Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (5 page)

“
Fuck,
dude! Someone
ashed
in my
Zen garden.
”

He points to a pot of sand with a cigarette butt protruding elegantly from its midst.

“Fucking hipsters.”

A drum beat starts up from somewhere in the depths of the apartment.

“Fucking musicians. There ain’t no peace in this fucking apartment, but it’s cheap. Whadda you do for a living?”

“Oh, I’m a writer. I’m trying to get a job on a magazine. I just arrived in New York . . .”

“New York is gonna eat you up and shit you out like some big-ass dog on
Smooth Move.
New York ain’t a fuckin’ playground, English girl. You think people are your friends—they ain’t your fucking friends. You gotta be strong to make it in this hell-hole of a city. Rent’s six-fifty a month, includes utilities, no deposit. When you movin’ in?”

“Erm, tomorrow?”

“ ’K.” Raoul drifts away, sparks up a Parliament Light, stands silently gazing at his decimated Zen garden. “Hey, I gotta plant you can have to put in that room. Make it more like home, you know?”

I stand, uncertain.

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

A new cacophony sweeps through the apartment and engulfs us. Raoul shudders and turns away, back to his room, still holding his cigarette and the lemon zinger tea. He puts the cigarette in his mouth, stares at my chest, absently scratches his balls, reaches up to retrieve it again.

“Yeah, well. It’s already dying.”

 

Every morning on the corner of Marcy Avenue the women line up, a tired uniform of blue jeans, a mix of Eastern Europeans and Hispanics. They look at me as I walk past, another fucking hipster kid snapping up real estate and pushing the Hispanics farther out, farther out, and forcing the Hasids closer, tighter, more suspicious, together, these American gentiles with their bare shoulders and cheek to go into the Kosher store. A car or a van drives up, halts, a hand beckons, barter, a price struck, a woman, two women, sometimes three, climb in the back. Cleaning, cooking, shopping—name a price. At midday some still linger, crowds depleted but still present, leaning against the mesh, ignoring the selfish roar of the highway beneath, still alert to the slowing of a car, money, a job. Once a lady never came back, and they found her body in a dumpster someplace. The next day I see some women crying. The day after that they stand on Marcy Avenue immune to the intrusion of the wind, the cold, the traffic, the snow, as if covered by ash from Pompeii.

 

Back in Buon Giorno.

“I’m telling you, girl, this fucking black guy was humping me senseless for twenty-four fucking hours. I got a standing ovation from the doormen in my building the next morning. I’m on the fifth fucking floor.”

Tina the bartender’s eyes light up with a fond glow as she launches into the tale of how she celebrated her thirtieth birthday by screwing a fifteen-year-old quarterback on the mistaken assumption he was nineteen. A quiet guy from Massachusetts chokes on his margarita. Tina turns her plump, sagging figure toward him menacingly. He retreats rapidly, leaves a dollar tip.

Benji wanders over. He resembles Lurch from
The Addams Family,
the disconnection between brain and body accentuated by the vast quantities of THC coursing through his system. Seeing nobody on the street, Benji scrambles to the back of the restaurant to retrieve a joint and dose up on ganja once again.

“So then I went to this bar, and Richard kept playing with my fucking nipples, and this tranny bitch was trying to talk to me, and I was just coming like a fucking tidal wave in the middle of the dance floor, and there’s this old black dude who sits at the end of the bar, and every fifteen minutes he yells ‘GIMME A WHOA!’ and everyone goes ‘WHOA!’ But then he wasn’t there, so I turned ’round and said, ‘GIMME A WHOA!’ and everyone was like ‘WHOA!’ . . .”

My phone beeps. A weird little text from Raoul. I’d left him my number on a scrawled-up napkin pushed under his door when I moved in to the empty apartment that morning.

Tina looks at it and snorts derisively.

“Well I ain’t fucking sad getting screwed like a bitch by my new twenty-year-old boyfriend. Hey, I tell you what happened when he was fucking me from behind the other day?”

I settle into my curious new routine, a half-person routine, because I am, at this stage, somewhere between who I was, who I will become. A home in Brooklyn, with roommates I smile at but don’t talk with. Afternoons spent writing articles, pitching newspapers and magazines, sending off résumés. Nights spent avoiding the lash of Monique’s tongue and attempting to suppress the lurid images evoked by Tina’s detailed and generous descriptions of her sex life. But three weeks have passed, and I’ve received rejection after rejection in my inbox, and forty-five-hour weeks at Buon Giorno are yielding little more than a hundred bucks a week and a constant headache. I need that Social Security number. I need that visa, that sponsor, that investment banker who wants to marry me. I need to get away from Buon Giorno.

“This place is
fucked.
Is
fucked.
I need to get high.”

Benji disappears outside. The door slams. Tina briefly looks up from her book on method acting, and then resumes drinking and reading, abandoning martinis in favor of Jack Daniels. I help myself to a glass of wine, sit in the corner, and wait morosely for customers who don’t turn up. What the hell am I
doing
in this city? One of the chefs joins me, Fernando, from Mexico.
Those Mexicans are short, ain’t they?
croaked my grandma once, shortly after making the observation that Sad-dam Hussein was such a
handsome
man.
You think they have dwarf blood in ’em?

“Hey, Fernando. Quiet night.”

He nods glumly, sticks a grubby finger up one nostril. He retrieves the contents, glances at it briefly, relegates it to the chef’s whites along with remnants of an avocado and the blood of a
bistecca.

“How long have you been in the U.S., Fer?”

“I think, maybe eight months. I am saving for college. I want to be journalist. I earn money, then I go back to Mexico.”

“You have a green card?”

He looks shocked. Shocked enough to stop his game of Hunt-the-Booger.

“No! Por su puesto, no!
I come over the border; we run across one night. But they pay OK here. Four hundred dollars a week.
Bueno.
”

In the kitchen Alejandro and JP were giggling. “You fuck American woman? You fuck her? Aawwww!
Las americanas son putas! Fácil!
Is easy to fuck them. Is easy. But to find one to marry, is difficult,
amigo.
”

I walk in and it goes silent, embarrassed, because they are different, they know that, and even if I am working in the same place as them, I’m white, and they know enough to be quiet when they see my skin. Their interactions are probably limited to other Mexicans—or the occasional “Fuck you, asshole” from a snarling and disdainful
princesa
as she walks along the street repulsed by the hiss, the longing “Mama
cita
”—the confusion as to why it’s so hard to meet these Americans, even the Hispanics are too American now, all too American for Mexicans who don’t speak English and live six to a room and can’t even get employment at Taco Bell now that the government is cracking down on illegals.

 

10˚38’N 61˚31’W
Trinidad was our second port after we sailed the Atlantic, after I’d been baptized Mimi. There our crew applied for a visa, because for some reason the U.S. would not let you into the country by sea without a visa, even if you were from the “special” countries—the ones they liked, the ones whose citizens seep seamlessly into American life and pump the economy full of funds and companies and investments and white people and bad sitcoms. There was a visa for everyone coming to the States, the Captain whispered to me: a visa for tourists from Third World countries, a visa for anyone who enters the country by sea, a visa for someone who comes into the country merely for business meetings, a visa for studying at college—a visa, even, for women who have been sex trafficked into the country. The guilt visa, that one is. The visa everyone wanted was the H-1B, the “green card” leading to permanent residency and then citizenship. But knowing the chances of gaining that were futile, everyone went for the next best thing, something that would merely let them enter the U.S., just let them in. We stood in line, me and the Captain. They sent me back because the picture wasn’t right, a gray background, not a white, and I stood in the heat outside the embassy, clouds pressing on my temples, squeezing, until a Rasta sidled over and took me to the store to get it done correctly. There they would also print out the papers for you, the references on headed letters, the bank statements, the assurances neatly packaged in specious bureaucracy, fallacies, hopes as insubstantial as cotton candy, sickly and full of air. I went back and queued under fluorescent lighting, among blue plastic chairs, and the Captain and I were the only white people in there, and everyone else had on their best clothes and their best hopes fading quickly under the
swoosh-swoosh-swoosh
of the ceiling fans and the sweat pooling under armpits, the heat intensifying like the disappointment, and we needed the visa, but it wasn’t the kind of need they had, and when we came away from the window with the nod of approval we knew we would get, we felt ashamed and left quickly before we could witness the clipping of the wings, the ritual of rejection and rawness.

Benji blusters back in, looking slightly blue and frostbitten, a crazed, paranoid look frozen onto his enormous features.

“The
bells.
I hear
the bells.
Can you not
hear
them?”

 

I go to see an immigration lawyer not long after arriving in Manhattan, a name passed on in e-mails to desperate Brits like me.
Try this woman, she got me my permanent residency, that one sucked, don’t use him, you want cheap and smart, hmm, hear that one lost Dave his appeal against deportation.
First visit free, options placed on the table, white, educated, employable? Take your pick!

She traces my future with enthusiastic semaphore, a tiny white skeletal hand in an oversized jacket, a gray cubicle in a Midtown office. Tarot cards drawn in the air: She plucks one, another, another. They all say the same thing, a simple image cloaked in the pompous frivolities of legal language: “An H-1B, also known as a working or sponsorship visa, requires sponsorship by a company that has to prove that the job has been openly advertised as vacant for over eighteen months and cannot be filled by a U.S. citizen, but they will need to apply for next year now. The deadline is in April, and the processing takes six months, or you can get the other visa for people like you . . .” It was a Rubik’s Cube of language, even for me, in my language, with my people.
No wonder there’s so many Fernandos in this country
I marvel wonderingly and gaze out the building at what I later learn to be the Chrysler Building. The lawyer’s tone changes, softens slightly. “Really, the best option is for you to gain employment with, perhaps, an English company based in New York and get paid in pounds. There are special visas for this. You’re a writer, you say? There’s a visa called an ‘I visa’ for foreign media workers. But it won’t let you work for an American company, even freelance, and to be honest, I can’t tell you the chances of getting a job as a U.S.-based correspondent, but I’ve heard from clients it’s pretty difficult—it’s not something you walk into. Other than that, if you could prove that you excel in your field of the arts, perhaps with a publishing contract, then you could get a J visa, which will put you on the path to permanent residency . . .” Prove your worth and we’ll take you. Permanent residency—that was the green card, the green go, the
Yes, we’ll take you, no more filing for dumb work visas and fucking around with Immigration. Stay a bit longer, pledge allegiance, and we’ll even let you be a citizen, the genuine article.
Such a long, long path. I was beginning to realize I should perhaps go home. Back to England. I leave and go to work at the restaurant. Later at about one A.M. I take the J train back to Brooklyn, walk home to the loft apartment in the snow, stay up until dawn writing and worrying. I shiver when I think of the apartment in Queens. I want to call home but I don’t. It’s not in my nature. I wasn’t brought up like that. I do things on my own, always. Before I hit the street there would be someone, something, some job, some bed. I sell a piece to a newspaper a few days later and the money helps. But no one wants to employ me, not even the English companies, and the money from waitressing is just not enough.

 

“I’m livin’ in a cardboard box for a week. People are really dig-gin’ this shit at the moment, the limitations of mental space represented by physical boundaries . . .”

I sit with Raoul in the kitchen, sipping lemon zinger tea and listening politely to his latest performance-art piece.