by Nina Lemay
We face each other in silence for a few long moments.
“Report me to whoever you want,” I say, trying to be cold but my voice is just tired. “I don’t care. Just leave me alone.” I extricate myself from the strap of the camera bag and put it down on the corner of the table. His gaze travels from the camera back to me.
“I’m sorry, Hannah.”
“Don’t bother.”
“No, I mean it. I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone. I won’t treat you any different from the other students.”
“How generous of you,” I say cuttingly.
“The truth is, I’m not the type of guy who drops hundreds on lap dances, but I bet you hear that a hundred times every night.”
No joke.
“So maybe it’s my… inexperience, so to speak. But yes, I did find you attractive. And maybe I’m crazy but in that moment, it seemed like you thought I was okay too. Maybe I’m even crazier for finding you even more attractive when I met you for the second time, here. Maybe it’s my male brain clouded with hormones and self-delusion.”
I should tell him damn fucking straight, but for some reason I don’t. I just stand there, suddenly aware of how little space separates us.
“But you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t give me the moral right to single you out, bother you and harass you. So I’m going to leave you alone, like you asked.”
He pauses, and I let myself exhale.
“And maybe everything you told me about yourself was fake, and you didn’t let the real you slip through even once—I have no trouble believing that, even though I really don’t want to. Just because I enjoyed the persona doesn’t mean I have any claims on the person underneath.”
I gulp, but there’s not enough air in the room. “Thank you.”
He shrugs. “You should probably go.”
I don’t say anything, I just nod, turn around, and make my way to the door. I pull the handle and it creaks open. I hesitate before taking the final step outside.
“Just don’t forget,” he speaks up. “The assignment is worth fifteen percent and it needs to be handed in by next class at the latest, or you’ll get zero.”
I freeze like someone jammed an electric shocker into the base of my spine. Then I kick the door open and storm out, letting it swing shut behind me. I practically sprint down the hallway, half-hoping to hear hurried steps behind me, to hear his voice calling my name.
Nothing happens.
I want to scream but the elevator is full of people, so I just hold my breath till black and red motes start to dance in front of my eyes.
I can’t even bring myself to go to my next class: the thought of Leary and his droning makes me want to hurl. I feel gutted, hollowed out. I don’t even realize I’m grinding my jaw until my head starts to ache. I want to scream and throw things.
So I just go straight from the elevator to the main entrance of the building, out the big glass doors onto the busy downtown street. The walk home might take twenty minutes or so, but I think I need it, to be alone with my thoughts, to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other.
That’s about as much as I can handle.
Nobody will make me apologize, I think furiously as I unlock my front door and run up the stairs to my loft. Nobody. Not for who I am, not for what I do.
Especially not him.
The assignment. Due next week, and I don’t even have a camera. I think of the Hasselblad I carelessly gave back, and my insides twist with the kind of visceral shame I thought I was utterly immune to.
I’d have to find one on Ebay, or at a thrift store. I’d have to find the right kind of film for it. Then I’d actually have to go and try to take at least one semi-decent picture.
For the first time it occurs to me that I might actually fail a course. I’ve had less-than-perfect grades before, usually because I skipped too many classes or my heart wasn’t in it and I handed in work that even I knew was sub par. But this time—well, as easy as it is to blame him for throwing me off-balance, I doubt I’d have had much success in the course no matter who was the teacher. I don’t know shit about photography.
Rationality aside, it only makes me hate him more. It’s like someone sent him here on purpose, to search and destroy my weakest spots with laser-guided precision.
I throw my work clothes into the dryer and hop in the shower. One of the undisputed benefits of this apartment is that I have the bathroom all to myself and, unthinkable bounty for a student, my own laundry units in an alcove in the kitchen.
Which is just as well. Try washing sequined G-strings in a communal laundry room without anyone noticing. That’s one thing I’ll never miss. There’s precious little about that dorm that I—or anyone—could miss. And I doubt the dorm misses me much either.
I wasn’t fun. I didn’t immediately make BFF’s with everyone like all the other girls seemed to; my roommate thought I was a snob because I kept to myself, the other girls on the floor just thought I was a bore. I studied and slept. I sketched and painted and once I threw a fit at my roommate because she used up my tube of the good-quality Titanium White and didn’t replace it or even bother to tell me.
We used to share a minifridge and a bathroom the size of a Kleenex. Now we barely nod hello to each other when we see each other in class.
I got the loft two weeks after I started stripping. The landlord gave me a knowing look when I handed in the deposit in crumpled $20 bills held together with a hair elastic. My dubious occupation didn’t seem to bother him, and soon one of the girls at work explained to me why: rent in cash every month, tax-free, apparently was worth taking on a risky tenant like myself.
I wasn’t sure how I was risky. I could break my leg, I suppose, and be out of commission for a while—no unemployment insurance for the clear-heeled. I tried not to think about what she really meant: the usual, the cliché, the strung-out junkie with the missing tooth whose earnings go up her nose or into her arm faster than she can make them.
That would never be me anyway. I had an almost childish, naïve certainty of that. I didn’t start drinking and smoking pot within the first month, like everyone said I would, and I never even tried drugs. My ex-dorm-mates did more drugs in a week than I’ve touched in all my twenty years: X every Saturday night, pot during breaks, Adderall and other prescription meds that got passed around through the school grapevine to help with the exam sessions. At the dorm, every night I’d get back from work the hallway would be so thick with smoke I could barely see, the air reeked of burning hay and I couldn’t make it to my door without tipping over a half-full beer can.
It all disgusted me. I would never be like that.
Guess there’s a first time for everything.
The club is full tonight. But as everyone will tell you, a full club is no guarantee of a good night. It’s even worse when everyone looks right through you like you’re a ghost. And tonight, my scrawny, tattooed, pasty shape seems to hold no attraction. I watch one girl after another get picked off the floor and head for the champagne rooms, hair swishing against tattooed, tan flanks, hips shimmying.
I think about the shoebox under my bed, the one with the stash of cash I keep telling myself is not for breast implants. I don’t know what’s stopping me. Not any bogus sense of integrity, whatever that means. Maybe I just don’t want to come back from winter break with sudden sweater meat and hear all my classmates and former dorm-mates whisper about it behind my back. I’m paranoid that way. I might as well just fly a flag above my head reading STRIPPER in glittery letters.
They wouldn’t be huge, anyway. Just a normal thing, the kind of boobs other girls take for granted, a small C-cup. I hate how I’m trying to justify it to myself even now, like I’ve internalized that client-voice: you’d never do something like that to your body, right? But the truth is, C-cups were always unattainable for me, out of reach, and by eighteen I had just about started to come to terms with it.
And now look. They’re a couple of weeks and a couple of stacks
of bills away. All I need to do is make an appointment.
It turns out everything is for sale, everything can be bought. And, dixit Margaret Atwood, piecemeal.
I go to the DJ booth, slip him a five and change my music last minute. No more Ms. Nice Stripper. No sexy music for you, no Christina Aguilera purring about icing on cake. This is a Metallica kind of night. The Unforgiven starts to play and I walk up the four narrow steps to the stage.
The speakers are only a foot away, and the music is deafening; I can feel the metal surface vibrate with it through the platform soles of my stilettos. I do a first tentative twist around the pole and my foot wobbles in my shoe; I catch myself just in time to make it look intentional, and smile.
Smile!
Tomorrow will be worse.
That makes me smile for real, somehow. Upturned faces regard me with faint interest, strobe lights reflecting in their eyes. My lights are red, always red, blue makes my pale skin look like a corpse, and right now red bathes their faces: a horde of bloodthirsty zombies about to start clawing and snapping at my bare calves.
The room reels before my eyes as I do another spin. Usually I don’t pay attention, I barely look into the crowd: there’s nothing there I need to see. A guy saying something to his friend, his eyes on me, sly, narrowed, and the friend chuckles. Another guy with his girlfriend who clearly doesn’t want to be here and who’s looking at me like she’s trying to make my head explode. Sometimes, other dancers giggling at a pole move I pulled off less-than-gracefully. And then you start guessing and you stumble, your shoes slip, your elbow locks when it shouldn’t and it just snowballs.
But today I can’t not look. I scan the crowd and my heart jumps whenever I see a tall silhouette with dark hair. But of course he’s not here. He wouldn’t have the nerve.
Would he?
I have to stop thinking. I have to stop.
I do my favorite pole move, flip my legs up over my head and slide down, one leg wrapped around the pole. The first few times I flopped: my arms were too weak, or I’d shoot down the pole too fast so my back hit the metal stage top, knocking the breath out of me and leaving a line of bruises along my spine.
The day after, my roommate saw the gigantic purple splotch on my leg and started to ask questions.
Now my skin is so used to it I barely feel any burn as I lower myself onto the floor and split my legs open as far as they will go. My shoes smack the floor with a clatter. Some guys actually clap. It’s nice, but a $5 would be nicer. A guy leans in, I glimpse the bill he’s toying with, folded lengthwise—green, a twenty. He’s giving me that proprietary smile. Not to disappoint, I flip over and slide my knees apart, ignoring the scrape: my butt is practically in his face. I sit up straight and slide a little closer so he can tuck the twenty in my G-string.
Nothing happens. I look over my shoulder: he still has that bill between his index and middle finger. Wants me to work for it, fucker.
I slide my knees together and sit on my haunches right across from him. His smile widens as I lean in, pressing the cups of my padded bra together, level with his eyes. He waves the twenty in the air. I let my fake hair trail over him, an old, time-tested move. I push my boobs up in his face.
He reaches out and grabs a handful of curled blond strands.
I freeze, wobble with shock and nearly fall on my ass. He wraps the locks around his hand and pulls.
My hand shoots up to my head just in time to grab the hair a few inches above his hand.
“Hey!” I snap.
Someone next to him makes a catfight noise.
“Let go!”
Lazily, he opens his fist and I pull my hair out of his grip. “Gee, fine. I just wanted to touch it.”
“Well, don’t fucking touch it.”
“Whatever.” He leans back. But I’m quicker—I reach out and snatch the twenty out of his hand, then jump to my feet in a practiced move one of the girls showed me. His mouth hangs open and he starts to say something, but I’ve already moved on with a swish of blond curls.
When I’m at the other end of the stage, I glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, as the doorman comes to have a chat with Grabby Hands.
I do a spin and my hair falls over my face, hiding my smirk.
Another guy tips me a ten. I tuck it in the strap of my shoe, lingering so he gets a good look down my cleavage. I slide my back down the pole and unhook my bra—sorry for the disappointment, boys. But the look of interest on his face is undiminished.
After I get off stage, he takes me to the champagne room, the nice one with the couch that costs extra.
“I saw that,” he says. “That guy’s such a jerk.”
“Oh well,” I say, making sure to smile radiantly. “Occupational hazard.”
In the nice room, the waitresses come to see you, and he orders drinks before I can say I’d rather have a vodka Red Bull, hold the vodka.
“How does your boyfriend let you do this?” he asks. He looks to be in his mid-twenties, nerdy, with those thick glasses that are less hipster and more prescription. His faded Green Lantern t-shirt has a hole near the collar. But he hands over a black credit card to start the tab, so in this case looks are deceiving.
He doesn’t wait for my answer as I settle into his lap, smile glued to my face.
“If I were your boyfriend, I wouldn’t let you do this.”
Oh, great. It’s one of those guys. Well, they also happen to be easiest to handle, I just have to figure out which subtype I’m dealing with.
Smile. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He looks interested. Well, then again, I’m sitting nearly naked on his lap. The least he can do is not look bored.
“Oh no? Why not?”
Carefree shrug. “I don’t want to settle down.”
He subtly puts his hand on my thigh. “Okay. You got a girlfriend, then?”
Oh, I get it.
“Yeah,” I say, smiling wider—smile! “You got me.”
“She jealous?”
“She works here, actually.” I twirl a blond lock.
He wants me to bring her in. I go out onto the floor, look around, and Maryse is there, walking away from a table of guys with an annoyed look. I wave her over.
We have this down pat. We dance for the guy together, do our faux lesbian act. Maryse is way better at this than me. I know it pays twice the rate, but it’s so awkward and takes so much effort that I’d rather just dance alone.
She peels my panties off and pretends to bury her face in my crotch, her mane of curled hair conveniently in the way. I pretend to moan. I squeeze her boobs, perky and hard—she had her implants done last year, and they’re huge, but on her they work. Unlike me, she doesn’t have protruding chest bones, and she has an ass to match.
The guy orders more drinks, a round of shooters. My rum and cola sits untouched on the low glass table, and I give it the side-eye.
Maryse upends a shooter into her mouth without flinching.
“Hey!” she holds one out to me. It catches the light, pale amber, something strong. Whiskey?
I shake my head.
“Come on, Alicia. You don’t want it, fine, more for me.”
I look at the shooter, I look at her. The guy is watching us like he expects me to slurp it out of her belly button.
I take the shot and drink it. The liquor burns down my throat and into my stomach, loosening my muscles.
Maryse sips her ruby-red daiquiri. “You want another half-hour, baby?”
That one is addressed to the guy. She’s standing with one knee propped up on the pleather couch between his legs, inches away from his crotch. She towers over him in her naked glory, utterly without self-consciousness. He looks from her to me, then puts his arm around me to pull me closer.
He takes another half-hour. We each leave with three hundred.
That’s three hours at the tattoo place, maybe enough to finish coloring in the background of Leda. A bottle of perfume, a lipstick or two and a blush kit from Sephora
, a single pair of jeans or shoes from a store on upper Ste-Cath. One third of monthly rent, one half of a new laptop (as long as it’s a crappy one).
A vintage film camera with lenses, flashes and the whole kit.
I need to make more money.
I grab the rum-cola off the table on my way out. It’s watered down from the melted ice, and too warm, but I down it in a few gulps.
By three AM my eyes are dry and my head is heavy, but I’m restless in that too-much-caffeine mixed with alcohol way. My hands shake a little. Up in the changing room, Maryse is bouncing around pulling a pair of skintight jeans over her thighs. Other girls are touching up their makeup in front of the mirror.
“Alicia!” Maryse hollers when she sees me. “We’re going out.”
“It’s three-fifteen. Where the hell are you going out to?”
“An after-hours. Wanna come?”
I upend my backpack and my clothes come tumbling out: a pair of old jeans with tears on the knees and a black sheer cotton shirt with a pattern of white swans. Besides that I have my beat-up Converse.
“I’m not dressed to go out,” I say, even though I know my mind is already made up.
“Fuck it,” says Maryse. “No one will be looking at your damn shoes.”
So I say fuck it. And we go out.
We take a taxi to the after-hours, five of us piling into the back seat of a rusty Toyota while the cabbie frowns in the rearview mirror because we only need to go a couple of blocks down Ste-Catherine, into the Gay Village.
The biggest after-hours nightclub in the city is sandwiched between a drugstore and a massage parlor with a ten-foot photo of a hairy-chested man in the window, leather straps across his torso. I’m still buzzed from all the vodka-RedBulls (don’t hold the vodka)—at least I didn’t pay for any of them myself. As long as you don’t pay for your own poison, you don’t have a substance abuse problem… right?