Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (25 page)

But then there are those other journalists, those other writers, those other people I meet who insist, more terrifyingly perhaps, that it is not Mimi, not stripping, not sex they are interested in at all.

“You were a geek?” the journalist asked, incredulous, clutching a woman’s magazine proffering tips for enhancing orgasm to twelve-year-olds alongside a glossy grinning picture of some silly
geek-girl-turned-sexy-stripper!
and I sucked on my cigarette, eyes tilted to the night sky, watching the smoke dissipate (acetone, cyanide, aluminum, DDT/dieldrin, ammonia, ethanol, arsenic, formaldehyde, benzene, hydrogen cyanide, butane, lead, cadmium, methanol, carbon monoxide, nicotine, carbon dioxide, tar, chloroform, vinyl chloride) and thinking hard before replying, untruthfully:

“No.”

BillyMark’s. We stood outside, the journalist and I, barely touching, a prophylactic gesture on my part, though the breasts, plumped up with a too-small bra and bursting plush and juicy from a tiny dress, took no heed and engaged him in conversation even when I did not. I leaned against a sticky wall perspiring with the sugared gum of the bill-slapper. Always, eleven p.m. on a Wednesday, they’d change the bills outside BillyMark’s. “Sometimes,” I said, and traced my finger down the damp, gloopy adhesive oozing from the wall, shining eerily in the hot darkness, “I think I’m going insane.” He gave this statement more attention than I would have, awarded a merit to my pragmatism I did not wish for. Talking is merely to expel the emotion from our soul, remove it far from the source, place madness into a context that soothes us with those empty signifiers, words. We kept talking, a delicate fox-trot around the real issue—what real issue, we didn’t know. “In what sense, insane?” He sounded concerned. “The nightmares?”

I gestured toward BillyMark’s as my answer, and I love that bar,
love
it, it’s part of me, who I was, who I am, who I had become. They call me Mimi behind the bar, Billy and Mark do. I’ll go there after I finish work, shoot pool, hang out with the bums, the pimps, the hos, the hookers. I institute madness, like I instituted Mimi, into my soul. “And how are things with this man you mentioned, Eton?” the journalist asked suddenly.
“I think I’m losing it,”
I whispered, ignoring his question, brow furrowed with effort and then I laughed cruelly, knowing that this laugh would sear through him with coruscating force, blacken what’s inside, but I intended it to hurt, because he was a threat to my Mimi, my alter-ego, the only lover who’s never left me. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I would, and if I didn’t she
certainly
would. It was as if I were powerless to pray for my own redemption.

I threw my cigarette butt into the gutter and went back in to order another beer as he followed me with his damn tape recorder, looking confused, out of place, a little sad.

 

Whenever the boat was still, I would write, the new laptop purchased with months of slicing, baking, grilling, frying, sautéing, fricasseeing, souffléing, all at forty-five degrees in the Caribbean basin, in a galley the size of a closet. The boys would
humph
suspiciously, look over my shoulder, squint their eyes, rub diesel fumes from out of their sweaty eyes, and retreat back into the engine room. “When’s it finished Mimi?” the Captain would boom cheerfully, ignoring my wince at being slapped out of my writing reverie. “Coming down the pub? No? You all right love?”

And they’d go, and I’d be left on the boat, a warm, soft wind whooshing in through the cockpit, kissing my salt-dried hair. I’d write some more, knowing that we would be moving again soon, and when we did, there would be no time.

 

She’s sitting in the corner, hunched up with a backpack vomiting shoes and makeup and fake tan and thin, Lycra slivers of dresses. Girls dance around the cramped dressing room in a ridiculous burlesque, pulling tired, sagging, snagged clothing over stitched and butchered bodies.

“You ain’t workin’?” Bambi demands.

She looks up.

“Got fired.”

“You got
fired?
Whaddya do? Dontcha remember?”

She waves a hand listlessly.

“Usual. Drunk. Punched some guy. Can’t really remember.”

Bambi floats away vaguely, disinterestedly, drags the ironing board weakly into the middle of the room, and starts to butcher her dress into a semblance of acceptability.

A small, ugly girl covered in acne scars launches abruptly into a topic of more interest.

“So, if you ain’t workin’, you two wanna go out tonight instead? I can get us into Marquee. I scored an eight-ball too.”

She addresses the question like it’s an option, a flippant, enticing prospect, but really it’s a desperate plea, cloaked and concealed, like the acne scars. She starts to talk, her words running out like viscous phlegm.

“. . . you know I got suspended at my last club, got so drunk I kept forgettin’ who’d bought me drinks, so I’d go and give a guy a dance an’ the waitress would turn up and say ‘Who’s gonna pay for this drink?’ and I’d forget who it was, and then one day my fiancé came in and found me . . .”

Bambi saunters back over, dress in hand, pupils already stung into oblivion, arrogant and insincere, suddenly concerned as if this was news to her, despite having been in possession of the facts for a good ten minutes. “Girl! Don’t leave us! You can’t leave!”

The girl looks up, takes another cigarette, flips a lighter, inhales deep, feeling the tar roughly caress the bronchioles, lull them harshly into narcosis.

“Got no choice. I don’t want to leave either.”

It’s obvious—so obvious!—that she’s doing it all wrong. She’s too proud, too stubborn, too angry, too indignant; she yells if someone yells at her; she stamps her feet at injustice, throws herself headlong into situations, cares too much, cares too little. She’s tough, the beaten puppy dog finally grown up, a toughness grown from suspicion, from hatred, a gentle naïveté pulped into submission. Pathetic naïveté. She’s unforgiving; she looks at those who haven’t suffered with a prejudice born of pain—her own. She’s isolated, because the fire driving her is raging out of control, in contrast to the trimmed wick deemed acceptable—acceptable! Standards and rules in the home of licentiousness! Seductive. When she talks to you, leans in confidentially like she’s known you for years, talks with the delinquency and warmth of her training, your anger thaws, dissipates, and a stark pornographic image flits across your mind,
fuck, push that thought out.

She’s sitting on the empty stairwell when I leave, trying to get away from the chaos of the dressing room, yet not ready to go home and leave her aborted night in the Emerald City behind. I pass her and walk on. She doesn’t look up but she knows I’m there. If she’d asked me to stay, I would have, but she doesn’t. She’s still puffing away on those damned Parliaments, depositing little piles of ash onto the cold concrete floor, swirling them around aimlessly with a cigarette butt. When I come back later, she’s gone. All that’s left is her dancer name spelled out neatly in ash, over and over and over again, as if, I thought curiously, she were trying to convince herself:

My visa arrives a few days later. I can leave. Walk away. But when I try to reach that clawed hand forward, buckled and tangled with the weight of strained ligaments, I can’t. I have no money, and too much sadness weighing me in place, sitting heavy and suffocating on my heart. I begin to write about the dreams in which Mimi flips and twists inside like a devil child strapped in the thick, white cotton of a straitjacket. It’s as if we have no choice, a Groundhog Day, constant, wearying repetition, our own liturgical ceremony performed with expertise if not reverence—the ceremony of fucking up. We have to see this through to a logical—or maybe
illogical
—conclusion, both Mimi and I, together. I go back to the cathedral of the club, pulse a little stronger, eyes a little brighter, walking toward whatever’s calling me without resistance, my own mythology, a martyr to the dance. Yes, there’s a choice, at every step of the way there’s a choice. But I feel as if I have to walk through burning coals again to find what I’m looking for. I’m compelled to, I’m obliged to, I owe it to her, to force a conclusion to her story. The third intifada.

 

Arriving in a new port was never exciting. It was merely different: the comfort of feeling sturdy, solid land beneath feet, land that didn’t rock and punch and tilt, land that didn’t heave and lurch and swing. It was a relief to be somewhere that had a landscape, details to set your eyes upon, distinguishing features, an absence of monotony. It was fun to go to the pubs, order pints, talk to other boat people like us, whom we had never met before but felt we knew just the same. And then after a week or so, we would crave it, the boat. Back to what we knew, in all its glorious, unvarying monotony. The same old. Even if we never saw our friends or our lovers, our families, our children, going back to the boat was a relief. Setting sail again was a relief, anxious hearts dropping back down dry throats to sit in the pit of our stomachs, swollen on jerk chicken and blackened catfish, Red Stripe beer, and dark, sticky rum. It was safe.

I left the boat in Aruba, flew back to France to take another boat from Golfe-Juan to Florida, via Antigua. The new boat, like the old, felt like home.

 

They never speak to the other girls, just stand and twitter in strange tongues, looking like children who had raided Mom’s makeup when she wasn’t looking. The garish hot pink flush of communist Revlon, electric blue eyeliner, Chernobyl-frazzled hair, rolls of puppy fat squeezed into Day-Glo polyester. The new club is full of them, it reeks of them, their stories strangled and asphyxiated by a lack of language, the cold, hard slap. This new club feels like home.

“Where do they get them from, Ruby?” I ask the makeup artist, a pretty, goofy girl with long, ratty dreads.

“They get ’em from the agency. The agency sends ’em over. Picks ’em up at night in a big black van, takes ’em home. I used to hitch a ride in the van at night, until they started chargin’ me.”

“They off the boat?”

“They off the boat all right Mimi. Bran’ new off the damned boat.”

They’re keen, I’ll give them that. The other girls eye them with distaste, us immigrants who had been here long enough to say
“cawffee,”
who had spent so much time trying to fit in here, we had forgotten where we came from. Identity, identities. With the cloak of our Mimis as a funeral shroud between us and our shame, you think we had time to care for these bitches? Who never paused for drinks, didn’t push a straying hand from between their legs, ease a ravenous mouth from their breasts? These girls were here to work, to pay for their tickets, their freedom from whatever post-communist, post-colonial hell they had arrived from. Ambition? Buy a car. Get an American boyfriend. Purchase hair extensions, Seven jeans, Cartier watches, Prada bags. We despise their ambition, we English speakers, we post-immigrants, we who had proven, if only to ourselves, that we could survive, even if that survival meant repackaging ourselves in polyurethane as a Mimi, a Diamond, a Chanel, a venomous creature, at once a friend as much as foe.

“Excuse me plis.”

The girl looks at me beseechingly from beneath an untamed mop of mousy brown hair, cute freckled face, no makeup.

“Excuse me plis, how is working in Manhattan? I have worked only in Queens.”

I flash her a glance, drink it in, all in. First time. Needs money. Not yet hardened. No clue. You wear the makeup long enough, you start to play the part offstage as it seeps arrogant and drunk into your being, blood flowing alcohol and Mimi. She’s too nice. She’s too
normal.

“It’s cleaner than Queens,” I say slowly.

“You have to take dress off in pri-vett rum?”

“You do. I don’t.”

I smile at her and disappear, glass in hand, to imbibe more alcohol and smile my fake smile. Later, and four hundred dollars richer, I catch her again, gazing dolefully into the mirror of the dressing room while Ruby and the housemom smoke Marlboros and swig pink zinfandel from polysterene cups. A haze of smoke. Her eyes are red as she stares at herself beneath the lights dotted around the mirrors, then looks at the other girls, embalming themselves with baby oil, perfect slut-look in place.

“Here.”

I grab her and steer her to the mirror.

“Sit. You make money?”

She shakes her head no, hazel eyes blinking rapidly. I take over. Foundation, layers of foundation over the brown, young skin, set in place with powder. The eyes. Dark, smoky, thick rings of eyeliner, long, lush plastic lashes. Little white under the brows to open the eyes up. Concealer over dark, hopeless shadows. I lock her in with powder upon powder, seal that tomb with a ghostly dusting of MAC. Ruby sits up and chokes pink zinfandel through her nose.

“Damn, girl! She look like a fuckin’ stripper now!”

The whole room starts to take interest, the memory of our own transformations stirring us into curiosity as we all partake in this deliberate erasure of the past. We haggle over a new name for her to replace the name she already had. We decide on “Michelle.” We debate on what precise shade of platinum will suit her best, suggest she purchase a lapdog for company, give her the name of a phone store where they don’t demand a Social Security number to get a contract phone, and if you sign up with a five-hundred-buck deposit, they give you a bright Pink Razr phone for
free,
just like we all had. Then we lose interest, and when a fresh wave of men surge in and litter the floor with the debris of other people’s marriages, we wander listlessly downstairs, flicking hair over shoulders, holding stomachs taut, gently rubbing the icy-cold glasses of our liquor against soft, fleshy breasts, goading them to stand erect, puckered and alert.