ONE
Some people have nightmares about showing up to work naked.
In my nightmares, what I am wearing is irrelevant.
A sweet dream is one in which I am blissfully unaware of my body.
Through the flimsy silk of a dream, maybe one of those sweet ones, I feel the harsh winter wind blowing on my face.
Cold air steals into the room through the window next to my bed. I turn over and pull the covers tighter, making a cocoon around my body. I vainly attempt to hold onto the color and hope of the dream, which is disappearing. Then the bedroom door swings open. The cat jumps up onto my pillow. And she steps on my head.
“Damn it!” I push the cat off the bed so fast that her feet slide across the floor when she lands. “Fuckin’ stupid cat! Barry!”
He appears in the doorway, an impossibly skinny, six-foot-two, slouching mess of a man in his late thirties. He grins at me around the Marlboro in his mouth.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
Barry is the only person I know who smokes more than I do. He can go through three packs a day with ease. When he’s not smoking, he’s coughing a dangerous sounding, hacking death rattle.
“Like what?” he wants to know. “How am I looking at you?”
“Like you think something’s funny.”
Barry rolls his eyes. But he stops smiling.
“Can’t you put out that cigarette?” I continue irritably. “It’s like a gas chamber in here.”
My living room curtains were cream-colored when I bought them. They’re brown now, stained with nicotine, courtesy of Barry. There’s always a cloud of smoke hanging in the apartment. A former junkie, Barry is missing many of his teeth. The ones he’s got left are as brown as the curtains, rotting away.
Barry is my on-again, off-again boyfriend. It’s complicated.
“What do you want, Princess?” he asks me. He’s dramatic for no good reason, using pet names that he knows I hate.
He sleeps on the couch in the living room. We don’t have sex. Okay, maybe once in a blue moon we will, if I’m drunk enough. But it’s always terrible. That doesn’t stop him from being possessive, of course.
I frown. “See if you can guess,” I say, indicating the cat. She’s now curled up at the edge of the bed, indifferent to us.
Barry is seventeen years older than I am. He doesn’t work and he rarely bathes. Our fights are legendary – our friends used to refer to us as “Sid and Nancy.” I let him live here because without me, he would be homeless. But also because he’s the only person who bothers to understand me.
He shrugs in the cat’s direction. “So what?” he wants to know.
We cope with each other – our common ground is a pervasive feeling of being misplaced in the world.
We are two unlucky strays who happened to find each other.
We are loyal to each other the way cancer is loyal, and eventually destroys.
“Why’d you let the fuckin’ cat in?” I demand.
“Because it’s five o’clock, love of my life,” Barry tells me sarcastically. “Time to get up.”
He turns and starts back down the long hallway.
My one-bedroom, pre-war Queens apartment probably used to be a railroad flat before the greedy bastards who own the building split it down the middle to build another apartment next door. My bedroom is large and grand, but I only have half a kitchen. I share a fire escape with the neighbors, who avoid me as well as they can.
The hardwood floors are cold today. We don’t get enough heat. Any heat that does come in leaks right back out through windows that were poorly installed. Or it clings to the high ceilings. My teeth chatter. The radiator hisses. It’s like a tease. I want to yank the covers back over my head just to stay warm.
“Barry!” I yell down the hall after him.
I always wake up in a vile mood.
“What?”
“Make me a hamburger.”
I light up a Marlboro of my own, inhaling deeply, and I close the window. No wonder it was so cold in here. I look outside briefly. It’s nearly dark out there.
I missed the whole day again. I have to be at work in three hours.
While I smoke, I’m mentally crossing off all of the things I need to do, and all of the things I could have done instead of sleeping all day.
I don’t have a lot of time to spare. It takes a while to get ready. The shower and the shaving, the makeup and the blow-drying. The subway. If I’m out on the floor even one minute after eight, I’ll owe the club fifty bucks. They’ll take it from whatever I make tonight. The girls pay fines for any number of small infractions, and late fees are at the top of the list.
“Shit,” I say out loud. I’m still tired.
My body aches, especially my poor, sore knees. My stiff ankles click as I put my feet on the floor, recoiling from how cold the wood is. I drag my body into the bathroom. I feel about eighty years old.
Barry materializes in the hallway again. “Your burger’s on,” he announces.
“You’re not watching it? You’re gonna burn it again,” I complain.
He pretends not to hear me, and stays right where he is, watching me brush my teeth. “How much money did you make yesterday?”
He may as well just go ahead and stick out his hand.
“Jesus, Barry. You need to ask me that right now?”
“Had a good night, didn’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
His eyes pierce into mine. “You came home wasted.”
I spit toothpaste into the sink and return his glare. “Well, I don’t remember last night.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s how I know you made money.”
He turns and walks away again. He misses seeing me flip him off.
It takes a few minutes for the water to warm up in the shower. I stand just outside the bathtub, waiting, sticking my hand under the nozzle every few seconds. I reek – I can smell my own armpits, as well as last night’s alcohol creeping out through my pores.
I laugh bitterly as I climb into the shower. I wish some of these men could know what it’s really like to see us naked. Real, like this… shivering, stinking, before all of the elaborate preparation. Before we slip into our costumes, we wake up human, the same way they do – with fuzz on our teeth and oil on our skin.
They know nothing about what we really are. They only think they see us naked.
After my shower, I comb my hair and slowly blow it dry. I apply heavy makeup to change the shapes and shadows of my face until the person in the mirror looks airbrushed. Most of the girls do their makeup in the dressing room. Not me. I put my face on at home to avoid spending any more time at the club than is absolutely necessary.
I dress in men’s jeans and two thermal shirts, layered one on top of the other. The outfit hides my curves. I appear shapeless. Then I toss three skimpy gowns, a thong, and a pair of stilettos into my knapsack. These are my costumes tonight.
Barry has left my plate cooling on the coffee table. I gobble the charred burger greedily. This is the only meal I’ll have for the next twelve hours. The other girls take breaks and send the bus boy for take-out. But I skip meals. I like to work straight through the shift, so that I save every dollar I possibly can.
Barry is staring catatonically at the TV flickering in front of us, waiting for me to finish eating so that he can smoke his umpteenth cigarette. We don’t speak to each other while I eat.
I wind a scarf around my neck, and put on gloves but no hat – I don’t want to mess up my hair. I catch a glimpse of myself in the window before I leave. In these clothes, no one would ever guess.
“This place is beyond disgusting,” I tell Barry. “I want you to clean it tonight.”
He waves me away without bothering to look up from the TV screen. “I will. Now get out of here already. You’re gonna be late.”
“What do you care?” I murmur as I leave the apartment.
I walk down three flights of stairs and past the mailbox. I decide that I’ll check my mail later. Then I trudge through the lobby, and open my building’s front door onto the swishing wind to head out into the cold night.
The subway car finally pulls up to the elevated platform. I swear… it must be twenty minutes that I’ve been standing here, my breath visible in the air as it streams from my nostrils.
My cheeks are frozen and my eyes tear. I’m hoping that my mascara stays on. I’ve got to buy a car soon. The club has a deal with a parking lot next door. It’ll wind up costing me less than taking a cab home every night.
A bunch of regular cabbies hang out in front of the strip club at closing time. They’re nice guys. But they expect a twenty or thirty dollar tip from us on top of the fare, just because we’re dancers.
There are cabbies with so much personality that on a good night, it’s worth it. Gordon, with his outspoken opinions filtered through a mechanical voice box, is everyone’s favorite. It’s like listening to a small child say a dirty word whenever he presses his finger to his throat and makes fun of the customers in that robotic voice.
I board the train, which jerks violently before leaving the station. I fall rather than sit down into a seat.
A guy about my age is sprawled in the seat directly across the aisle from me. His legs are open like he’s straddling a horse. He looks right at me and smiles a little bit. He must have seen me lose my balance.
“What?” I ask him abruptly.
He shrugs and looks away.
I stare blankly at the MTA ads. Every so often I glance around and inspect the other riders. There aren’t a lot of them. They’re spread throughout the car.
A couple of Asian guys with identical headphones lean against the doors, opposite each other. They’re dressed almost exactly the same.
An older black man with dreadlocks is taking up two seats, reading the Daily News. He turns the pages angrily, at one point putting his fist into the section he’s reading. Finally he crushes the newspaper into a ball and throws it on the floor. Then he folds his arms over his chest and stares straight ahead. “Giuliani! Da blood clot,” he grunts. I look away from him. He’s obviously crazy.
A young Hispanic woman with two unruly tots clucks sternly at the boy, who has just pulled his little sister’s hair. The boy’s arms go slack at his sides. But a minute later, he’s giggling and yanking on her ponytail again. The girl climbs over her mother’s lap, out of her brother’s reach, and sticks her tongue out at him.
No one sits close enough to anyone else to hold a conversation. We do our duty as New Yorkers, and ignore each other accordingly.
It’s a weeknight. Not many people go in my direction at this time of the evening. It’s a quiet, reflective time to ride. Most commuters frenzy out of Manhattan and into Queens at about five-fifteen. By seven-thirty, the trains are nearly empty. People are home having dinner with their families. Their workdays are over. Mine is just beginning.
The train rattles along. My gaze wanders to the window across the aisle.
I am seeing my own reflection, a ghostly presence superimposed on the cityscape by a trick of the light. My makeup looks okay in the shadows. I could be beautiful at certain angles, with no visible imperfections, and also if I look away quickly enough. A snapshot in time, like the moments I create for my customers, is the best I can do for myself as well. If I stare too long, I see things I don’t want to see.
As the subway enters the tunnel at Queensboro Plaza, the inside door opens loudly. A small, scruffy Mexican fellow walks through the car. He drops little cards on every seat and on people’s laps. I pick mine up idly. It’s a poorly printed sign language alphabet card. I turn it over and read it.
“I Am Deaf.”
I put the card back down on the seat. The man will make another round and collect money from a few people. The rest of the passengers will shrink from the thing and pretend they haven’t noticed it until the peddler snatches it back.
I’ve seen this man before. Tonight I don’t have any money. I also heard recently that the cops raided a house in Queens, and they found sixty-two deaf Mexicans living there. The Mexicans were enslaved, forced to panhandle on the trains. They were locked down at night like cattle. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here, but am I really helping these people by giving them my hard-earned cash?
I work for tips, and I know how the poor bastard feels. He’s a regular on this subway line. There’s him, there’s the blind guy with the horrific accordion, and a few little Asian men and women that sell batteries and trinkets. These are the people in my neighborhood. Loyalty to them would be a kind gesture.
But their work also reminds me of my own. In the club, many customers treat me like I’m panhandling.
“Maybe later,” they will tell me. They shake their heads emphatically. Or even worse, they swat me away like I’m a mosquito.
Being treated like I’m sparing for change on a corner makes me furious. To me, that’s the portrait of a pariah. And I resent the implication.
I realize I am scowling at the Mexican as I hand him back his card, so I look down at the floor instead.
I’ve got enough expenses without helping him out, too.
Just going to work – just showing up before I make any money – costs me about fifty bucks a night. The club I work for isn’t a glamorous place. If I worked at a five-star club like The Velvet Rope or The Parlour, I’d pay a two hundred and fifty dollar house fee. Maybe I’d take home a grand. But probably not. Those are giant Mafioso places with a hundred girls on each shift. They all look like porn stars. They are too much competition. It isn’t worth it.
No dancer ever tells the truth about how much she makes, because your dollar value is where you base your self-esteem. And it fluctuates highly from night to night.
To be honest, I typically make between three-fifty and seven hundred. Eight hundred or more marks a special occasion. I’ve never broken a grand in one night yet. But I’d stand on hot coals barefoot before I’d admit that to another dancer.
I’ve also had many of those nights that no one talks about – nights when I’ve made a hundred bucks or less. Nights when I’ve barely made tip-out. Those are the nights you feel sick about how many motherfuckers saw you naked.
You start to tally the number of guys who came into the club but didn’t give you money.
If all the girls complain that they didn’t make money that night, it’s easier.
But if you were the only one, your value sinks like a stone. What you made last night is irrelevant. That money may already be spent. It’s tonight that counts. You must prove your worth tonight by making good, and every night is the same. You start from scratch and you work your way up. If you leave with money, then you can justify your life as a dancer.
When one girl makes money and no one else does, the other girls turn on her like snarling wolves casting one out from the pack. They smirk amongst themselves in the dressing room. They wink at each other knowingly.
A big bankroll becomes a scarlet letter. Because if I didn’t make money tonight and you did, then you must have done something more for that money than I would have, goes the rationale.
Bitches.
Sometimes I blame myself for what is lacking in my life. Sometimes I blame the customers for what I constantly feel reduced to. Sometimes I blame my family – the turbulence and void of understanding in our past certainly hasn’t helped.
Most of the time I blame the whole world. It’s easier than trying to piece together how I got here.
The doors open on my stop, and I pick up my bag, tossing a backward glance at my reflection one more time before I step out of the train.
The steps from the subway station to the sidewalk are caked with ice. Ignoring that, I take them two at a time. At the top of the staircase I skid, and crash right into a fat man.
He scowls at me. “Where’s the fire?”
“Oh, please. Why don’t you look where the fuck you’re going?” I retort.
He walks past me, muttering something that definitely has the word “bitch” in it.
“You better believe it, buddy!” I call to him over my shoulder as he disappears. I grab the railing. That asshole nearly knocked me down the stairs. “People have no goddamned manners,” I hiss under my breath.
As I emerge onto the sidewalk, the wind is brutal. Walking down Lexington Avenue against it is like moving underwater. Pages from yesterday’s newspaper are given momentary life by the heavy gusts. The papers rustle loudly as they land on parked cars. It looks like we’re going to get another storm. I am so tired of winter.
The streets of east midtown Manhattan are quiet. This is a business district, and everything’s shut down for the night. Steam rises from the grates of the cold pavement. It’s pretty like a postcard. But if you get close to those grates, you can smell sewage in the steam’s deceptive clouds. A cab passes, breaking the monotony. Once in awhile a lone man or woman hurries by on foot through the freezing darkness.
I can’t believe I’ve been stripping for a year already.
Last winter, I took a job tending bar at Dames, a strip club in the Irish section of Yonkers. It was a working class place. The girls there were rough broads. They matched their customers, inch for inch. It was sports betting and low-grade neighborhood mobster bookies. It was mailmen, mechanics, bus drivers and bar brawls. It was the same two large Italian bouncers working side by side every night, and they were brothers.
As a bartender, I was able to make a living. But after a few months of watching the dancers pull in five times the money I made, I asked the owner if I could strip there instead. First he laughed. Then he fired me.
So I started working the city circuit. After bouncing around from club to club, I found one where I didn’t have to cover up my tattoos. The rest is history.
The main difference between Dames and Angels, where I work now, is the neighborhood. Working-class Yonkers is depressed and distrustful of everyone, both inside and outside of the bars. Angels is in civilized midtown, near the UN building. Some of our customers are international, cultured world travelers.
We get visiting diplomats, or international fashion buyers. They’re in town to work. They are educated, detached, and even amused. They’ve got real lives and families back home. For them, this is simply a way to kill time.
Some men tell me stories about their own lives. Their words are a glimpse into the knowledge that there’s a much larger world out there than the one I inhabit.
And yet, here they are, stumbling into my world. Not just looking through the glass, either, but climbing into the cages. Attempting to be fully immersed in whatever it is that they think we are for as long as they can stand it.
Something’s missing for them, the way it is for me. That much is clear. Strange as it may seem, we seem to have one thing in common: the vague idea that we’re being cheated out of some vital part of living.
It feels like everyone who participates in our lifestyle is rebelling. Even if they have to find bravery in a bottle or a glassine first.
We damn nine-to-five and straight life with glee. But we’re still looking over our shoulders. Together, we’re a collective eight-year-old child, whispering the word fuck under his breath and giggling. We’re free and irreverent like Gordon the cab driver, who for all I know sees his cabbie persona as minstrelsy, and secretly hates us all.
I walk past a homeless man, lying next to a building. He rolls over on his makeshift bed of steamy sidewalk grate. His newspaper blankets crackle as he resettles them. Then he falls quiet again – invisible. I step carefully around him and pick up my stride.
Are we mired to the roles we have carved for ourselves?
I am twenty years old. Most girls my age are in college. I feel like an alien in contrast. When I come across these chattering, bubbly young people on the subway, I resent them. I reassure myself that I’m living a full life. That I’m out in the real world having the experiences they talk about in philosophy class. But I’m jealous. Their choices are championed by larger society, while my own are spurned. They are budding stars, and I am on my way into the gutter.
I am alive and they are dead. I am dead and they are alive. It’s one or the other, and it can’t be both.
I’d give anything to be a carefree little co-ed with a squeaky-clean boyfriend.
Overall, I feel discouraged. I’ve dropped out of mainstream culture, and it hasn’t noticed my disappearance.
I’m approaching the club now. My shift is about to begin. I walk faster. I’ve got ten minutes to change into costume and be on the main floor before I get fined. I need to hurry.
Vasquez, the one-eyed doorman with the deep scowl, holds the door wordlessly for me as I breeze in. I walk briskly past the bar and down the rickety wooden staircase leading to our basement dressing room. I don’t talk to anyone. I’ll do that after I am dressed, ready, and most of all, in character.
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March 19th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Just came across your novel tonight through a review on WFG and I’m really enjoying this!
March 20th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Nat, that’s great! I’m so glad you like it.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:23 am
Hi Lauri,
Enjoying Sevicing the Pole very much. I’ve recommended it to several friends.
Keep up the great writing.
Brooks
June 5th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Brooks, I’m very glad to hear you like my work. And many thanks for recommending it to your friends. Hope you – and they – continue to enjoy.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
“We are loyal to each other the way cancer is loyal” – brilliant. I know those relationships. Knew. Past tense. Very tense as a matter of fact.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:42 am
August 11th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Hi Lauri. I’m a stripper in NY and very excited to have found another stripper story to read! I’m curious to know when your story is set. Is it recent? I can’t wait to read the rest.
Rachel
August 13th, 2009 at 7:08 am
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for checking out my work. I hope you enjoy it.
Servicing the Pole is set in the late 90′s, just before Giuliani’s cabaret and zoning laws turned everything upside down for Manhattan’s sex industry. Would be interested to hear whether you find any of the club stuff still relevant.
Do you write for $pread? Or have your own blog? Let me know, and I’ll link to you.
Lauri