Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (18 page)

The answers are always as unsatisfactory as the grind. I kiss him good-bye, and it’s a faux-lesbian kiss, sexless, with tongues, for show, like porn. I feel weird, wrong, and nearly call Eton. I don’t, instead stand on Seventh Avenue in the humid darkness of early evening, cabs whooshing past, lights blurred, Manhattan moving on relentless, but me postponed, hovering, uncertain and alone, feeling confused, a little empty.

 

Eton calls. He tries to play the Saviour card, perhaps to assuage his own guilt, but why he should feel guilty I had no idea.

“Look, your visa situation is ridiculous. It’s a mess. Let me pay for a visa lawyer. I asked around, I got the name of a good firm. Call them, they’re going to send me the bill, they have my credit card number.”

A little later.

“You don’t have the money in your bank account to show them and you know there’s no money in the club in summer. Let me lend you the money.”

There are more messages. I ignore them. Foxy’s by this time had sent me to their other club downtown, Baby Dolls, a sordid little hole not far from the (former) World Trade Center, just temporarily to cover for some dancers on vacation. There was no money there, none, but the manager, Anthony, was a relief after Dolores, after Hank.

“You havin’ boyfriend problems doll?” he’d say as I sat and sipped Red Bull at the bar. “I wouldn’t treat you like that if you were my girl.” But he’d smile and it was a kind smile, a father’s smile, and he’d look worried every time we went upstairs in a room with someone, and tell us to call, yell, walk out, if things got out of hand. We sit at the bar, the empty bar, and drink Red Bull and talk about life and watch marathon sessions of
America’s Next Top Model.
I make no money there, but I can almost believe I am normal. I can almost believe that I’ve tamed Mimi, made her more domesticated, a purring house cat. I’m happier. I miss Eton.

He calls again eventually, and he says the right thing this time, even though we both know it’s a lie.
I got scared. You’re everything I want in a woman. I wanted a fling and I got someone I wanted to be my girlfriend. I want to buy you flowers. I want you back. I lo
—No, not quite, not yet, not ever, not for me, not in this life. I know the score. He wants Mimi, he wants me to play along, and as long as I can play, it’s game on. I hide my drinking from him. I drink more at work to get through it. He never sees me drunk again.

 

In the room I must straddle him, usually with one leg over his thigh, the other planted on the floor in between his legs for leverage. He desires that the gusset area on my G-string be directly pressed against his penis, a pathetic and slow-rising slug, sleeping in the depths of his polyester suit pants, which emit a rank, stale aroma from their depths, like secondhand stores, old men’s apartments. He holds my hips and he moves me up and down. I am not Mimi when this happens. I am not anyone. I am just there for an hour, repeating this friction, thinking about the money and suggesting frequent cigarette breaks, when I will stare into the distance, and he will occasionally thrust out a fat paw to tweak my nipple, prod insistently at my vagina, cloaked in that G-string, thank God for that G-string. Cigarette finished I will resume my position and get back to work. I will change it by turning away from him, and his hands will be on my hips as he moves me up and down, up and down. Another girl who used to go in with him before she got too old tells me to do this. It is called “riding” and it means you can look away. I do not gasp, or feign pleasure, or whisper rubbish, or touch his bare skin if I can help it; I am just mute, a rag doll, a piece of friction—he prefers it this way. He never comes. He rarely talks. I found out he is an accountant, he is nearly sixty, he is divorced, he has fantasies of violent and unpleasant sex with underage girls. Sessions are tedious. He always stays for two hours, sometimes three. I am not Mimi, I am not anyone. The money is good. Eventually I pass him on to a new, small Hispanic girl. He likes them small, and he likes them to look younger than sixteen. I may have looked sixteen when I first started work here, when he first picked me out across the room and I winked at Bambi, pleased to have snagged a bottle, unaccustomed, yet, to the horrors and revelations the Room holds, still finding it sexy, in a way. Now I do not look sixteen. I have nightmares about this one. I can’t tell Eton about them. I wake him up sometimes whimpering pathetically, and I am annoyed at myself, and he snorts agitatedly, turns over, back to sleep, and I lie awake a while longer. I have nightmares.

 

On my nights off, we add a new pursuit to our repertoire of sex and food: ballroom dancing. Eton pays for my classes, naturally. We cha-cha and salsa, waltz and fox-trot, swing and tango. We spend hours practicing in the apartment until our steps are fluid as mercury, and we stare into each other’s eyes as we dance to double time, triple time, faster and faster and faster, until we fall onto the floor, giggling, panting, hot, and then he peels my clothes off, and we grow silent, intense, as our starving souls strive vainly to quieten that gnawing hunger.

 

“I’ve noticed that I’ve gone through rather a lot of toilet paper since you came into my life,” says Eton thoughtfully, chewing on a pizza, which was called “bruschetta,” despite it being, rather obviously, pizza. A young woman behind us released a terrifyingly horsy laugh. Her date looks around anxiously. I could tell they met on the Internet.

“Perhaps I could make a suggestion that you start to use
three
squares to wipe, and not the usual five or six?”

“I
did
bring you a roll of toilet paper the other day,” I say, defensively.

“But that was
single-ply.
”

The significance of this rests heavy between us.

 

I was still writing, occasionally, lackluster pieces for various magazines and obscure websites that paid next to nothing. I was just existing, languishing in stasis, neither legal nor illegal, still waiting for that visa, patiently counting my money every day, lining up in Bank of America to contribute more crumpled dollar bills to my account. The cashier would give me a suspicious snort and pick up a single between forefinger and thumb with obvious distaste. I’d shrug, walk over the street to Foxy’s, line up onstage. Dance a bit. Talk. Take my clothes off. Laugh with Mark the DJ. Laugh with Pedro. Gossip with Lily. Hustle with Hank. Squeeze money from the sad, tired specimens who enter during the day only for the free entrance fee, the air conditioning, the cheap thrills of sad breasts, exhausted sighs.

One day a journalist contacts me, and takes me for lunch and iced coffee in a tiny Japanese hipster café in Williamsburg not far from my apartment. He asks me questions for three hours, questions about the Champagne Room, questions about the men, questions about me, my goals, my life, my past. He’s only a few years older than me. I have a better degree than him, am probably a better writer. I find it amusing that I have become a zoo specimen of sorts, painful, but inevitable. I smoke ten cigarettes and he screws up his eyes as I exhale the smoke in his face, but I don’t offer to stop, and he doesn’t ask.

He comes into the club too, and I feel odd taking my clothes off with him there, though when Eton comes in I have no problem with it.

A month later the article appears in the
New York Times,
the accompanying photograph a dramatic portrait of an anonymous Mimi, face averted, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from a hot, dirty little patch of sand next to the waterline in Brooklyn. Eton looks at it in silence, then glances up at me, confused, as if unable to quite reconcile the fictional-seeming Mimi of this feature-length piece with the reality standing before him.

9

AS MIMI I AM A PRODUCT,
real life reduced to literary devices, plots, narratives, chronology, subplots, a catchy title.
If I write a book, it will be called . . .
What
would
it be called? “Girl Behaving Badly”?, “Adventures of an Accidental Stripper”? Something titillating! Something with a hint of youthful flesh, a flash of bosom, omitting the tired dark rings under my eyes, the twenty-a-day smoking habit and the cynicism. I like the Enid Blytonesque tone to “Adventures of,” as if I were rollicking through New York with Julian, Dick, George, Anne, and Timmy the Dog, a boiled egg and tinned pineapples in my knapsack, nestling cozily next to the G-string, pasties, and the see-through black baby-doll dress. “D’you think,” said my niece, upon hearing that I was writing a book, “we can read Auntie’s book in school for class, Mummy?” If it was called “Adventures of an Accidental Stripper,” why ever not? Why not hurl it onto the reading list alongside Billy Blue Hat and Roger Red? It’s OK! It wasn’t deliberate! It was Accidental! It’s a fun and frivolous romp by a Girl Behaving Badly!

We’re lost, Mimi and me, we’re fictions within fictions, social selves delicately seasoned, dusted with sugar, presented
table d’hôte
for your delectation. We are the ultimate biographical conundrum, and this we share with all strippers, those connoisseurs of pretense and false names. On these pages, as in life, we’re lost. We’re all lost.

 

Eton was obsessed with monkeys, and in particular he harbored a peculiar fondness for gorillas. His response to the cel ebratory mood that ensued post-article is pragmatic.

“Let’s take a day off,” he announces gravely, “and go to the Bronx Zoo. I hear they have an excellent Congo Gorilla Forest.”

We eat before we leave, in Norma’s on Fifty-seventh, where, it is rumored, there was once a thousand-dollar omelette on the brunch menu. Eton grunts in gruff delight as fluffy waffles and voluptuous syrup, nubile bacon and an orgy of fruit, appear on our table.

“So what will you do now, Meems?” he asks eventually, when hunger satisfied, he prepares to retire behind the
Wall Street Journal.

“I think,” I reply slowly, chewing delicately on a crisp rasher of bacon, “I should write an awful chick-lit book and sell it for a vast sum of cash to all the agents and publishing houses who have been contacting me since that
New York Times
article. And then I’ll use the money to write the novel I’ve been planning to write for the last two years. And perhaps on the back of that I can sell the novel I wrote on the boat all that time ago. And I’ll probably do a Creative Writing MFA so I can teach in university, travel to India, and maybe do some real journalism. And after all that, I’ll move back to England, get married, and have babies.”

He looks at me almost admiringly.

“Good show!”

“And I think I should move out of Brooklyn. I have enough money. I’ve saved about seven thousand dollars. I’m putting together the rest of the paperwork for the visa as well.”

He folds his newspaper abruptly and signals for the check.

“Well, as long as we have that settled, let’s go and look at some monkeys.”

He was amused that I knew how to navigate the subway up to the Bronx. When we arrived at the zoo it was too hot, an ongoing eructation of heat belching over us with sickly, fetid stickiness. We barely manage to see the monkeys and the reptile house, before admitting defeat and going home for fellatio.

 

In New York, unlike London, there is no amber light at pedestrian crossings. There is a red Stop or a green Go, and in between a malevolent flashing red hand indicating that between those two extremes there can be no soft, ambivalent, honey-safe amber. The tourists, when they see the red hand flickering urgently, stand confused and wary on the sidewalk, grouping closer together clutching their Bloomingdale’s bags, reluctant to cross, unable to decipher that ambiguous symbol. The New Yorkers stride confidently on, having lived with that flashing red light for so long, they are oblivious to it.

 

My status has been elevated somewhat by entrance to the hallowed pages of the
New York Times.
I’m suddenly subsumed by a whirl of meetings with publishers and agents, journalists and curious onlookers, who just want to see me, touch me, check that I’m real. It’s amusing, a relief, the tension in my head and heart slowly leaking out like serum from a blister, a painful, exquisite release. Yet I’m still unable to grasp the possibility that this hell could be over, it could all be over. I may even go back to England if I make some money from selling Mimi’s story, I decide. When I could return and be someone, be something, have proven myself, could go back being the victor. Maybe.

I start looking for a new apartment. Find one, with two giggly Asian accountants. Move out without saying good-bye to Raoul, notifying only the anonymous musicians. I move to Midtown, Fifty-sixth and Broadway, close to Foxy’s. I don’t know why, something about the stark, packaged, anesthetic feel to its gaudy tat appealed, plus I knew the area from having worked there for six months. It’s close to Eton. I don’t tell the giggly Asian girls what I do—
had
done—for a living. I would succumb to commercialism, sell out, and repackage Mimi in a pink cover and a PG rating. Mimi would pay the bills, as she always had, to fund my dreams. But this time in the relatively innocuous format of a paperback book, pink cover.

The days roll by, quickly, intensely. I have meetings in executive boardrooms with publishers, lunch with magazine editors, a photo shoot with a tabloid. I don’t feel like a pariah anymore. Mimi has become almost socially acceptable through New York City’s lurid need for dirt, pretty dirt, dirt that speaks its mind and plays its game, knows how to sensationalize itself, when to be quiet. I feed into her squalid desires without making her feel that she, herself, has been soiled. I feel, in a way, as if this were the fulfillment of my destiny. I didn’t make it the right way, so I took this route into making my dreams work for me. I’m not grateful for it. I’m not surprised by it. I expect it, in a way, for writing about my life, writing about Mimi’s life. I
deserve
success. I knew I would get it if I worked hard enough. I knew it would be painful in the process. I’m relieved it started before it became too painful. I know the weeks off from dancing, the garnering for a book deal, the flagrant manipulation of media, the five minutes of fame will last only so long though. I know I should work again in Foxy’s before my savings are sucked up by Manhattan rent, but I can see my way out now. It’s within my reach. And at the end of the day there’s always him, Eton.