Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America (11 page)

Rachel and I both nod our heads.

"Do you have identification?"

We nod again.

Mick motions for the guy in the change booth to buzz the door and shepherds us through.

"Okay, come with me and we'll get those copied."

As Rachel and I follow Mick up to a messy, dust-filled office, he talks over his shoulder.

"We don't pay anything but you keep all your tips. The work is pretty easy. You don't have to touch the guy's joint or nothing." He emphasizes the word joint as if to imply that he understands that penises are gross and that nobody in their right mind would want to touch one.

He leads us back to the main floor, then down a flight of stairs to the basement where the disco music is coming from. Everything pops and flashes—a huge neon sign of a winking naked woman sitting spread-legged, electric labia to the wind, with tits that blink to mimic swaying back and forth, giant rotating quarters hung from the ceiling, mannequins in filmy lingerie perched up high, surveying the scene below with blank gazes, and everywhere the sound of tokens—jingling in pockets, dropping into slots, flooding jackpot-style into twenty-gallon buckets as a short, gruff-looking red-haired man empties the coin boxes in the booths.

Our booth is four feet square, red, with a window covered by a yellow plastic screen in the middle, about the size of a full-length mirror. Next to the window are a phone and a small slot, just big enough to slide money through. There is a black vinyl-upholstered bar stool with a high back outside the door, where I sit in my funny lingerie, while Rachel, now stripped down to a black thrift-store merry widow that strains to cover her Russian peasant voluptuousness, stands next to me, trying to entice a man our way. "Would you like a show, sir? Double trouble, twice the fun!" I am grateful to be with her, this expert pitchwoman. My friend.

I hear the
chink
of tokens being dropped in a slot and the yellow screen slides up. Our first customer, a bearded, crazy professor-looking guy with curly black hair and Coke-bottle glasses, the
Times
tucked under his arm, is staring right at us, plainly visible through the Plexiglas pane.

"Hey! I thought you said these places used one-way glass!" I hiss at Rachel under my breath, panic escalating.
"How was I supposed to know this place doesn't?"

"Ew! If I have to see these guys, I don't want to do it!" I start to reach for my street clothes, which are piled in the corner.

"Oh, come on! I'll stay with you the whole time. How bad can it be?" Rachel has a vested interest in seeing this work—she wants to quit the boutique.

The man knocks on the window with the handset and motions to say, "Hey, what about me?"

Rachel picks up the phone on our side of the booth and introduces us to him by our stage names. She picked Gypsy, because she likes to travel, and I chose Polly, as in Poly Styrene, the singer from X-Ray Spex. "What would you like to see, sir?" she asks him, voice dripping with saccharine.

"I, uh, would like to see you, uh, together."

The yellow partition slides down. The sound of more tokens in the slot. The window opens again.

"Well, baby, we can do whatever you like, but you have to be sweet to the slot." Rachel wheezes lustily, pointing to the opening in the wall.

For every increment of flesh the man requests—my top off, her top off, my stockings, her shoes—Rachel just keeps tapping the slot.

By the time Rachel and I get out of the booth two hours and five customers later, we have 120 dollars to split. I can't believe it. Sixty dollars. I'm rich!

Instead of turning to the peep show I could have gone back to New Jersey, but in my view, returning home would have been tantamount to failure and I couldn't have that In the way that fear cleverly masquerades as pride, I convince myself that working at Peepland is the best thing for me. I can handle it Besides, it's only for a few weeks. Then I'll find something else.

I know the threshold I have crossed, that I have entered a dangerous and possibly damaging world. This is not cosmetic defiance like being a hardcore kid; a very serious taboo has been broken, and there is no turning back. This is scary, but in a small, sleazy way, it's exciting, too. I never would have thought that I'd do something like this, but now that I have, I am full of my own daring. I feel more in control of my life than I have in months.

In my journal that night I write with a flourish of neophyte brio, "I am working this business, it's not working me," not yet knowing that in this business
everyone
gets worked, at least a little bit.

The floor manager at Peepland is named Rita, a pale, thin woman with minuscule pupils and ropy tendons bulging from her forearms and neck. She always has a Newport dangling from her lip and calls everyone "baby." Rita put me on my guard, with her stringy brown ponytail and utterly transparent supply-side nurturing. She always had some wobbly, rash-ridden girl tucked next to her, calling her "Mom." Then she and the general manager, Lennie, a dead-eyed white guy with a gray Jheri curl, disappear one fine day. Nobody knows where they went, but then, nobody cares. I certainly don't. Rita didn't like me very much, either, because one day I caught her on the way to the bathroom with a syringe tucked behind her ear like a pencil. She never said anything to me about it, but I am just as glad to have her gone.

Rita gives way to Lisi, a chunky Italian lady with thick ash-blonde highlights and boggy black roots who constantly powders her feet, leaving white talcum footprints all over backstage. Lisi plays sugar mommy to Jody, a tall, skinny, hideously plain girl. Lisi is always prattling on about how gorgeous and thin Jody is, and how she's going to get her portfolio done and make Jody a famous model. We all roll our eyes at one another because everybody knows damn well that Jody ain't gonna be no model. But we keep our mouths shut—you don't want to get on the wrong side of Lisi.

And Lisi gives way to K.D., a stylish, high-yellow shrike with a weave so big you could pack a lunch in it. K.D., short for Kandine, makes no bones about playing favorites, going so far as to draw unflattering caricatures of women she doesn't like and hanging them on the dressing room wall. Broad-beamed women with orangutan faces, emaciated women covered in tattoos, women with mouthfuls of gold teeth. Ugliness is the ultimate sin in K.D.'s book, and those who deign to fall short of her standards are quick to feel her wrath.

You have to kiss ass with the managers, no matter what you really think of them, because they control the schedule. If a lot of girls want to work, who gets sent home is up to the manager's discretion. That means being told to come back another day, usually one nobody wants because it's slow.

Friday nights are unpopular. The money is great, but the girls either want to be home with their families or out partying. I like Fridays, though, because Mick buys everyone dinner. The bouncers come down to the basement, their hairy, gorilla-thick arms laden with boxes from Pizza King up the street, or Mick hires a kindly old guy to set up a buffet in the office and he fixes plates of sandwiches and pasta salad that we eat in the dressing room. I sit on the bench eating my turkey sandwich, watching the girls from the day shift get dressed up to go out. I admire how assured and sophisticated they are, done up with their gold—fingernails, name plate necklaces, bamboo earrings, bracelets, rings, and nugget watches, and their smart denim outfits and Fendi bags. They count their money, laughing and joking among themselves. To them, Peepland is just a means to an end, and the men milling around out there are fools. Their fools.

I am young, but I am far from the youngest girl working at Peepland. Some of the girls told me they had started there when they were thirteen. Depressing, for sure, but if you're on your own, where else would you go? "Back home" isn't an option. Some of the young ones are too rough to get close to, like Sophie, a skinny-ass white girl whose preferred form of greeting is a half-joking roundhouse kick aimed at your head, but most of them are eager to make a new friend, or at least have someone their age to talk to. I like Siobhan a lot, despite the fact that she is a compulsive liar. One day she'll claim she is a Brooklyn Jew and lives out on Ocean Parkway, even though she has a pronounced Southern accent. The next day she'll go on about how she is a dancer and is going to audition for work on a cruise ship, although you can see she is bow-legged and can barely walk straight, let alone dance. She attempts a pirouette, bungles it completely, then changes the subject. One of the few true beauties in our midst, with black hair, pale skin, small buds for breasts and a thick lower body, she'd look at herself in the mirror and crow, "I got juicy thighs, and a juicy ass!" Somebody else must've been taken with her great looks, too, because she wears a full-length black mink to work every day.

"What, are you kidding?" Laureen says to me when I present Siobhan's Brooklyn story as we share a Newport backstage. Laureen, my age, is five months pregnant with twins, and she still has braces on her teeth. "There's no way Siobhan's living in Brooklyn. She stays in the same hotel I do." One of the fleabag affairs down the street where for fifty dollars a night you could rent a room with graffiti-marked furniture, ashtrays spilling over with empty crack vials, and shit smeared on the walls.

It's no great achievement to get hired at Peepland—all you need is lingerie and a pulse. There are chunky girls, skinny girls, downright fat girls. Girls with saggy tits, small tits, freakishly large tits, surgically mangled tits. Cellulite, scars, stretch marks, bad tattoos. Girls who are quite stunning and some who are, charitably put, unconventionally pretty. They come from everywhere—Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, West Indies, New Zealand, Russia, France, England, Eastern Europe, and all parts of the United States. Some come for a day or two, others have been there for years.

With so many women coming and going, I am only able to remember them in small sketches. Ginger, with her gentle face kissed by freckles and her fine, red Andrew Wyeth hair tucked behind her ears. Every day she sits in the dressing room reading
The Wall Street Journal
, with her perfect teacher's pet posture. I couldn't imagine what brought her to Peepland, then Rachel told me she'd confided that a boyfriend left her after he'd gotten her pregnant. She had the abortion and vowed that if men were going to treat her poorly, she was at least going to get paid for it.

Patsy, a loud but very kind, long-haired Irish Bronx girl, discussing her upcoming Easter dinner and complaining loudly about her mother because, unlike Patsy, she uses frozen broccoli, not fresh, in her broccoli-and-cheese casserole.

Beautiful Marisol, with a short, bouncing ponytail and a light coat of brown fur all over her legs. She'd baby oil herself—fur and all—to a light, supple sheen and rake in tons of money. A rapper who was quite popular at the time used to come in looking for her, popping his neck and yelling over the music, "Where da hairy one at? Where da hairy one at?"

The women I get to know are aspiring models and actresses, single moms, illegal immigrants, druggies, rocker chicks, runaways, party girls, artists, secretaries, and security guards who drop in on weekends for extra cash, hookers who want a break from the streets, world travelers who want to finance their next adventure. Some women I only know by sight, as they clack by on their cheap heels on their way into the toilet stalls to smoke crack, the burning plastic smell filling the dressing room.

For the year I spend working there, Peepland is the most stable thing in my life. When all else fails, I can put on my sunglasses, hide my hair under a scarf, and take the train to Times Square. By dropping down into the rank, tacky basement, I am transformed. Instead of being this gaseous ball of potential, I'm an elemental force of nature, navigating the world by my own body, by a very simple set of instincts. Me, but not quite me. Anesthetized. Shrewder. Better.

There is nothing about working at Peepland that I find erotic—such as I know from erotic at my age. I'm no innocent, but I just can't understand the attraction of such a place, it's so filthy and pathetic. I know why the women are here: Money. We need the money for kids, clothes, trips, dreams, drugs, the time to build a life or something resembling one. We'll overlook the scuzz to get the job done. But what's the draw for the men? I'm mystified—I squint at them contemptuously and try to puzzle it out. Sometimes, if the tips aren't coming fast enough, I corner them: "What are you doing here?" "Is that a wedding ring? Why aren't you home with your wife?" When I'm not paving over foreboding with pimpy swagger, I wonder how I got here, how I fell so far so fast. I know there's a purpose here—this dip downward will fund my climb up, but this is not what I had planned. Not at all.

To live so close to the edge is terrifying in some ways, but curiously relaxing in others. I'm sort of glad to have a reprieve from rabid self-actualization. Nothing I do at Peepland counts toward anything, I'm just making money and marking time. While other people my age are taking calculated steps toward building a future, I am in manic free fall. They are safe and predictable, I gloat inwardly, while I am authentic and fierce.

I really don't know what the hell I am doing.

I take a drama class here, a voice lesson there, enough to keep up my cover. Out of a sense of duty, I still go to auditions but I care about acting less and less. I fear what people will think of me if they discover where I am working—shit, I know what a job like this means—but I also know that Times Square is a world apart from the East Village, and light-years away from New Jersey. If I don't tell anybody, nobody will find out. Peepland is a complete non sequitur to my "real" life, my own secret vice.

I don't have a career, a plan, or a goal. But I have my rage and I cling to it. I'm no longer mad at anything in particular, but I hang on to the feeling out of habit, as anger has kept the pieces of me together for so long.

Because I am a bitter little shit, the brutality and coarseness of Peepland suit me perfectly. Had I attempted stripping in one of the down-at-the-mouth topless bars where other East Village girls danced—Billy's Topless in Chelsea, the Baby Doll Lounge down by Canal Street—I would have exploded. I am not ready to withstand scrutiny or the demands of polite conversation. I'm better off where all the clientele wants is to grunt, gape, and paw.