Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (30 page)

You can hear the doubt, the confusion, the self-flagellation, in the Bach-Busoni Toccata. He feels his way into the music with the reckless execution of an artist discovering a terrifying impotency, virility painfully seeping out through the dribbling keys, dropped notes. He slips . . . the audience gasps . . .

But he keeps playing.

He slips again—and the audience is astounded, horrifed—afraid that he was right.
He had no more to give.
I used to stand outside Carnegie Hall sometimes, when I worked in Midtown at Foxy’s, inhaling the shocked scent of the audience, the tang of fear, and then the relief.

He recovers. He moves into Schumann, into Debussy, and finally, Horowitz finds his element in Scriabin’s Sonata Number 9, which he releases with an ecstasy born of the devil. Nothing this good could ever come from Heaven.

 

Before the night was over I went quietly upstairs, past the girls drunk and waving cigarettes around in the locker room, talking about their asshole boyfriends from the Bronx fucking bitches while they earned the rent. I dressed, scrubbed the crap off my face. I didn’t say good-bye to anyone. But I wondered as I walked home through the East Village, the warm night pouring onto me with damp, false caresses—I wondered if it was all worth it. If staying someplace, trying for what I wanted—or not even wanted, something I had to do,
have
to do because it’s all I know—I wondered if trading in ignorance for this unbearable sadness, this knowing, this dull, deep ache, was ever going to mean anything besides poverty, a Bob Dylan song, spending my last twenty bucks on a six-pack and some cigarettes, sitting down and doing what I know best. Ratcheting it up from my dark, boiled heart as the AC whirrs and Manhattan starts to slowly wind down in preparation for the reprise, which continues regardless.

When the phone call came I was sitting on the fire escape, expecting it. It was nine a.m. and my eyes were still wide and spanked with coke, and I clutched a cold bottle of Corona in my hand. I’d been at BillyMark’s the night before, shooting pool with some guy. Doesn’t matter whom. He wasn’t my boyfriend. The phone rang and I answered it and hoped my credit didn’t run out and we talked for a while and I brought out the Mimi doll, just for show, the fading euphoria of the night lulling me into a conversational mood full of flamenco grandeur, braggart lifts and twirls, steps that made you inhale quickly, sharp, in sheer, giddy amazement. I became a writer that day, officially, on the record, with a publisher’s advance. It was, nonetheless, a transaction. A transaction that pleased me, though secretly I believed that what they were buying from me was not the original, not the real. They were just buying another artifice, a meme, another simulation, while the words I wielded would release her into a terrible life of her own, divorced from mine. They wanted me, naturally, to write as Mimi. No one is really interested in the girl underneath.

I didn’t celebrate that night. I was bored of BillyMark’s and the club, bored of sex with strangers and cheap, bad drugs, bored of Eton, English, British cunts. Instead I purchased a six-pack of Corona and a half a gram of coke, and wrote some more. I gave myself two weeks to limp lamely through the rituals of dancing. I don’t know why two weeks. I don’t know why I just never went back. Maybe I knew that I needed to wean myself off her first before plunging cold turkey into a Mimi-less existence.

I seduced English later that week. It was almost an act of obligation more than any real desire, a reflex ingrained in my soul, like a hand reaching for the rosary, a litany repeated, mechanical and efficient. But his clumsiness, sweetness, tenderness, made me laugh, normalized the insanity of a clinical act and imbued it with something more, some meaning, some—
faith,
perhaps. It was enough to make me halt, disturbed, before either of us experienced the little death. We curled up together and slept so soundly, so comfortably, so
safe,
that I did not have nightmares. It was if my sin were merely venial, and not mortal.

That sleep aggravated me. I did not face toward the wall. Who had seduced whom? I felt powerless, longed for the safe transactions of the stripclub, seduction without impunity, seduction with necessary penury. A frugality when dealing with emotion, a laissez-faire when it came to the extravagant, ridiculous circus of pouting and posturing, giggles and sighs.

When I seduced him I did not plan to let it go so far. I waited for the slap, waited in anticipatory pleasure and need for it, and yet he regarded me quizzically, curiously, with gentle, nonjudgmental amusement. He knew that I was writing something that made me sleep badly. He knew that I would disappear at night for hours without him, hours that stretched into days, nights, weeks. He knew not to ask certain things. I think he knew not to take it, me, too seriously, expected me not to stay too long. He knew that I still lov—well, he knew.

“Has it changed you?” English asked with an interest that was too casual, too smooth, too light. I lay wrapped in clean white sheets and he sat at the bottom of the bed, wrestling with a corkscrew, a bottle of Chianti. I sighed, deep and long and low.

“You have no idea.” I smiled. And then we kissed.

I recently met a publicist who was interested in marketing Mimi to her fullest potential. He took me to some chichi restaurant and I was on my best behavior as my eyes glazed over in boredom at the prattlings of inane celebrities at the next table. I looked around for a waiter to fill my wineglass, which he did with a chilling obsequiousness. “So should I call you Mimi?” he said, after the wine had served as social lubricant and he became fatherly, friendly, jocular. I stared at him as if he had suggested I strip naked for him. The cheek! “No,” I said coldly, and excused myself to go to the bathroom, narrowly avoiding a skinny starlet with a Botoxed face, rigid, unyielding, frightening.

“I don’t know if I can give it up,” I tell English at seven a.m. after a night of hard drinking, and ash from my cigarette spilled like wine onto my lap. “I think that even though I want a normal life and clean living and everything to be nice and what it’s never been, I know that at some point I’ll get back to the top of the cliff, and I’ll want to jump—or Mimi will push me over.” It felt weird saying it out loud. But he was the one who told me about vertigo. And he said he mastered it by jumping, so that’s something, at least. That’s something.

“It’s OK,” he replies, and I can tell it really is. “If you get to the top, and you want to jump, I’ll jump with you.”

I wanted to say that wasn’t the point, but then it occurred to me that maybe it was. I thought some more. All I said in the end was, “Thanks.” But I think he understood.

Three a.m. and a warm wind blew. My bags were packed, the apartment bare and clean, life disposed of in shipping boxes and black plastic garbage bags. After three years, it was surprisingly painless to leave the city. When it came down to it, I doubted New York had even registered my arrival, let alone noticed my departure. On Houston cabs crawled past, slowed, perhaps by the hour, the bliss of a cool morning wind after the treacly heat of the day. A bum emerged from behind a parked car, wandered incoherently over, sat down next to me on the stoop. I recognized his face.

“You leavin’ Manhattan? I seen you around this street, with the English guy. I do work in this block sometimes for Fer, you know Fer, the super? Yeah, I know everyone on this street.”

His breath was hot and festering, a wet, dead rodent in the heat. “What are you doing up so late?” I asked quietly, a smile that didn’t reach my eyes, glance toward my watch
where the fuck is this car?

His eyes glimmered, glanced at me sharply, then the focus dimmed and the voice went low, intense.

“I have nightmares,” he shrugged. “Dreams, images, call ’em what you want. I have nightmares, most nights. Keeps me up.”

“What are they about?” I whispered, and Manhattan was never so quiet as I waited for that answer.

“Things. Violent things. Sad things. I don’t want the nightmares, so I don’t sleep no more.”

He threw back his head and laughed, and in that black, burned mouth the bitter charred stubs of teeth emerged and the stink, the
stink
—it was unbearable, like the laugh. “I have nightmares,” he repeated, and he laughed again, longer this time, harder. The car drew up. “Should I tell him you left?” he called after me, as the bags were thrown in the trunk. “He’s gonna miss you, pretty little thing that you are. You said goodbye?” and when I ignored him he let the laugh turn into something that sounded like a stifled scream. We drove off quickly down Houston.

There’s an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry. While Mimi squirmed and howled and thrashed away inside me, the exorcism, that ritual purgation of words, was performed almost seamlessly. She left quietly—too quietly—as if one day, she might be back.

 

Sometimes I miss her, the ole Mimi doll. I miss being raped by a focusless gaze, the anonymity of being the centripetal force in a roomful of dicks, of being the other woman, that faceless other woman we females all fear, the bitch who makes our boyfriend/husband/lover drool and cower and snicker and groan, balls heavy and leaden and loaded with lust for the something more, the something more men always want because monogamy is just not in their sex. I want to be the high-carbohydrate, benzene-loaded, phenylalanine-fizzy smack laced with aspartame and bursting with sugary, acidic cancer agents. I want to be the snack that fails to satisfy, the food for hungry ghosts with empty holes where stomachs should be. After all the plots to kill her off in spectacular style, I want to be Mimi. I want to be Mimi again, for all the good it does me, did me.

Sometimes, I miss her.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the wonderful David Godwin and all who work at DGA—Kirsty, Sophie, and Kerry. Thanks to my editor, Carole DeSanti, and everyone at Viking for taking on a manuscript that needed so much work. Thanks to Eton for the maid’s outfit and the dinners and episodes of
Lost.
Thanks to Scarlett for the Bas sett hound pictures, and Nicola for the spare bed and food. Thanks to Amy for telling me her story and everyone I met campaigning for immigrant rights. Thanks to everyone who helped me be illegal. Thanks to those who helped me get legal. Thanks to Paul Carr. Thanks to the yogis who never judged me—Sarah Tomlinson, Emma Canarick, and Allison Bonanno. Thanks to Paul Berger for writing the fateful article that started the ball rolling. Thanks to all the women I worked with in the stripclubs of New York City. Thanks to the (very few!) men I met there who had respect and kindness. Thanks to everyone who believed in me, read the blog, and encouraged me.