Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (7 page)

How do I find this job tolerable?
I don’t kiss.
It’s Julia Roberts, it’s Pretty Fucking Woman, and the time when one Champagne Room client did slip his tongue in my mouth, I got drunk on tequila and cried and cried and cried. My body is not my mind. But somehow my mouth is supremely intimate. I use it to tease but never to clinch the deal. You learn to let everything else wash over you. You learn to deal with loneliness. You learn how to dance like you believe it, with tricks and lies, wielded by the experts—women. Life is a lie. I defy anyone who can claim to live without lying.

The other day I thought I heard someone whisper my name behind me. Not Mimi, but my real name, the one my parents gave me. I almost didn’t stop, until I recalled vaguely,
That’s me.
There was no one there, of course, of course. It’s almost too easy, giving up my past life to take on this new one. I leave her behind—the student, the scholar, the graduate, the good girl—and become Mimi instead. Somewhere in between are the parts I prefer to forget.

Although I wonder, sometimes, if I really have left her behind, or if every time I gaze steadily without seeing into someone’s eyes as I murmur another lie, another name, the emptiness gazing back is just a confrontation with the other me.

 

Raoul paces in his room agitatedly, floorboards creaking beneath cracked cowboy boots, an aggression to match.

“Hey, English girl, I wanna word.”

“
Later
Raoul.”

Focus shifts, falls onto sheets of paper, random snippets of information, convoluted sentences, grotesque paragraphs about immigration staring at me dolefully. I was working on a new article about immigration reform, talking to an editor while reading an e-mail about obtaining something called the “I” visa—a journalist’s visa for foreigners that allowed writers to stay indefinitely in the United States while working on U.S. issues for foreign newspapers. Close eyes, twist the cord of the old, shitty phone around my finger, try and forget worries, move on . . .

I turn my focus back to the telephone.

“OK, I’ll have another piece done by Friday. D’you know when I’ll get the check through?”

“I’d quite like the money
before
next month if possible, could you talk to Accounts and let me know what they say? OK, thanks. Bye.”

I hang up, rifle through some papers, heart pumping. Raoul stands and watches.

“Sorry, writing stuff. What can I help you with?”

He stares at me through arctic eyes narrowed to razor slits. His gaze doesn’t waver as he reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and expertly kicks the cat with one pointed weather-beaten cowboy boot. He produces a cigarette. Lights it.

“So. New York treating you well is it, English girl? Made friends with the Hasidics downstairs yet? They love little girls like you. If you ever run out of money they’ll always throw you a couple bucks for a handjob. Remember that.”

He emits a dry little laugh, ratcheting back and forth in that sahara chest of his. He turns his sculpted face to one side for a second, chiseled carelessly so the exterior seemed fine art, but a closer, harder glance, just one more second of study, and you could see the tiny flaws, the imperfections, the lines of anger and volatility set in that face like a madwoman’s curse. He scratches his groin, a sigh, a bestial grunt of pleasure.

“Raoul, shouldn’t you be getting back to your cardboard box?” I ask, irritated. Catto jumps onto my lap and purrs.

“Cat has shit on its ass,” Raoul says neutrally.

“D’you want the rent or something? I haven’t had my check through from the paper yet, but they owe me like a grand now, so I have more than enough.”

“Shut your mouth, girl. I don’t wanna see that mouth moving no more. Silence, calm.”

Peace. It swamps over the chill space like the invasive warmth of a tranquilizer, peppered with the distant clash of a cymbal from the recording studio out back, and the words crowding in on me from the papers scattered on my floor, insolent black print.

“OK, we got peace. I wanna talk to you. I read one of your articles about immigrants. Seems you got a bit of talent going on there. Though I don’t think hanging out with your little illegal friends is gonna be good for you, English girl.”

I close my eyes briefly and shake my head,
no, scrap that sentence, this is not meant to be about me, never about me
that indefinable, odd feeling of clawing panic flapping away inside me like a reptile in its death throes.

“You OK?” asks Raoul curiously, leaning into my face. The phone rings again.

“Hello? What? Oh hey. What? WHAT!?”

Raoul sniggers and wanders over to the bed, assuming his customary position—horizontal, hand on genitals, scratching.

“Problems, English Girl?”

“Yes, fucking problems. The paper won’t pay me. Said they need a Social Security number, even though I’m freelance.”

“So give ’em your number.”

“Raoul, I don’t have one.”

The phone rings again, an insistent, shrill cry, like the retarded boy in the playground, rocking back and forth with his little battered
Dukes of Hazzard
car clutched dully in that damp hand, the buzz emitted from his cracked lips, a radio transmission of dog whistles
ee ee ee.
Once he had ear-wax, violent green pussy wax, pouring out thick, voluptuous clotted cream rivers from his ear, yet he did not waver.
Ee ee ee.

Raoul raises an arrogant eyebrow.

“So leave. New York just ate you up, English girl. Just swallowed you whole and here’s the fucking aftertaste, a belch, and some heartburn.”

“That’s the thing, Raoul. I can’t leave. Not now. I filed.”

“Whadda you mean?”

“I applied for a visa. A journalist’s visa. I filed my application yesterday.”

Raoul’s hand extends stealthily down the front of his Calvin Kleins, reaches thoughtfully into the innermost depths of his groin area, scratches tenderly, readjusts, emerges again. He lights another cigarette and holds it aloft, like the Statue of Liberty, and in the dull gloom of a dark afternoon the little red glow from the end shines soft, insidious, devilish in the growing darkness.

“Don’t see what the problem is.”

“I can’t leave until it comes through—I don’t have the papers to get out, the little white form they give you when you come in. It’s called an I-94. It’s really important—you’re screwed if you don’t have it—and the Immigration people have got mine. I can’t leave, and I can’t work until the approval comes through and they send it back.”

The cigarette drips ash, soft and liquid flakes of glowing amber.

“Well, I was gonna see if you wanted to hook up with me tonight. But seems like you already got fucked up the ass plenty this afternoon. Wanna beer?”

Raoul snickers, yawns, stretches, belches, cracks a bottle open,
glug-glug-glug.
I sat in the darkness awhile and I feel kind of lost. I
felt
kind of lost, sitting in my gloomy loft-room on Rutledge Street off Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, as outside the Hasids hovered uncertainly, looking for goys to turn on their light switches, turn off their ovens as the Sabbath broke. They came to look for America, so they said, and didn’t find it, not exactly, so they created what they wanted instead, Little Poland in Brooklyn.

Little Poland, home to Raoul and the musicians and me, but not really our place, not really. It was never our place.

From somewhere deep in the bowels of the apartment someone started playing a guitar, a lone voice quavering across the empty dullness of Brooklyn on a Friday evening. You keep looking but all you find are opportunities as fleeting as your first love.

So you either retreat to what you know, locate your corner, stake it out, and make it into mini-Poland, mini-England, mini-fuckknowswhereland, a replica of what you left behind, or you become someone entirely different, new, fantastical, illusory—an American.

A generation of parentless, nongestated hopefuls; a labor that started somewhere mid-Atlantic, a birth that happened smack in the middle of it all, the Statue of Liberty gracefully overseeing proceedings.

Raoul started humming to himself as he took a loud swig of beer, and I couldn’t help smiling ruefully, starting to get it all now.

Starting to get what was happening, starting to get New York, the way it worked, the tricks it played on you, the mocking glance, the spot-lit glare of attention, the ruthless rejection, a move on, past, beyond. Be careful what you wish for, said Fat Bunny’s glance, and I was finding my voice, re-creating myself anew as this Mimi character, this writer who headlines papers and then gets bumped because she doesn’t have the right visa.
Oy vey.
Five minutes of fame. And the rent to be paid next week.

“I got you a beer, English girl,” says Raoul, appearing suddenly in my doorway again. He holds it out sullenly, and then breaks into song, “
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together . . .
Fucking hate this song. C’mon. Leave that shit. It ain’t so bad. It’s America. It’s New York. Just fucking ride with it, English. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

He looks at me almost paternally, and I could read that glance, the Saviour glance. But I didn’t
need
saving, I had never needed saving. Raoul looks at me and I look back at him, hold his gaze. Something passes between us. He acquiesces, but I can sense that I’m now a challenge
those hips
and that poor and lonely in America, also weak prey.

“Drink, English girl?”

I smile, and take the beer from his hand. “It’s Mimi, arse—
ass
—hole.”

All you really want, sometimes, is someone to say,
It’s OK to fuck up. Come home.
But for all the family I have, there’s no one to say that, no one to mean it. What’s easier is this orphan girl, this Mimi doll, this new identity, this girl whose movie reel plays determinedly on, and stubbornly, like a brutal editor, omits the scenes that detract too literally from the plot
those hips
though which, perhaps, may add to the scene. This girl who can do
anything
—except, perhaps, ask for help.

 

I go back to Buon Giorno.

Lucia, the new Italian waitress, greets me at the door. Benji is sitting hunched over in a corner mumbling about bells. Tina’s behind the bar, already downing the JD, her imposing frame zeroing in on an unfortunate male seated alone. Before I can grab her attention, Lucia starts talking.

“English, how are you, English? I am not
gooood.
Not at all.”

She lolls dramatically against the bar, a woman in a melodrama, bosom heaving. Her pupils dilate and retract in time to the Gipsy Kings.

“I go to Canada for a week, and they will not let me back in. These asshole Immigration people, they say to me, ‘Why is it you spend so much time in this country? You must return to Italy.’ ”

She snorts loudly and wipes traces of white powder from her nose.

“So I say to them,
Fuck you motherfucker! Your country suck! I don’t want to live in this America, I go home! You suck cock motherfucker!
”

A diplomatic reply that I’m sure endeared her to those in Customs.