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

move into my room before he could press up close behind me, as if by chance. “Don’t trust no one in this fucking city,” he had said when I first moved in, gazing out of the skylight above my bed, watching a fresh wave of snow start to fall. His scrotum hung obscenely through the leg of his boxer shorts, I remember, the delicate trace of the raphe, that scar-like fusion line, clearly visible as it snaked, ugly, and gross, between his legs. I had looked away, annoyed. Don’t trust no one. Maybe it had been a warning about himself. We talked, we assumed a semblance of friendship; he often wandered into my room when I was writing and threw himself lackadaisically on my bed with a cigarette in hand. I did not trust him, but I was lonely and wanted to. I smile at Raoul uncertainly, lopsided, and don’t answer his question, instead take a drag of my cigarette, worrying as I did about how to pay the rent, thinking to myself that maybe I should look for a new job and quit the cigarettes, wondering if I could sell another article and then deciding simultaneously that giving up smoking might be a little extreme, even for this situation.
    I’m beginning to feel the change. I had taken the precaution of writing my article under a pseudonym, my nickname, the other me, Mimi, keeping the “real me” far away from the narrative that was unfolding. It was exciting to be someone else. A relief. As if by imagining myself as Mimi, this fictional creature called up in a storm, I would become her, and whatever happened to me in New York was inconsequential, something that couldn’t touch or scar the person wrapped underneath. But now—the now I am writing in, the real now—now I am someone else, always someone else, another-else tagged on to a someone that is assumed for the day, the hour, the man, the mood, so that even if I wanted to reach beneath the layers and rip them off, I doubt that I could. I change it up sometimes. What’s your name? they ask. Mimi, Kitty, Lily, Michelle. Pussy, if I’m feeling perverse. What’s your real name? Diamond, Desire, Escarda, Chanel, Mary, if I’m feeling really perverse. But never my real name. It’s not like we’d cry if we told you. It’s not as if the revelation of our real names, the hint of an identity pre-stripping, brings back technicolor images of weird Uncle Herb, the seductive allure of puppies and kittens, promise not to tell Mommy, a squalid motel room. The telling of the real name, it’s nothing to do with that. You won’t extract it from us like a rotten tooth, crumbled and black, a dark secret suppressed by the embrace of our shame with a cocked glance, a sigh, an erect nipple. Real names. Telling of. It’s just not au fait. It’s just not done. It’s just none of your damned business.
    After a while, the fake names become more real than the real, become indistinguishable from the real. Feeding off truth, the fake overwhelms truth, a monstrous tick grown juicy, plump, resplendent, and terrifying.
     
    I am sitting in a café in the East Village, sipping steaming gray coffee made bearable only by the addition of souring milk, a sprinkling of Sweet ’N Low. I don’t know what it is about New York, but their coffee is disgusting. I have drunk coffee in India, in China, in France, in Italy, in Guatemala—god, even in England the coffee is an improvement upon this tortured extract, bitter and black, a bile, a diarrhea of drinks. But swallowing this is easier, preferable, to cracking open the hard, sugar layer of forgetfulness in which I have concealed these memories in order to make them more palatable. Now I find that sugar coating is frowned upon, and instead “the truth” is preferred. Spit it out, get the narrative flowing, stop all these interruptions, it’s confusing! We want the story! Sod off, it hurts. It feels easier if I do it this way. I was never one for ripping off the Band-Aid.
    Next to me a Bangladeshi is composing a letter to USCIS—the United States