Table of Contents
When we go it alone, when we deny our interconnectedness, and miss the opportunity to mean something important to each other, we throw away the chance for real satisfaction and real beauty.
Tom Sheibley, 1955-2004
This is a book of memories. Everything in it happened. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
ACT ONE
INTRODUCTION
THE TOKYO BUSINESSMAN
Im a bit behind in the rent. It is the fifth of the month, and Im short $175. Ive been playing this game with my landlord, tiptoeing around during the day so that she wont hear me and come up to collect the envelope. The envelope is not ready yet.
The men have been coming into the peep show as usual, but they just havent been picking me. Sometimes they dont. Some girls claim that men are drawn to them when theyre ovulating, constantly picking them out of the lineup. Maybe Im not ovulating.
Its about halfway through a Saturday-night shift when I leave my booth to go upstairs for a break. Suddenly, I see a Japanese man in a gray suit headed my way. I stop and slowly start walking backward, back to my booth. I just have a feeling about him.
Japanese customers are my favorite: They seldom make eye contact, and they rarely speak. They dont ask my name or age or say that I am so beautiful, and that they could make me feel so good, if, you know, I went out with them sometime? They dont plead.
They like white girls, and I am white, which means very often they will like me, and give me money, which makes me like them. They put their faces close to the glass and squint and say nothing. They understand the transactional nature of the experience. It might have something to do with Zen Buddhism. The two are very similar, although many others confuse the peep show with a church, with the two-sided booth as a stand-in for a confessional and me for the priest.
The Japanese man comes up to me, as I knew he would. I explain the cost to him and he doesnt understand: Type it! he asks, confused, holding out his palm. This is an Asian custom, I have learned; they trace out numbers or letters onto palms when failing to understand a dialect or language. I move to write the number 35, the price of a show, onto his palm, but stop when I see Ahmed, the security and change man, shaking his head at me: The girls are not allowed to touch the customers. It is the number one rule.
There must never be contact.
It must also be a custom in Japan to tip exotic dancers throughout the course of their performance, even if they are behind glass instead of on a stage. Theyre the only ones Ive ever seen do it in the peep show: dropping dollars or fives through the slot every time I do something different, or smile, or turn around. They nod quickly, as if they understand something, something important I am saying without words.
Thats what this man does, except instead of dollars, he uses twenties and fifties. During the five minutes I perform, if you could even call it that, a steady stream of bills drops through the crudely sawedout money slot and piles up on the floor. The Japanese businessman says nothing and makes no eye contact, focusing his gaze intently on the area above my knees but below my neck. He watches carefully, as if he is trying to figure something out.
He keeps his hands folded in his lap, eyes scanning my body as if he will be tested after the show. I imagine the porters interrogating him behind the booths, leaning on their mops, cigarettes dangling from their mouths: And did she have any scars or unusual marks? they would ask.
What about tattoos?
The money is still coming through the slot, piling up on the floor. I had heard about thisnights like this, customers like thisbut always dismissed them as legend. And then he gave me $400, a girl would say in the dressing room. For no reason! I never believed them. Now I know these girls are telling the truth.
What impresses me the most about all the money on the floor is its senselessness, its arbitrariness. The Japanese businessman says nothing, studiously avoiding eye contact. When the show is over and the curtain closes, I hear him quietly collecting his briefcase and jacket and leaving. It doesnt make any sense at all.
I take a cab all the way back to Brooklyn that night. I put some of the money in the envelope when I get home at one in the morning. I dont have to tiptoe around anymore.
I surrendered to the world of Times Square.
John Rechy, City of Night
HOW I GOT HERE
The first time I ever came to New York, I ended up on the front page of The Times. I was twenty-one. There I was, above the fold and in color, standing behind a middle-aged woman holding an American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. We were protesting, my college friends and I and thousands of others, in front of the Waldorf-Astoria, where the World Economic Forum was being held that year. You couldnt see my face, obscured by my hair, but it was me; I was there.
It was midnight, and Id been walking with my friends to a party on a boat in Chelsea. I stopped into a bodega to see if that Sundays early edition was out yet and to see if news of the protest had made the front page.
I pointed frantically at my image to the Indian woman in a sari behind the counter.
Three dollars, she said.
I clutched the bulky Sunday paper in both hands and skipped out onto the sidewalk, holding it up victoriously for my friends to see. There was Patrick, the nerdy folk musician, who had wrapped himself in a blanket, and Hope, the spacey sociology grad student. There was Meredith.... Actually, I didnt know any of them that well. They werent my friends at all, really, just acquaintances at best. Id joined their caravan because I wanted to protest that months injustice, sure, but mostly because I wanted to visit New York.
What up, baby girl! boomed a small black manan Eighth Avenue hustler typewho snuck up behind me while I was sitting outside my closet-size booth at the peep show, startling me so badly that I yelped and jumped out of my chair.
Smoke dope? he hissed.
What?
Do you get high?
I... no. Do you want a live show?
Yeah, but Im tryin not to spend all my money. You want some dope? I can give you that. Weed, he elaborated.
I need to get paid in real money, I told him.
All night, men came in off the street and told me things. They were usually alone. They dropped their pants and masturbated behind glass windows. They shamelessly bargained and asked us if we did sex.
Two hundred dollars, theyd repeat over and over in foreign accents, unblinking, until I laughed or sighed or tried not to scream.
A bored Southern salesman chewed a toothpick while watching me. A sloppily dressed schoolteacher from Westchester passed a note through the slot reading WEAR THE FLOWERED SCHOOLGIRL PANTIE$!! They stooped and genuflected to put money through the slot sawed into the red-painted booth. We told the men the show was five minutes long, but the curtain went down after three and a half.
Sometimes, one of them might enter his side of the booth and cry. I was not equipped to handle all of this heaviness. It was better to think of myself as a channel: letting people and their stories flow through me, releasing them back out into the world.
