Strip (13 page)

“And now?”

“I've always wanted to do the Vegas thing” (but I didn't think the “Vegas thing” would happen so soon). Many retired ballet dancers had gone on to Vegas to dance or to choreograph or even run casinos, but they had already taken a few kicks at the ballet can (and it had kicked back). Had I sounded insincere?

“We have some good people. Talented.” He definitely sounded like he was exaggerating.

“Great.”

“Don't you want to know how much we pay?”

“You're making me an offer?”

“Come to my office for the paperwork.”

I followed him around the bar and down the back stairs. Girls coming up. Girls going down. A few of them nodded at him, touched his shoulder. No one noticed me. I got the feeling that drugs and booze were the big thrill on both levels, probably softening the rough edges, caked makeup, sweat and running mascara. As for me, I still had my days to get through, and since my body was my temple, I couldn't afford much more than the odd beer. I would have to be fit to lead this double life.

He took me into an over-large makeshift bathroom—concrete floor, particleboard walls—with a grungy mothball shower. “I'm sure you can dance if you've been at the Conservatoire but I need to see your behind,” he said. “We wear
g
-strings. I make most of the costumes. Assless chaps, stuff like that. I just want to see your butt. Know how it will look—know your measurements.”

I figured it out.

Turn around.

Undo belt.

Drop pants.

Expose ass.

Wait for it. Whatever it might be.

“Dancer's butt. Madame Talegdi find you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I thought she might. She's mad you know.”

“Crazy.”

“How are your thighs?”

“Stiff, tight. Too big.”

“They look great. Splits?”

“Both ways.”

He touched my behind, which felt good. But that was my problem. Then he reached around to my front. “Nice,” he said, gripping me. I exhaled. “This package will look fantastic in a
g
-string. I'll need to make a generous pouch. You'll do well here.” He let out an audible shiver.

“Was that my audition?”

“One of my guys just quit.”

“Right place at the right time?”

“Fifty bucks a night for the three shows. Plus tips.”

One week's work would pay my rent. “Tips?”

“Bonuses. You don't do drugs do you?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so. Well in that case you'll make some money. Just be careful here. There's always lots to walk in on. You don't want to get under anybody's skin. And watch your money, your tips.”

“I'm in?”

“You're in. So come back tonight. See if it suits you.”

He was genuinely cute, with a twinkle in his eye; he was almost bashful, harmless and completely innocent. I remember that look—he looked up at me like we'd done something naughty.

 

Outside the Chez Moritz,
the remains of the Indian summer clung to the end of the day, and a pale October sun turned the flat brown walls of the club orange. There was no going home for dinner and then coming back in the evening. I was confined to public transit and poverty. If I went home now, I would never return. I walked past an adjoining dump of a motel next door to the Chez Moritz and wondered who could stay in a dive like that.

As I walked I hummed that song. The one from the Disney movie. Something about how your dreams really do come true. Look at me: the poster child for following dreams. There I was following my dream, which had shrunk down to getting a coffee with extra cream at a truck stop out near a strip club that looked like an Armageddon bunker where the daily special was abuse and torture. I ended up about a mile down the road at a diner and spent two hours in a booth with a jukebox (which was useless without an extra quarter), stretching out a free refill of coffee and dreaming about the sugar pie in the display case. Dancers' naive conversations about the difference between a fat calorie and a carbohydrate were a thing of the past.

Things had to get better. Did the truckers at the counter and their girlfriends ever go to the club? Maybe their girlfriends were those dancers I'd seen moving in the dark. Would I see these guys back there later on? Or did they have more important things to do than drink and watch strippers? And did I look out of place? Did I look like a westerner? Or like a chorus boy? How many John Rottams came in every week? On tours some waitress would always ask if you were with the Company, even if they'd never been in a real theatre in their lives. They recognized us. They fed us, and our egos. But now I was so far away from that, and even further from anything I knew. Maybe the waitress would ask if I worked in that bunker over there.

There was a fancy diner that my parents took me to on Sunday nights for roast chicken and mashed potatoes. I would sit hands crossed. “Quit staring,” Dad would say. But my heart would go out to any sad, old cowboy sitting alone eating a hamburger. I imagined that if the rustler's cheeks weren't full, or if he swallowed, he might cry. The same went for a homely girl alone in a booth with puckered lips peeking into a compact, trying to look pretty, pretending she was waiting for someone. I wanted to tell them it was okay. I was sure I knew exactly how they felt. But they had their own stories, they'd get by, create a story to keep them from going crazy, like I had. Me and the lonely cowboy and the homely girl were in it together. It had something to do with comments at school, mostly about being the only one.

We sat in that fancy diner, and I stared at my parents and they stared out the window at our Cadillac. I wondered why they wouldn't look at each other. What had I done? Was it really my fault that there were no other kids? Maybe God thought I was enough. How could I convince them that I was? Did everyone wonder why I didn't have a sister at the table with me? I had to know. “Did you ask for more kids, Dad?”

“Ask who?”

“Ask God.”

“It's not up to God.”

“Then who?”

“No one. Kids just happen, like accidents. No one can know when they will happen.”

“That's nonsense. What your father meant was that they happen like surprises.”

“Do all these people have kids?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

“So not everyone has kids?”

“No.”

“But…”

“There's only one thing that matters in your life and that's to keep good care of your teeth. You can worry about kids when you get older.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Sons and daughters.”

I could go insane wondering why I was sitting in a diner on rue Lévesque. I was beyond the point of no return. If Lisa had invested her time and attention in my beginnings as a dancer, she must have believed in me; she was my first ballet teacher and she said I could do it. She was the very first to say I could be a real honest-to-God dancer. After all, she had danced with the Company in the corps. True, it was short-lived; her centre of gravity was too low and her thighs too big. Any dancer would know she'd never be a principal or a soloist. Still, an ovation was due for any female who got that far, and with her handicaps. The competition among women to make their lifelong dream to be a princess come true is nothing a man, other than one like myself, can ever comprehend. To want to be a ballerina must be the most alluring and devastating dream in the world—other than maybe the dream of having your own pony. Every woman wants to be a ballerina at some point—it demands absolute pristine and holy perfection—and if they don't make it, they can be satisfied that everything else will always be second best.

I left Lisa and the hometown studio. University in Saskatoon, the alibi, appeased my parents and off-campus I tracked down a brooding dancer, Drake, from the Company days gone by, who taught me how to dance like a man, between screaming at the little girls with bun-pulled faces. I took his classes six days a week. “You don't have to worry, you won't be paying.”

To add to it, I found a group of extremely talented ex-ballerinas in the campus gym—most within a whisper of having made their dreams come true. But circumstances, family, genetics—their bodies hadn't been perfect enough, arches high enough, chests flat enough, hips boyish enough, nothing proportioned
enough
—decided for them. Now they danced for the love of it they'd lost, along the way, among the competition and heartbreak. I danced with them in a brand new vacant studio used for nothing other than cheerleading practices between scheduled lectures in dim auditoriums and naps in the stale library. They were pushy and demanding, pre-law and pre-med, and I was so grateful. I stretched my arches under radiators until they stung. Forced splits in my doorway. Dared my hamstrings to snap. Ate, slept and dreamed dance. Took class with tight-lipped Drake. Learned what male dancers do on the ground and in the air. I had somehow pulled together a homemade full-time dance schedule. Now, in Quebec, I was cobbling together another life.

I finished my bottomless refill of day-old coffee, wiped my mouth, wiped my mind clean of these characters, paid, stepped outside, inhaled, pressed my shoulders back, ignored my growling stomach, stuck out my chest, made like I was a star and headed back along the edge of the highway, into the dusk and onto a bar stool to wait for the show to begin.

I ordered water and got beer.

Two big guys in charcoal suits slid on and off bar stools to the door and back, flexed their shoulders and cracked their knuckles. They looked like a genetic twins experiment gone wrong. Both probably weighed the same but were completely different shapes and composed of very different body mass. They were dark, Greek maybe—“He's Vasili.”

“No, he's Vasili. I'm Mihalis.”

“No, I'm…” And on and on. The heavy one joking that he could be mistaken for his brother, the muscular one. The other one, too thick to figure it out. Vasili must have weighed in at a sloppy three hundred pounds—white shirt untucked, hairy belly hanging over his belt. He kept tucking himself in, like he was trying to carry rising bread dough from one place to another. A few days' growth of whiskers covered his double chins, and ringlets of hair shone on his oval head. Everything about him said grease. He was chowing down on a bag of poutine, which he tried to share.

Mihalis was big, too, but it was three hundred pounds of triple-A prime Greek muscle, a former Mr. Canada contender. When he shook my hand I held on tight. Biceps practically split the sleeves of his suit. Shoulders like an ox. Face like an ox, too. Forehead tilted like a Neanderthal, as if the supplements were going wonky, or he'd been hit by a truck. I was curious about these muscle-bound types. They had some sense of aesthetic. Was it anything like mine? Mihalis had a dream. He owned a gym in Lower Town. That was his passion. So he must have understood if I stared a bit, since it was the nature of his career, and mine too. Both of us were exhibitionists; we had a connection to physical pain, narcissism, single-mindedness, perfection, dissatisfaction and being familiar with every inch of our bodies. Was there truly no line between the dancer and the dance? Was my need to dance coupled with my need to embody and possess the human form in all its potential sensual and sexual beauty? Most would not think a monster like Mihalis beautiful but so many, Michelangelo for instance, had tried and captured it.

Vasili came over, licked the grease off his fingers, and stuffed his shirt in his pants. “Come I introduce you to da girls,” he said.

I followed him to the jukebox where some of the girls were sitting, feet up on the edge of the stage. A small one in a white fur bikini, high white leather boots and blonde hair down to her behind was someone's little-girl fantasy. Mihalis called her
Chaton
. We were ignored by a tall
s&m
dominatrix in leather hot pants, breasts stuffed into a matching tube top, straight black hair, dark narrow eyes. Then there was one who looked as wholesome as an old-fashioned Hollywood starlet. Her hair was pressed into curls. Her name was Nadine but I'd say she was more Rita Hayworth. She wore a white blouse and a pleated plaid miniskirt. She took my arm and pulled me toward her, whispered something in my ear and laughed. Vasili rolled his eyes and told me she was crazy. “Poor Nadine,” he said. “Her 'eart was broke ten years ago and she's still not over it. She should be teaching kindergarten.” Then he said something to them and they giggled. The blonde little-girl Chaton nodded toward me, said something, and they laughed some more.

I took my place back at the bar and during three more complimentary beers I watched as after-work businessmen trailed in and slid over to the vacant tables. A few of the girls were dancing on boxes. One was in chain mail, one in a leopard and fishnet bikini and one in a black unitard, with her spandexed bum in some guy's face. They had a routine: pose, run their hands up and down their thighs, squat, take off their tops and then tickle their nipples.

And every time a waitress went by she checked me out, like she wanted to see what
the new guy
was like. Soon they were winking at me while they were shoving their rear end in some guy's face.

Meanwhile Chaton, now up on the stage in her white fur, was in a state. She yelled to anyone paying attention, “
Cureees
.” She was stuck, and looked like she was trapped in a poodle outfit, squirming and tearing at her zipper like she had fleas.

I stayed at the end of the bar and leaned against the wall. Another beer came. I sat. I stared at the rim of the glass.

Marcel's voice pulled me out of my reverie as he announced “
le premier spectacle du monde
,” backed by a bum-bada-bum disco beat. Four leggy showgirls, like giant peacocks, heavy with silver sequined harnesses that pulled trailing rainbow feather tails, swayed corner to corner. They balanced glittering headdresses, sometimes tipping and getting stuck on ceiling lights or each other. The Rita Hayworth girl, Nadine, spent most of her time scowling. Then Marcel made his entrance in a one-piece bodysuit split down the chest and opened around the top of the bum. I swear his head of hair was bigger than Gino Vanelli's, which made him look even shorter. He lip-synced Chevalier's gravelly “Le Temps” while the girls posed at either corner of the stage. He was convincing. He took himself seriously, and he'd done his homework. And the show wasn't bad; it was genuine glitz. But it wasn't dance.