Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City (23 page)

“So the manager I had a crush on said he’d call and he never did. But yesterday he took me to the back and we made out. He got his dick out and asked me to suck it. I said no.”

“Tommy?”

“No, not Tommy. Why, he tried that one on you? Tried it on me too. Said he loves me and I’m the most beautiful girl here.”

She flicks her long bleached extensions over her shoulder, whips out a compact, checks her makeup. Jolie slips away as a new group of businessmen walk in, slides onto their laps like a fart.

“I have an audition for this really big film tomorrow. It’s gonna make my career. Did I tell you I fucked this guy for seven hours straight on Sunday? My ex. He loves me. Says I’m beautiful.”

The rot spreads, mold covering the sheen of life, dragging it down with cloying, asphyxiating stealth. Little Chloe, blond and beautiful, six years old, laughing as Daddy heaves her onto his shoulders. Chloe, eighteen, sweet and clean, moving to New York to be a model and actress, excited, overwhelmed by the Big Apple. Chloe, thirty, pawed by managers, sucking dick for approval, seeking out compliments like an eager puppy, but waiting, just waiting, always waiting, for the slap.

Bambi disappears in the back with a manager before I can join her.

“Fuckin’ manager has a fuckin’
girlfriend.
”

Jolie and I glance at each other. We knew that. Chloe knew it too,
should
have known it.

“You upset?”

“So why didn’t he call me? Dump her? Why’d he make out with me, try and get me to suck his dick?
I don’t get it.
”

You don’t get it sweetheart, because it’s slowly choking all that’s good inside you, all that you wanted out of life, out of friends, out of lovers. It’s about sex now, sex as currency, sex as validation. Waiting for the slap, biding your time, hungrily yearning for it all along—but! something’s wrong. When’s it going to hit? When does palm connect with cheek in a swift, sharp movement?
Ah.
You can see it coming now out of the corner of your eye, but you don’t dodge. Relief, the expected. You sit there and wait for it.

After a long and sober season in the Caribbean and Central America, I flew to Costa Rica to work on
La Bella
again. We were in Aruba after a long, upwind battle against a tropical wave. Our bodies still ached from the shellshock of the boat pounding against the waves, ferocious and malevolent like the huge playground bully who preyed on the kindergarteners. You are reminded, so often, when sailing, of your own frailty, your own irrelevance. Swarming over deck in the middle of the night dwarfed by waves, clinging to a lifeline as fifty knots of wind tries to claw you out to sea, curled up on the bow next to the gyb watching the sun rise over a vast, empty ocean, working without remittance for a faceless owner who pays you wages to suspend your life to tend to his plaything, his tax-relief, his cruelest lover, his yacht.

We were in Aruba, moving uncertainly through people and a land that didn’t tilt and jerk and smack us underfoot. The crew, three men and me, decided to go to a stripjoint. We went to a stripjoint. I sat and sipped my beer and smiled as the whores fluttered around them, old withered women painted like China dolls, murmuring their pidgin-English seductions to sailors punch-drunk from the sea. The Captain disappeared for a half hour with one woman, returned, ordered a drink. His face was carved into a mask of mourning. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Aw, I just went upstairs with one of them whores. Not
for
nothing, just for a chat-like. She was very interesting. From Venezuela, telling me about her ambitions and all. But she started asking me if I wanted to fuck her, said for five dollars she’d do it without a johnny. Five fucking dollars!” He looked at his beer, picked at the damp label, rolled the bottom of the bottle around slowly, his gaze avoiding mine. “I’m a dad, you know that Mimi? Got me little girl back home with her ma in Sheffield. I’d fucking kill meself if she ever got that desperate.
Five dollar, sin condom, sin condom!
T’aint right Mimi.” He took a swig of beer and the painted ladies floated past, whispering and giggling, insubstantial will o’ the wisps, their eyes blank and staring and unfathomable. “T’aint right.”

 

Later that night I’m on a roll. Private room, seven hundred bucks already tucked into my garter. Buzzing from the champagne, buzzing from the giddy hedonism of earning money so easily. I call Eton, high from drink and money, wanting him to be jealous, pathetically emulating Jolie, all of them. The phone rings out. I return downstairs unsteadily, the cold of the brass banister fogging beneath a hot, drunk palm, my palm. I regard it wonderingly, a laugh, back to the bar, a break before I hit the floor again. Jolie was busy. She’d disappeared off into a dark corner, taking that insidious whiff of rot with her. Chloe was massaging a large, well-dressed man in the midst of a large group, laughing and flirting as if she’d forgotten the cracks threading delicately through her tender heart.

Tommy the manager grabs me before I reach the bar. “Come wid me.” I wonder vaguely if another client’s in the back waiting for me as he pulls me into a private room. No. It’s empty. The door swings shut with a neat, decisive click. My head swirls in confusion, and I giggle as he embraces me, squeezes my ass, hands me a shot. “Drink it.”

I do. He pulls his dick out. “Suck it.”

I laugh and push him away, the DJ’s calling my name and I’ll be fined if I don’t get onstage, and a pretty, sad girl grabs my hand, helps me up the steps to the lights and the fan swirling our hair around our faces, a giant blow-dryer emulating some sordid top-shelf photo shoot.

“Tommy trying to get you in a room?” she asks, concerned. I nod as I slip into the beat of the music, curl my body around its rhythms, wink at the DJ, slide the top of my dress over my breasts, blank looks from faceless men hovering in the dark.

“You make sure you stay away from him, OK? He does stuff. Drugs, girls.”
Like I’m one of them.
I am a good girl, I was not born to this, I am the last person you would ever expect to find in a place like this.

—my head suddenly lurches into the present with a contraction of my stomach, steady, breathe, hand connects with brass, hold, hold, something’s happening to me. What was in that fucking drink? I stumble off the stage and, then, they tell me later, extract a hundred dollars from one man easily (
Saviour or Sex God?
), smoothly, the art of seduction flaying the carcass of their desire, another wine (
Dontcha remember? Dontcha?
), thick, soupy feeling in head, rapidly blocking the connection between mind and body, ontologically distinct so what remain are vivid flashes of disconnected images in a sea of milky darkness, a sense of unease washed down with another shot of liquor, the liquor burns my lips, I lick it, like wine, like it were the blood of him—

—dark room, a marble table, sitting on a leather banquette he’s pressed against me hands greedily feasting on breasts calloused palms scraping clumsily against flesh as he squeezes hard methodical urgent You know how long I’ve wanted you? Watched you? You’re fuckin’ beautiful baby knock on door, waiter peers in anxiously, uncertainly, as he leans back against the banquette flies undone mouth lolling arrogantly arm draped over me—

—door closes Tommy grabs my head his tongue slithers into my mouth like an animal smacks hand against head again harder this time scratch of bristle against face pulls hair head’s forced down knocking-knocking-knocking on the door my tongue works obediently mechanically repeating my litany my catechism my prayers for the salvation of the soul departed the mind and body are ontologically separate
Ave Maria
even as my mind reaches another level of disconnection and my body no longer feels my breasts forced rudely out of my dress
do this in remembrance of me
a hand head roughly pushing G-string the tears running the pain I don’t even feel
gratia plena Dominus tecum
wish I could forget this bit but I can’t vague surreal sense of confusion
why-is-this-why-this-is-happening
I gobble it down swallow every last drop I receive him in place of God this harsh metallic salty taste in my mouth and the music starts to penetrate my head aching sore—

The restaurant at the back of the club. Managers. Rows of drinks. Tommy grabs one and pushes it in my face, and then kisses me long and hard and laughs and turns around and declares to the room “This one’s a writer! Warned me I gotta be good wid her cause she’s gonna write about dis!”
blessed art thou among women
No one catches his eye, the other managers sigh and look away, back to the game on the flat screen, some food arrives, it sits in front of me for a while, until he stabs the steak with a fork and pushes it into my face, smearing my lips with blood
he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him
prying it into my mouth, and it drops out, because I can’t chew, swallow. The corner of my eye is puffy and swollen. I stay in the restaurant all night, I earn no more money
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
I speak to people, apparently
(you were speakin’ to people, dontcha remember?)
I can still speak, when the night is over I find my way to my locker and get dressed.
I keep breaking
, I told Eton once.
It’s OK, you’re allowed to break
, he said, but didn’t he get it? Didn’t he understand what happens when the cracks and flaws held tenuously together are dropped on the stone flagged floor in front of the gasping, titillated audience, watching the break in avarice, in disgusted fascination?
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus
I’m broken, I told him, and I laughed and laughed and laughed, broken was always broken, was broken before this, will be broken long after
blessed is the fruit of thy womb
but this,
this,
was what it was to be broken
Sancta Maria
this feeling, fingernails scraping down skin, leaving white trails in airbrushed skin and the dark, greasy sludges beneath a manicure, nails dig harder, deeper, and only then with a pathetic whimper and a sob do you release
Mater Dei ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
in the shower with the water at full blast so the roommates can’t hear, and I wonder if what I thought I was before all this was just a role, cast off like a snake’s brittle paper skin, until with a rip and a tear you got down to the core,
pray for us sinners now
the molten, raw, cancerous center
nobis peccatoribus
I think of their faces as they bow their heads in prayer, Mam’s hand reaching for mine, and mine stuck deep, sulkily into my pocket
peccatoribus
Eton was Catholic too, he took me to Church once on Easter Sunday, shaking his head at my mortal sin, the revelation that the last time I had been was when I was twelve years old
peccavi
I close my eyes.

Bambi calls me the next day, arrogant, grumpy from the comedown.

“Comin’ into work? What happened to you last night? Got stuck talkin’ to that dumb bitch Jolie. Chloe was cryin’ over that fuckin’ manager. I made nothin’. Spent all my fuckin’ money on an eight-ball too. Tommy said he’d gimme some shit if I went in the backroom with him and he fuckin’ didn’t. Went off with some other bitch instead. She probably got him off, the whore. Fuckin’
sucked.
Whole fuckin’
night
sucked. You workin’ tonight?”

When I go into the gym I catch a glimpse of a gray, sad girl in the mirror, thin legs pumping listlessly on the Stairmaster, right eye scratched and swollen. Already the wounds are healing, the rot’s subsiding back down inside me, the eyes,
you can see in the eyes,
but they’re closing over too, a web of scars, like the rest of me. Pure white skin, privileged skin. Puckers quickly into a scab when the blade slices. I grab a cab to work, my makeup already on my face painting over the shame, and then I see the place and the stench is too much, too much, I tell the cab driver to turn round, take me back home again, without even letting him pull up to the curb.

As much as I love New York, it’s become too normal for me to extract someone’s finger from my ass, pluck a mouth from my nipple, grind against a hard cock, cut off pieces of myself with every shameful dark act I commit. I know that I have to dodge the slap, could see it coming from the corner of my eye. Didn’t want to soil myself beyond recognition, join the legions of girls waiting eagerly in line for the crack of that palm. I want a normal life, a dog, breakfast over the
New York Times,
bills, mortgage, 9 to 5. Cooking for my man. Once a year, two-week vacation to some cheap resort. Sitting down at the laptop to write my book, my screenplay, my novel. Not hellfire and damnation.

I think of Jolie, nice but stupid (
oh
so stupid), and I see myself reflected in the empty pools of her eyes. Maybe the slap has already come, it’s too late, the air I breathe—thick with pheromones—has already distorted me into a caricature of who I was, like Jolie, like Bambi. I used to look at Eton when he slept, and it was the only time I saw him stop frowning, drop that perpetual shield he has against the decay, permanently dodging the slap. It hasn’t gotten him. But me?

After last night, I know the stinging mark of the hand, the imprint of the fingers, the rising welts on my smooth skin, are already discernible.

 

The next day I wake at midday. I ignore the missed calls on my cellphone. I crawl into my workout clothes—a huge hooded top, sweatpants, scarf, hat. I walk five blocks to the gym; pull the scarf a little tighter against the fading scratches on the right side of the face, the yellowing bruise at the corner of the eye. I find a new strength in my body released from its usual hungover shackles. Exercise until my muscles ache, thighs taut and screaming; face pink, wet with sweat. Lungs vacated of stale nicotine breath, I can no longer hear the insistent murmurs of a vivid memory, an insidious shame from that night. Blissfully numb in the sharp smack of the wind on Broadway; thread my way back to the apartment through tourists clutching bags from Macy’s. In the apartment I shower for a long time, check the mirror—bruises still there, but fading. Towel myself dry, and note that my body still looks young, unblemished, seductive, even. I remember, distantly, that I have to write an article for a magazine in England eager for the lurid tales of the ecdysiast. I boil water, make tea. The rent’s due, a note from my roommates. Electricity, utilities. Have to work tonight to cover them. I pick up my coat and head out of the apartment for coffee, to stock up on fake eyelashes, L’Oréal tanning gel. I dial voice-mail as I wait for the elevator.