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 ofOne’. 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
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 ofOne’. 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
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