Chapter Thirty-Seven
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I was nineteen the first time I danced. I just needed quick money to get away from my stepdad and stay in school.
I needed to cover that one semester and then I’d figure things out.
I’d convince Queenie to give me the money, or I’d find a higher-paying job, maybe at a law office or a telemarking firm.
I showed up backstage expecting to be styled in something black or maybe hot pink, leather and lace, something trashy or burlesque, a feather boa maybe.
But the girls handed me a ratty stuffed bunny rabbit and shoved me onstage wearing my jean shorts and a T-shirt from a Tex-Mex restaurant where I worked briefly as a hostess in high school.
I thought it would be more like karaoke and I could pick my song, but the speakers blared Nine Inch Nails.
I didn’t know what to do. Help me. I felt so exposed, so outside my body onstage, not just naked but faceless, a girl in an Impressionist painting.
Help me get away from myself. I began to rub the bunny between my legs.
A guy in a brown suit nodded yeah, a satisfied soccer coach cheering me on from the sidelines.
He tossed me a twenty. I want to fuck you like an animal.
I realize now he hadn’t been paying for my beauty or erotic appeal but for my youth. My na?veté.
“Yum. Yum. Yum.” He tossed me another twenty.
Help me become somebody else.
—
It scared and surprised me how much I loved being watched.
The music, the bright lights, the rapt crowd, the filthy dollar bills tossed at me.
I made so much money that I stepped right over the one-dollar bills.
I was nineteen. I’d bleached my butt and given lap dances to a varsity basketball team, but scooping up singles was somehow beneath me.
When the lights came on, the club smelled of semen and industrial air freshener.
Benzos didn’t work. The only way I could come down was to clean, so I got on my knees with a Brillo pad and a jug of industrial Clorox.
I’d scrub until the sun came up or I came down, whichever happened first.
Then I’d go back to my dorm room and I’d take a long shower and I’d sleep, the Laura Ashley comforter pulled over my head, the Tiffany light Queenie gave me and a Mary McCarthy book on the bedside table.
All I wanted to do was sleep all day and wake up in the late afternoon and eat a breakfast burrito.
But I knew that no matter what time I woke up, Emily would be there.
Emily was always fucking there. Judging me.
Trying to save me. A ghost of the girl I used to be.
The girl who had dreams of studying art at Cooper Union.
The girl who painted and wrote bad poetry and pretended to be “literary.” The girl who’d never even had a boyfriend.
Who’d never done more than make out in the back row of the suburban metroplex.
Who’d definitely never shaved her labia with a men’s BIC Flex 5 trim and shave.
Who’d never curl into a ball in the shower.
Who’d never let the scalding water pound on her back as she sobbed and thought about the essay she had due in her Power of Prose class.
Who thought about a Jean Rhys novel and dinner parties and trips to Paris.
Who’d let the hot water run over her and thought about anything to not think about what happened that night.
Emily, always annoying me, always droning on about art and books and this fantasy of a future that she’d laid out for us in New York, like she watched too many episodes of Sex and the City.
I may have been a stripper with a burgeoning drug addiction, but she was the delusional one.
Truly. How could she look in the mirror and not see the truth?
That she was, at best, average. Nothing she wrote was original or special or worthy.
She got this hirsute boyfriend who published a poem in the Oxford American and read Proust in a hammock outside his garage apartment.
I instantly wanted to do him, just to piss her off.
I couldn’t help it. She was so grating, always talking about moving “up east,” as if the big city needed her.
Yes, Emily, the New York literati are just waiting for you.
Graydon Carter is saving you a spot at the Waverly Inn.
Nobody wanted Emily. Not her mother. Not her revolving door of father figures.
Not the incoming freshmen who filled out their dorm-room compatibility quizzes.
Emily—even the name feels plucked out of a 1990s baby name book by someone who didn’t care enough to flip the page. I had to get away from that bitch.
The Gold Star Fashion Modeling Agency had nothing to do with fashion or modeling, but the agency got me far away from Emily and Texas.
They got me real work, a makeup artist, catering, a set, rules, sex acts I could refuse to do.
The men—the producers and actors (if you can call them that)—all had to agree to my guidelines because I had a face like a fucking angel, which you could only see if you clicked past several pages of “Asian babes” and “Sapphic Sorority Sisters” and inserted your credit card details.
You don’t find that face every day in the adult industry.
This was before every slut with a webcam could make a living. This was the movies (sort of).
I did maybe two videos—one of which prominently featured a mason jar (don’t ask)—before I graduated to become a type of luxury good, sold at a very high price to a select group of subscribers on the dark web.
Later I would learn that the videos were a sales tool.
Test-drive the new Maserati. John (that was actually his name) kept a database, Excel spreadsheets with intricate details about all the girls, our ages, backgrounds, STDs (bonus if you were like me and had none), languages spoken (English, conversational Spanish), education (some college), and paired us with men.
Sergio saw me in the mason jar movie and requested me.
I guess it started from there, these superrich guys, the travel, the jets, the on-demand services.
I was good at being a professional girlfriend because the more I had to think about someone else’s needs, the less I had to think about my own.
I loved seeing the world. Although I hated the parties, putting on a fake smile, and pretending that we’re not all about to have an orgy as soon as the last oligarch’s wife leaves.
I saw the sights, met some interesting people, had arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of La Perla negligees.
Emily probably thinks I was hustling outside a Pancake House in Kentucky when in reality I was hitting the foie gras station and sixteen types of caviar at the buffet at the Peninsula in Shanghai.
I’d walked along the Bund, strolled into galleries, shopped at Shanghai Tang, pushing the limits on what I could spend, but it never even made a dent.
Money didn’t mean anything to these men.
I learned that the best thing about having money was the ability to think about things other than money.
I dyed my hair, got a nose job, had my implants removed, anything to make sure no one recognized me from my earlier work.
I started to read the Financial Times. I gave myself the kind of education I never would’ve gotten at a football school in Texas: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus.
I learned French, picked up some Mandarin.
I took easily to the tennis courts and ski slopes and even played pickleball.
You would’ve thought I was from Connecticut.
Word started to spread. I didn’t need John or a database.
If you wanted someone discreet, classy enough to bring to charity events and cocktail parties, smart enough to hold her own, to talk literature, current events, the markets, but dirty enough to do whatever she’s told, I was your gal.
But the best part about the work was that it made me forget Emily.
To finally quiet that incessant, annoying voice saying “You’re better than this” and asking “What about your dreams?” And “Are you still writing?” I know that even if I told her all of this, really opened up about how successful I am, how I’d gotten clean and built an interesting and lucrative life for myself, she’d still look down on me.
Maybe not to my face, but deep down, she’d think I was some hot mess who needed to be saved.
Okay, so my “career” came with some caveats (nobody loves getting cum on fresh makeup), but it was basically the life we’d always dreamed about, and I’d built that shit out of nothing.
Forged a fascinating existence out of Vaseline and baby wipes.
I’d started out stripping by a regional airport, the walls shaking every time a flight landed.
Graduated to a strap-on at a studio in the San Fernando Valley, and two years later, I was wearing a Versace bustier on a mega-yacht in the South of France.
If that isn’t success, I don’t know what is.
I’d forgotten Emily in order to survive. So if you ask me, she got what she deserved, summoning me back like that.