Eighty Days Amber (7 page)

The vision of my nuder-than-nude cunt flashed across my mind and the idea gave me a perverse thrill.

Smooth . . . All part of the new American me.

I snapped out of my brief daydream as Barry’s voice droned on.

‘There are some rules and they are never to be broken,’ he explained. ‘You never show pink. You never speak to members of the audience unless they request a lap dance.
You are allowed to turn lap dances down, but don’t make it a regular occurrence. What you do after hours and outside the club is your own affair. Clear?’

It wasn’t totally at this stage, but I nodded my approval, regardless. I needed the job but also something was building up inside me that made me already look forward to the dancing, the stripping. The intuition that not only would I enjoy it, but that it would give me a sense of control. Over life. Over men. It was the same realisation I’d reached after my initial, amateurish blow jobs and the night I had lost my virginity. A feeling of power.

Barry’s Liverpudlian tones chattered on.

‘I’ll take it as a given that you can dance, and as you’re a friend of Chey, you won’t have to pay the house a fee for every set like the other girls do, so all the money you make, from tips and private dances, is yours to keep. But please don’t tell the other dancers about it. It would cause bad blood.’

Again I nodded.

‘So when do you want to start?’ he finally said.

I began my life as a stripper the following day. Lev fronted me a few bills so I could acquire a costume, which I improvised from various items I found in the market stalls that occupied the old parking lot next to the building that used to house Tower Records on Broadway, just a few steps away from Shakespeare & Co where I loved to go and browse the latest books. I also hunted for the right music and spent hours deciding what I would dance to. My first thought was to select something classical, Russian even, but I thought that might be an artistic step too far for the Bowery. I finally opted for Counting Crows’ ‘A Murder of
One’. There was something melancholy about the music that appealed to my Russian soul.

By the time I had packed and unpacked my bag for the tenth time that afternoon, checked that I had everything I could possibly need and heard the lock mechanism in the apartment door click shut behind me, I was almost ready to run back to the patisserie and offer Jean-Michel my arse to grope again so long as it meant that I didn’t need to climb onto the stage that was waiting downtown for my approach like a block awaiting its next condemned man. But not quite. I was far too stubborn to allow a puny thing like fear get the better of me, and when my turn came I stepped out from behind the shabby dressing-room curtain with its beer stains and cigarette burns, squared my jaw and vowed to get on with it.

All the most important things in life, birth, death, losing one’s virginity, seemed to involve the removal of one’s clothes at some point or another and for me, stripping was just another one of those experiences to tick off, something that I had been building up to from the moment that I decided to skip ballet rehearsals in favour of pleasuring boys from the ice-cream parlour by the red-brick wall at the back of the school. As the music switched on and the familiar lyrics poured out of the loudspeakers, I wondered what kind of bird I had hidden inside, what manner of creature I would unleash when I dropped my flimsy costume and unveiled my nudity to the punters who were barely visible beyond the beam of light that I stood beneath.

I felt instinctively that I had crossed a Rubicon, selected a fork in the road that there would be no reversing from. No
matter what I chose to do in the future, there would be no erasing this moment.

I raised my arms overhead, like wings, and began to dance.

3

Dancing with the Ponies

Initially, at the Tender Heart, I was distracted by the rundown grunginess of the club and found it awkward to reconcile my intentions to be graceful as well as sexy. The downbeat atmosphere of the principal auditorium, with its cheap wall hangings barely concealing old torn posters advertising long-gone appearances there by Patti Smith, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and Television, combined with the tawdry disco tunes my fellow dancers performed to during their sets were a sharp dampener to any attempt to remain above the fray.

On my first night, apart from the fact I felt so terribly self-conscious and ill at ease in my unveiled skin, I made the mistake of shedding my minimal bikini and the assorted thin silk scarves I had thought would combine well with it and provide me with something to work with, leaving me standing at centre stage halfway through my music, totally nude and with nothing to do. Finding myself there, isolated, confronted by the vacant gaze of half a dozen bored customers whose facial features were all indistinct, I felt more like a mannequin than a dancer. I attempted an
entrechat
and nearly fell to the ground as my feet had no grip on the polished wooden stage. I quickly gave up on the idea of a few ballet moves for fear of appearing even more ridiculous.

I shimmied a bit, did a few turns, smiled as best I could. Then I repeated the feeble movements again and again, hoping for the tune to come to an end. I steered well clear of the rigid metal pole that dominated the stage and which all the other strippers that night had teased with, danced around, and embraced with pseudo-erotic abandon.

The hiss of silence in the loudspeakers came as a profound relief, as did the darkness which I took advantage of to quickly bend over and gather my scarves and shiny bikini and an orphaned five-dollar note that one of the spectators had deposited on the edge of the stage.

Later, some of the other girls, a varied bunch with a rapid turnover, one day here, another day gone, taught me how to dance around the pole, but it was never a discipline I took to.

I wanted to be different.

I also learned to time my effects and the stages through which I revealed my body, my assets. Since Chey and I had returned from the Dominican Republic where my blonde hair had bleached quite significantly in the sun, I had not had it cut and it was the longest I’d ever worn it. He liked it that way. Enjoyed gripping its ends hard when he rode me from behind. Now it was long enough to cover my breasts when I pulled it forward, an extra element of tease which the anonymous men who watched me, and the regulars I began to accumulate, seemed to like, my nipples winking through the curtain of falling hair.

Watching others, I also saw how they withheld the final reveal, only allowing the customers a brief, limited glimpse of their pussy just before the lights went out and the music climaxed, like a final tantalising treat. Surely, I felt, this was cheating; wasn’t it what they had come for?

Now that I had shaven, I delighted in the spectacle of my smoothness and a small fire invariably lit in my belly before every set at the prospect of unveiling what was the most intimate part of me to all these strangers, knowing all they could do was look and not touch, wonder but not taste. It gave me the feeling I could lead them anywhere, make them do my bidding, just for a sight of my cunt.

‘You’re getting better and better, girl,’ Barry remarked after watching my final set one evening, a few weeks after I’d begun working at the club. ‘You were certainly clumsy at your first attempts, and I wouldn’t have kept you on had you not been a friend of Chey’s and had such a beautiful body. But you’ve come on in leaps and bounds.’

‘That’s nice to hear,’ I replied.

‘In fact, you’re too good for this place. You should be dancing somewhere they have an appreciation of class. You’re wasting your time here; you should be uptown where they tip better.’

It was true, the financial offerings of the Tender Heart’s miserly spectators were far from impressive. And some of them were so unpleasant and uncouth that, by my second day, I’d decided to turn down private lap dances, and had formally informed Barry of this as a take-it-or-leave-it option.

He gave me some names and I went for interviews and auditions. There was still no news of Chey.

Once I made it clear I was in no mood for casting-couch antics and just there to dance and keep customers entertained, I was quickly offered the opportunity to perform in a better category of establishment and even had the chance to choose where I did so.

I began alternating between two private members-only clubs on the Upper East Side, which both catered for upmarket locals and the mostly foreign clientele staying at the four- and five-star hotels dotted around the Central Park area.

The gratuities were considerably better, and I soon settled into a routine, sleeping into the afternoons and working late nights and weekends, at Sweet Lola’s or The Grand, where my classical background was admired and even encouraged, as two nights a week they had a pianist in and the girls did slower numbers to live music, in a cabaret style. I’d brought the house down and gained favour with Blanca, the beautiful Czech woman who managed the dancers, with a rendition of ‘Makin’ Whoopee!’ that involved so little dancing and so much writhing on top of the piano that I felt as though I’d hardly had to work for that night’s tips at all.

I even agreed to the occasional lap dance, as the punters at both of my new clubs were so much more upmarket than they had been at the place Barry ran, with their expensive suits and endless parade of dollar bills that they were only too happy to throw around at the slightest provocation. One man wanted me to do nothing more than remove my shoes for him and show him my bare feet. He would pay princely sums in exchange for just a glimpse of my toes, and even more if I allowed him to press his face close to my ankles as I stood
en pointe
, though I never allowed him to touch me. I was too afraid of losing my now comfortable position to risk stepping outside the management’s rules for the sake of a little extra money.

The girls and I tried to split cab rides home wherever we could for safety’s sake – we’d all had a scare when Gloria, one of the dancers who I worked alongside regularly, had
been approached in the alleyway behind Sweet Lola’s by a crazed fan who had taken a swing at her after she had spurned his advances – and also to save money. I was earning more than I’d dreamed possible at the Tender Heart, but I was still frugal with it, and so that night I’d asked the driver to stop once the meter totted up to the amount of change in my pocket plus a small tip and I’d walked the few blocks home from the corner of West 14th Street and 11th Avenue. It was 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning and the usually busy streets near the West Side Highway were quiet so I took a detour, walking up to the great steel arch of Pier 54 and watching the water of the Hudson River continue its gentle flow, glinting in the light of the rising sun. A local dance troupe ran performances and lessons here and I’d often thought of tagging along, perhaps even making some friends.

Things were going well for me now in New York, but even though I was used to my own company, I sometimes felt terribly frustrated and lonely without Chey. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d only told me where he was going and when. I didn’t want to appear a nag or a shrew, and I was perfectly capable of surviving without him, but I had been born into a world of straight lines, uniformity and precision and I resented the chaos that his unexplained and unscheduled absences lent to my arrangements. I wanted to impose some kind of order on my existence, cement the feeling that, pitiful though it might be, my life must have some kind of purpose.

I was in a reflective mood when I arrived back at the apartment, and still tired from that evening’s exertions, so I didn’t notice Chey’s blazer hanging over the back of the chair in the second bedroom that he used as his office, the
folded-up newspaper on the kitchen bench or the gentle hum of his space-age washing machine.

I had already begun my post-work ritual – tossing my hold-all costume carry bag onto the sofa in the lounge, to be unpacked when I was awake again, switching on the kettle to pour hot water over a tea bag and add a slice of lemon, reminding myself of the home country, splashing a little cold water on my face in the bathroom to wash away my night-time, dancing self from the regular, everyday person who kept her clothes on, most of the time – when I noticed him in the bedroom. I was by no means unobservant, but Chey moved like a cat, graceful, quiet, always like a coiled spring ready to be released. He could have crept up on a flock of pigeons without sending them skywards.

My initial pleasure at seeing him was quickly replaced by other, stronger emotions when I remembered his abandonment, and how this time I had planned to lay down the law, and tell him that I wouldn’t be treated this way. Then I noticed what he was sitting next to. A colourful pile of chiffon and lace. The outfit that I had hastily tried on and discarded in favour of another as I packed my bag for that night’s shift.

He took one look at the mixture of guilt and defensiveness that spread across my face and his expression hardened.

‘I thought you only danced for me,’ he said. ‘Is this how you now dress at the patisserie? I went there to look for you, but learned you had left . . .’

‘Then you thought wrong,’ I replied haughtily. ‘I dance for me. Not anyone else.’

That much was true enough. Until I had completed that first shift at the Tender Heart, I hadn’t realised how much I missed the rigour of the steps, the flow of the music, the
pleasure that I took from the applause of a satisfied audience, how I enjoyed watching all eyes fixated on the rhythm of my body.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Did you not think that you could call me, that I would look after you?’

‘I’m not your pet,’ I told him peevishly, ‘not some mail-order bride who just wants to sit at home and wait for you. Spending your money and fucking you in return like a whore.’

‘You know I don’t think of you like that,’ he replied, visibly aggrieved.

I straightened my shoulders and set my jaw, prepared to argue to the bitter end. My independence had always been hard won, and consequently it was something that I valued highly. And if Chey didn’t like it, then I would leave him, and use the money from my dancing to make my own way in life.