Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (21 page)

“Third day. I was just curious to see if I could do it or not, but I love it! Getting paid to party. I’m studying theater at Tisch. I’m gonna be an actress.”

The manager signals to the bartender and a round of drinks are dispensed along the bar. Onstage a girl in a metallic G-string writhes deliciously on the floor, dark eyes flashing, her burnished skin shiny and smooth, a huge mass of tight black curls flowing around her slim shoulders. I catch a glimpse of a fiery eye, defiant glance, astonishment, a grin. Almost imperceptibly, Bambi winks as she grabs her dress off the hanger and helps the next girl up onstage. She joins me at the bar and helps herself to a sip of my white wine with a smile that looks almost real in its warmth.

“Hey bitch. What took you so long?”

 

We laugh a lot at Vegas, laugh long and hard and loud. Bambi and I drink, make money, laugh. Sometimes Lily drops by, sometimes Lucy. They say they’re happy being out of it, but they keep coming back. Every night is a party, every night is feast or famine, every night I numb myself to the reality of the next day: a cubicle room, two giggly Asian girls, a man I want to call but can’t. I forget about the visa, to tell you the truth. Forget about why I’m in Manhattan, forget about writing. Everything becomes subsumed by the only desire you need to have as a dancer: the desire for money, money as quickly as possible, dirty money, filthy money, money that stinks, money you abhor through acts that smack and sting and bruise, ah!
Money.
Money. Mimi craves the money, craves the drink even more, craves the nights at Vegas with Bambi, because in Oz nothing
bad
ever happens. We crave the money and the attention and suck the sweet nectar of scorn, the opium of disgust.
Mr. CEO, I have no sympathy for you, because you walked into a place where shit goes on. The management are vermin. We’re vermin, swarming all over pricks like you merely for your money. People’s wallets go missing on a regular basis. People get overcharged, and it’s no accident. Get the right girl, pay a little extra, and you’re going home with a fourteen-hundred-dollar venereal disease. It’s your own fault, and as much as I know what goes on here, what scum are running this place, Mr. CEO, you should really have learned by now. Don’t trust anyone—least of all yourself.

The nights slip away, dribbling pointlessly, melted butter dripping, escaping, peaking between the hours of one and five a.m., then subsiding into an aching, shivering withdrawal until the next fix the following night. Six weeks have passed since Eton and I last talked, and it’s now Halloween. I numb the pain with the sex of money, with alcohol, with my trip down the Yellow Brick Road. I have fun doing so, the kind of clinical fun only the truly self-destructive can understand. I inhabit this Mimi body almost as if it were mine.

“So, like, my fiancé is givin’ me so much shit at the moment. He’s convinced that I’m cheatin’ on him. He had his dad, like, tap my phones.” We’re all in Halloween outfits. Cutesy policewomen, French maids, schoolgirl dominatrices.

“Why is he so paranoid?”

“Well, he’s a little upset. He got a hard-on Friday and it wouldn’t go down. It turned out to be like, a
really
rare condition. He had to go into the hospital. They were gonna, like, amputate. So he’s takin’ it out on me. I gotta fly to Texas Saturday, calm him down a little. Hey, you get your SpongeBob outfit from the housemom?”

Everything is for sale in the club. The drinks, the experience, the girls hanging off your arm, pressed against your dick. You can buy hats, T-shirts, calendars, lingerie, shoes, makeup. For the right price it’s yours. The right price is the highest price. Halloween and they’re selling outfits to the dancers. Wonder Woman, though surely Wonder Woman didn’t have a 34F chest and a pussy stripped clean of hair? Spider-Man. We won’t even go into
that
one. Nurses and sailor girls, fairies and bunny rabbits. On Halloween girls dress like strippers. On Halloween strippers dress like girls, innocent cutesy girls with monstrous mammaries emerging from skin-tight plastic outfits like huge ripe peaches, tiny G-strings disappearing into ass cracks, stretched taut against pink-brown buttholes, glimpsed briefly—for the right price. Girls cluster in the restaurant, order mashed potatoes, vodka shots, Parliament Lights oozing wisps of gray smoke. One of the managers walks in, three nineteen-year-old strippers (Belly Dancer, She-Ra, Uncle Sam) look up, sipping their illegal drinks, eyes darkening. “Don’t get drinks from
that
guy. He
does
stuff. Drugs girls. Takes them in the back. You gotta be careful.”

Vodka-Red Bulls are the most expensive drink, so Bambi and I order five throughout the night and charge it to the manager’s tab with fake names.
I’m a French Maid talking to Shakira and Snow White.
We’re dancing for the owner, the owner’s friends, the club’s lawyer. The right price for them is a cheap price. Marilyn Monroe brings our drinks. The owner catches her arm, looks around. “Private Room. Now. All of you.”

Four girls, three guys. Marilyn Monroe looks like a waitress, acts like one too, but for the right price you can get Marilyn to lift her skirts, because that’s what she’s doing now, two big-tittied blondes kissing her, licking her, a finger gently massaging between her legs while I grind the owner, his gaze fixed on Marilyn, his hands fixed on me. She comes pretty quick, does a good job, looks real pleased about it too. Very gracious. “Thanks girls, that was
so
hot. I’ve
never
come like that before.” I almost believe her. She’d make it good in the porn industry, I could see that’s where she was headed. Cunning concealed as Marilyn Monroe, concealed as waitress, but for the right price she’s just like the rest of us, with our butts out, our sweet smiles. We are sweet you know, most of us. You’d be surprised. We’re also expensive, fourteen hundred bucks an hour. But how do you put a price on what we sell? Even fourteen hundred is a bargain.

Texas Jolie turns around and looks at the stage. “Gee, guys, check out this chick onstage. Off the boat, right?”

There’s one in every club. The patently shit stripper. The girl who can’t speak English, gets onstage, and goes red, covers her breasts, mutters Hail Marys under her breath, prays Daddy can’t see her now. To the uninitiated, one might assume she’s been sex trafficked, beaten into submission to the evil ways of the titty bar with a large club by a 250-pound Haitian pimp. Yet the simple truth is merely that she’s incapable of doing anything else. She spends her days twisting her tongue around the intricacies of American English, that vast convoluted map of grammar. She spends her nights trying to wiggle her sagging, cellulite-ridden arse in a seductive manner and failing miserably. As soon as she gets to Level 3, Intermediate English, she’ll leave, get a job in a bar, eventually become a secretary, the relief of prising that white, jiggling body into cut-rate H&M office attire evident from the way she will let her present equilibrium—hovering somewhere between acceptable with clothes off, and the fat bitch you fuck on a night out and kick out of bed at three a.m. for fear the hot chick next door might see you with her—collapse in a spectacular fashion.

Margaret, the patently shit stripper, steps timidly onstage, two sad, gray wings flopping behind her. She trips over her gown and reddens slightly. One breast pops out to her palpable devastation. In an attempt to retrieve it, she becomes entangled with the flopping wings. She has the fluid movements of someone who had been anally raped by a large shish kebab. An ancient version of “Firestarter” pumps out inappropriately from the speakers. Jolie laughs loudly, a horrible sound, wrong.

“What’s that bitch dressed as? A fuckin’ dead butterfly?”

Bambi gazes at her in awe.

“Girl, she ain’t no butterfly. She a
moth.
”

The night is slow so we order drinks on the manager’s tab. Queen of the Night emerges from the labyrinthine depths of the private rooms. Just as there’s always a patently bad stripper, there’s a Queen of the Night, every night. Sometimes it’s me if I get lucky early on. You can always identify the Queen by her obvious inebriation, the huge wad of notes tucked into her garter, and the fact nothing on earth can destroy the joy of having just gotten paid sixteen hundred bucks for two hours of drinking Dom Pérignon with some rich prick when everyone else was sitting at the bar getting drunk on Corona. She yelps excitedly, leaps onstage, and starts to crawl around while pretending to masturbate herself, much to the confusion of two Japanese tourists elegantly sipping Budweiser out of frosted glasses. She gyrates frenetically with an abandonment born of pure intoxication, and scatters her money haphazardly over the stage. We hate her.

“You tried those guys?” I ask Bambi.

“Yeah. They don’t like black girls.”

“Those guys?”

“Those guys are fuckin’ yeast infections.”

“Them.”

“Jewish.”

Pause.

“Shall we order a bottle of wine?”

Queen of the Night performs an impressive scissors kick onstage and falls on her head. The managers look on fondly. The night passes slowly. After half a bottle of wine, Bambi grabs my arm.

“Look at that bitch!”

“What?”

“That fuckin’ bitch! That moth! She’s givin’ dances to that guy, and that guy, and that guy. She’s a fuckin’ shit stripper. Why she goin’ home with more money than me?”

Queen of the Night lies in a drunken stupor onstage. The patently shit stripper is cleaning up. Bambi and I sit sipping our stolen wine, bitter as lemons, poor as church mice, faces like smacked arses.

And then we laugh and laugh and laugh.

 

Dad calls to say that they’re taking my grandmother out for her eightieth birthday.

“Does she still have those Chihuahuas?” I inquire.

His voice, thick with Welsh, rumbles across the crackling line.

“Oh no,
cariad.
They all died. Did I tell you what happened to the last one? Started having funny turns. Twitching, fits, you know. So your
nain
thought that maybe the dog had a heart condition, got out her angina spray, and gave it a puff.”

“Did it work?”

“No. Dog dropped dead. Your
nain
was ever so upset.”

We pause, and then laugh cruelly, laugh long, laugh hard, laugh until coffee came out of my nose, and my dad has to sit down, thirty-five hundred miles away but we’re right there together.

“How’s it going in New York,
cariad?
Got that visa yet? What you doing about money? You should call us more often. Tell us what’s going on. We worry, your Mam and me.”

I stop laughing abruptly. I hang up, later blame it on a bad line. I could still hear our laughter days later, and it hurt for some reason, but it doesn’t stop me laughing in the club. I laugh longer. I laugh harder.

Slowly, seductively, the laughter starts to take over, creeps in imperceptibly like a parasite. I start to shake, and it hurts, and then I find I can’t stop, choking for breath . . . willing that aching jaw to close, to gulp back the next throttling sob ready to break . . . and it’s
painful,
and suddenly there are tears, and it’s not laughter at all, it was never laughter, it was more like bitter, putrid rage, a scream inside, and I can only listen in horror to the bile pouring from me in aching, breaking peals, in that empty dead ring of hollow laughter.

I drink more. By ten p.m. every night,
I’m in Oz.

Eyes glassy, verging on the brink, slide off his lap and veer, wobbling over to the bitches—I’m in my element when alcohol hits the veins, runs pure, distilled.

“So when I first started working my name was Fema, but I just wasn’t making money. Then the housemom took me aside and said, like, ‘Sweetie, you gotta change your name. No one wants a girl called after the Federal Emergency Agency. Not when Katrina’s just hit New Orleans.’ You know, maybe she was
right.
I’m doing
so
much better now my name’s Coco.”

Ah, whattha
fuck.
In no mood for this shit, not today. I could feel myself transforming into one of them, rotting with frustrated ambition. The bartender turns around and hands me a vodka shot.

“So I wrapped the film Monday. I had to play a stripper at a bachelor party. Geez, I dunno how you do this job. Fucked
up,
man. The guys were
so
aggressive. I was
cryin’,
I was fuckin’
cryin’.
They have no respect.”

“So how’s the manager?”

“Oh he called me Tuesday. He wants to go on a date. You think that’s kinda sick when he has a girlfriend? I said yes.”

I dunno how you do this job.
The alcohol eases my entry into this sick, celluloid world of fantasy, makes it easier to hear the soundtrack, so when you’re dancing to the rhythm you’re playing the starring role in your own film, a shitty music video, a Broadway musical adapted for the big screen. I stumble away from the bartender, feeling her drag me down, out of the alcohol fog to where the air’s clearer,
fuck it, I want that fuggy no man’s land again
—’nother shot and I’m ready to go, exhale, fuck,
breathe
, push real life out of this place for a moment, get back to the Emerald City . . .

Whoops,
nearly fell then, hand to steady myself, Candy Shop, yeah sweet as fucking candy aren’t we, all of us with our smooth, unblemished, saccharine-sweet bodies concealing the decaying souls within, you know what happens if you eat too much candy, right?
Hey man, how are you? You wanna dance? No, well, I’m kinda drunk, so I’m gonna sit here for a while, talk to you guys . . .

Never understand why they get so aggressive.
For fuck’s sake, you came here to talk about the freakin’ NFL “in peace”? That excuses your slur upon my character? Yeah, I’m a slut asshole, a fuckin’ slut for doin’ my job and not gettin’ out of your face quick enough for your liking.