Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (9 page)

“Mimi, could you please step into the office?”

I can smell, beneath the menopausal woman and ozone stench, that unmistakable aroma of imminent unemployment. What I fail to detect is USCIS on hold to Brenda as I walk into her office.

Routine, routine. We all need routine. I established mine as soon as I could, in the only way I could. When I lost my job and my money and my hope and my Social Insecurity was exposed for all to see, I found routine in madness, found what else I could sell, and sold it. Routine ordered a life filled with transience and replaced the temporary and the unknown with the predictable and known. Routine—ah yes, we all need routine.

4

WITHOUT BLOOD THERE IS NO ATONEMENT,
it said on the door to the dressing room toilet cubicle, next to a sticker of the Virgin Mary, and a Sharpied KUNT scrawled inexplicably across the tiles. It always reminds me of school, the toilet cubicle in the dressing room. Reminds me, painfully, of things I would prefer to forget—first times and awkward transitions from adolescence into childhood. My first time was as loathsome, distressing, sleazy, and painful as I had anticipated. But there was no blood at least. When we locked ourselves in the girls’ bathroom to compare teenage notes, I remember the universal gasp when this fact came out.
There was no blood.
My eye slid back to the curious, looping, spiky graffiti at eye level to the toilet, where some haunted religious soul had leaned carefully forward (being careful not to drip), and etched it onto the door, and then pulled up her G-string and gone back out to dance.

It was curiously appropriate, now I think about it. My first time, you see, instilled in me the gift that would later serve as my survival instinct in later years, in stripclub years, stripclub years like dog years. That first time as her—degrading, humiliating, unwanted, nauseating—helped me out a little later as Mimi, although I can’t help but think that Mimi would have . . . oh never mind. There was the other first time, Mimi was there for that. That other first time.
You
know. When you got paid for it.

 

“What’s your name, girl?”

I look up dully, eyes sweeping over filthy concrete, resting on the yellow NQRW 7th Avenue sign, focusing, unfocusing, eventually settling on the speaker. A pretty, wide-eyed, tiny Asian girl with hair down to her butt is regarding me with curiosity. I shrug, look away. The girl laughs, a merry laugh, a laugh that has had a few drinks, but not enough to fall into oblivion. Enough to talk to strangers.

“Don’t be like that. I was just asking your name. I seen you working in Crobar, right? Bad day?”

I shrug again, cave in. “Crobar? I don’t work there. I just lost my job.”

The girl whistles low, giggles. The platform is empty save for us two, and an old white guy picking bugs off his shoes and splatting them between his fingers.

“So you’re looking for a
job.
”

“I’m looking for a job.”

She stops and gazes at me from the corner of her eyes, as if the angle gives her a unique optical glimpse into my soul. It was as if she was scrutinizing me, hard, looking for signs and scars of living that would lead her to her destination, some clue of who I was, what I was.

“Hey, I remember how I know you. You were in Foxy’s, hanging ’round, trying to get a job as a waitress and asking questions.”

I look away angry, and she laughs again.

“Hey, no worries. Thought I knew you from someplace. I know Dolores wasn’t real friendly but a girl just left, so they’re looking for someone right now to do the day shift. You should come back tomorrow, speak to Dolores again.”

“You a stripper?”

“Nooooo, hell, no! My boyfriend would kill me. No, I’m just a waitress, so we’ll be working together. But waitressing’s OK. Stupid outfits, but hell, it’s cash. I work at Hooters too. Just come in tomorrow early on before some other hoochy bitch gets the job. My name’s Lily.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Oh, and one more thing.”

She pauses and smiles slightly at some joke I don’t get.

“It’s ‘dancer,’ not ‘stripper.’ We don’t use no words like that in the club. It’s, like, rude to the girls.
Dancer.
Remember that.”

Stripper, dancer, ecdysiast.
A train draws up and Lily gets on. She pulls a book out of her bag,
LSATs Made Easy.
And then the train leaves, and it’s just me and the bum, picking bugs off his boots, squashing them methodically on the concrete platform.

 

“Mimi.”
I feel a tug on my arm. “That’s Dolores, sitting in the cash booth on the phone. Just wait until she hangs up and ask about the job. Good luck.”

Lily saunters off, a body that burned onto your corneas like a branding iron, drinks tray twirling. From behind the bar, aureola glare, seeping across breasts streaked with jagged blue veins, a yellowing canvas glossy with baby oil. It was like being stuck in a virgin’s wet dream. It was like being stuck in a stripclub in Midtown Manhattan at four P.M. on a Monday afternoon.
Oh.

“You after a jawb?”

Dolores is addressing me with her left eyebrow. I can see this because the skin hanging over her eyes has been spectacularly lifted, sliced, and pinned, ensuring even a commonplace eyebrow raise turned into a spectacular battle between gravity, nature, and surgery. Her jowls, it appears, have yet to surrender to the slash of cold steel.

“What’s your name?”

“Mimi.”

“You twenny-one?”

“Yeah, I’m actua—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mimi. And for fuck’s sake, wear some fucking makeup. The guys ain’t here to listen to your goddamn accent and talk about da
New Yorker.
”

 

Cooking in the galley, a hot day, hottest summer in France for years. It was still midseason, I had not yet met the Captain of
La Bella,
nor did I know that in three short months I was destined to sail across the Atlantic with a crew of four men. Now it was summer, busiest time of the year, hottest time of the year. People had been dying, dropping like flies in the heat—the old, the infirm, mainly—though I could see that we were not all immune. It was too hot. I seared tuna and watched the heat scar into the pink, rosy flesh. The boat rocked gently even though we were in port. We had a week before guests would arrive and we would have to be on call 24/7, serving drinks, food, anything they required. Now it was just preparation.

He came up behind me and I didn’t hear, the sizzle of the fish and the prickle of hot fat on my arm a trickle of sweat down a damp forehead
tired
been out the night before and he wanted cooked food for God’s sake miserable old
cunt
it was one hundred degrees outside and I wanted a beer wanted to get
out
of this job I’d only been in for two weeks but I needed the money and he slipped an arm around my waist a mouth—an
old,
wrinkled mouth, curiously dry—as it rasped across my skin old man mouth seeking mine. I went still. Froze. Did nothing. The tuna sizzled and the flesh puckered and scabbed into a black, chalky burn. Hot, hot, hot but I went cold. It was silent.
Please don’t,
I whispered.

I’m sorry,
he said later,
I don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t stop myself. I . . .

It’s OK,
I said, and avoided his eye, and the deckhand, listening, slunk away into the cabins and pretended not to hear.
Am I too old for you?
And then anger,
I’ve heard you coming back to the boat with other men, I’ve seen you in the bars drunk, why not me? Why don’t you have a boyfriend? Girls shouldn’t sleep around like whores.

I don’t do boyfriends,
I said.

He fired me ten days later. It was a relief. To avoid him I’d taken to sleeping in the deckhand’s cabin. The deckhand didn’t like it any more than I did. I left them with a fridge full of food doctored with laxatives, Visine, and anything else I had found in the medicine box. And then I took three tabs of ecstasy and partied in Juan-les-Pins until dawn and walked home through the market in Antibes and the stallholders laughed when they saw me at six A.M. still giddy with drugs and I inhaled the fresh, wet, earthy smell of basil, tomatoes mingled with rich cheeses, the cool, delicious morning sun, the salty breeze. They gave me bread and coffee and chattered away in French as I ate. I had nowhere to sleep that night so I went out again, and my bags were still lying neglected on Quay 19 in Antibes harbor. The next night I shared a bed with an Australian I knew vaguely from The Blue Lady. His girlfriend was a stewardess on a yacht charter in Greece, so there was a space to be filled.

The arrangement suited us both.

 

Dolores: “It’s come to my attention that undercover police officers are posing as guests in order to try and close us down. If a guest asks you for a fuck, a blowjob, a handjob, or to masturbate in front of him, the correct answer isn’t, ‘Maybe if you come to the Champagne Room we can talk about it’ or even ‘Let’s discuss this later.’ The correct answer is, ‘I’m not that kinda girl, and this is not that kinda place.’ Got it?”

The “dancers,” lounging in various stages of undress, all nod in agreement, apart from the Russians, who don’t understand, and instead groom their square inch of pubic hair for lack of a more stimulating entertainment. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of place this was if it didn’t serve fucks, blowjobs, or handjobs.

“They don’t do that?” I whisper to Lily. Her dark eyes widen and her waist-length hair crackles. “Noooo! It’s just
dancing.
They have to keep their G-strings on even in the Champagne Room.”

“So why the fuck do guys come in this shithole?”

“Just watch,” she says.

So I watch. Watch long and hard. I had become a virtuoso of watching since arriving in America. I sat in cafes ordering coffee I couldn’t afford, wandered through parks, always watching, observing, noticing the tiny details. The immigrants who came and forgot where they were from, so busy being American. The immigrants who could never forget where they were from, so busy trying to be American. The ones who never even tried, recognizing the futility of such a practice, instead just doggedly surviving. I see them all, the invisible people, the people without good jobs and careers and without hope, because I’m one of them.
It’s just a temporary situation, though. Just temporary.

In Brooklyn, Raoul sits and watches me without speaking, and his silent observance teaches me how to watch, like a predator, like you’re waiting for something you know will happen, like you believe it will happen, even when you secretly fear it won’t.

That first day in Foxy’s is disorienting, and I’m scared they might find out about my having no visa, even though Lily said it was OK, so I watch. The girls all harbor that manufactured look of boredom and distaste, and their smiles are like the smiles of a small baby about to burp—reflexive, fleeting, full of air, rumpled gas, empty. There’s one, the one from the first day, with the mouth like a slit throat and a belly creased like bed linen, thighs dimpled with purple bruises, eyes smacked back far into a head that could be gray, could be, if it weren’t sunflower yellow. The vowels tumble out of her like a Puerto Rican orgy, it was that slit-throat mouth that made her money, not the tarnished bloated breasts hard with silicone lumps, insolent nipples. Tired, tired, tired. She’s tired, but the smile never drops, it’s carried around like stigmata, and she occasionally, onstage, clutches her belly unconsciously then looks around, confused, like she dropped her last pregnancy on the floor behind her. The young feline Russian with no tits and no ass and no personality and the hungry eyes of money made it for some guys, she made it for some guys. Some guys like that look, the “I haven’t had my period yet, Daddy” look. And then some wanted the impossible undulations of the Brazilians and the Colombians who, when they weren’t fondling some guy’s knee, were on their rhinestone-encrusted pink phones calling
hijos
and
abuelas,
chewing take-out chicken parmigiana from greasy paper boxes when it got slow, discussing their boob jobs, the business. I watch all this, I absorb.

The girls frequently dart in and out of a tiny dressing room occupied by an orca of a woman dispensing tampons and safety pins, pretzels and hair rollers from the vast recesses of her rotted womb. “I’m Maw,” she tells me, after we stare at each other a good long while. She looks at my satin pants, my curly, shoulder-length blond hair, my stupid blue eyes, my lack of eyeliner, lashes, lust, and dismisses me. The satin pants. The tiny hotpants. I notice we got more looks than dancers (“ ‘Dancers’ are how they like to be called,” says Dolores harshly), us waitresses, us girls who don’t take our clothes off. It’s a mystery why in this furtive breeding ground for sin, the permissiveness allowed us wasn’t leaped upon and worried like a frenzied dog. Why do some girls take their clothes off and others earn dollar tips wearing satin hotpants? Money. Sure, money. But why do some girls have their boundaries, others don’t? Sex. Sex. Sex. Watching, listening.

“I used to be a dancer but my boyfriend gave me an ultimatum: ‘Marry me, get your green card, and give it up; stay and be a fuckin’ whore,’ ” says the bartender, overstayed on a student visa, never went home. “I’d
never
dance again. Once you start, you cross a line. You can’t go back. You change. Plus my boyfriend would kill me,” she continues. “I love my boyfriend. I could never touch another man.”
Thought you said you didn’t touch them?
She gives me a look. That look says,
Watch.

I watch more. I watch Ole Hank, one of the Champagne Room managers, the guys in charge of the floor while Dolores sits queenly in her postsurgery pinnednippedtucked splendor. (“She used to be three hundred pounds until she got her stomach stapled. She don’t look good now, but hell, you shoulda seen her
before
.”) I watch the huge bouncers, Pedro, Simi, the Brazilian toilet attendant who snickers and grins stupidly, like a fool, because he
is
a fool, a stupid, retarded fool who deserved no better employment than handing out candy and rubbers to the johns, but he’s a sweet guy. I watch the other waitresses, who are all hot, hotter than me, mostly surgically enhanced. (“ Kissed. Surgically kissed, says Lily, primly, on her break, and looks between
LSATs Made Easy
and
People
magazine, uncertain of which to delve into first.) I become a voyeur, a Peeping Tom, a silent witness, as much a part of the fixtures as the grimy handprints on the mirrors upon which we lean when Ole Hank isn’t watching. I watch and I look, and as I look and watch I notice that the dancers, strippers, girls, whatever the hell they are, those assorted pick-’n-mix candy dolls of lurid plastic, they too are watching. They watch the door, they watch the men, they watch the money, smell the money, stalk it, suckle on it, and in the absence of money, they sit down and bitch about the new girl’s fat ass or the old girl’s coke habit. And the dancing.
Well,
the
dancing.
Girls twist around men like sinews as dresses fall and sighs escape. Insolent breasts, nipples, brittle and sharp, about to snap off in the icy blast of the AC, and the men’s mouths snap like turtles reaching, reaching, but there’s a knee suddenly in the way, pressed hard, urgent, and the swelling it encounters distracts from the need for the mouth, and the knee rubs rhythmically up and down, up and down, eyes flick idly to the side checking for Ole Hank who is the arbiter of grinding (GRINDING: the act of stimulating a man’s genitalia through rhythmic pressure of the knee or buttocks;
verb:
to grind;
progressive:
grinding;
past:
ground), and I could have
sworn
a meeting of lips, their heads are so close, and the hands creep up, a little further up, gently up. “But there’s no touching, you see?” whispers Lily. The girls touch, but the guys don’t, else Hank is on ’em and Pedro and Simi throw them out.
But what about the Champagne Room? What’s the deal?
The deal is (drum roll,
please
), the deal is,
the connection between palm and cheek
—no, sorry,
the connection between hand and cock.
“You serious?” I ask. “I dunno,” she shrugs. “I don’t go in there. I guess you negotiate with the guy before you go in. No sex though. Just, like, second base, maybe a handjob, something like that. My boyfriend would
kill
me if I did that.”