Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (11 page)

“Hey, girls, wanna do a lesbian flawr show with me?”

Narissa pops her gum and for a second the pink tumes cence flounders, deflates, and her tongue slips out like a lizard’s, roots around, snaps it off snagged skin, retrieves it, chews. She helps herself to a bottle of champagne from the limo’s cooler. Lucy giggles, laughs like candy, all quivering and glossy and sweet, butterscotch brown skin and tightly coiled snakes of hair beneath a cheap black wig and an accent from the South, simmered down to a rich treacle. Igor, head-to-toe Ar mani, a white man with a black voice, reeking of Viagra and heartburn, grins. Julia, a twenty-two-year-old model
slash
single mother
slash
dominatrix
slash
club promoter
slash
anorexic bitch, looks vaguely excited, her exquisitely cut face branching into a cheap sneer, which just passes as a smile.

“Floor show? I will! Oh whattha
fuck,
how many calories does this champagne have? I have to like,
lose
five pounds by Monday or my agent’s gonna
fire
me. Fucking
asshole.
Like I
have
five pounds to lose.
Mimi,
feel my tit, Mimi. Is that a fucking
tit
which can take the
loss
of five more frikkin’
pounds?
”

Julia sticks her tits out. Actually, she sticks out a rack of lamb with two doll’s house-sized pepper pots protruding from it awkwardly. She holds the pose and shows no sign of desisting until I gingerly poke a nipple with my pinky.

“I had
great
tits until I had my frikkin’
son.
Breast-feeding just
ate
’em up. They just
disappeared.
Fucking pregnancy.”

She grabs the bottle of Veuve and swallows loudly, displaying an obvious talent for
something
if one takes the vivid convulsion of her glottis as any indication. A vein pulses slightly in her scrawny alabaster neck. Igor assumes an expression of vague concern.

“Baby, I wanna make you promise me you’re gonna grab some food in the party. I don’t want you passing out on the fucking flawr like last time, you hear me?”

Julia swallows loudly, belches, cackles. The vein throbs some more. Igor glances at me. His voice is dark chocolate; but the cheap kind. The kind on sale because it’s gone white with age.

“
Damn
Mimi, you looked twelve years old in the picture they sent me. Loved the Snoopy T-shirt baby! So you dance at Foxy’s?”

Champagne. Champagne—the drink of champions. Or is that milk? It fizzes in my nose, and my vision momentarily crackles into a buzz of static, and my voice, when it comes, sounds a little fucked, a little high-pitched, even to me.

“Erm,
kind of.
I was a waitress. Well, I
am
a waitress. But I’m thinking about dancing. I have an audition next week. I’ve danced before though. Like, in England. I have experience.”

Igor smiles, unconvinced. Narissa starts talking again. This becomes a theme for the night. Narissa talking.
Narissa is talking everyone! Take note.
The girl can talk, or at least approximate it. Her mouth moves, we listen, but all the while I’m thinking, if she shut her mouth, they’d be hell to pay the other end, what with the stream of excrement flowing so damned strong and needing some outlet.

“So, whadda they want Igor? Same as last time? Flawr show? Pussy lickin’? Anyone bring any dildos? Those fuckers had better tip well. Gotta pay my tuition fees for next semester.”

“Oh, where you going to college?”

Lucy’s face is wide and open and sweet. You know the face. Rape victim before the betrayal, Act 1, scene 1: Hint of world weariness but with fortitude and the Good Book struggles through, possibly reinforced by a meadow scene of yellow flowers, eager butterflies, small child.

“In Brooklyn. Trainin’ to be an accountant. You?”

“Oh, I just got here. From Georgia. I start NYU in the fall. Law school.”

Everyone gazes at her briefly, a silence punctuated by the rapid succession of burps emitted from Julia’s mouth. And then conversation moves swiftly on. Having a degree pre-stripping made you a bit of a loser, I suspect. Fictional degrees are de rigueur
.
Because if you have a degree, you certainly shouldn’t be here, and if you’re doing this for fun, you’re a fucking jerkoff hoochy-ass bitch who needs to get a life. So I don’t say anything. Just grab that bottle right back from Julia and drink, and she looks on in approval as everyone compares acrylic claws, a topic that is safer than the inimitable allure of the fictional promised land at the end of our stripping careers—paid-up home, 401(k), rich (dead) husband, and a face-lift.

The limo sweeps sleekly over the highway.

The marina in New Jersey. A volley of whistles and cheers bounce off a granite sky, making us wobble uncertainly as we walk along the jiggling gangplank to an audience of white-outfitted bemused crew. They hustle us swiftly into our dressing room—a tiny bathroom consisting of three stalls and a long mirror. Three girls stride in after us, tall, black, and oozing boob, shining with the excess of confidence that comes from avid coke consumption and free Veuve Clicquot in a white limo. A small, dumpy Hispanic girl sits quietly in the corner, slips off her T-shirt, looks timidly around.

“Can someone help me put cream on my back?” she asks, barely audible, in a victim voice that has already received the worst of life, probably from a blood relative, and really doesn’t expect any better. Together the girls turn to her with bright open smiles, and then stop. Her back is scaly with a fiesta of ringworm, topped off with peeling skin from too much Jersey shore. It had been an early summer, and for her, an unforgiving one. Silence. Lucy steps forward and smiles sweetly, gently.

“Sure hon. I’ll do it.”

She squeezes cream onto her smooth palm and places it warmly, softly, with loving care, on the little dumpy girl’s raw back. The other girls turn back to the mirror, and start shovel ing glitter, powder, creams, and lotions onto faces that looked barely legal, and I silently congratulate myself on having fitted in somehow, in a way in which this girl, this little fat butterball of repulsion and abuse and a hangdog air of cringing expectation, this little fat butterball oozing serum from scratched and putrid flesh, has not.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, stripping.

Slap on, slapped up, the girls walk up the stairs to the main salon, where music pulses and the roar of the semidrunk cascades down steps. Tripping in heels with the gentle swell of the boat, gulping, scared, scared shitless, scared of everything, scared of the orange tone of my flesh, scared I can’t dance, scared because this is something I’m not used to, broad daylight, still only 7:30 P.M. and night hasn’t cast its shroud over New York, and Narissa is still talking, and Lucy’s laughing easily, and Julia’s still sniffing and blinking from the coke smacking her brain cells, jabbing them before following with a fine upper cut, boxing out the sense she never knew she had, and the little dumpy girl hides in the bathroom, and the other three tall, beautiful, confident black girls, vaginas on legs, nothing but vaginas on legs, sashay easily up those damned stairs, into the room, pick their men, swing a long, slender leg over an expectant quivering thigh, let crotch slap against crotch in a straddle like a toothless grin, and Narissa teeters into the middle of the room, and fifty Colombian men all pause for a split second, a sliver of time barely significant like the touch of that finger on an inner thigh, until she yells, “Where da
fuck
is da bachelor?” and having located him, rips her dress over her head, jumps onto his lap, followed shortly by Julia, also de robed and sporting fuck-me boots and she’s now grabbing Narissa’s little red G-string (
my
red G-string), and despite the fact there’s only two of them and fifty guys, it’s like an ocean of titties and bare ass and neatly waxed pussies and long limbs flailing and pink tongues flaring out in a fire stream, lizards catching flies . . . But Lucy’s the wise one, because she demurely grabs a Red Bull, sidles up to the best-dressed guy in the group, and bats those big, brown Southern eyes . . .
and I’m damned if I see that dress come off at all.
And Igor’s looking over, raised eyebrows, I can see what the jerkoff’s thinking (
Snoopy
T-shirt?) so I grab the nearest drink from a willing hand and wait for that backhand slap of vodka to beat out the inhibitions. I turn toward the slap this time. Down it, slip outside, cigarette, steady,
steady
. Fucking
hands
shaking. I can do this. Statue of Liberty there.
Wanna drink, rubia?
The men leer at me. Yeah, I’ll take a drink. Another. The girls come out, hand me some more. I catch Lucy’s eye, and she smiles sadly. Music. Fuck, this isn’t so bad. This is
fine
once you get the drinks in, you can’t even feel the hands pressing between the flimsy wedges of fabric, between your conscience, your need to pay the rent.
Call Dad.
Can’t call Dad though. He can’t even pay the fucking bills.
You on your own now baby,
Lucy whispers, winks. I grab a proffered twenty-dollar bill, the dress is off . . .

The music’s louder, the sky’s darker, there’s money in my G-string, and I’m drunk, and Narissa and Julia are still rolling around on the floor as dollar bills float leaves gently around the flawr show, and then a skinny arm protrudes from the writhing limbs and whips my G-string down, slo-mo as my legs give way and my eye’s caught on a corner of the ceiling with sagging balloons taped to it, focus shifts to a carpet, midnight blue, small yellow diamonds, someone’s sneakers, yelling, an indistinct crackle of noise like static, if I readjust someone’s leg, and another, but there’s a hand attached to the body I can’t quite lift my head up to see, because my head’s pinned down by a skinny model knee on my chest, a foot on my hair, and the hand is somewhere it really shouldn’t be (that’s what the bouncers in the club are there for, surely?), but it’s not the club.

“GET YOUR FUCKIN’ FINGER OUTA MY ASS JERKOFF!” screeches Narissa as an errant digit from an onlooker eager to participate in the action threatens to disturb the delicate equilibrium of snatch licking taking place on the carpet. Julia emerges from between her legs with a tongue still glistening and finds an excellent opportunity for negotiation. “More money,” she announces in a curious monotone, and the whoops and the laughter pause as they scrabble in jackets for more cash, and it rains down again, bigger denominations, and then there’s a model between my legs, and a murmur from somewhere, “If you wanna be on top let me know, I think we have about two grand here, we can get more,” and between
her
legs is the face of an English girl, whose familiarity with the female anatomy is becoming increasingly intimate with every gyration of those skinny model hips, the money keeps coming, the money keeps coming, the music’s louder and outside the skies begin to darken, not that I can see, from my horizontal vantage point lying naked with skinny model ass plumped on my face in the middle of a salon on a 200-foot yacht cruising around the Statue of Liberty, but it certainly
feels
darker in here. It certainly feels darker. And the moans and the groans and the frenzied pumping and squirming of body parts is all something I know well, know so well, it’s so sadly, sickly familiar that I realize, all at once, that I ended up here because, like the rest of them, I was gagging for that slap, begging for what girls should never do, never have to put up with, never have to witness, experience, or feel. Not the nice ones anyhow. Not ones like me.

 

When the Australian’s girlfriend came back, I moved out and found somewhere else to sleep. That was how I met Jon-jon- the-jaapie.

My eyes were rolling and I could feel it, and I couldn’t remember where I’d been, but I knew where I was, and when Jon-jon opened the door he knew where I’d been because my eyes told him. So without a word he led me in, laid me down, stripped my clothes off, and there were no kisses, not that I remember, not that I could feel, but what I could feel was the drug permeating my body and my body following instinct not instruction. Instinct dictated what I did, because my head was incapable of it. I remember it didn’t hurt but from somewhere I felt like it should, and nothing happened after he wrestled with me for a little while, so he stopped. He went into the next room, woke up the other guy, one I hadn’t seen before. He came in and he was butt naked and he put his hands on me, and I said no, and they were fine with that. Jon-jon kissed me a little and petted me, and the second one sat down and watched, all the while smoking a cigarette, which dangled loosely from thick lips, and from its red glow I could see that my body still looked young even as it felt so old, cold and trembling from the inevitable comedown. Jon-jon lay back down again, and this time I think it did hurt. In the morning the apartment was empty, and I let myself out, and the streets were quiet because it was 7:00 A.M. and France had not yet woken up. In the morning the apartment was empty, and I let myself out, and sure I felt the sting of that slap but if you dwelt on it too long, if you thought about it too much, you’d go crazy. So you turn your head to the sky, let the sun caress tired skin, lidded eyes. Open them. Walk on home in the sunlight, hope that the other two in the room you were staying in had gone out so you could sleep, thank God you can move onto the new boat Monday, and forget.