Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City by Ruth Fowler Read Free Book Online

difficult, amigo. ”
    I walk in and it goes silent, embarrassed, because they are different, they know that, and even if I am working in the same place as them, I’m white, and they know enough to be quiet when they see my skin. Their interactions are probably limited to other Mexicans—or the occasional “Fuck you, asshole” from a snarling and disdainful princesa as she walks along the street repulsed by the hiss, the longing “Mama cita ”—the confusion as to why it’s so hard to meet these Americans, even the Hispanics are too American now, all too American for Mexicans who don’t speak English and live six to a room and can’t even get employment at Taco Bell now that the government is cracking down on illegals.
     
    10˚38’N 61˚31’W Trinidad was our second port after we sailed the Atlantic, after I’d been baptized Mimi. There our crew applied for a visa, because for some reason the U.S. would not let you into the country by sea without a visa, even if you were from the “special” countries—the ones they liked, the ones whose citizens seep seamlessly into American life and pump the economy full of funds and companies and investments and white people and bad sitcoms. There was a visa for everyone coming to the States, the Captain whispered to me: a visa for tourists from Third World countries, a visa for anyone who enters the country by sea, a visa for someone who comes into the country merely for business meetings, a visa for studying at college—a visa, even, for women who have been sex trafficked into the country. The guilt visa, that one is. The visa everyone wanted was the H-1B, the “green card” leading to permanent residency and then citizenship. But knowing the chances of gaining that were futile, everyone went for the next best thing, something that would merely let them enter the U.S., just let them in. We stood in line, me and the Captain. They sent me back because the picture wasn’t right, a gray background, not a white, and I stood in the heat outside the embassy, clouds pressing on my temples, squeezing, until a Rasta sidled over and took me to the store to get it done correctly. There they would also print out the papers for you, the references on headed letters, the bank statements, the assurances neatly packaged in specious bureaucracy, fallacies, hopes as insubstantial as cotton candy, sickly and full of air. I went back and queued under fluorescent lighting, among blue plastic chairs, and the Captain and I were the only white people in there, and everyone else had on their best clothes and their best hopes fading quickly under the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of the ceiling fans and the sweat pooling under armpits, the heat intensifying like the disappointment, and we needed the visa, but it wasn’t the kind of need they had, and when we came away from the window with the nod of approval we knew we would get, we felt ashamed and left quickly before we could witness the clipping of the wings, the ritual of rejection and rawness.

    Benji blusters back in, looking slightly blue and frostbitten, a crazed, paranoid look frozen onto his enormous features.
    “The bells. I hear the bells. Can you not hear them?”
     
    I go to see an immigration lawyer not long after arriving in Manhattan, a name passed on in e-mails to desperate Brits like me. Try this woman, she got me my permanent residency, that one sucked, don’t use him, you want cheap and smart, hmm, hear that one lost Dave his appeal against deportation. First visit free, options placed on the table, white, educated, employable? Take your pick!
    She traces my future with enthusiastic semaphore, a tiny white skeletal hand in an oversized jacket, a gray cubicle in a Midtown office. Tarot cards drawn in the air: She plucks one, another, another. They all say the same thing, a simple image cloaked in the pompous frivolities of legal language: “An H-1B, also known as a working or sponsorship visa, requires sponsorship by a company