The New York Doll (12 page)

Pretty soon he introduced me to all his friends and they all loved me right away, and very soon I found out why. As I told Mikky before, I had no idea about any possible girlfriends of R.’s, and pretty soon he told me that he broke up with his girlfriend a couple of month ago, but she still bothered him calling and asking to come back. It was surprising for me to find out that she was very persistent in her calls and I had no idea how crazy the girl really was until R. and his friend Vito told me some stories.

R. got separated from his wife many years ago and since then he dated Jessie, a fitness instructor, for almost ten years, but after his ex-wife got very sick, he decided to break up with his girlfriend to take care of his ex. Jessie moved to California, got married and became quite a successful painter. She still e-mails R. from time to time and says she never got over him. I understand her. R. spoiled me for all other men for the rest of my life and I don’t think I could ever be with somebody else.

Anyway, when R.’s ex-wife got better and forgot all about how good he was to her during her illness when even her own father and sister didn’t want to take care of her, R. met Denise. The biggest nightmare of his life, as he calls her. Also known as “the Nut”, “Stalker” and “Crazy Bitch” (all names are given by R. and I have nothing to do with them).

The whole story of how they met gives the tone to the whole three year relationship right away. R. loved riding bikes and some of his friends who also shared his love for Harleys, often went for a ride all over the States. So one day, when they were ready to take off for another trip, Vito brought a pretty blonde named Denise, who decided that R. was way hotter than her date and started flirting with him and asking him out. Because of the guys’ code and his morals, R. kept refusing her again and again, until she persuaded him that Vito and her have never technically been a couple, even though Vito took her to a couple of family dinners and she spent a night at his house (but not at his bedroom).

“She was calling me twenty times a day! – R. was laughing. – What was I supposed to do? I gave up. Biggest mistake of my life! I should have known back then that she was a crazy stalker!”

Denise always had an attitude. She never liked the restaurants R. was bringing her to, the food was never good enough, his friends were annoying, and God forbid a waitress or a hostess would smile at R., - at moments like that Denise was going completely ballistic.

“Did she give you her number? Do you know her? I saw you staring at her ass! Do you wanna fuck her? You motherfucker!” And then there would be tears, hysterical accusations, slamming the doors and walking out on him.

_______________

It was hard to believe that a woman can be that crazy until it concerned me one day, when Denise showed up at the club with couple of her friends looking to give me a beating of my life. I’ve never seen her before and so I was just happily dancing on stage when a bartender, Leslie, called me up and told me not to collect the tips after I’m done and just go to the dressing room right away, as R.’s ex-girlfriend Denise is sitting at the bar and she’ll make trouble. I was pretty drunk by then, so I just winked at Leslie, said that trouble was my middle name and started dancing as sexy as I possibly could. But right after my stage was finished, the club manager Philip and a bouncer escorted me right to the dressing room, so there wouldn’t be a risk of her making a scene. It was almost closing time, so I changed and was waiting patiently for the van to take me home. On the way to Staten Island I told Mikky the whole story and she laughed with me, and then I stated receiving a bunch of messages with apologies from R., calling Denise a “stupid drunken moron” and saying that she was now banned from the club.

Later I found out that as soon as Denise showed up, Philip called R., and R. rushed to my rescue in the middle of the night like a knight in shining armor. And while I was going to the van with Mikky, R and Denise had a huge fight on the kitchen, during which drunk Denise tried to stab R. with a knife. Thanks to his martial arts skills and years of experience of being a mobster, R. quickly disarmed her and after that gave her a nice kick in the ass goodbye, as the other manager and club co-owner Shawn told me later, laughing. “That girl was trouble, - he was saying. – R. had to sit at the bar looking at his shoes, he couldn’t look at the girls, he couldn’t talk to them, and he has to, he’s the owner of the place! She would make a scene out of everything, I’m so glad R. kicked her out!”

Too bad it wasn’t so easy to kick her out of our lives as well. She would still bother R., even though he wouldn’t pick up the phone, she would leave messages crying, saying how much she loved him, and then right away going to the aggressive mode and calling him names and asking how could he do that to her. Meanwhile, R., a very mellow man who put up with her shit for years, only broke up with her after she went on a cruise with her ex-boyfriend.

“God knows how many guys she’s been with while we were dating! I don’t even want to think about it. – R. was saying. – And you know me, I never run around, if I’m with someone, I’m only with that person, and she kept accusing me of cheating on her! I just kept saying that we see in others what we do ourselves. She hated when I would say that.”

Chapter 17

Zed didn’t take me going out with R. too well, and along with nasty text messages I was getting “upset DJ’s vengeance” songs for my sets on stage. I didn’t mind dancing to “What Goes Around, Comes Around” by Justin, or “Heartless” by Kanye, and if he thought that his choice of music would make me feel guilty, he was very mistaken. I couldn’t care less and instead of looking upset or mad, I was winking at customers right and left, and doing as many rooms as I could. The nights when R. was stopping by and we were hanging out together and leaving together, Zed was fuming and in the next couple of days he posted a picture of himself with five or six girls sitting around him. And one weekend, while at the barbeque with his friends, he put a Barbie doll on a tent pole and captioned it “girl of my dreams”. I showed it to everybody in the club and was dying laughing.

- What did you expect? – Mikky asked me. – You broke his heart. And a man with a broken heart does stupid things.

- No, honey, a woman with a broken heart does stupid things. A man should take it like a man and walk away. Because grown, 40-year-old men don’t act like little vindictive winy bitches.

- Just unfriend him then!

- No way! I’m having too much fun watching him trying to get back at me.

I was actually genuinely amused by Zed’s reaction, but I had too many things on my plate at that time, so his Facebook immaturity soon stopped being entertaining even on a slow Monday night. I was desperately trying to get my own place. And to get my own place I needed a lot of money.

You know how you don’t go fishing where there are no people? You go to a place where everybody’s fishing, because that’s where the fish is. The same happens with dancers: they fish where all the girls get some catch. It means that if the customer is new and he takes a girl to the room, you want to be the next girl who catches him right after. And that’s how I caught my most loyal customer, the guy who won the “Idiot of the Year” award from me and my friends, the guy who thought that we were actually dating, the guy who wanted to convert from Christianity to Judaism to marry me… God, I wish I started writing this book earlier, while he was still around, because I’m afraid I forgot half of the crazy shit that he was saying or doing. I gave him a name that perfectly fits him: Coconut.

_______________

I first saw Coconut sitting at the bar with Alana and was pretty much surprised that she was wasting her time on such an unworthy looking customer. Alana and Megan, who were always considering themselves the elite of any club they ever worked at, with all their “with-my-style-and-my-look-I’m-too-good-for-Jersey” attitude, they never wasted their time on someone who looked like a soccer player who just finished his workout and forgot to shower. And he’s drinking a beer? Beer is a drink of a guy who spends his last $20 at the strip club and then walks home because he can’t afford a cab; no way a classy guy will drink beer.

“So something’s up”, - I thought to myself and continued working the room as a couple of my regulars showed up early, so I was done with them and now had nothing else to do. To my great surprise, in ten minutes Alana took the weird looking black guy to the Champagne room. “He has money for Champagne?” – I raised my eyebrows as they disappeared behind the doors. I was surprised even more when the “soccer player” didn’t leave right after the time was up, but returned to the bar and got himself another beer. For a couple of moments I was choosing between playing my Candy Crush Saga or trying to work with him, and since I needed money pretty bad, I put on one of my sexiest smiles and came up to the guy.

After five minutes of talking two things happened: he fell desperately in love with me and I concluded that he was a complete moron, and as our so-called “relationship” continued, both feelings from each side were getting stronger and stronger. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the first impression from somebody can be untruthful or misleading; however with Coconut it was one way damn straight right. It was close to the end of the night and I was already pretty drunk, but very soon I realized that I will need much more alcohol to be on the same intellectual level with Coconut.

He was an accountant (what an exciting profession!), in his free time he loved playing soccer (you don’t say!), he was divorced and had two kids, a twenty something year old daughter and a son, still have no idea of his age. He didn’t normally go to the strip clubs, but this time his friends brought him after a soccer game and that bitchy girl made him go to the room.

- Well, now it’s time for you to go with the real girl, - I didn’t want to waste more time listening to his bullshit and called the hostess. – I will make you come back every day.

_______________

I actually did. Coconut was so crazy about me that he came back the very next day and became my personal dog who was following me wherever I was going. Coconut, who wasn’t exposed to strip clubs before, was very easy to manipulate and very soon I taught him that when I’m dancing on stage, he has to give me showers; that if we’re sitting at the lounge area, he has to buy shots from a shot girl (I was just trying to get as drunk as I could because I couldn’t stand him sober), and after my stage I needed a couple of massages from the massage girl. Very soon I mastered my training skills so perfectly, that I was making Coconut believe that we were dating at the club, since “I had no time to see him outside”. So I was texting him at 4 or 5 in the afternoon, saying something like “Are you seeing me tonight, honey?” (I always hated that word, “honey”, for no particular reason, so I was calling him that). And when Coconut would come to the club later that night, we would “have dinner” first (don’t forget, we “were dating”, so I had to make it look like a date), I would order my Caesar salad, he would order the same, then I would get 3 or 4 apple martinis in a row to get drunk faster and also make him drink something stronger than beer (he was spending much more and stayed in the room longer when he was drunk), and finally after I finished my stage, we would go to the room. In the room I was drinking Red Bull – vodka so I would have some patience to tolerate Coconut. He was an absolutely girlie man: his drink of choice after beer was “Sex on the Beach”. He didn’t know how much to tip the hostess and started giving her twenty percent only after I yelled at him once and gave her the money from my pocket. As I didn’t want to dance with him, I tried to teach him how to rub my back, but that didn’t work too well either.

- Jesus, you aren’t playing the piano, you’re massaging a girl! – I was yelling at him. – Do it nice and slow, it’s supposed to relax me and put me to sleep, not to wake me up!

     - Like this? – he’s doing something with my shoulders that can’t be possibly called a massage. I just rolled my eyes at him.

     - No, not like this! Turn around and let me show you.

     I had a lot of tricks to waste a customer’s time in the room. Surprisingly, all my massages and talking, and pictures of my dog worked pretty well and he was staying at the room for 3 or 4 hours and I was going home loaded with cash.

_______________

My aunt Anna and Ari left to Miami for a week and I couldn’t be happier to stay home alone. There was no more nagging and teaching me how to live my life, or waking me up early in the morning. I was finally getting enough sleep, getting up at twelve, feeding Tonya, who by that time would destroy half of the house, ripping the pillows and chewing on the walls. I couldn’t care less. I was loving every second of being there alone and finally left alone in peace. I knew it was the time to call the realtor.

Mikky knew some guy who was helping her friend Katie find an apartment in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn, and as I wanted to move closer to the ocean and Mikky, and further from aunt Anna and Ari, I gave this guy a call. The very next day I was on my way to Brooklyn to check out several apartments he picked out for me, one in Midwood and three in Sheepshead Bay area. I have to say, I was very excited to see them all, even though the one on Emmons Ave wasn’t an option for me because of my dog, who wasn’t welcomed at the building. I just felt such an inspiration, I felt that I was finally moving forward and that my life, just like a big puzzle, was finally falling into place together. I had a man who I was crazy in love with and who actually made me believe again that real love does exist and not all men are complete jerk offs. I had my little puppy who I adored to death and who loved me to death too. My job sucked, yes, but it was bringing pretty good money and I could finally send enough back to my mom, so she could pay off the loan she took from the bank when I just came to the States and had no place to live.