faster we wanted to resort back to that mewling, puking babe crying in a mother’s arms—a mother who would just as soon pluck her nipple from our boneless gums, dash our brains against a rock.

Of course, there are also those who do it just for money. Or kicks. Or because they like it. Or because they can’t face the alternative, and for them the alternative is probably a stint on the checkout at K-Mart in Mississippi, or Moscow, or Kazakh stan. But it sounds better the way I say it, don’t you think? It sounds better when the darkness you see in me now at the end of it all is corroborated somewhere, deep down in the past, in actions long gone but deeply engraved, actions that make what follows somehow understandable, comprehensible,
OK.
Because if we were fucked before we ever got on that stage, what happens after that can be seen as merely inevitable.

 

The wax hurt. The wax fucking hurt.

“Hold still Mammy,” instructs Olga as she splays me open like a spatchcock chicken. “Be
brave
Mammy.” She dips a wooden spatula into a bubbling pot of brown goo enticingly sprinkled with other people’s curly dark hairs, and liberally spreads it over my pubic region. “No cry Mammy. Hold skin tight Mammy.” She picks up a clean cotton cloth and smooths it over the brown goo, pressing on it hard. She peels up the furthest corner with the greatest of care . . . and rips it off. There is blood. There is pain. There is cursing—from me. “You make much
noise
Mammy. No be baby Mammy.” Olga soothes me in a smothering voice, grasping me tightly to her immense bosom and rocking me like a child, but the eyes are cold, all money. “Be brave Mammy. Be
brave.
”

Afterward I’m ushered into a booth and left to undress. I step into a TARDIS-like compartment, a blast of orange mist, a tongue that tastes of Belsen. I step out of the gas chamber and dry off the excess with a towel, which sheds white lint over my (now satsuma) body. “Ah better!” Olga proclaims as I reenter the salon. She plucks absently at the outline of her nipple underneath the white coat. “Very pretty Mammy! You want spa mani-pedi as well? Special price!”

There’s a special price on mani-pedi, a special price on hair-free, a special price on shaving and moisturizing and primping and scraping and plucking and faking, faking, faking. Plastic talons and chemical melanoma, but the batteries are running low, and you can’t fake it when the juices ain’t running. I’m scared, there, I’ll admit. Scared like toothache, irritating, but not palpable, like cancer, like tumors, like death. Before we ever stepped onstage we were cracked, flawed, fucked up, fucked hard, but we weren’t malignant.

“Where you going?” demands Raoul, and I stare at him hard and he snorts and his right fist curls up, and I don’t look away until he nods assent, and I say to him, “That was the last time, Raoul. You’re not my boyfriend.” And then his head dips, inclines, and he gives the vaguest nod, and when I leave he’s sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, and when I walk down the street I know he’s calling the JAP version of me, and all I can think is
Thank God that’s over with.
In view of this, in view of the Mimi-bitch already working through the roommates and breaking hearts and making sure there are no saviours for this fable, it’s no surprise where I’m going, what I’m doing. I make my way to Penn Station for six P.M. to meet a man called Igor, a white limousine, and seven strippers.