Free Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City by Ruth Fowler

ingly void of digits before the decimal point? The dreams that keep me on this peculiar path, stop me from jacking it all in, book a ticket somewhere new, put a middle finger up to the city that wouldn’t accept me? Or the fears that keep me from going back to London, insubstantial fears, fears of being nobody among my glittering contemporaries, fears of being nothing there, not even (dare I say it?) illegal? Or the knowledge that I’d been in the U.S. for eight weeks and seemed no closer to finding a base and filling in the empty spaces that were so glaringly apparent in my life from years of transience—was that real? Or could I just gloss over it? It’s irrelevant! I’ll laugh about it in a year’s time! It’s all part of growing up, of adventure, of life experience.
    Tina nods to me chirpily, her mouth twisted into a grin.
    “ Gimme a Woah! English, how’s it going? You ain’t working today are you? Hey, did I tell you about that fucked-up three-some I had that time with the bartender from O’Grady’s with one arm . . .”
    “Tina, I need help.”
    She stops, frowns, her eyebrows knitting heavily together.
    “What kind?”
    “Social Security number.”
    “What’s it for?”
    “It’s for me. I need to get a new job. I can’t keep working off tips, and freelancing doesn’t pay. I need a real job, a wage, not working sixty-hour weeks for sod all. You know how it is. Most people don’t check the visa, they just want the SS number, so it’ll tide me over.”
    “Thought you had a visa? Just get a journalist’s visa, easiest kind to get, that’s what I did back in Australia. Made up a fucking newspaper, wrote a few letters on letterhead— bang, ten-year entry.”
    “I’m applying for that. I just need a job now until it comes through. Soon. And the only way I can get a decent-paying job is that damned number.”
    Tina pauses, nods. “Hey, Julio,” she yells to a waiter. He turns and walks over. “English here needs your help.”
    He flashes me a disarming smile. “Why don’t we go outside for a cigarette?” He opens the door, and we sit on a doorstep, just out of sight of the restaurant.
    “Whadda you want?”
    “Social Security card.”
    “No problem. We’ll text you the number tomorrow. The card will take, maybe a week. It’ll cost you fifteen bucks, pay on delivery. All good? Cool.”
    He hurls his half-smoked cigarette into the street, where it rolls, stops, smolders. Already the snow had gone, spring was creeping in. New York was changing, starting to wake up. And having hovered, frozen in stasis, the Mimi side of things was beginning to mature as the ice thawed, the buds opened. And it was painless, that’s the strangest, most unusual thing about it. This Mimi-puberty wasn’t like the first, dredged in Sylvia Plath poetry and black clothing and stylish anorexia and tears and marijuana and acoustic guitars and dry humping spotty boys with Oasis hair and corduroy pants. This was utterly painless, and even the fear of doing something illegal, something that could have me thrown out of the country, something that was completely, unmistakably wrong, was complemented by that sharp pure smack of living, that pleasurable sting of existence, the realization that this, definitely, was something more.
     
    My new employment, secured with the fake SS number, is directly opposite the gaping wound where the World Trade Center used to be. The basic premise was that I would be responsible for interviewing potential carers, nannies, nursing aides, butlers, chefs, housekeepers, and other staff for the crème de la crème of New York society. Brenda, my boss, explains my duties in great detail.
    “So then you, like, pick up the phone when it rings, and there will be, like, a person on the other end, and you have to say ‘Hello, Star Skivvies. How may I help you?’ and they will reply . . .”
    The office is beige and pink. They play supermarket music continually at a tone set to resemble Chinese