Strip

by Andrew Binks

  “Of course not, but something…”

  “Choreographer, like…”

  “Like?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sure. Maybe. Although the term has seemed so tainted recently, that I’ve tried not to consider it.”

  “Give yourself a chance. At least see what this city has to offer. This isn’t it.”

  Rachelle was getting teary and drunk and I knew she wanted me to sleep over, wherever she happened to be living. Before we left I got the cheque, got the “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” from an indifferent bartender, and got out. We kissed on the sidewalk. She whined a little as I shoved her up the steps of the streetcar. She tumbled into a seat and ding ding, she was gone.

  I weighed Rachelle’s sage advice, and then I headed off to the Biltmore Hotel. The guy was right about a male show. The banner above the back door announced the Shuter Street Shooters. The interviews were held upstairs in a dingy hotel room, curtains drawn, twenty-five-watt light bulbs, cigarette smoke suspended in layers like silken angel hair. For my audition, the obese manager watched me change slowly out of and into my costume, and after that he tried kissing my tight lips. It was like being blindsided by a mattress. He didn’t get his hoped-for blow job and I didn’t end up getting any decent weekend shifts. I had to laugh when all the other humpy applicants—full of themselves—showed up in the bar, post-tryout, looking like they had stomach flu.

  I stripped for secretaries at lunch. We served them their food and then did our tease. They ate their burgers and fries while I slid around in my black scallop g-string, pretending it wasn’t midday, trying to ignore the bright glare that shot through the room every time someone came in. There was no table dancing, but the customers could come up to the stage to stuff the lucky ones’ pouches with bills. But every move by a spectator was weighted with self-consciousness. Unlike Quebec, which was reckless and intense, Toronto seemed to thrive on some kind of naive scandal. The audience was prudish; the customers watched us as if we were circus freaks. It felt as though we would all be carted off to jail any minute. It was the same looks I got from those English exchange students from Laval I danced for at the Chez Moritz, How can they do this, compromise themselves, exploit themselves? But we weren’t even showing anything! I soon found out there was more showmanship in the men’s shower at the ymca. And any closet-cases who came in with their co-workers jumped hoops to pretend they didn’t notice me. Meanwhile my neediness probably scared everyone off. One customer, equally as desperate, offered me a hundred bucks to have sex with him. But he wasn’t my type. Too pretty. Too precious. Too petite. It would have been like sleeping with a lawn ornament.

  One lunch hour I hadn’t made a nickel. Meanwhile cheers were coming from the big front room where the females stripped, on the other side of the kitchen. Brigit Bar-None, a queen-sized stripper, was featured. The front room was usually packed with construction workers having liquid lunches watching a series of dancers who looked identical, from their big hair and waxworks features to their perfect tits. I called them silicone bombshells; nothing like the variety there had been in Quebec. Once the hollering had died down, Brigit Bar-None, cleverly held together by a fishnet body stocking, strutted into our backroom. She pointed to me and then waved me to the side of the stage. I shimmied over, and she shoved a five dollar bill down my pouch and gave my nuts a healthy squeeze and smiled, wrinkling her nose like she’d done something naughty, then looked back at the audience. What a talent. Some customers followed her lead, and I cashed in that afternoon with a bunch more bills around my waist.

  After that I had a deal with one of the regular girls (another dancer gone wrong) in the front room, who pitied me. I’d give her a tip if she came in between dances and put money down my string (money I gave her for the task). Nine times out of ten, it got the crowd going. But as soon as the manager caught wind of it, we had to stop.

  Later that week, one of the secretaries (the one with the guy who made the hundred-buck offer) waved me over and asked if I would dance for her friend Margaret as a birthday present at her work. With ghetto blaster in one hand and my costume in the other, dripping with sweat after one crowded subway and two buses to Scarborough, while the temperature outside dropped and the temperature on the last bus had poached us and fogged the windows and drooped my bangs, hindering my search for visual cues like the storefront or a street sign, I took a chance, exited and ran through streaming traffic to an open strip mall. In a flower shop I found the infamous friend, Margaret, busily wrapping a bouquet in cellophane. “Are you Margaret?”

  She nodded.

  I got to work. The girls joined in, as did a cute little flower-arranging fairy. He was busy pretending to the girls he didn’t really care for this (who did he think he was fooling?), while making sure to catch my eye. And then there was another party happening at the same time, in his pants, which helped. I stared down at the women as I rubbed my thighs, my ass and my chest, but quickly my eyes caught the reflection of something in the far mirror—my body—and I saw just how much of a fucking ghost I had become. For a moment I thought my reflection was a side of pale beef hanging from a hook.

  My toes curled on the cold concrete. My pale skin rose in goosebumps, and my yellow hair flew with static. As far as I could translate, I was no longer Le Grand Blond, just le pâle jaune. My clothes lay in a clammy pile under the table. And there was nowhere to change from flower-shop stripper back into guy-on-a-bus. As I forced my damp t-shirt back over my head, the little florist whispered to me, asking if I would dance at his boyfriend’s birthday party. He tried so hard to play it straight in front of the Scarborough girls. He scribbled his name and number on a gift enclosure.

  Two weeks later I walked through an old neighbourhood called Cabbagetown, a place gradually being transformed into perennial gardens surrounded by ironwork fences separating red brick homes. The flower boy’s house was narrow from the outside, but yawning, open, new, all brick and bare wood, high ceilings and higher price inside. He squealed when he opened the door and said he’d told everyone all about me. In the two weeks since I’d danced at the flower shop, the little flower guy had invited every homo in Toronto.

  To make things worse, he mangled my tape and I had to strip to his music—Marilyn Monroe singing, “I Want to Be Loved by You”—which most likely ended any future bookings with this crowd. If music can go wrong when you strip, it will. Since I had nothing to lose and he held the envelope with the cash in it, I let the little guy act out his fantasies on me in his bedroom while everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to his much cuter boyfriend downstairs. Yes, it was sleazy, but I felt like I wouldn’t get my cash if I didn’t do this encore. Then he told me how nice I was. Maybe the birthday boy would be looking for his own fun somewhere else. “I actually have a dance background. I just do this for fun,” I said as I did up my pants. I tried to brush it off as a trifle, hoping he’d spread the word that this wasn’t my chosen career path. Fun.

  He squeezed my knee. “My boyfriend is a dancer,” and his eyes twinkled with something mischievous. Who isn’t? I mean people say stuff like that and it turns out they square dance once a month or are taking weekly tango lessons at the local community centre. Besides, a dancer with this house?

  “Can I write you a cheque?”

  “Sure.” I couldn’t tell him that a week waiting for it to clear was a pain. “John Rottam.”

  “Sexy name. Kind of good for a stripper.”

  That week Kent called. He had finally arrived in Toronto and said he’d found “us” a place through an old friend—over on Palmerston, a wide, lazy, tree-lined street with big, old brick apartments and houses. I was out of that work-in-progress place in a flash since Dennis, Mr. Vindictive Fag, had taken to spreading the word to everyone that I was paying the rent by stripping. I’m not sure if there was anyone left in the city who didn’t know about me.

  Kent and I picked up where we left off—
in a big, old apartment on the ground floor of a building that looked like a castle, and to make things even more perfect, it had a working fireplace. I knew I belonged. After work I’d crawl into bed with him, and not just because he had a new queen-sized bed. I noticed recently that he was so warm beside me, and he had started sweating in his sleep. He snored, too, more if he’d been drinking lots or had a joint. But he’d put his arm around me to caress me and I’d eventually fall asleep.

  No matter what he’d done the night before, he’d already be up and out looking for work when I woke. It was when we finally had time for a meal that he tried once again to talk me out of stripping. “Now that we’re back in the real world,” he said, “maybe you should have a real job. Did I tell you that you have a gift?”

  “Not since you got to Toronto.”

  “Promise me you’ll get your shit together.”

  “Not fair.”

  “Exactly.”

  When I was taking off my pants at Biltmore’s, he was out at the Manatee or Boots or Buddy’s. Drinking. Cruising. Every night. Recuperating, I guess, from pounding the pavement. Trying to relive his past. What were we doing? A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon, our paths crossed in the waking world, in our living room. “What do you do there?”

  “Drink beer. Talk.”

  “Get laid?”

  “God, no. I’m not going to go home with just anyone. That would be a commitment.”

  “So you…”

  “The bathhouse, a backroom, whatever. I like to see the goods up front, not wait until I’m trapped on the twenty-second floor in some psycho’s apartment.”

  But I’d seen the pictures of the people he loved in that album, with him looking so good, and I knew he had way more capacity for love than I ever would. Some of them came over. We’d sit around the coffee table in the living room, drink wine, pass a joint. Some of them seemed put off by our friendship. One woman, Ruth, took to me more than the others. She had a ruddy, freckly complexion. She had worked with Kent in the old days. I remember the night a few of his gang were over when Ruth and I were alone in the kitchen, and she confessed, “I’m glad you brought him back. You make him feel special. It’s not easy being a former golden boy.”

  “I’m glad he came back, too.”

  “I think you make him feel attractive.”

  “Well, he makes me feel that way.”

  “I used to think, I mean hope, I could convert him.” She laughed.

  I started to see what it was that made him click. I saw how much he needed the people who were in his life. They didn’t take friendship lightly.

  Kent and I drank tea the next afternoon and the world stopped for a few minutes.

  “Job prospects?” He wouldn’t give up.

  “I have to keep going to Biltmore’s—for the money,” I said.

  “You can’t wait tables like…”

  “A normal person? This is easy money compared to waiting tables. Besides I’m a shittier waiter than stripper. Anyway, what I make is nothing compared to other guys working up on Yonge Street, getting blown on the floor and making some decent cash. At least I have my standards.” He chuckled, but I’d lost my stamina to argue.

  “Look,” Kent continued, “I’ll make you a deal. You stop stripping nights and I’ll pay your rent. How’s that? I want you to start dancing again.”

  “Now you’re hitting below the belt.”

  “You have no excuse anymore.”

  Again I saw it, the need linked with the ability to dance, is a curse and a blessing, without a doubt the most wonderful feeling a person can experience. True, I had started to miss it. Nothing offered the absolute satisfaction, while demanding everything of me. Perhaps that was what being an artist meant. For those of you who take this path, I am warning you, you can never quit dance. It may turn its back on you or you may turn your back on it, but if art doesn’t find its way out, it will eventually kill you.

  I took Kent up on his offer and started trading the night shifts to get caught up on my sleep. I wasn’t sorry to let them go; weekday lunches were better money-makers than weeknights, and I stopped feeling like I lived at Biltmore’s. I bit the bullet and used my tip money to show up for morning class with Rado Zaitsev, the former Russian superstar and infamous alcoholic resurrected as a mediocre character dancer, but superb teacher with the National (and Kent’s former short-lived sugar papa). Then I started swimming every afternoon with a group at the y. We’d all competed at some point and every afternoon we were intent on keeping up the competition.

  Soon all that I had lost as a dancer and as an athlete started to return and fill up my limbs once again. I regained my competitive spirit. I felt myself start to climb across the surface of the water again. My thighs screamed against the water’s resistance, but gradually they propelled me. My feet stretched until they cramped. My back and shoulders settled. I took it all into class with me. I finally started to feel firm again. I started to get to know my body the way I had before.

  I started running, too, but had to stretch for ages after to get back the flexibility. I ran in bare feet on the indoor track. I needed to feel the ground, my calves, and the soles of my feet. I found a nearby church turned into theatre and used the basement to practise endless turns and tours en l’air. I didn’t force my turnout anymore. I fought against the Company’s ideas about technique that made no sense, and found my own truths, and I felt myself become a strong, solid dancer. But it was a different body I was occupying now. It was a place (a temple?) that had been tampered with, explored, discovered and perhaps conquered.

  Initially I was afraid I would be laughed out of the studio, but I knew that my steady progress was not going unnoticed. Zaitsev was a man’s teacher; he knew the breadth a man had to dance. He wasn’t about to force my turnout for aesthetics. He knew that jumping and turning came from the power in the trunk, and a solid landing, and that the audience couldn’t give a shit about forced turnout. My enthusiasm spread to the point that I convinced Rachelle to come downtown on Saturday mornings for class, and more time afterwards for coffee and catching up. “There’s a little earthy place off Yonge Street, just below Bloor where a tall, stunning redhead woman makes killer cappuccinos. You can treat me.”

  “Do they have muffins?”

  “The size of grapefruits.”

  “It will be like old times. Remember? Post-Company class? The Barbeque Restaurant. Bran muffins like…”

  “Chocolate. Cinnamon buns like…”

  “Fucking Volkswagens, they were so big.” I knew talking about food would get her out of the house. Our petite rendezvous became a routine.

  “Kharkov was so glad to see the back of you,” she said.

  “Many are.”

  “Disappearing, I mean.”

  “He, along with everyone else, thought that you and Peter were an item. He’s made Peter’s life hell since you left. Poor Peter, he doesn’t know if he’s a lady’s or a man’s man. He’s not Kharkov’s, that’s for sure.”

  “Has he got his shoulders under control?”

  “Yeah, but when I left he was doing something funny with his feet.”

  “He fits the mould.”

  “That, he does.”

  For weeks Zaitsev paid attention to me and gave me every reason to think I could get it back—the shouting, the way he handled me physically. My strength and balance had really started to return, in my quads, my arches, my obliques, and I believed I was starting to look and feel really fine again. Then, one day in the middle of an arabesque—one of my strongest, most stable, most stretched and

  extended—my work and his dedication went down the drain with a nasty, “You’re too old,” and a swat on my calf sending me off balance. And that was all he could offer—that and a “Don’t waste any more of my time.”

  Everything stopped. He had said the worst that could be said. He
had spoken the dance god’s truth. Not “You’re a klutz,” or, “You have two left feet.” Those you can rationalize. You can’t fix “too old.” It’s permanent and I may not have taken it to heart if I had started dancing when I was two. Despite my self-critical eye, I knew that what he saw was a perfect arabesque, and for some reason it pissed him off. Was he jealous? Did he know I was living with Kent? Perhaps Zaitsev thought I’d be nipping at his ankles for all those cliché character parts they’d given him. Every odd thought crossed my mind. This country has lost so many fine dancers, and created a generation of those more determined than ever to do it their way, all because of the collective nasty temperament and paranoia that has been passed down through generations of angry, frustrated, miserable, unfulfilled so-called perfectionists. I needed thicker skin.

  That very small hope I had nursed, that he would take enough of a liking to me to somehow get me onto the radar at the National, dissipated. All I had was the last of a dead dream to belong to something great, with one and a half regional companies to my credit.

  In the afternoon Kent and I met at a coffee place on Church Street with more gay guys than I’d probably seen in my entire life. He’d had two job offers, one as the manager in a café, part of a small chain, and the other as a career counsellor at a local college.

  “I think it’s time you get off your knees, I mean feet,” I told him, and he smiled. He was so ready to sit on his ass for his paycheque. After this, I put my typical damper on things by telling him my news. “I’ve blown everything—except Zaitsev—to be told I’m too old.”

  “Maybe he can tell that to Martha Graham. Quoting you, by the way.”

  “I mean, too old for what?”

  “Whatever it is you wanted?”

  “Where are all the ones who said I’d make it?”

  “Look, what the hell do you want? Stardom? Artistic fulfillment? Even I am starting to wonder.”

  “I’ve been dancing really, really well. You know that. I think I’m actually better than when I left the Company. I mean what the fuck? How much longer are you going to pay my rent?”