Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (24 page)

Their voices are pitched wrong, like little broken twigs crackling down the phone. Bambi: “Call me back.” Lily: “I need to check you’re OK. Something happened.” Another message: “Where are you? Call me.” Another: “Why aren’t you picking up? If you don’t call me back I gotta call the police.”

I don’t know immediately because the voices etch in me the fear, the shame, the disgust from yesterday morning, and all I can think is,
They know.
I remember shaking—I
am
shaking, my breath quickening, note the twisted silver wrapper of gum kicked into the corner of the elevator, stark against the thick brown carpet. The shiny brass of the wall is covered with thumbprints, tiny—from a child perhaps. The elevator whirrs soothingly. I don’t want to know, step out of the elevator, confront the stark truth, and when it hits the ground floor, doors opening with a dull, muffled ding, I stand reluctant, fearful of stepping out, knowing that the slap has come; it was now merely waiting for me to register the pain.

I can’t remember what I’m leaving the apartment for. The phone rings. It’s Bambi, I register with a nauseous lurch of misanthropy, a rising of bile in the throat.
Thank God Ivory, you’re OK?
What? What’s happened?
It’s all over the papers. Dancer found in her apartment. Dead. Stabbed. No names yet.
Who was it though? Who could it be?

Who could it be.
I want to call Eton with a want born of need, yet he knows me only as Mimi, doesn’t care about the rest. He knew only the person I professed to be, the girl who could fuck him, bend over into twisted imitations and simulations of pornography, that puppet show. He didn’t know the twisted soul inside who could commit unspeakable acts (for free!) after a shot of liquor from a manager. My body looks smooth, perfect, complete. The deception is in place, and Mimi assuages my fears with a wink, a smile. The doorman catches my eye and I smile back, without feeling whatever should lie behind a smile. I walk out of the apartment building, catch my breath in the chill wind, walk over to the newsstand outside the revolving doors. Reach for the
New York Post.

The face staring back at me is softer than I remember. An elegant face. The eyes are fiery and proud, not with the arrogance of drugs, but the stubbornness and ambition of youth. She looks—clean. She looks nice. She looks like a girl I would introduce to my grandparents, sit with in elegant SoHo bars discussing skin-care products and Prada bags, the latest
New Yorker.
Her skin is smooth, glossy, and young, the hair long, silky around her beautiful face, slim neck. But her name.
It says her real name.
Something sour rattles in my throat, crawls into the gullet, sits poisonous and sick. The shame! I clutch Mimi tightly, as if she would ever dare to leave me. A shudder, eyes closed, closed, closed, force it out, force it out of mind. Open. Mimi is entwined around me lovingly, protectively, jealously. We danced together, this girl and I. I recognize her face, the profile, the starkly normal name hidden deep inside the Chanels and Diamonds and Desires. She was not my friend. I can’t recall speaking to her, even when I saw her nervous and tetchy, driven away from Foxy’s by the cruel looks, the long hours, the unscrupulous management. They hadn’t put down her stripper name. That hurt me, that the stripper had stayed alive long enough to tattoo her with indelible ink, and yet she was nameless. She was us. She was Bambi on the slippery ole slope to destruction, starting to use the hard shit after work, smoking it to avoid track marks. She was that Colombian girl who people said started whoring to pay for the crack, died in some fucking shithole a couple of months before I ever set foot in a stripjoint. She was the older girls, with families and husbands and regular clients, the girls who never drink and have it together, who save their money and do this out of need, who don’t give handjobs and argue with their men back home to let them work. She was me, lost in a world that sucks the sinews from my bones with a smack of violet lips, a hungry grunt for more. Parents didn’t know she “danced.” Another fucking euphemism. Parents didn’t know she
stripped.

I take the newspaper, smile back at the doorman, back into the elevator, up to the ninth floor,
ding,
in my apartment, can’t remember why I left the apartment. I have to work tonight, I’ll call Bambi, see if she’s working. And then you sit there, empty, numb, nullified by something that they call grief, but you don’t know what it’s called, for grief is for someone who is dead, someone gone, never to return, someone who you know intimately, someone who shares your life like Mimi does. One moment changes everything, flicks the off switch. My head aches. I knew it wasn’t the dancing that killed her, held that rolled-up twenty-dollar bill to her nose for the last time, thrust that knife a little deeper until it hit the aorta. But I knew that by the time we get to the stage, peel our dresses off, caress our breasts, and twirl around on six-inch clear plastic heels, the damage has already been done.

Call Lily, gotta call Lily.
Her cell phone rings out. I don’t leave a message. Blindly make some tea, the English kind, hot, dark, the teabag left in for three minutes, removed, a splash of milk, no sugar.

I see myself reflected in the empty pools of her eyes.
The death of a nameless dancer whose real name littered the papers like a filthy, execrable word was a tragedy I could not bear
The rising welts on my smooth skin are already discernible.
It was out-and-out pornography, child pornography, callous and sadistic and unbearably, heartbreakingly cruel. Because whatever crap we tell ourselves, whatever clever marketing ploys lie out there justifying and legitimizing the groping and the sex and the abuse, whatever those in power will tell you and our clients will lead you to believe, however strong Mimi is, however beautiful that smile, that glance, that touch, the soul within is corrupt and rotting, because this job is wrong, wrong,
wrong.
I can see their painted mouths leering horrifically, a tongue like a lizard flickering in the back of that artificial mouth and whipping it into a bogus smile.
What do you feel?
a journalist asked me once, and he asked because he felt it too, felt the bitter, corrosive heat radiating off me, warping sheet metal.
I feel like I’m tainted and wrong, like I’m dirty, like I will never fall in love, or have children, or get married, or be normal, or lead a life that isn’t twisted with desire and sex and bitterness and filth, I feel like I will die with Mimi on my tombstone for all eternity, blotting out whoever I was before, whatever I was before. I feel like I gave birth to a monster, I feel like that girl, The Stripper. That’s what they daubed upon her cold dead chest, her blue body, as they waited for the air to swell deflated lungs, waited vainly, vainly, and then watched her die before she could ever inhale deep enough for a chance to correct them. I don’t know how I do this job. I don’t know how I’ve done the things I’ve done, how I’ve done the things I never told you about, locked up tight, bound over and over in tight-lipped memory, until they became forgotten, before they could be committed to this page, find their way into my obituary. I don’t know what makes me different, what makes it easier for me to have my head forced down on someone’s cock than for the next person, for the consequences to be slight in comparison to the gravity of the situation (did I enjoy it? did I ask for it? I didn’t hit him, I didn’t say no, I didn’t walk away) a few tears, cleared up by a hot meal, a trip to the movies, a group hug, the concern that my family do not find out for they could not deal with the shame, not like I could, not like I can. All I know is what makes that girl in the paper like me. We share things, similarities, understanding. Not that we are dancers, strippers, whores, sluts, hos. Just that we did a job because we felt we could cope with the consequences, the sheer weight of our apostasy, the nuclear fallout, not realizing that the half life would be for all eternity, and that the job would be what we were known for whenever we entered a room, someone whispered our name, looked over and glanced into our face, closed and guarded.

What do you feel?

He had asked again, more insistently this time, and I took a drag of my cigarette, looked distant, bored.
Hungry,
I said.
I’m fucking starving.

I have bad dreams.

The phone rings-rings-rings. Rings out.

The phone rings-rings-rings. Rings out.
I walk as if under water, everything muffled, not really existing until I have my three drinks, my cigarette, keep my date with Mr. Benjamin every night, step onstage with an almost audible sigh, watch as my body melds, pulsating, with hers, a lilt like an orgasm, a spasm, death. It will be OK.
The phone rings.
Dualism is a philosophical concept where the mind and the body are considered ontologically separate, yet the separation between Mimi and me rents this body in half, in quarters, in tiny, wretched pieces. This renders dualism, to me, an inadequate concept.
The phone rings.
I’ve been here before, it’s OK.
The phone rings.
It’s all going to be fine.
She soothes me, holds my hand, gazes into my eyes, coos at me like a mother.
Astonishing! I have never seen her like this.
The phone rings. I answer.

“Mimi.”

It’s Eton. I register this with a faint twist of displeasure, a worm of fear.

“Mimi, you left me a message the other night.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, but you were totally incoherent. I could barely figure out what you said. And then I did.”

Eton speaks again, his voice unusually tender, measured, resigned almost. He sighs and barely audible, the vowels concealing the exact emotion, murmurs:

“Mimi, I’m at home. Just come around.”

The walk to his apartment is only ten blocks. I wrap my huge scarf tighter around me, stuffed red, chapped hands with a perfect French manicure into jacket pockets filled with balled-up tissues shedding lint. My cheek still smarts, my eyes feel swollen and old. Manhattan seethes and bubbles, a witch’s brew. A bum is comatose on the street, just outside Duane Reade on Fifty-seventh and Broadway, his penis sticking out of his fly, obscene and swollen, a long trail of urine streaking down the sidewalk. Ladies in elegant kitten heels smartly step over the river. Steam rises from manholes in the street. Hot dogs, warm, spicy. The bonfire scent of huge, salt-covered pretzels. The doorman in Eton’s building greets me warmly, all smiles. Javier. He likes me. We speak Spanish occasionally. In the summer I’d bring him iced coffee when I did the morning breakfast run on Saturdays, still warm and sleepy from Eton’s bed. I step into the elevator with the little old lady who lives on the third floor. She bows her head in recognition. She walks the same route, unwavering, every day. Eton once helped her, last year, when he’d first arrived in Manhattan and she slipped in the snow. She’s tiny, wrinkled, shrunken. She’s all there, completely
compos mentis,
it’s merely her body that betrays her. Loves Eton. Smiles at him. He always talks to her.

I knock on the door. It swings open and for a moment he stares at me inscrutably. I walk past him into the apartment and over to the window, where I light up a cigarette, stick my head out into the chilly air and blow smoke into the wind. Eton sits in his chair and waits.

“So what happened?” he asks levelly.

He dwarfs me, like I’m a little girl, he’s Humbert Humbert and I’m Lolita curled on his lap,
goddamn fucking Lolita,
I’m always a fictional character for someone, except it wasn’t meant to be like this, with this
need,
the dialogue of sex disintegrated by pity as I burrow into his shoulder and cry, and he just strokes my head softly, and whispers, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

It strikes me, with acute irony, that this is, perhaps, one of the few genuine moments we’ve ever shared, when the heartless waltz between sex and love, seduction and betrayal, power and powerlessness, is destroyed simply by (
picnic, lightning
) life. And that makes me cry even more. Because he has a heart, the proverbial heartless bastard
has a fucking heart,
and he’s holding me and telling me he cares, and with this curious and unexpected admission comes a new truth, one I’d tried, like everything else, to push back into the darkness and paint over with the thick, caked layers of my stage makeup, to deny and to beat into submission with my shameless act of seduction, my Mimification of the truth, contorting and wrangling reality until it becomes as illusory and indistinct as the identical figures wrapped around identical faceless men in the darkness.

The undeniable, ineffable truth
the connection between palm and cheek
that we just don’t belong together.

12

IDENTITY IS A FUNNY THING.
We don’t really think about it until others start writing their own versions of us. And then it becomes so intensely, frighteningly important.

Women are complicit in the rewriting of my truth as fiction. They come to me, these writers, dribble into my inbox, led there by a paper trail of words, grasping reporter’s notebooks and clunky tape recorders vomiting spools of brown, tangled tape. I trade my history for hard cash, give them my bad dreams for a check, but the dreams remain, and what appears in glossy print bears no resemblance to what I had whispered to these career women, these cockroaches of human suffering, these journalists.
I love it! I would never leave dancing! It’s so empowering! I feel all woman! I used to be a geek and now I’m a sexy stripper!
Why is it that women clutch desperately, urgently, needily, to this fiction that this is erotic, glamorous, and in any way a “triumph” for our sex? Why do they revise my history, persist in drawing out my words, and then casting them aside, censoring them with the crude blanks and beeps of war-time love letters to pretty, innocent sweethearts protected from the trenches? I am a heretic for disavowing the dogma of my sex not once but twice: first, in becoming a stripper; second, in refusing the doctrine they attribute to me to make how I earn money all right, OK,
normal.
Normal. Not for me, for
them.