I loved how his fingers journeyed across my skin, teasing, playing, hurting me even, and taking me to the edge until that magic moment when release finally came. With him I felt like a flower; and I opened myself up for him like never before. I’d been a cocoon, a larvae, and now I was a butterfly and I soared.
High.
And when I came I would whisper his name.
Chey.
And then fall asleep in his arms, safe, protected, warm and soft, my limbs akimbo, washed by the release of desire.
One morning when I woke up, he was gone. There was just a hastily scribbled note on the kitchen top telling me he had to go away at short notice, didn’t know how long he would be, but assuring me that he loved me to the moon and back. I smiled. It was an expression we’d heard someone on a TV series say and we had both burst out laughing at the same time. It had become a private joke between us ever since, though I was beginning to feel the truth of it.
In the note he suggested I stay on and look after the apartment while he was away. Big deal, I thought, annoyed that he could leave me so easily. To cool my frustration I walked all the way to my job on Bleecker and straight into the fierce argument that led to my losing it.
My savings lasted just three weeks and without a visa getting another job was far from easy. And there was still no sign of Chey. I had no alternative but to relinquish my sublet in Brooklyn and move my few belongings into Chey’s Meatpacking District apartment, somewhat fearful of what his response would be when he found out. But still, six weeks later, there was no sign or word from him and his phone was no longer taking messages even.
One morning I had scraped together some change I found on Chey’s desk and was having a coffee at the nearest Starbucks, gazing ahead at the rusting steel columns of the High Line and pondering my limited course of action, when someone called out my name.
‘Luba!’
It was Chey’s fat Russian friend, the one who had deliberately spilled the coffee over my blouse. His name was Lev and, when we had been introduced by Chey a few months ago, he had profusely apologised for his earlier behaviour. He was visibly scared of Chey, who held the upper hand in what I assumed was their business relationship. We never spoke together in our native language and Lev had a pronounced East Coast accent.
I greeted him with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, my anger at Chey’s absence colouring my attitude to his acquaintances.
‘So, how are things?’ he asked me.
‘So, so,’ I replied. ‘You wouldn’t know where Chey has decamped to, would you? Or how much longer he will be away?’
‘He never tells me anything,’ he said.
‘Typical.’ I swore under my breath.
Without being asked, he sat himself across from my table. I glanced over at him. His shirt was bursting at the seams, its front buttons screaming in agony as his stomach forced itself forward and was barely contained by the material. How could such a lump of a man be associated with Chey?
He misinterpreted the scorn on my face for sadness.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked me, with a look of concern.
‘Your friend Chey; that’s what’s wrong,’ I replied. ‘One day here, the next day elsewhere, without a single word of warning. It doesn’t make things easy,’ I protested.
I then explained what had happened at the patisserie and how I’d lost my job and was now in a precarious position. He offered to let me have a few hundred bucks, but I just couldn’t accept them. Not from Lev. He would expect a return payment in one way or another, and that was something I was unwilling to give him. Instead, I brushed off his offer and told him that I had to find a job, and why it wasn’t as easy as it appeared.
A broad, goofy smile illuminated his face.
‘I’m illegal too,’ he declared, as if it was something to be proud of.
‘Congratulations!’ I exclaimed bitterly. ‘I’m proud to be a member of the same club . . .’
‘But Chey, he tells me you are a wonderful dancer. You trained in Russia, didn’t you?’
‘I did. But that was a long time ago now. And I wasn’t that good, not technical enough.’
‘What’s technical about dancing?’
‘I don’t think you’d understand,’ I pointed out, taking a sip of my rapidly cooling coffee.
‘If you wanted to dance again, for a job, you know. I think I could help. Until Chey returns, if you want.’
‘Tell me more,’ I said, although I already suspected it wouldn’t be at the Lincoln Center or with the New York City Ballet.
He explained.
Initially, I was dubious.
‘You sure you have no idea when Chey will be back?’ I enquired, hoping this wasn’t my only option. How could I dance naked for other men when I knew, deep in my heart, that it was only Chey I truly wanted to dance for?
‘No. It’s impossible to know. Business, you see.’
‘Take me, then,’ I said.
The name of the club was the Tender Heart and it stood, all steel shutters, graffiti-laden walls and discoloured pink awning, at the top end of the Bowery, close to Lafayette Street. It had once been a popular rock club during the glory days of punk, I was later told. The walls of the basement area still dripped with several generations of alcoholic sweat and I almost gagged as Lev guided me through the narrow foyer to a recessed area where the offices were.
‘It’s better when the air conditioning is on, from late afternoon when the club opens to the public,’ he pointed out to me. ‘Barry, who runs the place, is always trying to save money so he has it switched off when the joint is closed.’
Barry was a diminutive Brit with an old-fashioned and dubious moustache and thinning hair. During the course of any conversation, he wouldn’t fail to remind you several times every hour that he hailed from Liverpool. But he looked nothing like any of the Beatles.
He sat at a rickety desk that had survived every world war you could think of, facing piles of untidy ledgers. Just a glorified accountant, I assumed, and no hint as to who the club actually belonged to. I briefly suspected Chey, but the place was just too downmarket and lacking in class, I decided, to be associated with him.
Lev had called ahead to warn him of our arrival.
‘So, you’re Chey’s girl?’ He grinned.
‘I’d rather you called me a woman,’ I said. ‘I waited long enough to become one, so I’m rather fond of the title. And I don’t belong to anyone.’
‘And feisty at that,’ he concluded with an amused smirk. He probably thought he looked ironic.
‘Yes, they breed us tough in Russia,’ I said, thickening my accent on purpose.
He looked me over, like a butcher appraising a cut of meat.
‘Our common friend has told you what we do?’
‘He did.’
‘You dance?’
‘I did. Although not the sort of dance you have in mind.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘No.’
Barry gave Lev a glance and the fat Russian acolyte stepped out of the crowded office.
‘Can I see you?’ he then asked.
‘See me?’
‘Your body. Naked. In this sort of job, you understand, it’s what I’d call’ – he searched for the right word – ‘a prerequisite. You see, the customers must have something decent to feast their eyes on.’
‘OK.’ I nodded.
He sat back in his leather armchair and kept on staring at me.
I undressed.
His eyes lingered over every square inch of my skin, moving from part to part, area to area, almost examining me forensically, assessing, judging.
I just stood there facing him, feeling the oppressive heat floating throughout the room, seeping in under the door from where the club’s public areas were, my legs ever so slightly apart, trying to retain a modicum of modesty and elegance as I was being perused.
‘Very nice,’ he finally stated.
I lowered my eyes.
‘Breasts are
small, but real, high and firm. That’s good. Dancer’s legs, thin but strong. Turn round,’ he ordered me.
I obeyed.
‘Lovely arse. A true work of art,’ he proclaimed. ‘Turn again,’ he asked me.
Again, he looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my crotch.
‘That’ll have to go,’ he said.
I looked down at my naked body, perplexed.
‘All that hair,’ he pointed out. ‘Nice colour, matches your head. So rare, real blondes these days. All comes from a bottle. Some of the girls in other of our establishments even colour themselves down there, but it looks so fake, I always feel. Even though some of the punters are taken in by it. But at our location, we’ve always made it a point of honour that the dancers are smooth . . .’
Maybe I still looked puzzled.
‘Shaved,’ he continued.
I confirmed my agreement. It wasn’t something I’d ever done. Back at the dormitory it had not been allowed by the monitors. Later, in St Petersburg at the School, we were required to trim on the sides so no unseemly hair could be seen peering outside of our leotards, even though we always wore thick tights for both practise and performance.
The vision of my nuder-than-nude cunt flashed across my mind and the idea gave me a perverse thrill.
Smooth . . . All part of the new American me.
I snapped out of my brief daydream as Barry’s voice droned on.
‘There are some rules and they are never to be broken,’ he explained. ‘You never show pink. You never speak to members of the audience unless they request a lap dance. You are allowed to turn lap dances down, but don’t make it a regular occurrence. What you do after hours and outside the club is your own affair. Clear?’
It wasn’t totally at this stage, but I nodded my approval, regardless. I needed the job but also something was building up inside me that made me already look forward to the dancing, the stripping. The intuition that not only would I enjoy it, but that it would give me a sense of control. Over life. Over men. It was the same realisation I’d reached after my initial, amateurish blow jobs and the night I had lost my virginity. A feeling of power.
Barry’s Liverpudlian tones chattered on.
‘I’ll take it as a given that you can dance, and as you’re a friend of Chey, you won’t have to pay the house a fee for every set like the other girls do, so all the money you make, from tips and private dances, is yours to keep. But please don’t tell the other dancers about it. It would cause bad blood.’
Again I nodded.
‘So when do you want to start?’ he finally said.
I began my life as a stripper the following day. Lev fronted me a few bills so I could acquire a costume, which I improvised from various items I found in the market stalls that occupied the old parking lot next to the building that used to house Tower Records on Broadway, just a few steps away from Shakespeare & Co where I loved to go and browse the latest books. I also hunted for the right music and spent hours deciding what I would dance to. My first thought was to select something classical, Russian even, but I thought that might be an artistic step too far for the Bowery. I finally opted for Counting Crows’ ‘A Murder of One’. There was something melancholy about the music that appealed to my Russian soul.
By the time I had packed and unpacked my bag for the tenth time that afternoon, checked that I had everything I could possibly need and heard the lock mechanism in the apartment door click shut behind me, I was almost ready to run back to the patisserie and offer Jean-Michel my arse to grope again so long as it meant that I didn’t need to climb onto the stage that was waiting downtown for my approach like a block awaiting its next condemned man. But not quite. I was far too stubborn to allow a puny thing like fear get the better of me, and when my turn came I stepped out from behind the shabby dressing-room curtain with its beer stains and cigarette burns, squared my jaw and vowed to get on with it.
All the most important things in life, birth, death, losing one’s virginity, seemed to involve the removal of one’s clothes at some point or another and for me, stripping was just another one of those experiences to tick off, something that I had been building up to from the moment that I decided to skip ballet rehearsals in favour of pleasuring boys from the ice-cream parlour by the red-brick wall at the back of the school. As the music switched on and the familiar lyrics poured out of the loudspeakers, I wondered what kind of bird I had hidden inside, what manner of creature I would unleash when I dropped my flimsy costume and unveiled my nudity to the punters who were barely visible beyond the beam of light that I stood beneath.
I felt instinctively that I had crossed a Rubicon, selected a fork in the road that there would be no reversing from. No matter what I chose to do in the future, there would be no erasing this moment.
I raised my arms overhead, like wings, and began to dance.
3
Dancing with the Ponies
Initially, at the Tender Heart, I was distracted by the rundown grunginess of the club and found it awkward to reconcile my intentions to be graceful as well as sexy. The downbeat atmosphere of the principal auditorium, with its cheap wall hangings barely concealing old torn posters advertising long-gone appearances there by Patti Smith, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and Television, combined with the tawdry disco tunes my fellow dancers performed to during their sets were a sharp dampener to any attempt to remain above the fray.
On my first night, apart from the fact I felt so terribly self-conscious and ill at ease in my unveiled skin, I made the mistake of shedding my minimal bikini and the assorted thin silk scarves I had thought would combine well with it and provide me with something to work with, leaving me standing at centre stage halfway through my music, totally nude and with nothing to do. Finding myself there, isolated, confronted by the vacant gaze of half a dozen bored customers whose facial features were all indistinct, I felt more like a mannequin than a dancer. I attempted an entrechat and nearly fell to the ground as my feet had no grip on the polished wooden stage. I quickly gave up on the idea of a few ballet moves for fear of appearing even more ridiculous.
I shimmied a bit, did a few turns, smiled as best I could. Then I repeated the feeble movements again and again, hoping for the tune to come to an end. I steered well clear of the rigid metal pole that dominated the stage and which all the other strippers that night had teased with, danced around, and embraced with pseudo-erotic abandon.
The hiss of silence in the loudspeakers came as a profound relief, as did the darkness which I took advantage of to quickly bend over and gather my scarves and shiny bikini and an orphaned five-dollar note that one of the spectators had deposited on the edge of the stage.
Later, some of the other girls, a varied bunch with a rapid turnover, one day here, another day gone, taught me how to dance around the pole, but it was never a discipline I took to.
I wanted to be different.
I also learned to time my effects and the stages through which I revealed my body, my assets. Since Chey and I had returned from the Dominican Republic where my blonde hair had bleached quite significantly in the sun, I had not had it cut and it was the longest I’d ever worn it. He liked it that way. Enjoyed gripping its ends hard when he rode me from behind. Now it was long enough to cover my breasts when I pulled it forward, an extra element of tease which the anonymous men who watched me, and the regulars I began to accumulate, seemed to like, my nipples winking through the curtain of falling hair.
Watching others, I also saw how they withheld the final reveal, only allowing the customers a brief, limited glimpse of their pussy just before the lights went out and the music climaxed, like a final tantalising treat. Surely, I felt, this was cheating; wasn’t it what they had come for?
Now that I had shaven, I delighted in the spectacle of my smoothness and a small fire invariably lit in my belly before every set at the prospect of unveiling what was the most intimate part of me to all these strangers, knowing all they could do was look and not touch, wonde
r but not taste. It gave me the feeling I could lead them anywhere, make them do my bidding, just for a sight of my cunt.
‘You’re getting better and better, girl,’ Barry remarked after watching my final set one evening, a few weeks after I’d begun working at the club. ‘You were certainly clumsy at your first attempts, and I wouldn’t have kept you on had you not been a friend of Chey’s and had such a beautiful body. But you’ve come on in leaps and bounds.’
‘That’s nice to hear,’ I replied.
‘In fact, you’re too good for this place. You should be dancing somewhere they have an appreciation of class. You’re wasting your time here; you should be uptown where they tip better.’
It was true, the financial offerings of the Tender Heart’s miserly spectators were far from impressive. And some of them were so unpleasant and uncouth that, by my second day, I’d decided to turn down private lap dances, and had formally informed Barry of this as a take-it-or-leave-it option.
He gave me some names and I went for interviews and auditions. There was still no news of Chey.
Once I made it clear I was in no mood for casting-couch antics and just there to dance and keep customers entertained, I was quickly offered the opportunity to perform in a better category of establishment and even had the chance to choose where I did so.
I began alternating between two private members-only clubs on the Upper East Side, which both catered for upmarket locals and the mostly foreign clientele staying at the four- and five-star hotels dotted around the Central Park area.
The gratuities were considerably better, and I soon settled into a routine, sleeping into the afternoons and working late nights and weekends, at Sweet Lola’s or The Grand, where my classical background was admired and even encouraged, as two nights a week they had a pianist in and the girls did slower numbers to live music, in a cabaret style. I’d brought the house down and gained favour with Blanca, the beautiful Czech woman who managed the dancers, with a rendition of ‘Makin’ Whoopee!’ that involved so little dancing and so much writhing on top of the piano that I felt as though I’d hardly had to work for that night’s tips at all.
Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days) Page 5