Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (16 page)

Can’t,
I’ll whisper back.
Tonight I have a date with Mr. Benjamin Franklin.

“What do you do outside the club, Mimi?”

I laugh, shift slightly to avoid a drunken stripper about to launch herself over my clear plastic heels, and gaze out unseeing across the mass of naked, writhing, toned, slithering bodies melded onto men in suits, fresh from their day at the office.

“I write.”

I wait for the snigger of disbelief as I turn back around and lower myself directly onto his body, so I can feel his heart beating against my chest. His hands slip up to my breasts and cup them, and before I can pull away he looks at me, oddly sad, aroused, curious. A quiver of something unfamiliar rustles inside me. Then I do a very, very strange thing. Something which is completely, utterly taboo in a place which functions entirely on illusion, which considers sex as nothing more than a transaction.
There’s no touching, you see?

I kiss him.

 

I finish the dance, gather my twenties, rush away from a confused-looking Eton, when a girl I don’t know grabs my arm and spins me around angrily.

“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t let guys touch you on the floor. Don’t
kiss
’em. Save it for the Champagne Room. You start doing that shit you’ll get fired.”

Hank walks over.

“Mimi, doll, I don’t want you doin’ dat shit on the floor. You hear?”

I stutter out an apology.

“No fuckin’ apologies! The other Champagne host Kate wants a word wid you.”

I drag myself into the tiny dressing room. Kate looks at me in disgust over her old-lady secretary glasses and frizzy brown hair. The House Mom, huge and resplendent and immovable, tuts loudly and resumes knitting. Knitting was a new craze among the girls. Everyone was knitting. The ugly Russian girl was crocheting G-strings to sell to the other girls. The tiny skinny dark girl was making a jacket for her dog. The House Mom seemed to be knitting for the hell of it, for a break from
Us Weekly
and
People
magazine and naked girls whining for tampons and eyeliner. Kate lifts a decaying hand up to her mouth and places a Tootsie Roll on her tongue, which she proceeds to grind slowly in her jaws like a cow chewing cud. Apparently she’s an actress. She’d make a fucking fortune in snuff movies, that’s for sure. The dressing room is buzzing with girls fixing their hair and makeup, gossiping and laughing drunkenly. I glance at the clock. A half hour to go. In the background I hear a conversation between Diamond and Desire, two of the older dancers from the Bronx.

“I tell y’all about that fuckin’ new girl?”

“No, what happened?”

“So Hank makes me go and fuckin’ apologize for tellin’ that bitch to kiss my ass. You know what she did? Saturday night, I enter the restroom. She’s in there, door wide open, takin’ a shit, and it stinks. Fuckin’ stinks. So I tell her to close the door and she ignores me. So I tell her again. Nothin’. So I go on in there and tell that bitch she gotta fuckin’ change her attitude. I don’t see why that wrong. I can’t have bitches treatin’ me like that, givin’ me no respect. I don’t wanna smell no fuckin’ shit when I go in the restroom, you know?”

“Oh honey that’s
terrible.
”

Kate fixes me with her snuff-movie stare.

“Mimi, we’ve had complaints about you fingering yourself in front of guys, sticking your finger
up places it shouldn’t go,
moving your G-string aside and showing guys—your
pussy.
”

She whispers the last word as if the girl standing next to her currently examining her anus in great detail for signs of excrement might take great offense in the unanatomical name for one’s vagina. I sigh and attempt a defense.

“Look, you know that’s bullshit. Some fucking bitch is making that shit up because I’m making money. You know I don’t do that shit.”

Snuff-movie stare again.

“Look Mimi. You’re treading a thin line. We don’t tolerate that kind of behavior here.”

I act penitent, but she sends me into solitary confinement in the corner of the dressing room for a little “time-out” and reflection upon my numerous sins, with the implication that I must, at the end of thirty minutes, demonstrate some obvious signs of extreme and humble repentance. I pick up the House Mom’s copy of
Us Weekly
and curl up next to the lockers and a spangly G-string bearing the remnants of someone’s vicious yeast infection encrusted across the gusset.

 

“Hey.
HEY!
”

I’m on the street letting the blissful taste of a cigarette trickle down my throat and cling to my bronchioles.

“Hey Mimi!”

Pedro huffs up to Bambi, Lily, and me, scowls, sweat dripping off his brow from the humid darkness of the city nearing a heat record-breaking summer. Bambi raises an eyebrow. “Don’t let ’em get you down Mimi. You made money tonight, right? Fuck ’em. He was hot. You did nothing wrong. I’m going out with some of the girls. You coming?”

I shake my head no. I still don’t go out with the other girls, only Lily occasionally, but she’s so busy studying for her LSATs that she doesn’t go out much either. Pedro scowls after Bambi.

“Don’t like that fuckin’ girl. Hey listen. The guys was laughin’ at you earlier. Sayin’ you was one of the girls who does shit in the Champagne Room. Mind tellin’ me what’s goin’ on?”

“It’s none of your business!”

He looks at me and his face, big and ugly, softens.

“Hey listen Mimi. I like you. I know you got more in you than this. It’s just a temporary thing, right? Until you get your feet back on the ground. Go back to school, buy that apartment, get that job—whatever the fuck you wanna do with the money. Don’t go makin’ out with these assholes, OK? They just see you as a walkin’ fuckin’ vagina. I’m just tellin’ you. It’s a job. You gotta stay in control.”

My head is banging, and whether it’s the heat or the drink I just want to go home, back to Brooklyn, far from all this Midtown shit, far from where the boundaries between acceptable behavior are blurred by dollar bills fluttering gently onto a stage, those whispered words we’re never allowed to use in the club,
hooker, slut, ho.
“Am I a hooker?” one of the girls had asked me once as we sat at the bar and sipped martinis. “This guy gave me a thousand bucks to go out with him after work and hang out in Crobar. We made out. But I only went ’cause he gave me the money.” Hooker, ho, slut, stripper—the same thing in most people’s eyes. A kiss in a bar is forgivable, but a kiss in a stripclub makes you a ho by virtue of its price. Am I a hooker? Who gives a fuck? I’m Mimi, is that the same thing? A name detaching me from my family, friends, the achievements of twenty-six years of living, which wasn’t, it feels, so much. I shake my head, avoid Pedro’s dis turbingly paternal gaze, hail a cab, weave my way through people pouring out of offices, shops, Broadway shows, diners, bars—the normal bars. All the places without naked chicks, tits-and-ass, twenty-buck dances and a little bit of boob. But when it comes down to it, about the same things. Money and Sex. I step in the cab. The driver, a heavy, graying Russian guy, eyes me with interest.

“Is quiet?” he asks, nodding at the door of the club and pulling out onto Broadway, narrowly avoiding a shuffling bum. I shrug into the rear-view mirror, catching his eyes, black, deepset into folds of wrinkled brown flesh. We retreat into comfortable silence. Suddenly Ole Vladimir starts up again.

“You are not American? I can tell you are not American. You know why? You are nice. New York women are not nice. They are mean, they are like Rocky. You know, Rocky the boxer?”

“Ahuh.”

“Not nice, these women. I am divorce. I am divorce for three years. But I do not want marry, because New York women, they are not nice. You know parry?”

“No.”

“Parry happen in Brighton Beach. Five women, five men. There is vodka, there is much fun. Maybe two girl Russian, two girl Japanese, one girl Dominican. Is good money, is fun, women enjoy parry. I enjoy parry. I can take you to parry. I will pay you.”

The cab crosses the Williamsburg Bridge, turns right at Peter Luger’s, the famous steak house, delves into the depths of Little Poland and the shitty loft apartment.

“I’m getting off here, thanks sweetie.”

“I give you my number so we parry?”

The door shuts with a bang.

Upstairs, the loft oozes waves of baked, stifling heat, the aroma of ammonia and kitty crap. The musicians were out, leaving a pile of ancient frying pans engrained with burned egg festering in the bowels of the greasy sink, spilling out in burps of dirty cups, filthy spoons, stained bowls scattered over the kitchen table, even the sofa. Raoul was next door, prowling like a prairie dog, sniffing out my sin, ready to rip flesh from my carcass. Lucy was out working in a club called Privilege on the West Side. There’s a letter from USCIS. “We cannot approve your visa application until you show us sufficient evidence of funds to support your presence in the States.” I throw it in the trash, shut the door. Retrieve the bills from around my thigh—pathetic, two hundred bucks today, and a Thursday at that, usually the most lucrative in Manhattan—scrub the streaks from my face in a sink swimming with long, dark hairs and wads of hardened toothpaste, gulped down lurid blue Gatorade to avoid the hangover. I crawl into bed, music whirling in my head, the eyes of that Eton guy, the slightly salty taste of his lips. I’d forgotten what it was like to kiss a man. I fall asleep almost immediately, yet it’s a disturbed sleep, a sleep I suffer alone, pickled by the vulgar heat, wafting in relentlessly through the hole in my window where the AC unit had been stolen by a desperate hipster.

 

Two days later. E-mail.

Perhaps we are all of us, by nature, dichotomous, and it’s only through circumstance, desperation, or innate stupidity that the other person, that bold, obscene stranger, the Mimi in all of us, can emerge. I look on curiously, a little admiringly, a sharp intake of breath as Mimi coolly taps out a single-word response.

8

I MEET ETON
for dinner in a Japanese restaurant off Columbus Circle. I want the Kobe steak, but it’s ninety bucks a pop, and I don’t want to come across as a gold digger. Eton has gold to dig. His family owns an island, a shipping empire, an estate to rival the Queen’s. I tell him my name is Mimi.

“No, what’s your
real
name?”

Everyone wants a piece of me, a little bit of chili to spice up their lives—until it starts to sting.

“Michelle.”

We go back to his apartment. I watch him, expecting the pounce. I watch him, expecting the slap. I like him, but still, I expect it, and I’m tired, and nothing is for free, and it had been an expensive dinner even without the Kobe steak. I watch him. I recognize my watching. It’s a class thing, a poverty thing, a
need
thing. I saw a little girl on the subway today, flanked by two huge slabs of Mexican woman. Her mom grasped a box of M&M’s tightly. The little girl stood with candy stuffed in her sticky fat hand, and watched, and watched. She watched like a hustler. Every time those doors opened she examined the crowd. She didn’t approach just anyone, but when she saw what she was looking for, she darted. She chose women mainly; ethnic women over forty, and kids in baggy pants and caps. She avoided whites, men, and hipsters. Her mother and her grandmother sat immovable, immense mollusks of women, unsmiling, sluggish, and severe, an impressive wallop lurking in those meaty forearms. I knew if I approached her, for a tiny moment there would be that hesitation, a loss of poise, suspicion, confusion. The other Caucasian did it for me. “Honey, how come you’re not in school?” The girl’s face slammed shut like a clam. They got off at the next stop.

I’m waiting for the slap, the pounce, the question. Does Eton want to be Saviour or Sex God?.

The question comes, after I tell him my story, but it’s not the question I expect.

“Would you like me to lend you the money for the visa application?”

 

La Bella.
The deck drained all moisture from our feet. We did not set foot on any other surface for four weeks, the sensation of that smooth, baked teak sanding our soles and rendering them numb. The Captain’s feet looked babylike, soft and clean, but he could have run over hot coals if he’d wanted. It was midday, and we weren’t long into the journey, maybe five days from Las Palmas, and the temperature had crept up until our throats shrieked for moisture and our mouths opened, closed, like guppies, swallowing brine air that shattered into salt crystals as it hit our tongues. Shammy the deckhand was below in the cabin, writing the logbook in his careful, puppyish script, and the other two were asleep. The Captain wanted to talk. He told me he’d fallen in love when he was seventeen and she was nineteen. They’d saved their money, moved to the West Indies, bought a scrap of a boat, a tiny thing called
Blondie,
and started to fix it up. It took seven years. Then they left, set sail for Panama. They sailed for two years, but halfway through she’d flown back to England, leaving him in New Zealand. They wobbled uncertainly over long-distance calls and the obligation of a mutual history, and then they found each other again in South Africa, but this time, something had broken. They took the boat back to Tortola, and she returned to England to have his baby, and they were, to all intents and purposes, a couple. Eighteen years had passed since they fell in love. He was thirty-five and she was thirty-seven. He lived on the boat permanently now. She lived in England with the baby. He tried to describe what it was. I don’t think it was love, but I could see that it might have been, once, before things grew too tired and familiar, like the soles of our feet, numbed to stimuli.