Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (2 page)

It was late by the time we left the bar, we were a little drunk, and I still wasn’t convinced he was a captain. He went back to his boat, supposedly, I went back to the crewhouse, and I didn’t see him again. He sailed for Barcelona the next day. I stayed on in Antibes, and as the days become lighter, longer, warmer even than that first glorious evening back in the caress of the South, more travelers—Brits, South Africans, Americans, Aussies, Eastern Europeans—arrived hoping to seek employment on the boats. I applied for jobs as a chef by day, drank beer at night with other people like me—broke and selfish and unemployed and young and hungry for life. We had nothing to lose, and, indeed, did not care even if we lost that, so long as on the way we felt the sting of our own existence. By the end of the summer I had a packed résumé of employment, several thousand euros, an impossibly high alcohol tolerance, and a considerable amount of sea miles. In Barcelona one evening toward the end of August, I met him again, the Captain, over prawn crackers and Foo Yung in a shoddy Chinese restaurant. I was with a group of boat crew, all of us taking a course on fire safety for our insurance papers. He grinned at me and through the gap in his front teeth rolled a cocktail stick around with his tongue, grotesque and comical. “You met me at the right time, luv. Need a bloody chef to cook for me and the crew when we sail the boat across the Atlantic in October. Reckon you could do it?”

I imagine Mimi as a parasitical spirit, a placenta feeding off my experience, siphoning from my awakening to life, groaning with the bellyache of eating fruits not yet ripe enough to pluck but all the more delicious because of their illicitness.

She waited patiently for her revolution, timed it to perfection. Midway between America and Europe, in fifty knots of wind, strapped into the cockpit of the sailboat to prevent the waves from clawing me back out to sea, doused and drowned and slapped and bruised by the ocean. I’d give you the lat and the long but I can’t remember it. You’ll find it if you look hard enough though, somewhere in the logbook of
La Bella.
Even in the midst of the storm, when there were other, more pressing concerns at hand, like breathing, surviving, not capsizing, she saw her chance.

“All you talk about,” he roared across the wind—the Captain, that is, and I could see him shaking his head in exasperation, in admiration, in amusement and pain—“is yourself.
Me me me me.
I’m going to call you Mimi.”

Logged, down with the wind angle, the tides, and our position. There and then it all coalesced and it all changed. Up until that point it had been the clever kid gone awry, broken-hearted, stumbling away from home to where the booze was cheap, the drugs were plentiful, and the sex was shared, all sticky, indiscriminate wrestling bouts of it. A cracked, flawed version of me, ready to splinter and bleed. And now, Mimi. Two syllables, just in case you didn’t get the self-obsession the first time. Two pairs of letters coupled snugly, no room for any more. Indestructible and self-contained.

Life changed after that. I guess it’s like calling the devil. Find the right name, you draw him out. Although this wasn’t an exorcism. This was more of a baptism.

I have my ritual when I come in. The ritual of anesthetization.

Dressing room. Quiet, empty. My body’s calm, flexible, glowing from several hours of yoga. I look in the mirror and the face looking back is scraped clean of makeup, unblemished skin, a soothing rose tint of health. The dressing room is dark. I slowly walk around, then screw the lightbulbs into their sockets around the large makeup mirrors until a fluorescent glow drains the last vestiges of health from my appearance. The face looking back in the mirror now is deadened, skin translucent, dark rings encircling the eyes. I stare into the pupils and light a cigarette, and my chest heaves in repulsion, because I don’t smoke outside this place, and coming in involves conditioning myself to be the person who works here, and this involves smoking, another drug to deaden the feelings of outside. The ritual of anesthetization. I stare into my eyes and then I have that curious feeling of looking outside myself, at myself, and it disturbs me, because I don’t want to look too deep. Down the stairwell into the kitchen. I help myself to the busboys’ coffee. Bitter and strong, the buzz kicks through the yoga haze. Milk. Sugar. Walk upstairs again. I take a cigarette from a discarded packet, light it, take the coffee, and settle into my usual position, the old, tattered sofa in the corner of the dressing room. It faces a full-length mirror.

Looking into this mirror I can see that the ritual is starting to work.

I move into the main body of the dressing room. I put on foundation. Clinique. Light-reflecting concealer under the eyes. Dark, smoky brown shadow over the lids. Thick black liner. Curl the eyelashes. Paint over them with mascara, own brand, cheap crap from Duane Reade. There is an order to everything, and the careful orchestration of that order is the balm to a chapped and fractured soul. The coffee and the nicotine buzz are fading. Girls come in, laugh, chatter. There is one thing I have consistently found about strippers in New York. They love dogs. If you ask about their Chihuahuas, their pugs, their runty little lapdogs, you will slot in like you belong. After months of diligent enquiring about their pets, I belong, and I throw out a comment or two, eye myself in the mirror. Today I am wearing a tiny white schoolgirl outfit that barely skims my ass, neatly divided in two by a white-and-red-spotted sequined G-string. I have waist-length blond hair, $21.99 from Ricky’s around the corner, clipped into my own shoulder-length mop so the acrylic and the real blend seamlessly. Sophie walks in. Her Chihuahua is suffering from a slipped disk where the annulus fibrosis weakened or tore, resulting in a bulge or protrusion of the nucleus and annuli that exerts pressure on the nerve. Old Venus comes in, breasts erect. Her dog is having jealousy issues with Lila, the champagne manager’s dog, after the two were introduced over an extended drinking- marijuana-smoking session sometime last week. The ritual of asking about their dogs soothes me, acts as an analgesic, and the music over the Tannoy speakers kicks in, which means the club is officially open, which means I can go downstairs and order a drink and sit at the bar and let the alcohol soak into my body, leak out over my system, and blot out the goodness like india ink. My legs sink gratefully into the comfortable familiarity of rigid plastic shoes that, after continual wear, are perfectly melded to the arch of my insole, although it is more likely that I myself have melded to the curve of hard plastic. Giulio, the manager, is behind the bar. He has black greasy hair combed back off his face in a Guido-
Sopranos
style that would be ridiculously caricatured if you saw it on a character onscreen, but for reality it is fine. He smiles briefly and says “Yes” before I even open my mouth to request a free drink. It is another one of our rituals. He knows it as well as I.

The blast of the AC slaps my porcelain skin, deliberately cultured to maximum whiteness to emphasize my supposed English complexion. The early days of fake tan are over for me, as I learn to accentuate what makes me different from the legions of Rubenesque Brazilians. The bartender is a dark, busty Puerto Rican girl with a Bronx accent who likes me. We talk and laugh about the other bartender, a white girl with a large nose and no sense of humor. I can’t remember their names, even though I’ve worked with them four times a week for seven months. She can remember what I drink though, and as she tells me about her dog she drizzles Ketel One over crackling ice, adds a wedge of lime, soda water. The first sip is pure vodka, and my stomach clenches involuntarily. Over the empty chairs is the shadow of the DJ in his booth behind the stage, purple and black and red. My hands are shaking. Ketel One, crackling ice, a wedge of lime, soda water—my drink of choice refined over eighteen months of trial and error and inadvertent alcoholism. Red Bull and vodka and I was awake for weeks. Beer, headaches and bloating. Cocktails, vomiting within hours. Wine and I had constant blackouts. In the beginning, when I started stripping, I drank very rarely, an odd shot, more likely a Diet Coke. I still think of this with awe.
I drank nothing.
I worked without medication, without the deadening of the senses, the deadening of oneself, the real. I worked fully exposed to the illusions of the club without my blanketlike embrocation of alcohol and Mimi. I earned very little compared to what I earn now.

I’m sitting at the bar, drinking my third Ketel One and soda, and I’m still talking to the Puerto Rican bartender, and I have no idea what I’m saying. I doubt she knows what
she
is saying. It’s a ritual we perform every day, a request that today be like yesterday—no surprises, money, drinks, bed before four a.m. if we’re lucky.

There’s no one in the club besides us two. Then the blond girl with the sweet face, the puppy fat of a teenager, walks down the stairs. She sits on the stool next to me and puts a gentle hand on my arm, a plump hand, soft, tender, pigletlike.

“How long have you been dancing plis?”

The question, phrased in the halting imperfection of Eastern European, surprises me and I answer without lying, which is unusual.

“A year. I started working as a waitress at Foxy’s, and then realized I could earn more money as a dancer, so I became a dancer.”

“A year? But you dance so well. You are the best dancer in this club. You are very flexible onstage. I want to dance like you but I do not know how.”

I digest this without blinking. I am a good dancer. I’m probably the best in this club, this small club. I have mastered the art of not giving a crap, so crawling across the stage wearing only dental floss panties and a look verging on the orgasmic has become effortless, reflexive.

“It took me a year to learn. How long have you been dancing?”

“Two weeks. I was a waitress in Foxy’s too. And then I came here. But I think it will take me a long time to learn how to dance like you. You make very good money, yes?”

I take a sip of my drink, Ketel One over crackling ice, wedge of lime, soda water. Everything visibly relaxes, an exhale, a sigh. I’m nearly there, rituals complete.

“Promise me something,” I say, and my voice is urgent, insistent. “Make your money here, but don’t work longer than a year. Save your money and then fuck off. Don’t stay.”

Her brown eyes blink rapidly. Soft eyes, soft skin, soft rolls of baby fat around her plump waist.

“Maybe I will go back to my country in a year. And you? You are going to leave?”

“Yeah. Soon.”

My stomach lurches, and I turn abruptly, walk over to the bathroom, squat over the toilet taking care not to let my dress trail on the floor, and then violently and efficiently expunge the contents of my intestines into a toilet stinking of piss, traces of white powder on the floor, sopping rags of pulped tissue paper around shards of glass, and the sour, stale smell of old alcohol, cheap perfume. This, too, is my ritual every night. I wasn’t born to this. I did not intend to be this way. I have a good degree. I am training to be a yoga teacher. I have ambitions to write journalism and screenplays and fiction. I care about global warming and the crisis in the Middle East. I am a kind person, the kind of person who stops when an old lady falls in the street, who likes animals and babies, who still believes in love. Had I taken a different route I could have had a comfortable life and career in London. I am the last person you would ever expect to be a stripper, to live this life, to anesthetize myself every night so my bowels drip out of my body rather than press unbearably on the nerve, like protruded annuli.

In the mirror, the person who walked into the club and began the ritual of anesthetization ninety minutes previously is gone.

I smile. It’s going to be a good night.

I gorged myself on life, and then one day, on vacation from the last boat I ever worked on, five years after I’d graduated and started traveling, three years since I first stepped on a boat, I woke up alone on an avocado farm in Guatemala. A half-finished novel by my side, lips tinged with cheap red wine and the kisses of someone’s husband, chest hurting from the altitude, I knew that it was time to stop. There’s no grand explanation for it. No epiphany. Just a void that could no longer be filled by the procrastination of travel and the thrill of the new. I sat drinking coffee on the chill of the mountain-side, watching smoke puff lazily out of a volcano, and felt immensely sad at the thought of halting this incessant movement, of becoming familiar and intimate with a place, having a relationship with location rather than a one-night stand. I went back to London, not a little scarred. I was different certainly, when I came back—you must understand that. I liked the nickname I’d picked up on my travels, mulled it over in my head, rolled it around on my tongue like a savory treat, an aperitif, a delicate bonbon, a snack that fails to satisfy.
Mimi.

On the tube, the interminable Northern Line, buffered from the winter cold by the stale, hot air, I realized England was not The Place. As soon as I’d stepped into the London Underground, slapped with the rancid roar of bad-breathed commuters, I wanted to get off. But I was on the interminable Northern Line and realized with a lurch (which could have been nausea, or could merely have been the motion of the train), that staying on this line could be more detrimental than the years of squalor and traveling and life bulimia.

I got off before I hit Edgware or High Barnet or Morden or any of the multitudinous stops in between. You might ask how that’s possible. You might not give a proverbial shit, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s quite simple once you get the hang of it, this leaving business. You think of a destination, you book your ticket, you pack your bag, you leave. Once you’re in the habit of leaving, those around you will get used to it too. Your parents, if they’re like mine, will just give a
humph
down the phone, get back to a cup of tea and the telly, clucking disconsolately at that expensive education at the taxpayers’ expense gone to waste.