Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (27 page)

I call Eton. He doesn’t pick up.

13

OK, I’LL ADMIT.
This one made a difference, coming as he did so late in the game when I’m winding down, still bruised, a heart cracked from my longing for Eton, my need, my lo—when I’m ready to hang up the shoes and the dress, coolly contemplate the assassination of my bestest friend. I think he thinks he’s saving me, as he reads these words over diligently and holds me in the grip of my nightmares until I wake up with a choked cry still coiled in my throat like a small viper.
Eton
never does that. “Face the wall,” he’ll growl indignantly. “Meems, we’ve had this conversation before. I’m not joking. Face the bloody wall!” Now
this
one. Ah, this one. I think, in all honesty, he believes he’s falling
in love with me.
The late-night phone calls and the planning-our-lives-together and the symbolic and extravagant gestures, the smileys carefully chosen (Crying Face! Happy Face! Bear! Heart! Flower!), planted in between effusive cyber-kisses—ah, sweet love! But when Mimi goes, I doubt he’ll be happy with what’s left—this shell, this husk, this crust.

I do wonder sometimes if they could be defamatory, my words. An invitation to former clients and workers, friends and fucks, to behave tortiously, to embroil me in the vicious vocabulary of law suits, the grandiose performance of legal battle? Yet the privacy invaded, the horrendous disclosures, have been mine, and mine alone—or Mimi’s, depending on how you look at it. I received an e-mail from someone recently. Someone who had found their way into my nightmares on these pages, someone who expressed concern at my intentional disclosures, my lack of regard for his privacy, my obstinate and stubborn habit of re-creating, exactly, what I had once heard whispered in my ear, caught and registered at a dinner table, stolen maliciously and stored, gloating like a Golum, in my words. I lost patience, found myself goaded into a fury. What about what
I’ve
lost? What has been stolen from
me?
What about how people view
me?
I’ve defamed myself in spectacular fashion, I’ve inflicted intentional emotional distress upon myself all my goddamned life, can
I
sue
me?
Can
I
e-mail
me
with a fancy lawyer cc’d, the barest hint of a threat in grave and polite legal language, a malicious intent to maim in the only way possible, stealing from me my words? Me me me me, but what about
me?

I wanted to slander him, face to face, scrawl it in brass rubbings, steel tomes, diamond obscenities, to defame him for all eternity, for all to see, I wanted him to know how much he’d hurt me, in my life, in the time we knew each other, but also now, when I am trying, trying,
trying,
to stop these nightmares, in the only way I know how. I never asked for anything from him, and yet Eton wants me to retract my words. I e-mailed him back a polite refusal, and when we met up that evening he never mentioned it.

He looks concerned at my outburst—no, not Eton, the other one, English. He watches me hiss and spit and curse, and then gathers me to him, distressed, and I want to punch him, kick and scream, fuck him, because what
good
could he do me? An empty gesture of prolixity? The closeness of his heart assuaging my erratic beat? He wasn’t Eton.
I want to stop your nightmares.
But then I realized I had stopped, and had started to doze off as if I had been drugged, and he’s rocking me, his mouth pressed tightly into my hair, his eyes—I knew even though I could not see—closed as if in prayer, as if willing to draw the demon out of me, extinguish it once and for all.

 

“You remember the time you lost it?” I ask, nursing my drink (Ketel One, soda, lime, crackling ice) as I recline against the bar and eye the Knicks game on the flat screen. Suddenly you’re an “older” girl at the ripe ole age of twenny-fucking-seven, you’re hanging out with the older strippers, talking about how it used to be, talking about the past. It’s comforting, reaching back to that vague repository of memory, even as you swallow a hard gluey knot at the thought of six months stretching into twelve, into eighteen, into today.

“Oh yeah. I was seventeen. I waited until my third dance and I was still fully clothed. My friends stood at the bar and yelled, ‘Venus, you gotta get naked! It’s a fuckin’ stripclub!’ Everyone told me I’d be a pro at the end of the week. That night I cried, ’cause I’d lost my innocence. And then, by the end of the week, I was a fuckin’ pro. Way I figure it—once I got molested for Smurfs, and now I do it for hard cash.”

I chuckle and let the vodka sink into the pit of my stomach, clench my bowels involuntarily, force the contents to stay there, to soak up the alcohol as I enter phase 2 of the ritual of anesthetization. Derek Jeter scores a home run on the big screen. It’s 9:45 p.m. and girls flutter listlessly sipping foul pink drinks from martini glasses, waiting for the Monday-night perverts. Always perverts on a Monday. What kind of retard wants to look at tits on a Monday? Mondays, deathly Mondays, quiet Mondays, boring, hopeless, waste-of-time Mondays. I just want to go home. It gets boring pimping Mimi out every night, especially when there’s no one to pimp her out to. I just want to go home. Stop thinking, drink. Ketel One, soda, lime, crackling ice.

“I just wanna go home,” sighs Venus, and she’s thirty-five, and she has a fifteen-year-old kid, and has been dancing for eighteen years, and home is a two-bedroom brownstone complete with two small, brown yapping lapdogs, a home just like normal people, and she looks at me and I know what she means. It’s one long hellish Yellow Brick Road, and every time you think you’re getting nearer to your destination, something else happens. Something else drags you back.

I wonder if she’ll ever let me go, this Mimi creature I love and loathe.
I want to stop your nightmares.
But she is my nightmare, night after night, every chapter I write, as if the very process of giving her life on the page makes her stronger, more potent, more terrifying, more destructive. She gnashes her teeth and wails like a banshee in my dreams. Yes, I may leave this place, this hell the club—but whether Mimi will leave, now that,
that
is another story.

 

I can’t be with you, I tell him lamely, enjoying his discomfort. She’ll never let me. Go find a nice, clean girlfriend you can take home to Mummy.

Later I call Eton, spend the night facing the wall, our backs barely touching.

 

I arrive at my yoga class ten minutes early, nod to the girl on the front desk. She takes my curled-up ten-dollar bill with a visible sneer, refuses to meet my eyes, waits until I walk away before surreptitiously wiping her hand on her saffron yoga pants. I roll out my mat. The teacher starts talking about the need to be flexible, adapt, change—some bullshit about welcoming the destructive power of Shiva into your life in order to make way for the new. Lady to the left of me farts and tries to disguise it with a cough. The room twitters and hums in expectation. Silence. I need it to balance out the anesthetization, to feel something different from what I felt onstage, which is dark, giddy, exhibitionist pleasure. Here no one looks at my mat, my body. Class starts. But sometimes they look at my soul.

I call my dad more often now, but we never speak of how I survive in Manhattan, what my life is, if I have a boyfriend.
Come into Downward Dog.
He asks about the writing, how the great American novel is coming along, and he says the same thing before he hangs up. “Take care love. Mam sends her love. Something will turn up. You’ve worked hard.” But what’s love without the accompanying check? What’s love without a Get Out of Jail Free Card, someone to sit you down and say, “You’re fucking yourself up irreparably baby,” What’s hard work without the rewards?
Extend the right leg into the air, bring it forward and place it in between your palms.
Maybe no one says it because I talk such a good game. I’m doing OK, writing a lot, totally learning from this experience. I talk it to the infrequent date I take home and whisper sarcastic noth ings to, until at five a.m. I churn them out like sour butter so I can sleep until midday, make that daily yoga class before the ritual starts up again—me and Venus and Colette, girls I’ve seen before in Bambi and Lucy and Jolie, seen before, and before that even, will see again and again and again in every bitch like me who walks into that dressing room. It goes around and around on an interminable hamster wheel.
Take the left leg forward to meet the right.
My distant family on an echoing phone line, my distant dreams fading.

I’m on overdose. Overdosing on life, and you can’t tell from the tone, but I’m loving it.
Fold down over your legs, uttanasana.
The dark way I paid for my purity tapped into something that was more me than anything else—ridiculous, fierce, dirty, and wrong. The labels adopted here are more soothing than any I’ve had in those forty other countries, lives and times, coalescing in that two-syllable word—Mimi, me-me—more me than anything else, more me than she from before.
On the inhale float the hands above your head to meet in a high prayer.
I’m gloriously, fantastically tainted by cheap vulgarity, reveling in it.
Bring the palms to meet in front of your heart, namaste.

I have my own apartment now, paid for by numerous hours in the Champagne Room. It’s on the Lower East Side, right next to that dive bar Sixes and Eights, part owned by the two black punks you can buy coke off if you don’t mind them doing lines off your nipples.
Inhale your arms above your head.
I have books I bought lining shelves I bleached with Clorox from the deli on Stanton. I have friends who call me and ask me to bars and restaurants and movies I can’t go to, because at eight p.m. on the dot I’m in that club, smaller than the others, less interesting, just as dirty, just as pure.
Exhale, swan dive over your legs.
I have yoga clothes I drag to the Laundromat on Second Avenue between Third and Fourth every Tuesday and watch churn in the washing machine while I read Flannery O’Connor and Machiavelli and Iyengar.
Step back with the left leg.
I have hangovers and comedowns, and I have sober days when I read books, stare out of my Lower East Side illegal sublet, and gaze at the small snippet of blue sky I can see above the fire escape.
Take the right leg back into Downward Dog.
I have moments when I can laugh like I did back in the beginning, but more moments when I laugh like I did with Venus.
Inhale forward to plank.

When I come home from yoga I play music from the club—hard, electric trash echoing tinnily from my laptop. Before I step into the bathtub to scald off the sweat and the confusion, I stare at myself naked, luminous and shadowy under a twenty-five-watt bulb. The precise pure moment when I slip the clear plastic heels on and pose in front of my audience of
Blattella germanica,
tiny roaches daring to grow more bulbous and foul with each passing day, the exact second the old dude with no legs in the wheelchair on the street slides a needle into a vein, the girl next door screams her orgasm out loud, someone’s phone rings, a baby mewls—I realize. I stare hard hard
hard,
harder than I do with the vacant gaze born of the anesthetiz ing ritual, harder than that pathetic glance begging myself for sympathy, harder than puppy-dog eyes into a soul pleading for forgiveness for fucking up the last eighteen months,
Harder.

I realize I did this shit
because it gave me a fucking purpose when I had none.
I wanted something impalpable—experience, life, knowledge—without even knowing what that meant, not knowing that I wouldn’t even recognize when I had it because it would hurt so damned much.
Not having what you want gave you a purpose
(and I can’t help noticing the left boob is marginally bigger than the right, and that bikini line needs tending, and maybe a French polish isn’t amiss). And now I have the apartment, the ambition to write more ferocious than ever because I have the words and the darkness, and every writer needs that darkness, I have the money pouring in from a source that no longer claws and rips my pathetic heart open until it becomes intolerant of sympathy because it’s numbed already. I had embraced my atheism, there could be no redemption, the soul was lost, I had nothing left to lose. I have the hours free to write my great American piece of high-brow pretentious crap, the yoga classes all happy-happy, clappy- clappy,
Hare Krishna Hare Om.
Deep down in that sour, addled heart, simmered and stewed until it cracked right open and poured the soft pulpy interior onto the page, I had all I ever wanted, my life’s ambition, my dream. Maybe it wasn’t the way it was meant to be, how it should have been, no. But maybe it’s all Mimi and I deserve.

If you want aesthetics, leave now. But if you’re still here, reading this far into the story, aesthetics was never what you desired, was it?