Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (20 page)

“Yeah.”

I get up blindly and leave, forgetting to swallow, and outside I spit egg-and-bread into my hands, dry retches of nothing clogging my throat. I stumble back blindly to my apartment, sit dumbly in the AC, chilled and numb. Eton follows after he has consumed the remnants of his, and my, breakfast. I ask The Questions.
What else happened? Who called who? Why did you call her? Why didn’t you tell me? You had sex with her?
“You don’t understand. It didn’t
mean
anything. It was just
sex.
” Eton leaves the apartment. It was the first time he had ever been in my apartment. I wait awhile, staring at the walls, and then I walk over to see him.

The bed still smells of sex, semen, cunt, and sweat. Is that mine or hers? How could she not
smell
it? It’s everywhere. It fills my nostrils, pungent and heavy and thick—it’s a thick aroma. Eton smells it too, the souring of something, the lewd crowing of sick triumph, a score, a strike.

“I never asked you, Meems, about the men you danced for, where they put their hands, where they put their mouths. I was hurt when you said you were going back to dancing. And now I’ve hurt you, and I’m sorry. I never meant to.”

He tries to kiss me.

The images slice into my head like bursts of flame, searing hot, a knife in white heat. The man who touched me. That one who looked at me with those eyes—empty, disturbing, dead. The lawyer who climaxed against my thigh. The banker who whispered
“Oh yeah”
for an entire hour. The many who made me sick. The one I kissed. The sweet and funny graphic designer whose hand I took and led to places it shouldn’t have gone. The scent of sex made me feel sick. I could still feel the half-chewed bread mixed with yolk that had lain in little globby patties in my hand from breakfast. I inhale sex (hers or mine?), I smile sweetly, I kiss Eton, I profess forgiveness, my head whirls, and I lead him to the bed, the scent of sex (hers or mine?), I pull him on top of me, and grind against him, and kiss him deeply, before pushing him down, and taking him gently in my mouth. I let my mouth caress him, urge him to get harder with my throat. As the blood rushes down and he sighs in relief, Mimi starts to stir again, to awaken, to smile, to snicker silently inside, to hate.

I bite, hard.

10

ETON THOUGHT
he was saving me, like the one before him, like all the others. He didn’t realize that the process of imagining himself with Mimi was all part of the drag act, the peep show, the blue movie. He didn’t realize that playing the part of Saviour is something they all relish.
To save, the act of saving, rendering one a Saviour:
the fantasy that comes after the other fantasy, which is relatively innocuous in comparison. Take her in the Champagne Room, get her to sit hard on your cock, grind down,
hard,
that rhythm, that pressure, hold her hips so she can’t move away,
thudthudthud
you can hear the beat of your heart counterpointed to that long, slow grind, an unrelenting cadence, a courtship you can’t stop, can’t, can’t, so close and when it swells unbearably, bruised and purple and weeping, you quickly unzip, push the tiny G-string aside, wet with her lust, clumsily squash, squeeze, cram into her, and she’s gasping in delight and pleasure and that unbearable, exquisite portrait of pain, the female orgasm.

Try this in the room and you’ll be met with an obstinate hand blocking all entrances and exits, the imitation of desire, an empty sigh like the tired, bored ghost of pleasure. “That’s enough dude,” she’ll say a little crossly, and if she’s long at this game and sick of it, you’ll know, and maybe that turns you on even more. If she’s long at this game and hungry, she’ll negotiate, and maybe that kills your lust. If she’s new at this game and stupid, she’ll do it for free, and you can smell the fear in the mingled scent of her musk, and you can feel the uncertainty and the disgust in the stifled cry and the face that looks away, and in that moment hovering between rape and transaction, maybe you’ll entertain the pleasing notion that you could save her, this little foreign girl, so far from home and stinking of abuse. You could save her (final thrust, a squirt, wince) if you actually gave a crap.

I think Eton thought he was saving me, like the one before him thought, the one before that. Maybe I choose them on their ability to simulate; for someone who despises actors, I do appreciate their importance when casting the main roles.

I don’t ever want to hurt you,
Eton said to me late one night, words rustling down a phone line laden with static, the carefully orchestrated tremor, the choreographed catch in the throat as palpable as the lies, as empty as the promises. But I knew he would because he already had and I forgave him in advance, or was that retrospect? Monogamy is not in their sex. “You don’t understand. It didn’t
mean
anything. It was just
sex.
” I’ve heard those words a thousand times, a thousand times, and you see, I
do
understand, because it’s my job, it’s my livelihood, the distinction is our monopoly, the foundation of our empire, and the basis for a thousand and one lap dances. But secretly I believe they are the same, sex and love. The price on both is high, high, high, astronomical, ridiculous, extraordinary! And I can afford neither.

That is why, nowadays, I never pick up the bill. It’s a trick I learned from Mimi, and from Eton.

The phone rings.

“Meems.”

He didn’t say who it was. He didn’t need to.

“Thanks for sending that chapter to me. I appreciate it. But, well, erm, I’m not, altogether
comfortable
with you writing about me . . .”

He floundered slightly. I waited.

“You see, the thing
is,
it’s quite horrendous reading about oneself and wondering with dread what’s going to come next . . .”

It was late. The hour loaned us an intimacy that erased the months in between the last call, the last touch.

“I’m out of control, on the pages. You have all the power. And I don’t understand why you stick quite so religiously to the truth. It’s unnerving.”

I sigh because Eton has not yet realized that I, too, had no control, no power. It’s all about her, it’s her story, Mimi’s, and while I may have the opportunity to exercise some tiny autho rial liberties—exaggerating a nervous tic, attributing bad breath and cellulite to a character I dislike—in the end I’m powerless to halt the incessant, relentless rolling of this story to a conclusion of Mimi’s choosing. Even the cover, the title, the marketing that has been discussed in those boardrooms, with those editors—it’s all evidence of my frightening disempowerment, her authority. I struggle hard to keep elements from the story that may hurt him, us, but in the end the barest of omissions was the only liberty allowed, and the story still thrashes and weeps and holds its arms out greedily for its siblings, wanting to be reunited with the parts I deliberately and efficiently silenced, even when Mimi stamped her feet and pouted, furious at my intervention.

“I’m only letting you write about me because I know how hard you’ve worked for this book, Meems,” he says, troubled and uneasy, biting hard on pusillanimity, knowing that even if he forbade me to write about him, I would anyway, caught in the thrall of veracity. “But I think you should know, I hate it. I hate reading it.”

This book, like her, is morphing horrifically before my eyes, the cells multiplying, deformed, like cancer. They can hurt and that fact hurts me. They are alive, too much alive.
I want to stop your nightmares,
Eton had said once with uncharacteristic kindness, and I turned away to face the wall out of habit, perhaps. When Eton called I only half listened, instead hearing those words.
I want to stop your nightmares.

I find writing about dancing even harder than the dance itself. The dance, at least, ends with the song and the brisk exchange of hard cash. But this keeps going, grows bigger, more fearsome, more unwieldy, horrendous.

I worship at the altar of Olga. My offerings? Libations of tears, torn from my eyes like the wires ripped from between my legs (“No cry Mammie! No Cry! Nearly over!”), stray hair, plucked delicately with Indian threads, my skin, lost under a haze of Mystic Tan, dark blond roots vanquished by the enigmatic two-hundred-pound Russian beautician—sacrificed to the stripclub.

Mimi is back in business.

When we finally sailed into Charlotteville, Tobago, it was too late to take the dinghy in to locate Customs. We were stuck on the boat until morning, our yellow quarantine flag hanging bored and listless in the humidity of a West Indies evening. Around us were three or four other boats, flickering lights shining through portholes, the comforting swell of other human voices. The Captain said we could swim, and he lowered a torch into the water so the deep emerald green lit up with flecks of jewel-like jellyfish, crystal drops. We drank beer we had saved for six weeks, and we lowered ourselves reverently into a sea that licked and kissed our burned, salty bodies, then we grew braver, jumped off the bow, laughed and talked and joked and drank some more. It ended up just me and the Captain, sitting on the aft deck, feet in the water, talking, drinking, drunk at some unknown hour, for we were still on European time, not Caribbean, even though we were
here,
we were looking at it, what we had wanted, what we had worked for all these weeks. All of a sudden he asked me something, and my face crumpled with the effort of holding it all in, all those months and years before the boat. Too much pleasure and pain for one person to bear, and he held me and kissed me on the top of the head as though I were a little girl. “Could tell you’d done some hard living,” he murmured, and hugged me a little tighter, “No ’arm done though Mimi. No ’arm unless you let it.”

The next day we set foot on land, white, perfect beaches framed by lush, fertile jungle, chickens pecking and scratching, grinning fishermen smoking joints, small colonial houses nestling gently in the crook of the mountains. I left the others and sat and drank beer on the beach, and it rained, big, fat plods of rain, and I felt happy being alone, happy being Mimi, laden with a past that just added to the intrigue, made it all the more interesting. Made me, in some ways, so much stronger.

 

Vegas. There are two, one on the Upper East Side, one in Chelsea next to Bungalow 8, Marquee, and Crobar. You belong to one, you belong to both. You’re a Vegas girl. It’s the best club in the business. High-end. Vegas isn’t just a stripclub, Vegas is a scene. Vegas is
Vegas.
Thousands of bored, agitated cheerlead ers across Middle America secretly yearn to up and leave Peaceville, go to the big city, and launch their careers in Vegas, because in Vegas you aren’t just dancing for overweight IBs and prepubescent bachelors. You are getting paid to sit and network with movie stars, rap stars, football and baseball players, with the full figure, flesh-’n’-blood version of those glossy, air-brushed creatures from the pages of
Us Weekly.
You work in Vegas, you might end up on
Howard Stern,
in
Playboy
mag, immortalized by Vivid Entertainment, glorified by hosts of Americans, male and female. Vegas is where I end up.

“One fuckin’ one,” snorts Sandy with disgust, eyeing the Yankees game on the flat screen while expertly harpooning a graying slab of gyro meat from his tin take-out plate. “Hey doll, you noo here? I ain’t seen you around before. You gotta boyfriend?”

Waiters run past, bartenders stock fridges with Red Bull, a collective wail arises from the girls in the dressing room. “Where the fuck is the makeup artist? I need eyelashes!” A sea of bare, tanned, oiled flesh swamps the dressing room, magnified by the mirrors lining the walls, multiple girls, multiplied girls, breasts and bottoms, the whiff of deodorant, perfume, hairspray. Downstairs the music starts with a heaving lurch and an epileptic frenzy of lights. A girl curls up on the chair next to me, hugging her knees into her chest and balancing her chin on top like a child. Glittering flits of glimpsed girls disappear, reappear, grouping and regrouping.

“The girls aren’t very friendly here are they?” I observe, more for conversation than any real surprise at this fact. Dancers aren’t friendly. We stick to the known, the tried-and-tested. New girls piss us off. New girls are competition. New girls are fresh meat.

“Nah. They’re bitches mostly. You new?”

I nod. “First night. Came over from Foxy’s.”

“You know what happened to me the other day? It was like, my first night here. I was in the Champagne Room with this guy and he said he’d give me four hundred bucks to jerk him off. So I was like, ‘OK,’ you know? What the fuck, it’s money, and afterwards he gives me four bills. I get upstairs and they’re twennies. I can’t believe I gave a fuckin’
handjob
for eighty
bucks.
Fuckin’ asshole.”

I laugh. “How long have you been dancing?”