Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (6 page)

“How will you take a crap?” asks one of the musicians aimlessly, emerging from the bathroom and disappearing swiftly into the makeshift recording studio at the back of the loft.

“Fuck you hipster,” says Raoul.

The apartment did not have natural light; if we had been able to siphon that off too, from the Hasids downstairs, doubtless we would. Instead we subsist on a diet of eerie gloom filtered through candy bar wrappers clogging the infrequent skylights. Like plants deprived of chlorophyll, we start to curl up in that apartment, grow yellow and turgid and soft. There’s a sense of unease like a dissatisfied sigh, an unarticulated desire, ambitions starved of talent, egos deprived of audiences. “How’s your writing coming along?” demands Raoul inscrutably, and I can’t tell if he’s seriously interested or not. “Finding working in the restaurant with them Mexicans is giving you divine inspiration?” He smiles blankly, a little cruelly, and there’s a baffled silence. I don’t tell him about the article I’ve written about immigration. It seems prudent not to, for Raoul scares me with his flashes of temper, his volatile personality, his attention to me that seems, in turns, almost resentful. He was the only one in the apartment who talked to me. “Those hips,” he’d growl, and look at me unpleasantly, and I’d look away and move into my room before he could press up close behind me, as if by chance. “Don’t trust no one in this fucking city,” he had said when I first moved in, gazing out of the skylight above my bed, watching a fresh wave of snow start to fall. His scrotum hung obscenely through the leg of his boxer shorts, I remember, the delicate trace of the raphe, that scar-like fusion line, clearly visible as it snaked, ugly, and gross, between his legs. I had looked away, annoyed.
Don’t trust no one.
Maybe it had been a warning about himself. We talked, we assumed a semblance of friendship; he often wandered into my room when I was writing and threw himself lackadaisically on my bed with a cigarette in hand. I did not trust him, but I was lonely and wanted to. I smile at Raoul uncertainly, lopsided, and don’t answer his question, instead take a drag of my cigarette, worrying as I did about how to pay the rent, thinking to myself that maybe I should look for a new job and quit the cigarettes, wondering if I could sell another article and then deciding simultaneously that giving up smoking might be a little extreme, even for this situation.

I’m beginning to feel the change. I had taken the precaution of writing my article under a pseudonym, my nickname, the other me, Mimi, keeping the “real me” far away from the narrative that was unfolding. It was exciting to be someone else. A relief. As if by imagining myself as Mimi, this fictional creature called up in a storm, I would become her, and whatever happened to me in New York was inconsequential, something that couldn’t touch or scar the person wrapped underneath. But now—the now I am writing in, the
real
now—now I am someone else, always someone else, another-else tagged on to a someone that is assumed for the day, the hour, the man, the mood, so that even if I wanted to reach beneath the layers and rip them off, I doubt that I could. I change it up sometimes.
What’s your name?
they ask. Mimi, Kitty, Lily, Michelle. Pussy, if I’m feeling perverse.
What’s your real name?
Diamond, Desire, Escarda, Chanel, Mary, if I’m feeling
really
perverse. But never my real name. It’s not like we’d cry if we told you. It’s not as if the revelation of our real names, the hint of an identity pre-stripping, brings back technicolor images of weird Uncle Herb, the seductive allure of puppies and kittens,
promise not to tell Mommy,
a squalid motel room. The telling of the real name, it’s nothing to do with that. You won’t extract it from us like a rotten tooth, crumbled and black, a dark secret suppressed by the embrace of our shame with a cocked glance, a sigh, an erect nipple. Real names. Telling of. It’s just not
au fait.
It’s just not
done.
It’s just none of your damned business.

After a while, the fake names become more real than the real, become indistinguishable from the real. Feeding off truth, the fake overwhelms truth, a monstrous tick grown juicy, plump, resplendent, and terrifying.

 

I am sitting in a café in the East Village, sipping steaming gray coffee made bearable only by the addition of souring milk, a sprinkling of Sweet ’N Low. I don’t know what it is about New York, but their coffee is disgusting. I have drunk coffee in India, in China, in France, in Italy, in Guatemala—god, even in England the coffee is an improvement upon this tortured extract, bitter and black, a bile, a diarrhea of drinks. But swallowing this is easier, preferable, to cracking open the hard, sugar layer of forgetfulness in which I have concealed these memories in order to make them more palatable. Now I find that sugar coating is frowned upon, and instead “the truth” is preferred.
Spit it out, get the narrative flowing, stop all these interruptions, it’s confusing! We want the story!
Sod off, it
hurts.
It feels easier if I do it this way. I was never one for ripping off the Band-Aid.

Next to me a Bangladeshi is composing a letter to USCIS—the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I know he is Bangladeshi because he is talking to the men who work in the café, who sell magazines and candy and baconeggandcheeseonarollwholemealwithsaltpepper and gray coffee. The letter says he is recently arrived in the United States on a B-1/B-2 standard tourist visa for citizens of countries not on the Visa Waiver Program (that is, Third World countries where the citizens are more likely to want to emigrate to the prosperous States), but now his wife is pregnant, and alack! The credit card he was using to finance the trip is maximized to its potential! There are no savings on hand, no kind relatives to help, returning to Bangladesh—an impossibility! There can be only one solution. Mr. M. Nasirullah must be given a green card! Or at the very minimum, some kind of working visa/visa extension/ability to stay unbothered in this green and pleasant land! He grunts in satisfaction as he types the last sentence with a flourish, one finger tapping the keys, slow, deliberate, and then he leans back and sighs, and we both sit and stare dolefully at the buzzing screen.
You have five minutes left, please purchase more Internet credit at the cash register.

My thoughts slip idly to Lily, as I sit here stingstingsting on my tongue, Mr. M. Nasirullah’s hope drizzling through attempts to forget and isolate and conceal that part of my life. It stings the present like that hot black bile on my tongue. It takes me back. I have those moments a lot. When I’m not in the club and I’m not smiling bright and false and stupid and answering stupid questions with stupid answers in my stupid Mimi voice, I’m sitting blankly, alone, reliving the past again. The fog of memory rolls in, damp and emphysemic.

I call her Lily because Lily is one of the names I use for myself, sometimes. I like it, like the pale, insipid quality of that ghostly white, delicate flora, the flower of death. I’m magnanimous, I know, extending my generosity to her, when really I gave her little else but this: a new name, on top of the superimposed identity of “illegal” that circumstance bestowed upon her. Lily was tiny and beautiful, sleek black hair, DD boobs bought by her boyfriend for her twentieth birthday. She was my friend, I think, and she drifts in and out of the story, my story, but she never has a starring role, because we found each other’s presence unbearable, eventually.
Things OK? Dating anyone? We must have coffee, we must have dinner, we must meet up, talk, chill out.
But we don’t. We only met because we had our Social Insecurity in common. She told me her story, and it wasn’t like mine, which is threaded with alternatives, options not taken, bad decisions, split-second life-changing moments. It wasn’t Mr. M. Nasirullah’s story, but it was of the same genre, the same “U” rating, the same general theme. The United States of America, new life away from persecution /poverty/war in homeland. To find more poverty, more adversity, struggle, pain, and for what? After twenty-three years no green card, no pledge of allegiance, no voting rights, no passport? No hope? The norm. The norm. What is the norm? It’s New York, this movie set of drunks and bums on gray streets littered with packaging and cusswords and a glance down, inside, away. Then it was Brooklyn, trapped in Little Poland with the musicians I never saw, never spoke to, a seemingly impossible situation, stuck penniless in New York, etching out a painful living with the odd article, waitressing for tips, unable to gain
real
employment, the appropriate visa, but still hopeful. I was still hopeful then, because after all, white English girls don’t have it too hard, do we? Nothing bad really happens to
us.
We’re of Jane Austen ilk, where the worst that can happen in life is old maidenhood and not getting Darcy. My point is, my point is . . . these gray people, tinged with color, will fade in, and fade out, but pay attention to them, please. I owe it to them, to Lily, because I didn’t help them, and I know they needed it. I met the people, who had it worse than me. There weren’t all sex-trafficked gazelles from Eastern Europe, doe-eyed Colombian maidens, heavy breasts laden with rich creamy milk ripe for the suckling. Half of them, like Lily, came because they had no choice. Half of them came because they wanted something more, something more than
tierra de nadie.
And we stayed—I stayed—because we felt, all of us, sadly, peculiarly, as if there was nothing, really, to go back to, as if here was as good a place as any, as if here, no matter how hard it was, divorced from the weight of the past, we could become whatever we wanted to become, whereas if we went back, we might only be failures.

I walked down the Bowery, on the Lower East Side. Past the mission center full of Christians and do-gooders, enjoying the anonymity, eyes that slipped unseeing past this body drowned in shapeless brown, averting the gaze we actively cultivate, tease out like a splinter in the night. I felt bitter. I want someone to do good by
me
—fuck the bums, the tramps, the retards, the crazies. What about those who just want a chance at that job, a bit of money to get the lease on that apartment, some time to write that novel? A large black man was talking to a bum, twisted and snickering and drooling and cursing. “Go ’round the corner man. I can’t help you no more. Go ’round the corner.” I looked into his eyes, this man, this volunteer, this messenger of God, this model member of the flock, and his eyes were full of love and sympathy, understanding, full of it,
full
—just not enough to go around. Lily’s story was the story of all the people with false identities, all the Mr. M. Nasirullah’s, the slit-mouth Colombians, the Mimis even, and I
had
love and sympathy, I
had
understanding. Just not enough to go around.

Last night I wasn’t working but even when I don’t work I can’t sleep, my body wired into the beat, the club controlling me like some perverse and twisted remote. I stay awake until four A.M. usually, and when I sleep it’s sordid and alcoholic. So last night I surfed the Internet a little, and who should I find but one of the old Brooklyn roommates from the Raoul apartment, in some band that is, apparently,
HOT!HOT!HOT!
across Europe and Japan. People from the past always turn up again in New York, circle around like fetid water in a blocked sink, a scuzz of oil, a jism of grease. I wondered, briefly, about Lily, about the ending to her story. But there are too many stories about people like her, people like me, contravening the conditions upon which we were present in the United States of America, nonimmigrants accepting unauthorized employment, upon which grounds we could be subject to deportation. At first I liked speaking up, getting my voice heard, feeling like I was making a difference, writing articles, attending meetings about these people—the injustices! Did the Republicans know it was near impossible to get a H-1B working visa due to the time restrictions and limited numbers placed upon them, even for white, educated former sailors and pill poppers? But this brief month of activism was before the situation got really bad. And when you start struggling and twisting and biting and scratching, life clawing you down into a whimpering ball, you just don’t want to know anymore. You don’t want to hear other people’s stories. Fuck trying to help everyone else. Fuck your whining and your bitching. Fuck your hardships and your sob stories and your lined, wrinkled, sad faces. I could only take so much of it. Lily knew that too. I guess she doesn’t hold it too hard that we’re not friends anymore, after our emotive sharing of experiences, group hugs and all. I guess she’s used to people moving on while she stays behind, trapped in Social Insecurity.

This is all I can afford her: a new name, a paragraph in this tract otherwise devoted to
me-me-me.
And now I must move on. Time is passing, and we—that is, Mimi and me—have work to do.

3

WHEN I GO INTO WORK
I switch off. I feel nothing, have no opinions, no sense of shame, no emotion. Everything closed, tucked neatly out of sight. In that way you become a negated space, a void for people to fill in however they desire. Mimi, the walking, talking doll, the paint-by-numbers English chick, whatever you want, I’ll name the price. I’m the cute, young, private table dancer who makes people laugh and does things men in their forties only wish their first wives had taught them . . . (incredulously)
Where do the kids get it from nowadays?
. . . (curiously)
How many people you slept with, Mimi?
. . . (nonchalantly)
Oh only two or three. I don’t really believe in sex before marriage,
letting a sly knee slip between legs, a breast stroke the side of a man’s face, a careless sigh escape, look deep into someone’s eyes.

They say you can always tell a liar because they can look you straight in the eye. Someone should tell these pricks that. “You having a good time, Mimi? You glad we met? I’m different from the average guy, right?” But of course,
mi amor,
but of course.