Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (3 page)

Leaving, ah, I can leave! No money, no savings, no overanxious parents, no ties. Leaving is easier than staying, staying where the rent and the tax and the living and the struggle to keep ambitions flourishing costs money that you just don’t have. Leaving what you don’t have is the most exquisite feeling on earth, for when you leave what you don’t have, you can only find it.
Leaving.
That’s one thing I am exceptionally gifted at, something I have always managed to do without failing, something that has invariably provided me with a bed, and food, and money when there was none.

Arriving? Well. Now, that’s something
entirely
different.

Perhaps you’re wondering what went before this, before my mid-Atlantic baptism, before that fateful trip to London, preceded by five years of solipsistic wandering, before the decision to up and leave for New York. Perhaps you’re wishing for a more ardent and thoughtful biographical recollection of my life, something a little more than the recollection of a depressing trip on the London Underground. Perhaps a few sweet childhood photos of myself, to contrast with the glossy, hard set of a corrupted mouth as I swing, eyes a-flash, around that damned pole. Sorry, no can do. It’s not my job. Both memoir and biography deal with making a whole out of parts, pretending the gaps have been filled in, what’s on the page is absolute veracity. But as far as I can recall there are very few of either genre that deal with the literal process of making someone up, composing yourself anew, becoming someone entirely different to who you ever thought you were, literally editing and forming the person who’s writing the words. And that’s the ridiculous task I’ve been given.
Mimification.
It’s Mimi who has become inextricably bound up in New York, in dancing—in truth as much as in fiction. She’s me, but she’s more than me. She’s the movie me, minus the credits; the novel me without the chapter endings. She’s the story bleached of inconsequential detail; the rash I get if I use scented bubble bath, sitting in the Laundromat on Second Avenue waiting for my washing to dry every Tuesday, or the time it takes to pee. When Mimi walks, acts, moves, it’s with a soundtrack in the background, the essence of me, distilled and pure, so me she’s more than me, she’s nothing like me. “You’re sure this is true? You’re so
different
in real life.” Me? I’ll fade into a corner with strangers, blush if called upon in company exceeding two, whereas Mimi . . .
Oh Mimi,
the men sigh, their mouths burrowed in my hair (fake), their dicks twitching with longing,
Oh Mimi, Oh Oh Mimi.
She’s me, I swear; I’m her and this is our story. You can tell when she takes over, you really can, although we do, at times, become indistinguishable. But really, it’s
her
dragging the other me on that dirty, downward spiral to the bottom of a slime-covered pit of iniquity and sin, a rumpled, thin figure sodden with drink and lolling on a Manhattan sidewalk, still painted like a doll and smelling of stale smoke, of pheromones, of a night dancing.

2

I WALKED THROUGH DUMBO
on that first day, sick with trepidation, a sense of the inevitable, acutely sensitive to the approval of averted eyes and glutinous glares. The Hasidics looked away, the Hispanics hissed, low and snarling, suppressed animal lust leaking out like a punctured tire through teeth snaggled and brown and cloven with poverty.
Gooood
Bless You, siphoned through those broken piano keys with a low whistle, an ache, a twitch. God Bless
You.
I looked like a woman of low morals who would serve IBs and traders midday Budweisers in an underground cell in Midtown. Or maybe I just looked like I possessed a vagina, let’s not be too optimistic about the discernment of the men who hiss at you, or the men who pray to Yahweh. Hands clenched tight, manicured fingers digging into pink palms, nearly at the subway, nearly at the club. I glanced at the face of one of the men, one of the men who hiss at you, dark-skinned and leering, his face creased into a sea of a thousand wrinkles. I couldn’t see his eyes, because they were hidden behind thick lenses. But in the reflection of his glasses I could see the girl Mimi, now evolved into a bad imitation of whatever a stripclub serving staffer was supposed to resemble. I looked like I should work there. I did, really, with the badly dyed hair, the poverty roots, and the makeup applied with a shit-shovel. Let’s hope the boss saw it that way. Let’s just hope so.

Broadway, Midtown, emerging into the blinking, gaudy fetidness of Times Square, lurking winos, commodified perverts, and musicals featuring tired homosexuals filling in the crow’s-feet of disappointment and age with thick, poisonous makeup and repulsively cheerful song. Broadway. And while we’re here, what the hell’s going
on
with Broadway? I’m not a New Yorker and even I can tell there’s something fucked up about this winding non-avenue slicing through the grid system, an oleaginous concession to the obese red-state tourists in their white socks and whiter sneakers, the white cotton of their captioned T-shirts strained taut against jiggling man breasts, mammaries grown huge through emasculation by junk food, Fox News, frotting. New Yorkers would never tolerate an area like Broadway condensed, so they planned it to snake elusively through Manhattan island like an aorta, explode into the premature ejaculation that is Times Square, an angina of planning, before it pisses off west again farther north and disappears with a sneer into the Bronx. The stripclub is on Broadway, lily-white Broadway, white trash Broadway, built for the Hanks and the Juniors and the ladies released from their Middle American bakefests to see Letterman (
see
him!) and swoon.

I lit a cigarette before I entered that cavernous mouth oozing the promise of titties and ass like halitosis. The doorman nodded at me in a disinterested way, and the exhausted blond with the enormous breasts and the mouth like a slit throat—wet and crooked and shiny against cigarette-paper skin—overtook me with a sigh and pushed through the dark glass doors as she flicked a lip gloss-stained Parliament stub into the street. I watched her leathered face stitched by no money, bad decisions, and several abortions get swallowed up by the club without even the simulated pleasure of a little mastication. There followed a brief moment of . . . triumph? vindication? a little gloat of pleasure perhaps? remembering Paula of the 34D chest from Year 9 Drama, with that derisory snort directed at me, directed at the skinny nerd who, at fourteen, was the last virgin in Year 10, still wore an M&S training bra, and never (I swear
never
) even shaved her legs.
No wonder she never got laid
the playground whispered, venom borne on breath tainted by the prejudice of snakebites consumed in the kids’ playground on the council estate just off Ivy Crescent. So
this
is where all the cool girls ended up.
This
is what happened to the bitches, the easy lays, the girls with the perms and the right trainers and the Kama Sutra sex lives predating their menstrual cycles. This is where they
arrived.
I always wondered about those girls. When you’re fourteen and sad, it was no consolation, the assurance that they’d be, in the end, knocked up and fucked up. Even
that
was cool, cooler than anything
I
could do, destined for university, destined to be a clever white bitch. Even aged six I was a weirdo with my hair like bugs’ tentacles waving fondly above the shoulders of the other little girls.
Mam, please don’t put my hair into three plaits; all the other girls laugh at me and say I’m a freak.
At twenty-six it’s some consolation to know that they ended up in a stripclub. Until you realize that
you
ended up in a stripclub too.

Lily appeared in front of me.

“Hey you. C’mon, I’ll take you to the boss.”

Girls writhed on a stage, pocked with two poles. Girls writhed on men, fewer clothes. A line of limp and lethargic waitresses yawned and withered in the brutal assault of the AC. Dingy corner, slab of a man, guffawing and guffawing as a girl’s hand slips lower, lower, lower—down his bulbous stomach, a button undone so the white hairy paunch stares at me obscenely, the umbilicus bleeting, futile, like a drowning man.
But this doesn’t come yet,
I should stay in line, step by step, counting it out as it happened. Arrive New York, find job, move from Astor Place to Brooklyn, lose money, lose hope, then . . . I would prefer chronology, from A to B, because it would be easier, yet the truth is that chronology does not exist anymore. The past preceding the stripclub is corrupted by the knowledge of what came afterward, and try as I might, I can’t disentangle it, find a straight-up, easily digestible truth that can be explicated by the glories of the linear. I’m sorry, I really am. I wish I could make it easier. I wish I could make it easier for myself too, but it’s corrupted, like I said. It’s a plastic audiocassette with the shiny brown tape tangled and knotted and ruined. Even if we managed to untangle it by the grace of God, played it, it would sound distorted, creepy, and wrong.

 

The card is flimsy, thin, nondescript. An off-white speckled like a robin’s egg with tiny circles of yellow and blue and pink that you can barely discern until you pull it into sharp focus, study the clean stamp of the gray lettering. It’s so
nothing.
So irrelevant. But when you don’t have one, with your name neatly typed in capitals below the white shadowed letters SOCIAL SECURITY and the nine-digit number responsible for punching you into the American system, you start to think that somehow being deprived of one equates to nothing less than social
in
security. Not even social insecurity. Nonexistence.

However, when you’re on an Air India flight to New York, squashed up next to a huge Bengali lady called Bunny, nonexistence is the farthest thing from your mind. Questions of legality, bureaucracy, employment, money, the slight niggling concerns of transporting your entire life to a city you have visited for a grand total of forty-eight hours and in which you have absolutely no friends—for someone who has traveled for five years, who has survived solely on her ability to be a cheeky gobshite, who has absolute faith in her ability to turn up somewhere broke and make good—these concerns don’t really feature. Sure, it’ll be difficult. There’ll be discomfort, but I know I can take it. How hard can it be, after all? Illegals are people without education, who can’t speak English, who no one wants to employ. To get a green card, presumably all you had to do was show up, get a job offer, and then show the paper to Immigration. Worries, concerns, anxiety—I feel
some,
sure, but to be honest, they’re obliterated by my infallible confidence in a Cambridge degree, a pretty face, and consequent employability.

I stood in Baggage Claim gazing outside at the snow dancing agitatedly in gales of wind, the sky a midnight blue at nine P.M. Heaved my luggage gratefully off the conveyor belt, struggled toward the exit signs, the gaggle of waiting cab drivers with Brooklyn accents, Jamaican faces, New York attitudes. The airport is
tierra de nadie,
no man’s land, a nonplace, a transition. Airports, boats, trains; curled up against a dusty backpack, spine lodged against a rigid plastic chair, unbrushed teeth, empty Styrofoam cup sticky with dredges of coffee. The first time I boarded a flight on my own I thought people could tell that I didn’t belong. As if traveling was a snooty sorority for the dreadlocked globe-trotter, a frat house for the first-class hobo, something that excluded a small Welsh girl who’d never even been to London alone. But no one knew. No one could tell that I was out of place. Forever after I associated airports with something better, something more. Airports were where I took off my skin of comprehensive schoolgirl, Northern accent, bit of a nerd—taking it off, hanging it up, walking away.

The automatic doors outside Baggage Claim swing efficiently open to expel those who have successfully navigated Immigration, clutching tickets and pristine visas and fake addresses and false promises to return home after two weeks and a scrawled cellphone number hopefully clutched in a nervous hand. The snow swirls in and taxi drivers queue up for their fares, ignoring the listless, anoraked men clutching paper signs with names scrawled on them in blue Sharpie. Wind smacks faces, crawls into hair, into nostrils, ears, drags you away from monochrome airport existence and tinny announcements and soggy egg sandwiches wrapped in crisp cellophane, and it’s drawing me in, already, New York, even if the sting of the cold is like the back of Mam’s hand and the whistling in my numb ears is suspiciously like her menopausal squawk. I turn back for a moment and meet Bunny’s eyes, warm and twinkling raisins, and I could swear she flashes me a deep, warm smile, as palpable as if she’d enfolded me into that grandmotherly bosom, a wink, and I turn away with a gulp before I can cry. I leave the stale fug of JFK behind, step into the cold, and pull out my map to find out where the hell I’m going to be sleeping tonight.

 

New York, that light factory of foreign voices and stinking gutters and steam wafting from paving slabs and shouts and people hurrying hurrying hurrying and someone shouting loud
Hey girl, get on over here and talk to me girl
and a crazy lady lying in the doorway asleep with a thin trickle of yellow ooze dribbling from her slack mouth while the world passes by in designer heels and prêt-à-porter labels. It punched you rudely in the face along with its peculiar scent, that hot, sharp stench of people, death, shit, garbage, life, sex, betrayal, fear, death. New York fucking stinks. I love it and hate it, all at the same time. Loved it the first time I came here on my way home from a ski trip to Oregon, age twenty-two, sleeping in a bunk bed in a hostel in Harlem, wandering round clutching a subway map, navigating from street signs and pure luck. I knew I couldn’t leave. It wasn’t a sign. There was no bullshit opening up of the heavens and a messenger from on high telling me my fate lay in Manhattan. No, we make our own fate, our own luck. I made my fate by staring out of the window of an airport shuttle bus three years earlier and resolving to turn myself into a New Yorker.