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

that has to prove that the job has been openly advertised as vacant for over eighteen months and cannot be filled by a U.S. citizen, but they will need to apply for next year now. The deadline is in April, and the processing takes six months, or you can get the other visa for people like you . . .” It was a Rubik’s Cube of language, even for me, in my language, with my people. No wonder there’s so many Fernandos in this country I marvel wonderingly and gaze out the building at what I later learn to be the Chrysler Building. The lawyer’s tone changes, softens slightly. “Really, the best option is for you to gain employment with, perhaps, an English company based in New York and get paid in pounds. There are special visas for this. You’re a writer, you say? There’s a visa called an ‘I visa’ for foreign media workers. But it won’t let you work for an American company, even freelance, and to be honest, I can’t tell you the chances of getting a job as a U.S.-based correspondent, but I’ve heard from clients it’s pretty difficult—it’s not something you walk into. Other than that, if you could prove that you excel in your field of the arts, perhaps with a publishing contract, then you could get a J visa, which will put you on the path to permanent residency . . .” Prove your worth and we’ll take you. Permanent residency—that was the green card, the green go, the Yes, we’ll take you, no more filing for dumb work visas and fucking around with Immigration. Stay a bit longer, pledge allegiance, and we’ll even let you be a citizen, the genuine article. Such a long, long path. I was beginning to realize I should perhaps go home. Back to England. I leave and go to work at the restaurant. Later at about one A.M. I take the J train back to Brooklyn, walk home to the loft apartment in the snow, stay up until dawn writing and worrying. I shiver when I think of the apartment in Queens. I want to call home but I don’t. It’s not in my nature. I wasn’t brought up like that. I do things on my own, always. Before I hit the street there would be someone, something, some job, some bed. I sell a piece to a newspaper a few days later and the money helps. But no one wants to employ me, not even the English companies, and the money from waitressing is just not enough.
     
    “I’m livin’ in a cardboard box for a week. People are really dig-gin’ this shit at the moment, the limitations of mental space represented by physical boundaries . . .”
    I sit with Raoul in the kitchen, sipping lemon zinger tea and listening politely to his latest performance-art piece.
    “How will you take a crap?” asks one of the musicians aimlessly, emerging from the bathroom and disappearing swiftly into the makeshift recording studio at the back of the loft.
    “Fuck you hipster,” says Raoul.
    The apartment did not have natural light; if we had been able to siphon that off too, from the Hasids downstairs, doubtless we would. Instead we subsist on a diet of eerie gloom filtered through candy bar wrappers clogging the infrequent skylights. Like plants deprived of chlorophyll, we start to curl up in that apartment, grow yellow and turgid and soft. There’s a sense of unease like a dissatisfied sigh, an unarticulated desire, ambitions starved of talent, egos deprived of audiences. “How’s your writing coming along?” demands Raoul inscrutably, and I can’t tell if he’s seriously interested or not. “Finding working in the restaurant with them Mexicans is giving you divine inspiration?” He smiles blankly, a little cruelly, and there’s a baffled silence. I don’t tell him about the article I’ve written about immigration. It seems prudent not to, for Raoul scares me with his flashes of temper, his volatile personality, his attention to me that seems, in turns, almost resentful. He was the only one in the apartment who talked to me. “Those hips,” he’d growl, and look at me unpleasantly, and I’d look away and