Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (4 page)

The bus drops me off outside an apartment complex on Astor Place. “Nice address, baby,” says the driver, a huge Jamaican guy. I have no idea where I am. I drag my suitcase into the shiny brass lobby, locate the elevator, up to the third floor. The guy I’m staying with is one of those friends of friends of friends, the ex-boyfriend of my sister’s boyfriend’s friend. I have a grace period of four days with this stranger, four days to find somewhere to live, a job, a future. I have about seven hundred dollars in my bank account. I ring the doorbell. Steps. Door opens.

There will always be a part of me, or Mimi, missing on the page. An episode omitted, a careless phrase forgotten, an important detail elided. Mimification is a process that afflicts every biographer, autobiographer, memoirist, as we censor ourselves unconsciously in the retelling of the story, salvage the scraps of fact and memory and conjecture, mold them into the words that make up an image of a person, an era, a fleeting, insubstantial moment. We’ll scratch our heads in bewilderment as we try and trace our path backward, hunting for an elusive, haunting fact to cram into our chronology. Closing my eyes now, attempting to remember, I am haunted by the present fleeting backward, reaching out to the past with outstretched hands like a lost and cruel lover, as if the past will make sense of the present. But once it’s on paper, it’s undergoing the change, the Mimification, the rendering of fact into story, into narrative, into—dare I say it?—some form of fiction. And yet fiction, I feel, would be so much easier than this repackaging of the doubtful truth into the definite, this deliberate attempt to make it digestible, to make memory toe the line, leave a neat, well-tended garden path leading to the present. But then there are some things that even now astound me about the truth. I go back, recheck against diaries and e-mails home, notes, memory, yet even fiction cannot assuage their impact.

I have four days to find somewhere to live, a job, a future. Seven hundred dollars in my bank account. And I do not yet know how to use the Manhattan subway system.

 

If you are Indian you head to Jackson Heights; if Dominican, Washington Heights; Russian, Brighton Beach; Polish, East Williamsburg; Kazakhstani, Nigerian, Bengali, Lebanese—there is a place for everyone, everyone in their place in New York. You turn up, flash your passport, stare dolefully into the camera, proffer a flight-swollen index finger to the little glass screen, left first, then right.

What’s the purpose of your visit?
Promise you’re here to visit your married sister and her newborn baby,
two weeks, just two weeks only,
and then it’s off to the nearest payphone, clutching that thin jacket closer around a shuddering body, unfurl the crumpled paper, avoid the man outside with that
stench,
a stench you don’t find in Mexico City, in Calcutta, in Istanbul, in Dhaka. A stench of poor white man, white man poor and begging in the slums, indicating that there is something wrong, something very wrong in this peculiar and frightening city, and as you put in the tarnished quarter carefully preserved for the purpose all the way from wherever you were disgorged, you turn your freezing, disoriented back to the cacophony of chanting issuing eerily from the rocking figure, the white beggar with that stink
YES-NO-YES-NO-YES-NO-YES-NO
and you wait for the phone to pick up, the phone to pick up, so you can surround yourself with accents like yours, people as poor as you, as desperate
yes-no-yes-no
you seek your own kind because as soon as you arrive
pick up
you realize it was a mistake to think you could have just slotted in without going through the pain
yesnoyesnoyesno
the pain that no one bothered to tell you about when they said that America was the Promised Land.

But when you are white, British, educated, a possessor of four fully functioning limbs, and not (especially) retarded, you are a misnomer, a blip, a mistake, a joke. One cannot employ white people to do the job of dark people! Go seek your own kind! Of course I never intended to go about things the difficult way. I send off the résumés, call and schmooze, network and e-mail. Yet class, privilege, luck, and money divide me from seeking “my own kind.” Where are my kind? On Park Avenue in crisp tailored suits, sipping aromatic teas in spacious lofts in TriBeCa, shopping for dainty Steve Madden shoes in SoHo, lapping up an expensive education at Columbia? My own kind don’t want me. Don’t I know how hard it is to get a working visa since 9/11? If you don’t work for a bank,
furgedd it!
A writer? Job in publishing? Oh sure, Condé Nast works on a purely meritocratic basis.
How naive you are, little girl, how naive.
How naive I was to think it would be easy, that I could play New York like I’d played most of my life, with a bit of charm, a bit of cleverness, a bit of persuasion, and sheer stubbornness. But it’s not enough. I head to the other end of the spectrum within days, shrunken and shocked by the rejection from “my own kind,” determined, however, to work cash-in-hand until I can scramble to the top of the pile. I find my
other
kind, slum it for a while, hey, maybe I can write about this too. But what’s this? What are they saying? Go! Get out! What is
she
doing here? What is the purpose of her visit, this strange visa-less Caucasian creature seeking employment in establishments that are the preserve of those who lack, not of those who derive from a perfectly efficient First World country on friendly, indeed
loving,
terms with God’s Blessed Land.

When you are white, English, educated, and without an H-1B visa, you’re a reject among rejects, caught in no man’s land, land of nobody. You find that you must seek employment with those few whites who filter through the visa system because of pigheadedness, because of stupidity, because of laziness, because it’s easier not to bother plowing through the reams of paperwork required by the process of getting legal—that and the fact that they didn’t have a hope in hell of fooling USCIS into thinking they would contribute anything useful to this country. You must bond with them, stave off your illegal corner of England from those
selfish
Mexicans, snapping up the coveted cash-in-hand jobs like greedy toads feasting on flies.

 

Buon Giorno restaurant, Spring Street, Soho. Monique turns around, her face set in an ugly frown, her arms crossed and hugging herself from the cold that crept into the restaurant through the cheerful glass windows looking onto a snowy Spring Street, through the door that opened and banged shut every five minutes. She stares at me briefly, unsmiling, and then barks, “Hey English, don’t get the fuckin’ cawffee. Why you think we have a fuckin’ busboy?”

Waitressing. The art of subtly patronizing people who want to humiliate you. That intricate tango of social niceties, complemented by an encyclopedic knowledge of the wine list, the dessert menu, the aperitifs, the
plat du jour,
and a willingness to embrace varicose veins in later life. Waitressing is considered an accomplishment in New York. Not
quite
ranking with bartending, that brigadier of skills, that valuable addition to the dowry (“plays pianoforte to an exceptional level, an expert needlewoman, fluent French, excels at croquet, and mixes
superb
mango daiquiris”), which was esteemed to the extent that expensive and time-consuming colleges offering courses devoted to the tireless explication of its mysteries had sprung up on every Manhattan corner. Yet procuring a serving job was considered a step on the way to becoming an illustrious bartender, and
everyone
knew bartenders earned more money than traders and brokers and Donald Trump,
because they paid tax only on credit card tips and worked, for the most part, under the table.
Who needed a degree? A bartending job, combined with self-proclaimed genius in the acting/directing/writing arena, was all one needed to ensure financial, social, and occupational success in the Big Apple.

Whoever had perpetuated this myth had done it well. In each dining, drinking, or catering establishment in the city, a thick wad of discarded résumés with Photoshopped pictures of winsome, sinewy youths (Hank from Bend, Oregon, graduate of the Sommelier Society of America Certificate Course; Julia from Pensacola, Florida, Certificate in Cocktail Mixol ogy, GPA 3.9) lay covered in lint and mothballs and splodges of liquor congealing the type into little pools of blurred, sticky ink. Once upon a time the restaurant industry was monopolized by slurring, accented, long-lashed illegals, and now it was the preserve of the starry-eyed hopefuls. It was a lucrative business. And with the current post-9/11 air of paranoia that America was being besieged by furrerners, it was hard, very hard, to find a job without the requisite papers.

If you
did
find a job, it’s probably because no self-respecting American teenager saving up for their semester at the Strasberg Institute would work for the kind of wages you were willing to work for. The lack of a single U.S. citizen in the only restaurant that would employ me should really have started the alarm bells ringing.

“Benji,” I ask slyly, turning to the obscenely tall busboy as Monique, the Bronx bitch behind the bar, shoots us a menstrual look of hate. “How do you get your checks cashed?”

“Ah,” he pauses, sways slightly. Benji is stoned. Benji is always stoned. The ritual of doping oneself up with THC becomes a necessary one when trapped in a tiny Italian restaurant working for tips with a rottweiler of a bartender six nights a week.

“I am on the water polo scholarship, so I have the student visa. But I am not allowed to work. So I have the checks made out to my American friend. He cashes them for me and gives me the money. Why? You do not have the Social Security number or the green card?”

“No.”

“English girl, let me tell you something. You think anyone in this restaurant has the green card? Giovanni? Franco? Tina? The Mexican chefs? You must make up the number. No one will know. The United States, they do not care. With this Social Security number, we can pay the taxes, but we cannot claim the tax returns. They make the money off us. Do not worry. Now, I go to smoke the reefer. Do not tell Monique where I am gone.”

He disappears into the night. The door slams shut behind him in a flurry of snow. Monique rolls her eyes and slips me a glass of wine in a coffee cup with a pursing of her lips, a shrewd look of sympathy. I could feel the pace of New York filling my veins with adrenaline—deadlines, timelines, everyone in a hurry—it seeped into my body and saturated the flesh, started to become part of me, like a tumor, like pregnancy, like the veins threading through my skin. I felt normal. Practically, theoretically, factually, I was an educated white girl with everything going for me, simply working in a restaurant until I could get a “real” job. But the weeks to find that job! The look of tired disdain as my résumé was thrown onto the sticky pile, the same one separating me from the Hanks from Oregon and the Julias from Pensacola! I was different from them, I felt different, and the closed look on the manager’s face told me this immediately. You began to feel that your edges were becoming a little less defined, a little less clear, indistinct, fuzzy, blurred, and uncertain. People saw the white clear skin and heard the clipped consonants of the English, but that privilege was canceled out by my liability as someone lacking the necessary paperwork, thus turning me into a threat to national security. The quiet solitude of the restaurant and an empty bar came as a relief. I was paid nothing but tips, but it was a relief, not being a liability. It was a relief, being with people who understood what it was, more than I did, to be a nonperson, to find that solid earth was becoming unsteady, unfamiliar, with the unmistakable, almost resentful air of stolen goods.

 

You seek your own kind. The Mexicans from the restaurant lived in a studio, all six of them, in Astoria, a decent neighborhood. Benji was in Greenpoint, sharing a room with two other Hungarians, a fourth soon to arrive. I sought my own kind but I couldn’t find them. They weren’t in the cheap accommodations you find on craigslist, that’s for sure.

“For what you wanna pay, you ain’t gonna get much more than this,” the super says, scratching a rotund belly protruding from a dirty wifebeater. He points to the mattress in the corner, next to the girl with the blank face and the pupils seeping like bruises into the iris, hematoma eyes too damaged to hint at the real damage inside. “You want?” presses the man, bored. It appalls me, a shared bare room somewhere in Queens. I feel nauseous, realize I’d have to stretch my budget a little further if I didn’t want to live like those girls. Those girls like me who had been led to where I ended up, with promises that were not entirely spurious. I found my own way there.

I found my own way there, but I assure you I tried to make it work the other way, the
right
way. I tried those other jobs, I tried the lawyers, I tried,
I tried.

 

The “loft conversion with room to rent” is an attic full of musicians, cats, plants, and junk, situated above the headquarters of a Jewish newspaper titled
Der Blatt
in the heart of the Ha sidic community in Brooklyn. The spare room is a painting studio with a damp futon underneath a Jackson Pollock reproduction. There are no bills—utilities are silently dredged from the unwitting Hasidics downstairs, even AC channeled up in the summer through an inventive series of pipes, hoses, and holes. The apartment was a parasite, a heaving mass of writhing, middle-class, Ivy league-educated Jewish musicians, and one Southern blasphemous artist all feeding off the Hasidics.

Raoul answers the door. Raoul is an artist from Kentucky. He’s handsome, young, curious steel gray hair, an amused mouth. Kind face, cruel eyes. He doesn’t seem kind.

“There’s people in and outta here all day. It’s driving me crazy. I gotta have me some kinda normality, you know? I gotta have me some order in my life. But everyone here is nice, they’re good people. Except me.”

He pauses, takes a deep drag of lemon zinger tea, and then spits it rudely back into the cup.