Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (28 page)

BillyMark’s. Billy-Fuckin’-Mark’s. Of course it’s where I ended up, that bar. Every damned night after work, every damned night, and I stopped caring about life, stopped worrying about what Mimi was up to, I just went to BillyMark’s.

Ceiling fans wafting the dark stench of sweat oozing through cheap polyester; six ripped black motherfuckers staring at you with blank faces and an air of pugilism; a slim, tired blond bitch with a poodle perm sitting quietly in the corner. We sit, play pool with the
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
of dilapidated ceiling fans slicing through warm, melted butter air, caressing our bodies like the soft whistle of the Dominicans—sour, sweet, curdled. “You looking at my ass?” I ask the biggest motherfucker. “You wanna mess with me bitch?” and they fall about laughing. The blond bitch sighs, and it seems like with the exhalation something moves, stirs inside her, just as quickly dissipates in the hot summer air. “Got a cigarette?” I ask, and we go outside, lean against sticky, gummed-up walls perspiring with the blanket dark.

“They think he’s my pimp ’cause he’s black,” she says with the lethargic twang of Atlanta, Georgia. She spoke so soft you had to lean in close, before you realized you were almost touching her head, her soft, badly permed hair, her limpid brown eyes with pupils so huge they wrestled you lazily into pity if you stared too deep. “He ain’t my fuckin’ pimp. I’m a dancer. He’s my boyfriend. I used to escort. Still do when I need the money. But I like dancin’.” The fake hair’s trailing off my shoulders, eyes crayoned into a caricature of a ho’s, I look like a ho, a ho at two a.m. in Billy-Fuckin’-Mark’s. I look like a stripper. So she knew, and she told me this shit.
Dancer.
We’re not fucking dancers. When, in the history of time, has grinding cock ever been dancing? In the world of the fucking American club, that’s what. You go into a club, a bar, some shithole on Twenty-seventh and Tenth, you see all these bitches with their Prada handbags grinding cock on the dancefloor, and they call that dancing. They’d be offended if they knew what they were doing was being done on the opposite side of the street for a lot more fucking Benjamins.

“You thought about working in Manhattan? Like, at Foxy’s or Vegas?” I ask, and the smoke from my cigarette puffed out as I spoke, hot breath, loaded with tar and decay.

“You work there? You’ll help me get a job? I need money. I don’t like escort work. It’s kinda boring, lonely. I gotta two-year-old son, I need money.”

And it hangs there like the smoke we exhale, distilled and loaded and heavy in the front of our faces like a mask of death, or maybe just Manhattan, but I take her number knowing I won’t call, and we go back in and we sit at the bar, two blond bitches waiting for their men to finish playing pool.

“Hey Mimi, he your boyfriend?” yells the bartender, and I shrug, shake my head no, and the old Puerto Rican lady married to the young dude from Cuba starts singing, her addled hands floating elegantly around her face as she mimes along to Patsy Kline on the jukebox, and the big black motherfuckers stop for a second, and everyone pauses, holds their breath, and it’s kind of beautiful in this fucked-up lunatic place way out on the West Side, filled with pimps and hos and people like me who just came along for the ride. Kind of beautiful, a lotus growing from crap, and when the old Puerto Rican lady stops singing, the blond girl starts texting her friend, the black motherfuckers pick up their pool cues, my guy takes a swig of Jack, and the old Puerto Rican lady stands, smiling beatifi cally, shining like she knew there was applause even if we couldn’t hear it, and she sits down again, downs another shot of tequila, and then goes outside to cry, because it was too fucking beautiful not to.

“Call that girl again?” he smiles, cradling the pool cue as the Puerto Rican lady sobs and her husband dressed in one-piece camouflage gear slowly peels the label off a Bud bottle, rolls the paper, sticky, damp, in his hand, so I pick up the phone and call my black bitch up in Harlem, Bambi. “He ain’t pickin’ up the damned phone the Fat Fuck,” she screams, even before I say hello. “I can’t find him. Listen, if you guys want coke or weed, that’s easy, but this shit ain’t going down well. There ain’t no one in Manhattan beside that Fat Fuck, and he won’t get off his fat ass to fuckin’ deliver.” Waves of cheap beer are coursing through me, and the guy’s talking to Billy at the bar, or maybe it was Mark, or maybe Billy. So I get another beer, go outside with the blond bitch again, and dance salsa with the Puerto Rican lady in the lewd heat of a Manhattan night, dancing like we’re lovers, laughing and cussing out the menfolk.

We wait until the next day. Order a take-out of diesel to keep us going, hand delivered straight to my apartment by some dude I stare at like a child, my eyes glazed by too much liquor, too much sex, two straight days of drinking. I call in sick. “You ain’t working? You gonna get in trouble girl. You left early Thursday night too.” I left early because my time was running out, the story was drawing to an elegiac conclusion, an arabesque of destruction, me and Mimi. “I can’t give blowjobs,” one of the girls said to me last week, a bitch from London, and her eyes widened with horror at the thought. “I can’t even imagine puttin’ that thing in my mouth. Fucking disgusting. My friend told me to imagine it was a lollipop, but I can’t. It’s just sick.” And then she looked over at some guys, slipped elegantly onto their laps, hand slid between thighs, a gentle lick on the ear. I left.

The diesel’s working its shitty little magic as undulating waves start to wrap around me, claw down the thoughts, and replace them with that sunken, smacked feeling of disconnection that comes from being so connected, so in tune, it’s almost unbearable.
“I’m so fucked up,”
I whisper, and he just smiles, and there’s a moment when I have a twinge of something—horror? fear? fear and loathing in the Lower East?
Is this right?
—and then it’s so right you don’t need anything else, just the warm, intense, safe pressure of prolixity and from somewhere the tinny prick of the music worming its way into your brain, and the waves just keep rushing, and rushing—

We end up several hours later wearing different clothes, in the club downstairs. “Call again,” he says, and I do, someone different this time, and it’s the same answer, so I use the tricks I learned back in France, I used nightly at Foxy’s, at Vegas, at Jack’s, and I stand and watch and wait and talk shit on the street, and hit the jackpot. Inside he’s sitting waiting on a black cracked-leather chair with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on a Formica table, two plastic flutes smudged with fingerprints, and the black dude who owns the place slides into the booth next to us.

“This little white bitch cracked me up man. She just stood outside and came straight out with it, ‘Can you sort me out?’ in that hot little accent. I don’t do it for everyone, but I looked at her and
knew
she was special. Gimme eighty bucks. I’ll sort you out.”

So he does. The club’s filling up, and there’s a bunch of Hispanic girls, their asses hanging out of teeny-tiny skirts, there are too many girls, a lot of girls, and the music’s old school, riding somewhere between Bob Dylan and hip hop, not even eclectic, just fucking wrong, and I love that too. When the waitress comes over she’s sad and listless and Russian. “What’s your name sweetheart?” I ask. “Michelle” she breathes sadly. There’s something between her and the black guy. We don’t know what, and are too fucked up riding the waves to even care. And then the other guy comes back and we’re led into the backroom, sigh, exhalation. I love this shit, loved it, left it, and now it’s back in NY to haunt me, another fucked-up night in shit city. We’re in a black room in the back of a club and the manager’s chopping out lines of something with a sharp, metallic stench, free drinks, we’re flavor of the fucking month. The place is full of trash, we’re trash, white fucking trash, middle-class trash playing it dirty because it’s the place we feel at home, we feel ourselves. He doesn’t know my real name, doesn’t care, and I like him for it, like him for not being Eton, like him for the mutual using, like him even more for knowing that tomorrow he’ll be gone. I don’t know his real name. And then that blissful, fucked-up tsunami of chemical endorphins blasts into your system, and your ego expands so painfully it’s like you’re going to explode, and I look over at him, playing drums in the middle of this fucking shithole in Manhattan we found without looking, and he looks up and just smiles. Smiles at his little white trash fuck grinding along on the dancefloor with some fat dudes and loving it, feeling the inevitable, inexorable pump of chemicals coursing through the system and melding indefinably with the memories of times past, the beat of something you’ve known before, that sweet, orgasmic pleasure of living in a way you really shouldn’t, and loving it,
loving every damned fucked-up minute.
He gets up and he starts dancing with a slim, tanned girl, hotter than me, but that’s cool as well, because he’s not my boyfriend, I don’t do boyfriends, never have done. The end of the night approaches, but it’s still not over, even as we’re locked into the club and fed Red Bulls to pump our over hyped, exhausted, frazzled souls into something even higher, and we go back to my place with the tired, sad Russian girl and the two pimps, drink Stella and black tea, smoke some weed, and the sad Russian girl leans over to me, and I clutch her hand, cold and unloved, and she asks me if I’ll help her, and I slip her my number, and the black dude smoking shit slouches against the wall, his eyes rolling in the back of his head, and the guy I’m with laughs, and when they leave, we lie in the bath, let the music assuage our abused bodies, let ourselves drift gently down and into each other as the water trickles gradually down the plughole, The Drifters play on . . .

He leaves at midday, by which time I’ve forgotten his name, deleted his number, gone back to bed, alone. Eton calls a few hours later. I don’t pick up.

I start to vomit the darkness crawling into my soul back up on the page. Summer rolls on, intense and unforgiving. It’s all the same to me now. I just write, fill up the void with words, scrabbling and feverish, urgently seeking the combination—the perfect combination—that will unlock the door, swing it gently, cleanly open, show me the end.

14

ENGLISH USED THE WORD
“girlfriend”
the other night.

What a repulsive term, so redolent of playgrounds and hot, sticky childhood paws stinking of cheese and onion crisps as they scrabble, disgustingly, for your hand.
Girlfriend?
I thought, vaguely after I’d recovered from the initial distaste,
that should probably be in the plural,
but I’ve noticed, lately, Mimi’s aversion to his (highly suspect) charms. When men are around, Mimi is around—the two go hand in hand,
men-Mimi, men-Mimi,
like a merry-go-round, swinging back and forth. Yet that disarming smile, the English charm, and that good-natured optimism of his—all traits I abhor yet find mildly tolerable—seem to make her bristle agitatedly, walk silently away in a pouting, suspicious sulk. She does not trust him. I don’t either, but slowly, irritatingly, I am beginning to slip as each day brings me nearer to the conclusion, as my words begin to peter out. If she had her way the story would go on forever—but I’ve noticed her rages are becoming interspersed with periods of sad, quiet calm resignation. Could it be the end? I feel almost guilty. And then the rage again, the rage as she demands more attention, more time, another story—
but don’t you remember that time . . . ? And did you put that in? And what about when he . . . ?
We argue a lot, nowadays, I have to say. He listens in confusion and not a little fear when our petty squabbles froth out into a tumbling tumorous mass of obscenities. I oscillate between me and Mimi, veer frighteningly between hatred, and—something I have never felt before. I’m loath to give a trite and specious term to what is, after all, just the need for a little companionship, something a little different from the perverts and the pedophiles and the creeps. Someone to fill up the ever widening gaps in between my feasts with Eton. But then we tumble into bed arguing vociferously about stoic philosophy, American politics, the crisis in the Gaza Strip—something to flaunt our young, intelligent minds, display their full pretentious arrogance—something far removed from all of this, something that reminds me I still exist in a world outside the contingent realm of my body. I laugh as his hand gently, deliciously, traces its curves with a tender reverence and the good humored battles melt into a buttery pool by sucking, hotness, taste, thirst satiated, hair and mouths and limbs melded and fused in one long kiss so my body is his, his mine. And yet—would you believe it?—we have not yet done the deed . . . “sealed the deal.” . . . I feel dizzy, a little sick, a little scared . . .
It’s just a pleasant distraction from an otherwise unfortunate period of my existence.
I don’t do boyfriends.

Mimi, of course, disagrees with his presence, would have me rewrite the story with a sunset ending in Mustique on Eton’s opulent yacht.
I can’t do that,
I tell her. I do have a little smirk when I exercise what little power I have, but then I have a duty to record some semblance of truth, surely? It’s not cruel to insist on the truth? It’s just journalism, good scholarship, conscientious objection. We do agree on one thing, though: no boyfriends. No, no boyfriends. I have always followed this policy, and I have yet to suffer the ridiculous acrobatics of a broken heart, the inevitable Judas-like betrayal. I have yet to drag the carcass of a relationship upon these slim, toned shoulders, and with osteoporosis in the family, I have no plans, as yet, to do so.