Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (26 page)

I walked through Union Square one day. People swarmed excitedly clutching megaphones and drums and banners as they marched onward and upward for immigrant rights. There were Mexicans and Chinese and Bangladeshis and Indians and white people from who-knows-where. Some new bill proposed, Senator McCain shooting his mouth off once again, pissing off the GOP. I stood and watched them awhile, but really I felt nothing, aside from a little tiredness, and a thirst for Ketel One, soda, lime, crackling ice. I went into work early. I had nothing else to do, and I was bored of my own company.

 

Venus examines a nipple intently, turns back to the bar and motions for a top-up of vodka in her glass.

“Last night I got so fucked I kept calling my vagina Al Pacino,” she says.

“Why?” I ask.

The new girl strolls past, whippet thin, long, striped hair in anorexic, braided worms surrounding an angular face. A “butt fuck, give-it-to-me-in-every-orifice, cum-on-my” face. I wonder what my face looks like, I wonder idly, even though I stare at it every day when I walk into the dressing room, twisting the lightbulbs around the makeup mirrors to reveal stark, ghostly features. Etched with tragedy, the ones who want to “save” you always say, ignoring your yawns, the glance toward the wallet. No, not tragedy. Just life.

“Mimi, when you teaching yoga bitch? I wanna come to one of your classes. Fuckin’
love
doing yoga after some weed. You know, my son’s into that shit. I’m getting worried about the little faggot.”

Venus cackles, and through the round, suggestive hole of her dress, her belly quivers and shakes like a jelly, a brown-lined jelly with silver stretch marks delicately threading around the belly button like a slug’s trail. I finish my drink. Ketel One, soda, lime, crackling ice. I nod to the Puerto Rican bartender for another, and I turn to Venus and we laugh and laugh and laugh for no damned reason. I suffer every time I wake up with that scratchy, ratcheted throat clawing its way to the sink like a creature alien from the rest of me, but I don’t ever drink less.

Derek Jeter scores again, and the bored DJ sitting alone in his booth starts to play bad rock music loudly as strippers twitter and yawn, and we chink our glasses together, look into each other’s eyes, beyond them, and I try not to think about the yoga class I have to attend tomorrow, with the inevitable hangover.
Maybe,
you’re thinking,
nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed at all from six months ago. She’s still here, in a fucking club, getting drunk, plotting an impalpable escape, trying to inhabit the body of a fictitious bitch called Mimi she made up for the hell of it.
No, things have changed. They’ve changed all right. Bear with me, because I’m still taking you on my journey, and as you’ve probably noticed, nothing’s black and white. Having swallowed this great lump of darkness, I’m still spewing it out before I find the light. I’ll explain in good time. Bear with me, please. Bear with me.

 

“You never fuck with a ghetto bitch” says Venus darkly, and belches, her belly quivering like aspic.

“No, never.” Colette the masseuse, a tiny woman with a massive slab of silicone pork fat in place of breasts, nods sagely.

Venus winks and slips me a fluorescent-green martini shot.

“You know the problem with these fuckin’ bitches nowadays Colette? They’re fuckin’ career strippers. It ain’t no fuckin’ career. We used to have fun in the old days. There was drugs, there was shit goin’ on. The dances were dirty and we played it dirty. And nowadays there’s these fuckin’ Russian bitches and some goddamned Disneyland legacy from Giuli-fuckin’ yani. It ain’t no fuckin’ career. I’m here ’cause I’m too fuckin’ lazy to get a real job. I’m here because I’m a fuckin’ waster. I’m a stoner. I’m a fuck up, and I have been for eighteen years. You know my ex-husband slips me money when his wife ain’t lookin’ ’cause he feels so guilty I’m still a fuckin’ stripper? I’m here ’cause I ain’t ever figured out a way to get outta this place. I’m here ’cause I ain’t ever tried.”

Venus grabs her silicone tits and grins broadly, proudly, and Colette nods her head, and the thin layers of skin hanging from her neck flap together with a gentle clapping sound.

“It used to be
fun
in the old days.”

Walk of Shame, the walk of shame across the empty floor to the two chairs occupied by men-in-suits, the perfunctory, dismissive glance, sizing up breasts, face, ass, potential for “extras.” It’s so much easier these days. After the slap something changes, hardens and softens in you all at once. You learn, the sadness sinks into your soul, coal black, but then there’s diamonds formed from coal, but mostly it just sits there, waiting to get burned. Drinks imbibed, you wear the layers like they’re part of you. After a year they are, kind of. I know people more, I know people inside out. I care more, strangely. I care for the people like me, who talk about getting out, actively use the money strapped around our thighs to daily purge our souls, bade farewell to the yellow brick road, have a normal life with normal, educated, kind people who aren’t sex workers. I care about people like Venus who will never get out. I care more. I know people more. Men.

I sit down. Guy looks at me. He looked older than me, exhaustion smoothed onto skin that had crinkled through smoking and stress and too much alcohol and no one to make him smile for the right reasons, but he was young, twenty-eight I guess. I guess right. English I guess. I guess right. Finance. Large bank.
But of course,
mi amor,
but of course.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asks, as soon as he catches my eyes laughing at him for being so predictable. I was never predictable. I am never predictable. No one would ever have predicted I’d be good at this, I’d still be here eighteen months later, I’d find something so predictable in every predictable fucker’s questioning of my unpredictability. And then he looks uncomfortable and asks again, his question hanging in the air as if he’d traced it with a Sharpie at the precise moment the song ends, so I could hear his voice clearly for the first time.

That accent, those vowels.
It was Eton all over again. Something digs deep into my heart, past the layers, the scarring, the alcoholic sharp-tongued defense, the jewel of sense I keep hidden in the back of my skull that allowed me to keep dodging the same slap I once turned toward. A shift in the guts.
Get your money and run, don’t tell him shit, don’t open up again.
“So what are you doing here?” he asks again, more curious this time, and my eyes shut down. Same question every night.
It’s a long story, let’s not go into it. Just show me some fucking cash.

“I’ll do better than that. How about you help me fix up my friend here, and we’ll have some fun together?”

He knew, he could tell, he played his role perfectly, and because he did, I could play mine. I laugh long and hard and sincere. “Champagne, two sluts, and some drugs?” I lean over and stare right into those eyes, let a smile touch my lips, let my lips slyly brush his, retreat.

“Perfect!”

The Russian bitches peel off, blistering like burned plastic, howling and charred and bitter because I’m stealing the money they need for poor Ole Grandpapa’s cataract operation back in fucking Kiev. Champagne Room. The English guy hands over a bundle of notes to the sluts—my colleagues, I should say—handpicked because I know who the sluts are in this place. They disappear with English guy’s friend. But English guy just wants to talk, helped along by the drugs of course, courtesy of the waitress who kindly reassures us it’s not cut with glass.

English guy. So predictably predictable. English from jolly old fucking England, Mummy caught with those porcelain talons generously digging into the crotch of one of Daddy’s old college buddies post-sundowners one evening. Daddy understandably doesn’t want the scandal so the divorce is quick and generous, and somewhere, lost in alimony, are the two little blond boys so impeccably tutored in buggery by their parents that really the prefects at boarding school came as something of a relief. Little, lost, lonely English, life a whirl of Aspen, St. Tropez, St. Barts, the Hamps. Had a few friends at Oxford, but never seemed to go down well with the girls, though he tried to make light of it. Little, lonely English. Parents superbly and aristocratically indifferent; he’s only just starting to bond with Daddy, who finally told English he loved him when he discovered the prostate cancer was in rather an advanced stage. Little, lonely English.

The drinks keep coming as we curl up close on a leather banquette in a small, windowless room in the back of the club, but then, something—strange. My dress doesn’t come off, and we huddle close, talking, laughing, conversation improved by amphetamines, and when the slut comes into the room to see if my guy wants “servicing,” he says no. No. A simple no.

I curl into the nook of his armpit discussing London fields while my colleagues bust a gut behind a thin partitioned wall getting his drunk friend to spurt pathetically into a limp Trojan.
Stop trying to save me—go for them. I’ll get out, I’ll do it without you. Hey, I may seem like a drunk, coked-up bitch, but I’m training to be a yoga teacher. I have friends who probably work alongside you. But the ones on the end of your cock—you think they have any chance? They need your help, your unconditional offers of money, jobs, contacts, but never love. When you don’t come back, don’t call, don’t think about me, deliberately slice me out of your mind as if the memory was a tumor, I’ll still get out. Not them.

I didn’t expect to meet a girl like you here.

“Come back to my apartment?” he asks at two a.m., after 1.5 grams of the alkaloid formation of
Erythroxolon coca,
or cocaine. And I say yes. He entered this place like a blustering cunt, paid for whores, and leaves holding my hand like a lamb. And when we arrived at his apartment (eight thousand dollars per month) he made me tea, draped a soft blue shirt around my shoulders (“This cost seven hundred dollars. Can you believe I spent 350 quid on a facking shirt?”), and then drew me to him. His arm wraps around my shoulders, cold and thin. Wasted. I touched his cold hand with my warm finger, let it seep into him. He doesn’t try anything else.

“It feels so—
comfortable,
” he observes wonderingly.

Maybe it’s the drugs tapping into the emotions, exposing the pathetic, lonely reality behind the empty, huge apartment, the seven-hundred-dollar shirt, the nice guy acting like a cunt, sipping Earl Grey, talking about his best friend’s wedding in Oxford, his once-a-week yoga class, Daddy dearest’s undignified anal probes.

“Don’t try and save me,” I said. “Don’t try and date me. I don’t date very well. I don’t do boyfriends.”

He looks confused.

“But it’s hard
not
to when you need help.”

Little, lonely English. Tonight he gives a shit because he found a girl who could be his therapist, and in exchange for emptying his wallet of approximately nine thousand dollars, I’ll let him believe he can save me—that he
wants
to save me, instead of bending me over for sodomy like he’s been taught. Once I did. Need saving. Once I needed to crawl into Eton’s lap and sob and take the pain away. I needed my own gruff Daddy with a million-dollar estate and advanced stage of aggressive cancer to fork out the money for my rent and living allowance so I didn’t have to dress up as Lolita for Humbert Humbert every night. I needed a grownup to tell me what I was doing was right or wrong. I needed to feel that every choice I’d ever made, every spectacular exit, every sleeping body I’d left curled up in sheets was inevitable. That I was playing out my fate, my karma, what I
had
to do because whoever was behind the control panel was making it that way, making my life shit, turning me into a victim, a puppet on a string, God’s little fucking lapdog.

The shirt feels soft and cool on my skin, but the apartment looks too empty for one person; unread books lining shelves, an empty fridge, a guy my age who wakes up in the night and needs to smoke to have something—
anything
—to assuage what’s hotwiring his brain into nervous action twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think I
do
need help, lying there, my brain subsiding into an alcoholic fuzz, the vacancy of a comedown, temporarily soothed by entering someone else’s loneliness and confusion, trading it for my own. He does not sleep, he has bad dreams most nights he says, and smokes a cigarette, and I hold his hand and whisper,
“I want to stop your nightmares,”
and he looks at my pale, limp palm with disinterest, the pulse of the comedown pulling him into a private purgatory I shrank from in horror as too similar to my own.

“I’m going to work,” he announces at 6:30 a.m. and smiles, and it’s the uncomfortable smile of distance. I can feel the smudges of black hollowing out my eyes, skin translucent and pale, blond hair in a halolike fuzz around my thin, expressionless face. A mousy face, devoid of glitz, of sex. A young face. “Stay, sleep.”

I don’t stay. I let myself out without a note, knowing I would hear from him again. I liked him. I have a thing for English cunts. He’ll probably be pissed, kicking himself for missing out on the Brazilian slut, opening up to a dumb fucking stripper, believing her stories. But he’ll still come back. So much loneliness in Manhattan, besides my own.

When I leave at 7:23 a.m. for the walk of shame, it’s curiously gray outside, darkened shop windows reflecting empty cobblestone streets. Designer names mark this area as elite, alienating.
Chanel, Steve Madden, Burberry.
SoHo. No idea where I am. Not my New York. It’s chilly, a day before the heat of Easter weekend sets in and wakes the blossoms into spring. The weekend will be warm, brunch with friends in the East Village, coffee and eggs and daffodils. But now, midweek, it’s cold, unfamiliar. I have a curious feeling that I’ll turn off West Broadway and onto Kensington High Street, but rounding the corner there are no black cabs, just an early morning yellow taxi swooshing by, grinding to a halt. I step in, my jaw still aching from gurning for twelve hours. I’d forgotten what it was like, the walk of shame, senses numbed, a dull contemplation born of nerves frazzled into sheer exhaustion, clothes damp with cold, stinking of the night before.