Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (29 page)

I have bad dreams.

I wonder if, when I leave this place, they’ll go, or if they’re like cancer, always lurking somewhere in my malignant soul.

 

I walked there barefoot, and the sidewalk felt molasses warm and sticky. Everything feels surreal in 110 degrees, and the skirt barely skimming my ass, the black soot etched onto neatly manicured soles—these are merely details swimming around in a fishbowl of heat—magnified, syncopated, irrelevant. Cold pink feet on a warm black sidewalk, the only thing catching me from falling right off that freakshow merry-go-round called Manhattan.

I put the shoes on right before I step into the restaurant, curl a tendril of dry, bleached hair around one finger, skirt too short. Want it to feel right. Doesn’t feel right. The whole night, place, time doesn’t feel right. It’s anal without the Astroglide, dead babies at a wedding, foreskins at a bar mitzvah. It’s disconnected and jarring, and slipping those black soles into silver mules adds another layer of unwelcome detachment. I want the sidewalk, foul and syrupy; I want to revel in the dirt, engrain the city onto soft pink soles, scour it into the white cotton of my appearance and wear it like stigmata. I give it up for silver mules, a chichi joint, and swinging away from the intimate embrace of the night into the slap of arid AC.

An angular vegetarian restaurant with sneering waiters and a man with a blank face and an air kiss. I sit down. We talk. My head swirls from no food and three sips of wine. I can’t remember the words, just more careless details muffled by the heartbeat in my head. The phone rings. I don’t hear it.

“Your phone’s ringing,” he says. It’s the Fat Fuck.

“I gotta go,” I say gratefully. “Wait for me.” I stand outside, just out of site of frosted pale glass. Heels hurt, top buckle grating across the thin layer of veiny flesh. Damp is pooling in the soft pits under my arms. Stand on one foot. Stand on the other. The Fat Fuck was a while. Couples walk past. It’s one of those nights every bad writer will describe as “balmy,” as if you could stick it in a tube and sell it as ChapStick. Balmy. A balmy night, aromatic with the scent of dog piss, exhaust fumes, masturbation. Masturbation. Life, one big futile exploit to jerk off our souls, our ego, who we think we are, who we want to be, who we profess to be, who we construct with the latest electronics and condos and exotic sexual positions and fucking underage kids. The climax is a little death, that long awaited, never-talked-about spatter of liquid dissemination. The Romantics called it a little death. Maybe the quality of orgasm was better in those days. Maybe I’m dating the wrong guys. I take my shoes off again, making sure I’m out of sight of the guy. Feel ridiculous in the dress, those damned silver mules. Feel surreal, doggy-paddling in the soupy heat. My head swirls nauseatingly. The Fat Fuck turns up eventually, and I can feel the tension from the guy inside even though I can’t see his eyes, maybe because I can’t see his eyes.

“You ever thought of bachelor parties?” the Fat Fuck asks, a drawl somewhere between Harlem and Atlanta, Georgia. “I can hook you up. They always want white girls. Always askin’ for white girls. Hard to get white girls. They don’t wanna get intimate with black guys. You have a problem with black guys?” In his hand a plastic bag, dripping. He has on white yellowing Chucks, no socks. I keep eyeing that damned bag, wondering when he’ll shut the fuck up, nodding, agreeing to whatever the hell he says. He has my chocolate-coated mushrooms on ice, wrapped lovingly in a Gristedes bag, drip-drip-dripping onto the sidewalk, teardrops evaporating instantly on asphalt. Right now I’d agree to suck off his damned dog if it got me those fucking mushrooms, two weeks late, so I don’t even want them anymore but paid him because someone else would pay me more. So I stand outside barefoot while the guy sits inside encased in his BlackBerry bubble of burned enthusiasm. Some fucking pride. Seven blocks and two avenues barefoot, hiding the evidence in silver mules, a push-up bra, the cool, leveled gaze of someone used to standing outside being assaulted by waves of heat waiting for a Fat Fuck to turn up and deliver Class A’s. My life sure as hell sounds better than it feels.

The Fat Fuck leaves and I have to put those damned silver mules back on, push open the frosted glass door, brace myself for that wasteland of a conversation. His mouth is a round
O
when I throw the mushrooms at him. It’s an inauspicious time. You know when you feel the tide change, start to drag the debris, the driftwood, the treasure, back out to sea, snatch back what it vomited up on the shore? That’s now. Somewhere between the consumption of a pesto green soup and the pickup of chocolate-covered mushrooms lovingly wrapped in a Gristedes bag, now dripping over plastic vinyl chairs. “So what’s wrong?” I ask eventually, when the pulse in my head threatens to make me scream. You have to ask three times, like calling the devil. “No, what’s wrong?” You’re getting there, you’re getting closer. “No, just tell me, what’s
wrong?
”

“You scare me,” Eton said. “There’s something very dark in you, Meems. You’ve changed.”

I look down into the pesto green soup, look up at him again, and then I kiss him on the cheek and leave abruptly, the buckle of those damned silver mules grating horribly against raw flesh. There’s an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry, and it’s taken me twenty-seven years to learn. It’s a superb exit. I wait two blocks and then I kick those damned silver mules off, grab tight, tight, tight onto the railings, feel the sidewalk firm and solid and comforting beneath my bare feet. You probably couldn’t tell, or maybe you could, but I was scared that if I didn’t hold tight, I’d fall right off.

BillyMark’s. Hot fingers against a cool bottle, the same Puerto Rican lady at the end of the bar, but this time she isn’t singing and there’s a wise stillness in her nut brown eyes as she gazes at me and smiles.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” asks Billy, or maybe it was Mark, or maybe Billy. “Thought you said you had a hot date with someone special tonight? Future husband? You guys have an argument?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say.

“Aw, you guys have an argument? You ain’t talkin’ no more? I ain’t never met this one either. How come you never brought him here? You guys’ll get back together again, guarantee it.”

The old Puerto Rican lady gazes at me steadily, her addled, spotted hands resting gently on the bar.

“No,” I smile, and stare curiously into her deep, pure eyes, so beautiful, so alive, set back in sagging folds of brown crepey skin, and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” is playing on the jukebox.

 

I was falling, falling, falling, but couldn’t remember the jump, and the bottom seemed to be evasive. So I tried a little harder.

“You never said good-bye,” B said, calling me in Palma as we prepared to sail across the Atlantic.

“No, I didn’t,” and I hung up, called the next one. “Meet me tomorrow night.”

Kept jumping right into the next addled day sodden with alcohol and the echoing, stark numbness of a beer-sodden soul still reeling from a chemical high and the smack of the night. I forget every man, but I remember every morning, my eyes wide and vacant, unable to speak. I’d sit at Bar Toni, down espresso, and nod to the French guy with the curly hair and the dirty, long, yellow fingernails who sold me shit I’d sell to tourists for twice the price. I left my men like I left my boats: abruptly, before I got kicked off for turning up for work at six a.m. with no sleep and a jaw locked tight, clenched shut—whether through drugs or something else, I couldn’t tell. Still can’t.

C came with an unspectacular yelp like a small dog while his wife roamed the streets for him, calling a cellphone that beeped uselessly beneath the bed next to the suitcase and the flip-flops.

“I’d leave her for you, you know,” C sighed, and he would, I knew it. He’d jump, knowing that the fall would be swift and clean and the result a carnival of crushed and splintered bones, intestines oozing like reptiles across a baked sidewalk.

When I got to Gibraltar he’d left a message for me. I ignored it. And then we sailed to the Canary Islands—which island I forget—and it rained, and we sat in a bar sipping Baileys staring at the masts of sailboats kissing dirty gray clouds. He called me again.

“I want to leave her. I’ve decided. I’ll meet you in St. Martin.”

But I hung up, and when the Captain looked over to ask me what was wrong, he caught my eye and smiled, and he knew, having mastered the exquisite art of falling, falling, falling for all eternity, without fear or retribution or spilled blood—ours, at least. I time them to perfection, my leaps over that cliff, waiting until the bow of the next boat noses close to mine and I can spring over in a perfect arc, clearing saltwater licking at my heels, fall to safety, fall on my feet, hit the deck cleanly, half wishing I could feel the same sting that everyone else gets from the impact of earth punching body.

I’m always on my way out, ready to jump. Bag slung over shoulder, moving on, ticket in hand, a flight, a boat, a train. It’s a solo occupation. On reflection maybe I never mastered my vertigo. I just lived with it until it became part of my soul, and every night was just jumping again and again, senseless, exalted, perfect. I don’t know if I can give it up.

 

When I first saw her, the eyes weren’t so much lobotomized as scared rabbit. Rippling folds of baby pink flesh nestled beneath buds of breasts—dangling like a suckling cow too young to be reproducing but forced into it by the cattle market. She was scared, this bitch; scared beneath the thick, black lines painted round blue depths of inane youth. When she danced, it was with a fixated grin boring into your face to distract from the body she doesn’t want to show; the body her parents probably think is still covered up with cheap H&M even as she sends back the big fucking dollars to pay for their post-communist rent, their American beers. “How do you dance, plis?” she had asked me, and I just shrugged, nodded to the vodka clasped in my hand, the glass misted from the heat of my palm, ice crackling and fizzing, emitting little puffs of gas into the arid, chilly air. She took the drink and she grimaced, the little rolls of flesh rippling up from her baby stomach up through her baby breasts, into a face whose cheekbones sank beneath prepubescent pudge.

“Listen sweetheart,” I said, and I leaned in urgent, like I gave a fuck, grabbed her hand, stared into those pretty blue eyes, felt my hand tighten against a round, pink forearm, saw my skin ghoulish, white and taut against this fucking honey-blossom oozing the nectar of nineteen and new in Nueva York. “Get out. Get your fucking money, get back to Russia. This place isn’t for you. Drink what you need to do the fucking job, keep your wits about you, don’t suck cock, and you’ll be fine.”

She looked scared, now I think about it, but her brain was still working because the pupils contracted as she shrank away, disappeared to a corner, thought about the cash, got back to her pathetic faux-grinding in midair. That same fucking grin, the blond hair, dark roots delineating the stark white flesh of her scalp bobbing up and down in the white light, the disco flashes from the sad glitter ball, there since ’83. Familiar. She was always there, in her corner when the lights tracked across the club. Another crappy dancer. Kind of gawky, kind of cute.

I didn’t give it another thought, just turned up for work, saw her around. Didn’t notice that shy, sly smile slowly flailing like a weak sapling beneath the cancerous weeds of something sicker. I started skipping work, hanging out with deadbeats from BillyMark’s, but the money ran out, so after a couple of weeks I went back.

But it was all different when I went back. Different because you get away and you become the person you were before, the person slowly asphyxiating beneath the thick, caked layers of Mimi. You become what you aren’t when you’re in that place, caught between the rapid beats of bad house music like a heart patient on amphetamines, the jarring, listless gyration of the dance. The two never meld, surprisingly. You’d think if you spent forty hours a week in this place you’d get some fucking rhythm. Just a discord. A discord like the sour taste from too many cigarettes counterpointed against no food for a week, the dark stench of alcohol roaring out of your mouth like a sewage drain, drenched in Orbit sugar-free. She was the first one I saw, but now the pretty blue eyes were lobotomized with the scalpel of money, hard fucking cash, and she led the old dude with the bad breath up the fucking stairs to Never-Never Land, ’cause I’d never been there and I didn’t intend to go, the
private
private rooms, more private than the others, where your dick up her peachy ass costs 300 bucks, and ramming the back of her throat will go for a Ben Franklin, and straight-up pussy probably about 250. And you wonder what it was like for her—the first time. Whether it was as bad as her stage show, as transparent as the scared rabbit eyes that were a glass mirror right into her fucked-up little Russian head, allowing the sense to leak out like a soft-boiled egg cracked swiftly open. It seeped out as easily as that dress peeled off, that spangly, glittery G-string curled up in the corner of the room like a dead spider, that dignity was shed.

Me me,
she breathed.

 

You must listen to this,
said English one evening,
d’you know the story behind it?

When he felt he couldn’t give anymore, he stopped.

He spent those twelve years rediscovering the craft—obsessing over the score, the scales, the obsessive dotted rhythms of Schumann, the lilt, the exaltation of Bach. And after months rehearsing, in May 1965 he announced a recital.

People lined the streets outside Carnegie Hall, unheard of for a classical musician. His wife, Wanda (so it’s said), handed out refreshments to the queues of people desperate to see the reclusive pianist, isolated from his public for over a decade.

He was late. Terrified, as usual, by the task he had undertaken, the task that simultaneously drove him and destroyed him. He stood in the wings and refused to step out into the lights, his nerves strung to a pitch outside the human range. The manager was eventually forced to push him onstage.