Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (14 page)

On the subway Bambi grasps the shining pole in the middle of the compartment, lifts herself effortlessly off the ground, twirls around. “How’d you learn that?” Lily squeaks, crossing her arms over those puppies, those devastating puppies, those little babies For His Eyes Only. And Bambi just laughs. “A long train ride back to Harlem baby, two kids to feed and the survival instinct. Hooters ain’t doing it for me, you know?” She looks at me. “You’d better start playing that
Rocky
soundtrack and wearing those heels. ’Cause you ain’t walking like no stripper white girl. And you know it.”

How do you get the skills? You watch. You watch and watch, like I did, like you’re watching the program of the century, the grand finale to the meaning of life, the answer to every question you ever vaguely wanted to ask God, to find written in the Koran, to emerge from the murky depths of a meditation. You go home. You make friends with a stripper who moves into your apartment next to the kitty litter box and tells you exactly how much pressure to put where with what body part and when. You hang out with the biggest hustling Harlem bitch who walked the earth, and you observe how she narrows her eyes, glances at that pride, and throws it beneath the squealing brakes of the NQRW even as she puts a slender leg onstage, waves away the offer of assistance, and glances at me contemptuously, knowingly. You ask advice from Lily, whose pride, so tied up with those puppies, the LSATs, and that boyfriend, prevents her from stepping onstage, but who knows the industry, knows the men, knows, knows, knows what it is to be a woman—and knows, even more than I do, what it is to have secrets.

 

When the Australian’s girlfriend came back I was with Jon-jon, but when Jon-jon went to sea I was back in the crewhouse, until Johnny Monaco stepped in. I knew him from The Blue Lady, smoking joints, drinking pints, selling tabs of ecstasy on the sly. He worked as a mate on a boat that sat in port all summer, allowing him ample access to extracurricular activities. We became friends, and then a bit more, because I was still waiting for a new job, and you need to have something to occupy your time. So I was with him, but he was with his girlfriend. He had managed to convince her to let me move into their apartment for a few days until I found a new job on a boat. She regarded me with suspicion. Rightly so. We would kiss and pet and fondle like schoolchildren whenever she was out of sight. One night, five days after moving in, we all went out, dropped E’s, drank too much. It ended up, inevitably, with a shattering plunge into a foursome. But is it a foursome when two of the four are not interested in anyone else?

We lay on her bed, entwined in a long, drugged-up, labyrinthine kiss that drew us further and further into a giggling vortex, head spinning, senses exploding. The girlfriend was on the sofa with the other man, the first mate on a luxury yacht. After a half hour or so she stood up naked, ran over to us, whispered anxiously in his ear, and the other man walked over and plucked me from the arms of my illicit lover, splayed me gently on the couch, and ignored my fretful, confused struggles. His knees pinned my thighs down and as I split in two I heard, distantly, the sound of her sobbing, and then I realized it wasn’t sobbing, it was a cry of pleasure, and in the dark I saw the writhing of limbs white and perfect in the moonlight, and the only tears were coming from me as I braced against the sofa, too dead to be painful, too far gone to be inconvenient.
Sorry,
he whispered the next morning.
Have fun?

 

Sex and guilt, this almost insanely perfect dialectic, are what feed me, clothe me, pay my rent, sustain my dreams of writing and living in America, what wake me with unease in the middle of a carbolic night, a carbolic life. They say that compulsive sexual activity, promiscuity if you like, depersonalizes sex, that one who indulges in such activity is a screw-up, an abused child, a fragment of dysfunction, a waif in need of salvation, a person from whom you should run far, far away.

I’d agree with that.

“I’m auditionin’ today,” announces Bambi to Pedro. He grunts disinterestedly and resumes eating Spaghetti Bolognese from a greasy foil plate.
“Puta,”
he mutters under his breath.

Ole Hank was hustling the bitches like his life depended on it. “Girls! You got a half hour! I want house fees now or I’m sendin’ you home!” The doors opened at twelve and the lustful wandered in, the bitches were primped up, and a new waitress stood uneasily in the corner.

“How you finding it?” I ask. It’s curiosity. I ask because I know how she’s finding it. Like I found it. Like Bambi found it. It’s a house of fucking horrors, but curiosity, money, and the pornography in our souls led us there, kept us standing holding that drinks tray, dropping that dress. She looks at me with enormous eyes.

“It don’t pay so good. They said if you want money you have to go in the Champagne Room. How d’you get guys in the Champagne Room?”

“You flirt with them.”

“Oh.”

Pause.

“But whadda you have to
do
in there?”

“Dance.”

Pause.

“Dance—you mean like those girls are dancing over there?”

I nod. Her eyes strain open as she entertains the notion, lets it seep in, reluctantly fondles it, passed from hand to hand, stops, pupils well up, obliterate the iris. Whispers, “I feel kinda
self-conscious
about my body.”

“Mimi!” snaps Hank. “I’m puttin’ you and Bambi onstage next. Grab a fuckin’ shot from the bar. You’ll need it.”

“How d’you do this job?” asks the girl in wonder. “How’d you
learn?
”

“You just have it in you,” I reply.

Hot, wet tang of tequila, the taste of bad sex and worse memories, fanny farts and premature ejaculators. The new girl stands in the waitress line next to Lily and Basia, alternating feet, looking bored.
I feel kinda self-conscious.
I’ve heard those words before. I think I said them once. Bambi too. We don’t feel self-conscious, in truth we don’t. Because no one’s shy when money’s involved.

“How long?” I ask Bambi, and nod to the girl. Bambi snorts. “When she has to pay the fucking rent, that’s how long.”

“Next song,” Hank says.

“Next song,” the DJ says over the Tannoy.

“Next song!” squeaks Lily, and Pedro slaps her ass for the hell of it, and why not, it’s a nice ass.

Hot, wet tang of tequila, my hand on that brass pole. On that first dance you exist only for these dot-to-dots of sensory perception. From hand on pole to hand on dress, slip dress over head, switch hands. It’s not the nudity, truly it’s not. It’s not the five bored, anonymous gazes, it’s not the prickling heat, the first time you see your reflection staring back at you, no, no,
no.
Not the adrenaline,
certainly
not excitement—it’s one P.M. on a Thursday afternoon. No. It’s the relief maybe. The relief that Raoul isn’t here, my parents can’t see, Paula’s safely tucked up on the council estate back in Wales. I’m alone, and no one knows what I’m doing, what I’m doing spectacularly, magnificently badly.

“You sucked,” says Bambi pragmatically.

“Were you nervous?” asks Lily. “We thought you were nervous. You walked kinda funny and you never let go of the pole.”

Dolores and Hank are talking as I go up to them, pink, damp, too concerned, too damned concerned about this fucking shitty job where we make money by not caring.

“You’re hired,” says Dolores. “Go make up a schedule with Hank.” She returns to
Us Weekly
and a Baby Ruth bar chopped into a hundred tiny pieces to get past the gastric-bypass surgery safely. I’m like that. Chopped into a hundred pieces to make it through a tied and twisted, restricted, gut. Forbidden the luxury of a duodenum, my pieces slap directly, rudely into the jejunum. One piece, distinct from all the rest, is this new thing, this new person, this fetish creature, this commodity, this Mimi doll.

7

WE’RE ALL B-LIST IN THE CLUB.
We’re there because we’re not A-list in our chosen careers, and to supplement that we paint in the cracks with heavy-duty stage makeup and clear plastic heels. Does it bother us? No. A few drinks, several Benjamins tucked in the garter, one or two compliments about our breasts/face/ass, and we’ve had one hell of a good day. B-list stripping sure beats B-list waitressing, or B-list bartending, or any other kind of B-list career within our “professional” bracket as—for the most part—illegals, mothers, and oversexed outsiders. Our customers? Yes, they too are B-list actors playing a part in a badly scripted daytime-TV soap that would probably be X-rated if it was ever released. Not that they know all this of course. They always believe that we find them attractive, that they’re number one, that they’re Tom Cruise in this low-budget burlesque comedy played out relentlessly every day between the hours of noon and eight P.M.

I’m loving this job.

Mr. Tom Cruise comes from Dallas, and his graying tash hangs limply in sharp contrast to the veritable forest of spider’s legs sprouting gaily from his nostrils. He exudes the stench of gin, cigarettes, and the pungent, noxious aroma of old-man-divorced-no-kids. I am stuck onstage, while a new English dancer from Stringfellows (on a highly illegal “working vacation” with two Eastern European friends) has a tantrum at the bar, thinking, mistakenly, that she is important, and that anyone gives a fuck.

“ ’Ow the fack am I meant to darnce if I can’t bloody eat? When is my food ready?
Oi!
Bartenda! I’m
talkin’
to you!”

Lolling listlessly onstage for my fourth song, Mark the little fat DJ mimes me a long, intricate story about his weekend from the DJ booth. Lily stands by the door with Basia, sour and acidic. I don’t talk to them much anymore, not since the audition. We’re too busy prowling, Bambi and I. Prowling as we sit at the throne of the bar in our polyester mantles, our aura of fake tan and baby oil, our smiles, alligator smiles, crocodile tears, the emotions of a
Sarcosuchus imperator.
Mr. Tom Cruise approaches the stage, waves a twenty-dollar bill at me, and smiles sympathetically.

“Doing overtime up there?”

“Looks like it.”

The ugly Russian girl takes pity and replaces me onstage. Bambi’s sitting at the back of the bar with Mafia Joe. It’s one of those days, those languid, early afternoon days when the heat outside is in stark contrast to the icy chill of the AC blasting the ten girls who bothered to show up for work only because they couldn’t get a lift to the Jersey shore. I approach Mr. Tom Cruise and am shortly in the midst of an erotic table dance. Next to me a girl sits back on her haunches, her ass plopped into a guy’s crotch, her eyes gazing fixedly, bored into the distance as he groans softly behind her. Her vermilion mouth stretches wide into a yawn. Over in Camp Mimi, he seems to be into it, Mr. Tom Cruise, though he doesn’t look like he has money. Black slacks, the plaid shirt, no tie, no signs of corporate wealth. I ask him anyway, for the hell of it, the token question, “Wanna get a private room?”

And he nods. “Sure.”

Jeeeesus.
1:30 P.M. This is my day. I
am
the star of this B-List enterprise, this low-budget movie. And Mr. Tom Cruise is, paternally, asking me what kind of champagne I would prefer, Veuve Clicquot or Cristal? Each costs over a grand. Hey, let’s get both! And one hour stretches into three . . .

Mr. Tom Cruise is paying for the act. He knows this, yet pretends not to. He’s paying for this B-List girl, Mimi in New York, to act like she’s into him, and for fifteen hundred bucks . . . Hey, that’s certainly possible. Mr. Old-Man-Divorced-No-Kids is funding his own movie right now, casting himself in the central role, emerging from his chrysalis of “corporate lawyer just stepped off the plane and dressed like a hick” and becoming “Mr. Tom Cruise entertaining Alexis Carrington Colby” at immense distress to his disposable income. I just ride with it, pretend to be the A-list bitch he thinks he’s getting, although we all know if he was capable of getting any, he certainly wouldn’t be seeking out
my
services.

I emerge buzzing from the Champagne Room three hours later. Hank the manager grabs me before I can sneak into the cockroach-infested stairwell and retrieve the half-smoked Parliament I left there three hours previously. Hank’s one of the nicer managers. Likes to pet you, doesn’t mind shooting the shit occasionally. Of course your popularity with the managers is proportionate to the amount of money you’re squeezing out of the clients. Today I have a smiley face and five gold stars.

“Hey doll, you wanna earn money?”

I nod.

“Go see dat guy wid a leather jacket on gettin’ a massage. Say you recognized him from
Law & Order.
He’ll love you for it. B-list, you know?”

I’m a B-Lister pretending to a B-Lister we’re A-listers.

“Oh Mimi, you’re cute, you know that? So what episode you see me in? Was I
good?
”

Kristina, the masseuse, pummels listlessly at his shoulder blades, rolls her eyes, helps herself to Mr.
L&O
’s Jack Daniels, and turns the conversation back to a more interesting topic—herself. Mr.
Law & Order loves
Kristina, who is, in actual fact and contrary to all appearances, not just a twentysomething flat-chested New Yorker, but a top model for L’Oréal and a veteran of over forty movies. But the soundtrack to
this
movie,
this
bad TV drama, is slowing down now, switching off, because it’s 7:30 P.M. and the night girls are starting to swoop onto the floor with their fresh glitter sparkling smugly in contrast to our tawdry sequined skin. Slickly oiled breasts eclipse sagging cleavages, and Mr.
Law & Order
asks for my number as his gaze already starts to wander over the shoulder.

I’m in a good mood. Slip out onto the street, a wad of cash thudding against my thigh. Stifling, thick with the stench of burned rubber, the screech of tires, meandering tourists in baggy shorts, businessmen, a thick, damp smog from the June heat. The other dancers, the ones I don’t speak to, drift away down Broadway. I stop at the local deli, order pastrami on rye, mustard. A rich corporate dude is in there with a bum, a young black guy, about thirty years old. I watch them without pretending not to, adopting that unashamed New Yorker stare. He walks up to the counter, orders the same as me, pastrami, rye, mustard, lettuce, tomato. Ah. Just buying him a sandwich. He glances around genially as if expecting applause. Just buying him a sandwich, playing the role of the guy who cares, the CEO who’s at one with the people, massaging his ego with a token act of beneficence. He looks at me, then back at the little Chinese man behind the counter. “I’m paying for her sandwich too,” he says, and smiles at me with a Sweet ’N Low smile, saccharine, bitter, and carcinogenic. He’s Humbert Humbert and I’m Lolita, in a Snoopy T-shirt aged 5-6 and too-big jeans. I’m only just old enough to have gotten my period, dressed up in Mommy’s makeup, clutching my fucking dimes (earned by sucking Daddy’s dick) for a trip to the store to purchase some baby formula for my seven little siblings in Hell’s Kitchen. He’s loving the drama, this guy trying to save the scum of New York. I Iet him pay for the sandwich, let him have his badly scripted moment, swirl it around in his mouth, revel in the obnoxious taste of it.