Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (12 page)

 

When you’re facing utter degradation, even actively courting it for the money, you remember the times before, when you did it for curiosity, for kicks, because you were fucked on ecstasy, had drunk too much tequila, because you were on that slippery slope to destruction, because you just stopped wanting to be good, or somehow believed you were never good to begin with. And it’s different, doing it for money, tirelessly plucking those fingers from worming their way into your anus, your vagina. It’s different because the other girls have your back, know where you’re coming from, detach from their bodies so you do the same, so you can have your tongue lashing away like a lawn trimmer over a numb clitoris, and a half hour later be standing, cool, unshaken, on the aft deck of the boat, sharing a cigarette and counting the proceeds, and knowing that whatever dark memories are stirred up by this curiously frigid act of flawr show sex in a bachelor party on a motor yacht cruising the Hudson, they have those memories too. And looking into Julia’s eyes, her beautiful eyes and beautiful face, you can’t help but know that whatever you’ve done, she’s done it as well, a hell of a lot harder.

“Hey, you wanna see a trick?” calls out the prettiest of the tall black girls, in a tight-fitting corset barely containing breasts exploding volcanolike from its depths. “Watch.” Men gather round in the gloom, clutching drinks and paper plates of soggy quiche and sweating lettuce. She bends over the buffet table, carefully pushing the cocktail sausages out of the way. She unfurls a paper napkin, and places it carefully on her behind, her butt curving deliciously into the topography of her lower back. She turns back to the buffet table, chin in hands, and winks cheekily. Suddenly a rip-roaring fart echoes in the light breeze, and the napkin lifts up, startled, before gently floating to the ground. There is a gasp of mutual admiration, then cheers and applause.

“Why you do this?” one says to me, and I look into his face and laugh, turn to Julia who’s snorting a line of coke from the back of her hand, kiss her long and hard and tasteless on the mouth. Then we both laugh, and Julia asks me if I would like to be her standby partner for the sex show, which she does occasionally, when the modeling work isn’t paying too well, now she’s getting too old for bookings at the ripe old age of twenty-fucking-two.

“It’s disgusting, this job,” says the guy again, his English straying into the familiar Uruguayan lilt I know from having lived in Argentina. He looks at me, and I feel a twinge of something. Annoyance. “How do you do this and sleep at night?”

“I don’t kiss, jerkoff,” I say, and kiss him for the hell of it, and a breeze teases my thighs and between my legs, caressing where I’d been licked and scratched and poked . . . and I never managed to locate that G-string, some cocksucker was probably beating off to it right there and then. Another guy pulls my hand, leads me back into the darkened salon.
“Baila?”
he says, and we talk Spanish for a while as I dance, and he tells me they all work in a factory, he sold coke too, and the party was for the boss’s son who is getting married, it was a tradition in Colombia, to throw a party for the workers, or some shit, and my mind was drifting off, my dress was drifting off, another dance, and it’s only then that I realize his hand is between my legs, his fingers are prising me open, it hurt. “No,” I whisper, and my eyes are wide, I can feel the whites showing, and in his black, black face I see the whites of his eyes, the room’s empty save for those whites, those fucking orbits glittering in a dark universe
“Basta, pelotudo,”
I muttered, and I slap him, and he laughs a creepy laugh, like an old dog hacking its lungs up, and gives an awful shudder. It’s time to leave.

In the dressing room we count the money, everyone pointedly ignoring the stall with an empty condom and a fizz of jism floating in the toilet from where some guy got lucky, some girl got dumb. Nine hundred bucks each for three hours work. In the limo we tease Igor, and laugh at Narissa, and watch Julia be sick because she ate a sandwich and she’s worried about the calories, and he lets us out at Penn Station. I walk a few blocks with Lucy, the Southern girl, and we talk, exchange numbers, meld into the crowd, just two girls walking down Broadway together. Insignificant. You look at the people walking past, and they notice nothing. You’re still the same person, and it’s comforting, that anonymous reassurance. I feel happy because I made money. I don’t feel anything else—shame or misery or disgust, the things you might think I’d be feeling at this point. In truth I don’t. I block it out, because I need the money, and there’s no safety net in life, save for that soft mattress of good, solid cash. In truth I feel nothing, because I’ve felt it all before, and it’s useless—regret. I’ve felt it all before, in another time and another place, the same damned thing.

I call Lily to let her know I’d gotten home safe. I don’t tell Raoul where I’ve been. He’s not my boyfriend. I call my brother too, over on the West Coast with his wife and their kid. I make out it was easy, and it
was,
but not the kind of easy he thinks.

 

I stripped with detachment; I stripped always as Mimi. Like the rest of the girls, the faded sepia memory of the “first time” ever present as a peeling backdrop to our rotting stage show. I had fucked, been fucked, knew fucking—perhaps the only prerequisite, really, for the job. If I hadn’t had Mimi I don’t know if I could have done it, in all honesty. I need her, you see, and that need scares me. That she has become an indelible part of my existence scares me. I need her to corroborate who I am, the ghost behind the words, the words delineating only her, ignoring the parts where I was present. I could distinguish between the man who saw me as a whore, a bitch, a stripper, a sexualized creature distinct from the mother who gave birth to him, the wife who will bear his children, and the man who saw me as a mother, a wife, a friend, a lover. But could they, now, see the difference between me and Mimi?

Sex is different from love, people say. An obvious distinction, but one whose fallacies kept us sane. I think we all—men and women—have our dark sides, our mistakes, our lustful, out-of-control moments that lead to minor indiscretions, a kiss in the darkness, some fumbling, a gasp, a cry, regret. Sex workers, people like Mimi, like myself, were more honest about those indiscretions, and what they allowed us to achieve—ready cash. Instead of burrowing our sadness, it’s written all over us in an ironic appropriation of our own shame, turning it into a shield that makes us strong enough to walk onto a boatful of fifty men and strip naked for them without crying over the loss of our innocence. It means that we can lick and kiss and curl our tongues into a stranger’s most intimate crevices and shrug it off when we pick up our paycheck. It meant that we can erase our own existences under a silly faux name, a fictitious, fantastical existence, take the money offered us to compose a history to go along with the make-believe, package it up all pretty, sell it. We can even, in certain cases, go a little further, take the extra two hundred, lock ourselves into a toilet stall with a man whom we do not know, who panting and grunting and breathing thickly, removes a Trojan from its wrapper with trembling hands, pulls it rapidly over his cock, spits, rubs the shaft, slaps our face against the wall with a sharp thud so we gasp in pain as he thrusts urgently, deeply, roughly.

 

She calls me the next day. Lucy, the Southern girl, butterscotch and soft thighs and a neatly manicured pussy of one rectangular strip, shampooed daily, conditioned once a week. I invite her over to Brooklyn because she needs a place to stay, and I figured the band is so used to itinerants sleeping on moldy couches that they wouldn’t notice a small girl curled up in the corner of the painting studio.

“So you have fun the other night? Igor’s great, ain’t he? Fucking love love
love
that dude. I e-mailed him from Georgia and he hooked me up straight.”

The little dumpy black girl with the flaking back on the boat was all about abuse and cowering from the slaps. She wore those wounds like they were a scarlet letter, with reverent misery. Lucy, in contrast, was all sweet-smelling harvest hay and wet, sticky, rolling in the barn, and soft flesh that enveloped you like a murmur. Clean, safe.

“That white guy I was talking to. He gave me, like, a thousand bucks to stay with him all night. Didn’t even take my dress off.”

“You got lucky,” I snort.

“Oh, I saw that floor show. Girl! Now
that
was funny. So, where you dancing? I gotta get a job afore school starts, I’m totally broke. My Daddy’s paying my rent when school starts up but he ain’t giving me shit now.”

I crack open a beer and hand it to her.

“Oh no. I never drink. We weren’t allowed to in Atlanta, so I just got used to it. You work at Foxy’s?”

Another lie? I consider it. But there’s too many lies around.

“Uh, yeah. As a sodding
waitress.
Can’t you tell?”

Laughter, clean, pure laughter, siphoning through you like a hosedown of the soul. You think you’re clean and good, and then you feel things you forgot long ago, and you realize you were never what you thought you were after all. You’re still waiting for the burial, or the resurrection.

“
We-ell,
Igor and me was looking at your picture afore you showed up, and lemme tell you, you don’t look like a stripper in that picture. But
girl,
now you pulling it off pretty damn well bitch!”

She collapses onto my bed and giggles again, high and irrelevant, sordid and cheap, a little wrong. I feel edgy now. Uncomfortable.

“So how come you have nowhere to stay?” I ask.

“I met this dude on the Internet, Eric. He’s, like, an investment banker. So he put me up for a few days in this hotel downtown in the West Village until I could find my feet, get hooked up with an apartment and shit. So we went on a date the first night, but to be honest, he’s not really my type. We had like a good time and all, ate some crab, then he ate me out for dessert, but I don’t really like to be, like indebted to people, you know? Girl, you gotta Tampax I can use?”

She bustles out to use the bathroom. I believed the myths before I started working:
It’s all about empowerment! Embracing our vaginas and exerting power over men!
The myth that replaced the other myth, the older one, the more accurate one: Strippers and porn stars and all those people in the business are stupid, abused, fucked-up whores with Daddy issues. Maybe they just wised up and saw where the money was. Maybe the whole world is all about sex now—sex and money—and these girls are the only ones not pretending. Maybe we’re just as screwed up as we appear to be.

“So how did you get into stripping?” I ask when Lucy returns.

“I wanted to be a model when I was at college in Atlanta. So I got some pictures done and sent ’em to this agent. Big, fat white dude, Lenny. He grossed me out. You know when you get a bad feeling from people? I didn’t like the way he looked at me. He kept telling me he’d get me bookings, that I was beautiful, all this kind of crap, but he didn’t do
shit.
Then one day he asks me if I want to make money on the side ’cause I ain’t doing so well with the modeling. So I was broke, and I didn’t wanna ask my Daddy ’cause there’s six kids in the family, you know? And he has enough to deal with, what with my brother being disabled and all, and he’s so proud of me going to college I knew he’d give it to me when he couldn’t afford it. Though he’d shoot me if he found out I did this shit. So anyway, I said yes. Turns out Lenny meant
escorting.
So he’d call me, gimme the name of a hotel, and I’d turn up and sometimes the guy would be OK, and most times the guy would be freaking
gross.
And it’s not like you could choose. It ain’t like in the freaking movies where the guys pay some bitch for the conversation, take them out for a four-course meal and the opera. I did it for a while, but he was taking a big cut of the money, and it didn’t feel safe, so I left. He was real mad, kept calling me and saying he’d tell my family and shit if I didn’t work for him no more. I just ignored him. Didn’t say nothing. Didn’t reply to the calls. Eventually he shut the fuck up. But then I ran outta money so I called him again and he hooked me up with a job in a whack shack. You know those places? Where a guy comes in and jerks off while you dance? It’s kinda gross but the money’s all right and they can’t touch you, so it’s OK. I kind of figured I could make more though, ’cause I was one of the better-looking girls, you know? So I left there and started working at Leopard’s—you know, the stripclub?—in Atlanta. I
loved
Leopard’s. Classy place. Nice clientele. Clean, no grinding, no touching—nothing like that. Guys would come in, take us into the private room for three to four hours, businessmen from New York, an’ I always got chosen ’cause I was intelligent and could actually hold a goddamn conversation, not like some of these bitches, all blond hair (no offense, girl) and fake titties. I got real tits and I talk to the guys about politics and current affairs and all that shit, I ain’t some dumb fucking bitch getting a guy into the private room by promising God knows what. Guys love the fact I got ambition and I’m getting the hell outta this business. That’s how I like to dance. You talk to them and you make them wanna date you; you don’t offer them a goddamn handjob for five freaking bucks. I remember one time these guys came in from school and just kept staring at me, trying to figure out how they knew me. It was so freaking funny, I used to take math with them and they didn’t even recognize me onstage.
Love
that shit. I gave it up for the last few months of college, but when I got a place at NYU I figured I might as well come up here for the summer, make some cash afore I get my student loans. Plus I broke up with my boyfriend ’cause his parents didn’t like him dating a black girl, and it kinda broke my heart, so I needed to get away from Atlanta. I can’t
wait
to start at NYU, get a good job as a litigator, make some money, get away from this shit. I wanna go into litigation. So, it’s OK if I stay for a week? I’ll be real quiet. Maybe I can get a job in your club. And I’ll help you with the audition.”