Two weeks after my abortion, I dropped out of college.
My mother worried when I quit. In her world, a college degree still guaranteed a future. I didn’t want to worry her further, or have her see me as irresponsible, so I never told her how ill I was, or why.
John and Jen congratulated me for ditching FIT. “You’re already working as an artist,” Jen said matter-of-factly. I fixed my mouth into a hard red smile. “Art school is a scam,” I said with a shrug. “FIT was horrid anyway. We should get its accreditation pulled.” John smirked.
Despite their words, I still feared entering the future without a credential the world told us meant so much. FIT itself I wouldn’t miss. A few of my professors had taught me things: Dave Davries introduced me to Victoriana. Sal Catalano berated me for the anatomical failings in my work until I knew how the fibula joined the tibia. But mostly I was relieved to no longer have to show up.
Instead, I spent my time on Craigslist, emailing shadier listings, showing up at bare apartments to be photographed naked with cheap disposable cameras by guys who browbeat me to spread my legs. After each gig, I counted the twenties, then folded them neatly in the bottom of my purse. I was still running a fever. On the subway, I sometimes fell asleep and missed my stop.
After a week waiting in lines at offices, I assembled the forms I needed to quit FIT. As I dropped the envelope in the mailbox, I thought, This is me giving up on middle-class employment. There’s only one thing left—to make it as an artist. For luck, I whispered Cesare Borgia’s maxim: O Cesare o Niente. Caesar or Nothing.
When I wasn’t working, I lay in bed, talking to female friends on the phone about our abortions. One woman told me about the pill she’d taken to induce a miscarriage. The doctor at the clinic had lied, telling her it would just feel like cramps, but the blood and pain lasted fifteen hours, shocking her so much she thought she was hemorrhaging to death. Another woman spoke about the relief she felt as soon as the pregnancy was terminated, clear as a runner’s high. I was myself again, she said.
All I wanted was stories.
I balanced the phone in the crook of my neck and drew with my other hand. I focused on the dirty clothes left in piles on my bedroom floor. Drawing crumpled cloth is an old and demanding exercise, once ubiquitous in French ateliers. When you draw cloth, your mind has no preconceptions to fall back on, as it does when you draw a dog or a strawberry. Each fold must be observed, measured, and then rendered fresh. This teaches you how to look at the rest of the world.
The concentration took me out of my head, in the same way drawing ferns had done years ago when I waited for Anthony. As I lay there drawing, I knew I never wanted to be broke again. It’s easier to be broke when you’re young and strong, and even to fetishize brokeness (a state fundamentally different from poverty) as artistic and pure. The fever burned that romance out of me. Being broke just meant I didn’t value myself enough to pay an extra three hundred dollars for a private clinic where I would have been treated nicely.
In New York, bohemia has become a tagline—as real as the condo ad over the Bedford L stop. “Grit meets glamour,” the ad reads. Artists, for all their wildness, have often been the unwitting shock tropes of gentrification—at least to the city power brokers who dictate everyone’s living conditions. Once the real estate market no longer needs them, they’re erased as thoroughly as the graffiti that once covered 5Pointz, the outdoor art exhibit space in Queens that was razed by developers after artists made it famous.
The art scenes that defined New York were joyous and feverishly creative. In the moment, they felt like everything that mattered. But as their participants aged and got sick, they found that the only ones who derived any security from those scenes were their exploiters. Andy Warhol won, not Candy Darling.
I didn’t want to be cast in that stock role. I wanted to stay in this increasingly expensive city where I had been born. I wanted a stable apartment with heat and air conditioning and no rats. I wanted doctors who were nice to me. I didn’t want to be precarious. I didn’t want to be erased.
Lying sick in that bed, my politics became personal. My anger over the Iraq War was nothing compared with my hatred for the decaying old politicians who would force me to give birth. Fifty years ago they would have succeeded, would have made me risk dying in pain and shame.
As I recovered slowly from what must have been an infection, I marveled at the treachery of my body. Being ill made me a stranger to myself. I didn’t know the fatigued, weeping, vomiting girl I’d become. My body was a prison, not a servant. Though Fred was dealing with his divorce, he came sometimes to take care of me; he later told me I was like an animal who doesn’t show sickness until it finally breaks.
My roommate, Richard, cooked me soup. John and Jen listened to me with love. They made me feel healthy, beautiful, and strong. Even with them nearby, though, I was still alone in my body, as they were alone in theirs. If I didn’t take care of myself, no one else would. No one would be there to catch me. Not even the kindest lovers. Not even the best friends.
Lying in bed, I promised myself two things: I would do my best to help anyone as powerless as I was at that moment. And I would never be that powerless again.
When the fever finally broke, I celebrated by accepting a gig to go-go dance at Goodbye Blue Monday, a thrift-shop bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a stage in the back. Out front, pulp novels and beaded lampshades were piled on tables and chairs, a goiter of junk. Five people sat in the audience. Finally able to hold down food, I bought a green cookie from the bar. Onstage, Ruby Valentine danced. Her body was soft, dimpled, a tumble of curves that never knew a gym. Her hair was red, her skin translucent white. She danced on her toes, winding veils around her to a Chopin mazurka. She moved so slow, with a sickly eroticism. I could not look away.
I danced badly, blinking in the lights. Fred walked into the bar. He was so big, his hair long and gold, and he walked right toward me like a savior. He held a bouquet of roses. I walked off the stage toward him, and let myself shrink near-naked into his arms.
Around that time, Fred finalized his divorce. He gave his wife everything except his paintings. Then he moved into my apartment.
His presence was as sustaining, and as difficult to write about, as air. We’d never be apart again.
After three years, I hated modeling. I came to each shoot expecting the GWC to rape me. If there’s a beauty privilege, there’s a good-girl privilege too, in which only white virgins locked in their rooms are presumed innocent. By working in the sex industry, I had thrown that out. Sex workers, like trans women, are believed to have brought violence on themselves. “Yes, officer,” I imagined saying. “I was naked in his hotel room. For money.”
No one ever tried. But I never lost the awareness of my own vulnerability. Driving home from one of my last shoots, a GWC begged me to fuck him. “My wife’s pregnant,” he said. “She won’t sleep with me. She says it will kill the baby.”
I stared ahead, willing him not to touch me until the road led us back to Brooklyn, where I could open the car door and run upstairs to my apartment.
For safety, models really ought to bring along escorts, but I asked Fred along only once. In that motel room in Jersey, the photographer showed us his ultrafast camera—a thousand frames a minute!—proud as a man with a sports car that he never took out of the garage. As Fred sat sketching in the corner, I gamely tried to pose in front of the vertical blinds, but in that moment I became obsessed by the cloud of societal judgment. I was not a good woman. I was not the type who deserved protection.
I posed faster for the automated flashes. But Fred’s presence wrecked the photographer’s fantasy. After an hour, the photographer gave up.
“It’s just not working,” he said with a frown, handing me my cash.
Afterward, Fred took me to a cafeteria in Chinatown. I ordered us both fried fish. It came wrapped in newsprint. Each bite tasted like chalk.
All this time, I was still posing for SuicideGirls. Tho
ugh the site claimed to be a refuge for rebels, it had its in-crowd just the same.
On the models-only message board, girls tore each other apart competing for gigs as unpaid retail workers at the San Diego Comic-Con—the crumbs of nonopportunity that hot girls are told are their highest potential reward.
Then, in the summer of 2005, we SuicideGirls all got newly restrictive contracts. By signing, we gave away more than just the rights to our photos, as any client acquires in a shoot. Now we were banned from posing for other sites. SuicideGirls owned our stage names, our likenesses, even the copyright on our tattoos. They could turn us into characters, and we’d never see a dime.
Fuck the real woman. They had the Platonic concept. When our aging flesh was a shadow on their digital wall, they would still own our fresh, valuable pixel ghosts.
That fall, many of the most famous SuicideGirls quit.
First went Sicily. The SuicideGirls burlesque tour had spawned a DVD, and the DVD a special on Showtime. Before they knew about the Showtime deal, the dancers had been paid a pittance to appear in the video, and they were promised a small additional fee if they participated in a promo tour.
Sicily wanted a contract spelling out the deal. Sean refused.
When a SuicideGirl quit, the site declined to acknowledge the fact. Instead, they put the girl in the “archive,” deactivating her profile and deleting her diary. Though the site lost the illusion of a girl’s availability, in the archive she became content at its most pure. Each girl, upon archival, got her own message board thread, titled, obituary style, “Good-bye, ——!” Hundreds of members posted their well-wishes, but the site deleted any comments asking why the model had left.
Sicily blogged her disappointment on her SG page. Within minutes, she was gone. “Good-bye, Sicily,” read the thread. Her friends from the tour followed. Soon the message boards were nothing but good-byes. Good-bye, Shera. Good-bye, Stormy. Good-bye, Katie. Good-bye Good-bye Good-bye.
I wasn’t friends with these women, but I decided to leave too. We were all naked girls. Sean was the tattooed Man. What would we have if we didn’t stick together? On my SG diary, I wrote about the ways the company misrepresented itself, underpaid its workers, and fired anyone who complained. I finished by saying that we had to stick together, and that I wanted nothing to do with the site.
I did not write that SG’s problems were the same as those that bedevil so many indie companies as they get big, from clothing brands to magazines. Indie companies start out scrappy, telling workers that their low wages are justified by the coolness of their jobs. But as more money comes in, with it come the corporate bastards those workers were trying to escape from when they came to work at an indie in the first place. As the company expands, it exerts increasing control over the workers’ lives and personas, but it preserves the cheapskate disorganization of its past. The start-up’s former DIY ethos becomes nothing more than splatter on a logo and an excuse to ask for unpaid overtime.
During the press furor that later enveloped SuicideGirls, many journalists assumed the site was exploitive because it was porn. They were letting sex elide politics. SuicideGirls was exploitive because it was a corporation, and corporations are amoral by design. They don’t get big without kicking someone down. Posing naked is generally a less abusive gig than waiting tables—but any gig can turn bad.
My post stayed up on SuicideGirls for seven minutes before the site’s moderators deleted it. Then they locked me out of my account.
Good-bye, Molly.
A few months after SG’s troubles hit the press, a new porn site appeared. The site featured Missy’s outtake photos of former SG stars: Apnea, Sicily, Stormy, Shera, et al., pouting unretouched under flat lights and brand-new names. Whoever sold the pictures hadn’t even bothered to edit out the ones taken mid-blink.
Photos once marketed as punk empowerment now ran alongside copy describing Goth Cunts Who Get Fucked in Their Holes. The Internet removes all context. We were all the same content soup.
I had met Albert, a burlesque producer, in a coffeehouse when I lived on Havemeyer Street. Since then, I’d spent many afternoons at his loft, listening to his jazz records and hearing his stories about New York’s burlesque scene. He had no buzzer, so I had to call him when I was outside. While I waited for him to walk downstairs, I stared at the skyline. The waterfront was raw then, its rocks adorned with broken bottles. A torn wire fence was all that stood between you and the East River, and that tarnished water was all that separated you from Manhattan. Upstairs, as I sat in the soft light of Albert’s loft, sketching the burlesque posters on his walls, it felt like New York was fading back into the city it had been a hundred years ago.
Sometimes Albert let me sit in when his burlesque troupe rehearsed. Honey Birdette peeled off a dress made of garbage bags to reveal a beaded gold bikini. Dirty Martini was as curvaceous as a Botero, her tiny waist spreading out to lavish hips. In her blond flip wig, Dirty was the queen of New York burlesque; I loved watching her after rehearsal, as she toweled herself off, while negotiating gigs fast and slangy. Then I’d draw her onstage, en pointe in her pink satin ballet slippers, her plush flesh aloft in the air.
I started going to more shows, drawing more dancers. I painted New York’s stars—Tyler Fyre, the World-Famous Bob—in clumsy oils on my living room floor then presented the art proudly to Albert, who used the paintings on his show posters.
Just as Toulouse-Lautrec drew his cancan girls as warriors, I recognized something in these women that casual observers seldom did: Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
I sat sketching the dancers, too afraid to talk. Before I knew it, I fell in love.
Burlesque started in Britain as working-class comedy that “burlesqued,” or satirized, the elite. When it came to America, it mutated, as so often happened to old-world seeds planted on our soil. Burlesque in New York was vaudeville’s disreputable sister, filled with dirty comics and dancers in body stockings, or less. These girls were less classically beautiful, less classically trained, or just less able to pass as high-class than the chorines who served as arm candy for wealthy men in the early 1900s. Burlesque girls were strippers, but they were paid as performers: they did not pay their venue for the privilege of working there, as strippers are obliged to do now.
By the 1960s, burlesque was a ghost. My mother had seen it as a young woman in the Catskills, aging women in tassels jiggling next to Borscht Belt comics. They embarrassed her with their tacky frailty. But in the early 2000s, strippers like Dita Von Teese, Catherine D’Lish, and Jo “Boobs” Weldon willed burlesque back into existence, mixing strip-club bump and grind with drag and avant-garde performance art. During the height of the burlesque revival, TV people often urged performers to call themselves better, classier, or more artistic than strippers. They created a false dichotomy. Burlesque was seldom sex work, because it usually wasn’t a job, more a hobby and a calling. But many dancers stripped to support their burlesque habit.
In 2003, when I started performing, burlesque had a distinctive aesthetic. Dancers painted on defiant masks: red glitter pressed into lips, white makeup lined tear ducts, false lashes so long they brushed the brow bone. These dolly faces sat atop bodies less perfect than would ever be allowed on Broadway—jiggling, human, muscular, sublime. Dancers coated themselves in Dermablend, and layered flesh-colored fishnets studded with rhinestones. At its best, it could be achingly erotic or disturbing as all fuck.
If stripping was hard work that paid okay, burlesque was hard work that barely paid at all. A few top performers made tens of thousands. They were conventionally beautiful women, like Dita in her rhinestone birdcage, with acts as subversive as Versailles snuffboxes. Others were able to piece together enough gigs to make a lower-middle-class living. Most got fifty dollars an act. Their pa
yment was in glamour, a word that once meant witchcraft. Burlesque gave dancers a chance to embody everything—perverted clowns, shimmering angels, all of existence compressed into the space of a song.
I lurked for three months before Albert asked the obvious question: Did I want to join his troupe?
I started dancing burlesque when I was twenty. I stopped when I was twenty-four. In those years, New York nightlife became both my finishing school and the home to which I’d return. I learned to make my face up like a French pastry, gluing on crystals in a snowy alley that doubled as the backstage for the Galapagos performance space in Brooklyn. I learned to walk on glass, to eat fire, to stalk around in platforms with my back straight and proud. I danced next to contortionists and drag queens on a beer-soaked stage where every transgression was permitted as long as it was wrapped into three minutes and you showed your tits at the end.
I stood topless, and the applause hit me like a wave.
The first time I danced was at the Manhattan dive bar Arlene’s Grocery, in a show produced by the underground party promoter Editrix Abby. With my dollar-store lingerie, I was a clear amateur, but the screams from the audience spun my head. I hit my marks. A girl tried to grab my ankle. I kicked her hand, hard. I grinned. I was onstage. I made the rules.
I kicked her hand again.
Those nights bleed together in my memory now, like the acts of a long burlesque show. In Albert’s troupe, I played the Greek goddess of Astronomy. I held a rotating disco ball I bought in Chinatown, pretending the flickers it cast were stars. I spent hours in a trimmings store in Hasidic Williamsburg, buying fringe, tassels, appliqués shaped like eyes. I glued hundreds of crystals to my corset, one for each polka dot.
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