Ruth Fowler - Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City

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PENGUIN BOOKS

GIRL, UNDRESSED

Ruth Fowler was raised in North Wales and graduated from Cambridge University. She has written for The Village Voice, The Observer (London), The Guardian, The New York Post, Wired, and other publications. She currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a journalist and screenwriter.

HUMBERT HUMBERT

THIS WORLD YOULL GLEAN from scraps of words, debris of the past carefully gathered, lovingly preserved in whimsical gauzes of tissue-paper memory torn up and painfully re-created on these pagesthis world wont feature the New York you all know and love, vacuum-packed and delivered to your tastefully decorated abodes via HBO. Itll slip in shockingly few apple martinis at Pravda while eye-fucking the male model at the next table. And therell be a sad lack of shopping expeditions to Bergdorfs to punctuate each chapters end (though not through want of desire). Itll make you reevaluate everything you ever learned about New York, for while Manolos may be featured, theyre certainly not the star attraction, and while there is sex, its not on the third date. Yes, theres at least one millionaire, but his obsession with toilet paper and strip-joints ensures that hes no ones Mr. Bigexcept, perhaps, mine. You see, while I spend quite a few hours frittering away the time with my bourgeois English friends in Marquee, rubbing shoulders with Manhattans A-list crowd, I also hang out with those people you just dont listen to very often: the illegals, the immigrants, the people in low-paid, cash-in-hand jobs.

Im one of them.

IT SOUNDS LIKE an obvious statement when I say that girls dont grow up wanting to be strippers, but youd be surprised. Most peoplecivilians, that isseem to think that even in the cradle we were wrapping ourselves around a greasy pole and grinding our hips to Britney Spears, while our crack-addicted Mothers painted on their faces prior to standing on the corner of the highway trying to pick up new Daddies for us.

No, the truth, the reason why were strippers, is invariably more boring, more grounded in nonexistential needs like moneyand pragmatic concerns, like money. Its all about the quick fix of money, like that hasty illicit cigarette outside when the boss isnt watching, covered up with a gargle of mouthwash. Our mouthwash is our own mantra, repeated over and over in our heads, Its not forever. I think we keep coming back because standing on that stage, posing and preening in the mirror, turning and arching so the light strikes our luminous, smooth skin, is the only time we dont think of things. You knowthings. Guilt things. Hopelessness. Boredom. The fact that Old Venus in the corner always says, Its easy to get into, impossible to get out, nods her head, looks down at her breasts, like two bizarre antennae placed upon a sagging thirty-five-year-old body, and youre thinking, is that me? Does that refer to me? So we dont think. I know I dont. I put every effort into making my movements deliberate, controlled, seductive, self-absorbed... and on the rare occasion I do catch my own eyes in the mirror onstage, I dont even recognize them, encased in pandalike makeup, huge, defiant, ferocious, daring my other self, the self I was before all this, before Mimi, to argue back, to walk offstage, to have the confidence to say, Thats not me anymore, and mean it.

When we get drunk, the regrets come out, the dreams and ambitions cloaked in cheap polyester, stretched taut against skin hidden beneath layers of Mystic Tan. Im a good girl, really I am, sighs one. Im a good Jewish girl. Ill make a good wife. She takes a drag of her cigarette and I think to myself, Im not a good girl. Not really. Not anymore. But I sure as hell would like to be.

I was always the boring, studious, well-behaved child. Quietly ambitious, personality the ghost of good grades, my rebellion was confined to the occasional cussword and a failed drug deal (age sixteen) that resulted in the purchase of dehydrated morels and the contents of a Tetley tea bag. At Cambridge University I was one of a minority of students who attended what was known as a comprehensive schoolgovernment-funded state educationand as part of an even smaller minority from the wilds of North Wales, I was a certified novelty. People noted with amusement my short, accented vowels, and my impressive capacity for gin with respect. Cambridge is flat and barren, set in the bleak Fen District of East Anglia, and the absence of the mountains Id known all my life left me with a hollow feeling, a sense of being exposed, naked in that bitter northeasterly wind that always seemed to blow no matter what the weather. I believed themthe universityin their glossy prospectus that claimed poor kids went there from state schools, and Northerners, and even brown kids. But to be honest, most of the people I made friends with sounded like the Queen, had gone to the same boarding school, and all fucked off to London every weekend to go clubbing and avoid the bad assortment of student DJs mixing drum-and-bass music in seventeenth-century cellars. Pubs. Cambridge has a lot of pubs.

I was one of those types who always wrote for the student newspaper, whose plays were put on in the local theater, who was on every committee, who left with a firstthe UK equivalent of a 4.0, a magna cum laudebecause the token minorities must get firsts or thirds; theres no acceptable in-between for us dilettantes of suffering.

The day after graduation I left the country, driven onward and outward by a fire in my belly, a consumptive hemorrhag ing passion in my soul. Something deep inside was longing to get out, far away, see it all, live, breathe, be different, make a difference, eat to excess, drink to excess, love, fuck, scream, cry, hateto excess. I think I surprised even myself when I didnt sign up at the corporate milkround and get a job with Merrill Lynch, or go to law school, or work for the government, or do any of the things that good Cambridge graduates are meant to do.

I went to Argentina. Got a job as an English teacher in a private school, taught Shakespeare to squat hairy teenage boys sporting masturbatory sneers upon their spotty features. I hated the work, was frankly confused by polo, loved the country, was paid next to nothing. I would take the train from the suburb of Hurlingham, the apex of English expatriate existence, into the center of Buenos Aires every weekend, bypassing the dusty, empty stations whizzing past. In one a llama was tethered to a post, nibbling at the dirt ground, the legend TIERRA DE NADIE scrawled above it across the exterior of what seemed to be a decrepit public convenience. Tierra de NadieNo Mans Land. Land of Nobody. Land of Nothing.

We were all so hyperbolic in those days. We were Cathy from Wuthering Heights, impassioned and annoying and always right, by turns tragic and ecstatic, riding the peaks and scoffing at the troughs of living. A friend from university who lived off espresso and Marlboros, her huge, beautiful eyes bloodshot and yellowed with adrenaline and nicotine, would stare at my sensible well-fed demeanor with incomprehension when Id knock on her door to deliver some essential nutrients. You need to sleep, Sarah, Id murmur, glancing around at the pages of writing littering her floor, the dog-eared books, two smoldering cigarettes upended in a moldy piece of toast. I dont sleep, shed correct me. I cant