Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (15 page)

“Whadda you do, baby?”

“I write.”

“No, come on—lookin’ like that. Whadda you do?”

No answer.

Hollow laugh.

“Whadda you do?”

“I write.”

I turn to leave.

“Hey! I thought we were gonna get coffee!”

I turn back, still in the role, my B-list one-liner.

“No thanks, ‘baby.’ Cheers for the sandwich.”

He stops and stares. I know even though I’m walking away. I feel it. I couldn’t help smiling, the comforting scratch of money prickling against my thighs.

“Who
are
you?” he calls after me.

“Baby, I’m the Queen.”

The Queen of it all, the star of my little B-list life, my little B-list existence, re-created in words just begging to be made into a movie. Paramount, you reading this?

Because tomorrow, for sure, I’ll reprise the role.

 

Aborted from being me for visa purposes, I write as Mimi, anonymous and sly, and yet every bit myself, more so, something poisonous and rich released from being me-me, so that now I can write like I never could before. I’m loving it. Loving, for the first time in my life, easy cash, waking up every morning, drunk and foggy, to find myself sleeping in large-denomination bills from where I forgot to remove the cash strapped around my thighs. It’s easy. It’s innocuous, the shots downed, drugs snorted, crotches ground down to dust as their jaws drop lower
Geez, how the fuck you do that
and me and Bambi just laugh, slap hands, don’t ever let the roles slip until we’re safely tucked up in bed, and even then it only surfaces for that three-hour interval between waking and stripping, sufficient hours to fight back the nausea, the headache, the hangover, step on the treadmill, shower, paint your face back on, go back to the club, slip into the dressing room with the other girls, do it all over again . . .

 

We’re sitting at the bar. We’re always sitting at the bar. Makes us feel safe, the ritual of one white wine, two vodka shots, three skinny cigarettes, and a chewing gum before we hit the floor. Bet’s telling us about her abortion. She was on the pill, had used a condom, and
still
managed to get knocked up. She was worried the abortion wouldn’t work either. It would be born in the Champagne Room with 666 tattooed on its head and roaring in tongues for the teat. Bulgarian Natasha shudders and crosses her legs. Our job was mutagenic, toxigenic, carcinogenic, to fertility. We did not menstruate and children were deleted from our wombs with startling efficiency, or else lay at home cared for by grandparents as Mom became sour and shrunken from the job of providing. Julie the bartender sits down. Used to be a dancer, quit because she got too old. She looks down a skinny, badly sculpted nose at us and pushes her boobs back into their too-tight brassiere. “Are you girls, like, best friends?” She motions to Bambi and me. We shrug and down our vodka shots. In the grand scheme of the club, in the hierarchy of bitches, we are best friends—Bambi and I—despite the fact that after eight weeks of working together, I still don’t know her real name. But
in
the club, we work in unison, an efficient bitch-grinding machine, leaping on the unsuspecting, the powers of two pairs of breasts, two smooth asses—one white, one black—a potent combination, devastating for the credit card. We work that bitch (yo’), pump the client of all he has. We are the bitches, yes—and possibly I am more of a bitch than Bambi, for she, at least, seems genuinely to like me. But when it comes down to it, the bitch of the day is whomever we choose to assiduously milk dry of money.

“You tried that guy?”

“No. He don’t like black girls.”

“You always say that.”

“Baby it’s true! Somma these bitches ain’t never seen a fuckin’ black girl before. I said to this one guy, ‘You ain’t never touched a black girl before have you?’ And I was right. He hadn’t. Fuckin’ tourists.”

They rarely see past the smooth asses, brimming like ripe plums from tiny G-strings, the plump, firm saline breasts, the kohl-rimmed eyes fringed by stick-on eyelashes. Rarely believe us if they do ask us anything about ourselves.
Oh yes, I have a degree from Cambridge. I’m twenty-six, I’m a writer.
Their eyes glaze over, or they laugh disbelievingly, because you’re just another bitch workin’ it, and after all, they’re here for the tits and the ass, the attention, the fake caresses, the soft sigh of false desire.
Oh, say dat again in your accent doll. Dat’s so fuckin’ hot, dat accent.
It’s not about you. It’s about them. Or so they believe.

There’s something dark, twisted, and insidious in all of us, working the devil (dressed in Brooks Brothers) today, every day, at noon walking down those stairs into the club with no windows, a midnight starting after 11:59 A.M., plunging our befuddled money-grabbing brains into confusion with every replay of the movie reel. We’re reveling in the power of our beauty and our youth, collating the stories to proudly tell our grandchildren when we’re addled and wrinkled, our breasts have sagged, our teeth stained yellow, our eyes milky and dimmed. We’ll get out the photos then, show them pictures of ourselves parading round the dressing room on lingerie night, posing in fake furs for Pimps n’ Ho’s evening, the managers fondly draped around us, as if our beauty and youth could rub off on them too. In some impossible transformation we become whoever we want to be in this club, leave our degrees and our intelligence and our discretion behind, wallow in the dancing, the glitz, the glamour, the celebrities, the endless Cristal poured down our throats, so decadent we could bathe in it.

 

 

When the film reel draws to a close, we’re drunk and giggling. Tip-out the House Mom, the old, wrinkled, sour Italian woman in the dressing room who always scowls at me. We tip-out the DJ, short and squat with his Hawaiian shirt, his ready grin, slippery hands, Hitler mustache that he tries to brush, laughing, against our mouths. We tip-out the managers, and they hug us, pet us, kiss us, slip a hand on the waist, the ass, and we lean in close against their boners like we’re taught to.

“You OK,
guapa?
” grunts Pedro the bouncer, narrowing his eyes, sunk deep within folds of wibbling flesh, enormous muscles slathered over with a generous dash of fat.

“Yeah,” I smile.

It made me feel safe, that question.
You OK?
Yeah, yeah sure, I’m OK. I’m doing OK. I’m surviving. More than anyone else would do in the same situation. I’m doing it on my own. I’m independent, getting there, proud. It makes me feel safe, that question. Though safe from
what,
I reason. Because the glitz, the show, the men, the money, the film played out relentlessly day after day—it’s comforting in its familiarity, in its very fakeness, its self-mocking hyperbole, its imperfect B-list sham quality. And that’s the thing—something that isn’t real can’t ever hurt you. You
are
safe.

 

“. . . and then I’d lick you from here to here, and then I’d kiss your pussy, and then I’d slide into you, harder and harder . . .”

(Gasp, pause, lights cigarette, looks at me.)

“Tell me your fantasies, Mimi. Tell me what you’d do with my dick.”

Always a question that stumps me. I am not, verbally, the most articulate of people, plus I have a slight problem with the exact realm of impossible fantasy this kind of talk leads one to. I don’t think my mental powers are sufficiently strong enough to be able to envision this most impossible of situations—the idea that I would
ever
actually lower myself to be found in bed with someone
quite
so grotesque as Mr. Accountant.

“Erm. Let’s see. I dunno. I’d erm, I’d make you play with yourself, then I’d probably make a cup of tea and have a cigarette while you jerk off on your own.”

I disappear for another “restroom break” while Mr. Accountant mulls over my erotic response. Twelve hundred dollars and this is what Mr. A. gets for his money. Two flat Diet Cokes, a bottle of pinot grigio and a superior level of sarcasm, coupled with a constantly peeing English girl for 120 minutes of quality time. I sit in the restroom and talk to the attendant, a middle-aged black lady from the Bronx, sipping vodka neat out of a Poland Spring bottle. The girls flutter in and out. Busy afternoon. I leave the bathroom and bump into Bambi. The club’s filling up. “You OK baby?” She’s obviously distracted, looking around with the look of the hustler. I nod, sip some of her wine. “He a groper? Just masturbate. They love that shit. Make him watch.” She’s gone. Twenty-three minutes to go. Pedro’s at the front desk, talking to a manager before he goes on the door again. He grins at me sympathetically. He’s a good guy, Pedro. Not as dumb as he looks. Sometimes, on a slow day, we’ll order in from the deli, sit at the bar, ignore the old regulars sneaking in for their favorite girls, drink coffee, talk, laugh. Was going to school. Left after flunking because he had a kid too early. Lost his scholarship. Abandoned his dreams. But he hasn’t extinguished it all. I could see there was something stirring inside him, waiting to get out, just biding its time beneath the big, black, mean exterior, the constant scowl.

Fuck, gotta stop thinking so much. Not drunk today. I can do this. Alcohol makes it a lot easier. Hank winks at me and swaggers past, steering a potential customer into the back-rooms with his salesman patter, playing up the Guido-speak—“You see anudda girl dis fuckin’ hot in da club? Take her in da back! I’ll give you a special price . . .”

I reenter the Champagne Room.

“So Mimi, tell me what
I’d
do with my dick while you were making tea and having a cigarette . . .”

Wine, grab, drink, drink hard, drink fast, drink as if each swallow takes a bite of time, sharp incisors ripping soft flesh, but hard to swallow. They all say that don’t they? Hard to swallow.

Time’s up. Back to The Emerald City, as Bambi calls it. “We’re in Oz now baby,” she’ll whisper, then lick her pinkie finger and gently trace the outline of her erect nipple with exaggerated gasps while a client squirms in horrified, aroused fascination. The thick, stale smell of old man crawls in my throat like a wet, feral cat, breathe, breathe cold AC crackling in lungs like dry ice, back among the young and the beautiful again. In the corner a big corporate party has arrived fresh from the office, and the girls line up, giggling and obedient, to dance for them. Not drunk enough. I’m not drunk and high enough to hustle effectively, exude that undeniable whiff of supreme confidence mixed with cheap perfume, not take no for an answer.

I am heading toward the bar when I see the guy in the corner.

Loners. If they have the look of the masturbator they’re going to be lucrative clients, but you need a higher level of tolerance than I currently have. This one looks innocuous though. Young. Ruffled blond hair. Strong jaw. Blue eyes. Slightly confused, like he doesn’t quite know where he is, what he should be doing. This one looks like a stripclub rookie, like he’ll be keeping his hands to himself, like he’ll get a hard-on if you give him a look. He’s dressed expensively, but thrown together all wrong. He has money, but he doesn’t have a woman, that much is for sure. Hank smiles and winks as I walk over quickly. It is a seamless operation. Smooth dress over ass, slide neatly onto the arm of chair, successfully block view of Chanel gyrating gracefully onstage.

“Hey.”

He looks up, blinks.

“Hello.”

The
vowels
—this guy went to Eton, or Harrow, or some damned place. I can hear it even through the pounding of house music, the gasps of girls, the chinking of glasses, the almost imperceptible rustle of ass against stiff cock.

“You’re English.”

He musters a comeback. “So are you.”

“Yes!” I smile inanely and shuffle into his view again before he can spot the twenty dancers with monstrous silicone boobs ruthlessly working the room and attacking their prey—men in suits. “And you went to Eton, right?”

He blinks, confused. “How the
hell
did you know that?”

We know, we all know. We learn to recognize when they’re married, when they’re lonely, when they’re divorced, when they’re new parents, when they’re rich and successful, when they’re merely pretending to be. This job imbues you with a kind of sixth sense for mankind in all its varying forms—of which, when you’re talking about the narrow margin of mankind who frequent titty bars, there are really only about four basic types:

1. Saviours

2. Sex Gods

3. Perverts

4. Rich fuckers

Let’s not discriminate, let’s not be reductive. Most clients are all these, rolled into one indefinable, belching, drunken, horny, brown-paper package of second-class USPS. It doesn’t take much more conversation before I’m slipping off my tasteful polyester sky-blue number bedazzled with plastic jewels and pressing my knee into his cock, my breasts against his face, maintaining that miniscule distance, that all-important distance. I’m giddy suddenly, comparing it to the first dance I ever did, four weeks previously, hamstrings stretched taut and screaming as I crouched and sweated and nearly cried with the physical endurance of holding such intense proximity without touching the man who’d tucked a twenty into my garter with lust-filled care. And now. It’s like cleaning my teeth.

He surprises me out of my reverie by suddenly running his hands gently up my thighs, and murmuring with a slightly startled look as if he surprised even himself—

“Come out for dinner with me. I’ll take you somewhere nice.”

I turn around and gently slip away from him, grind him gently, with detachment, bored, disappointed.
Nice.
Huh. I don’t reply to his request. They always ask this.
Will you come on a date with me? Will you? Please? Do you like me? Really? Or are you just trying to get more money from me? Will you come on a date with me?