Girl, Undressed by Ruth Fowler

Author:Ruth Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

I finish the dance, gather my twenties, rush away from a confused-looking Eton, when a girl I don’t know grabs my arm and spins me around angrily.

“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t let guys touch you on the floor. Don’t kiss ’em. Save it for the Champagne Room. You start doing that shit you’ll get fired.”

Hank walks over.

“Mimi, doll, I don’t want you doin’ dat shit on the floor. You hear?”

I stutter out an apology.

“No fuckin’ apologies! The other Champagne host Kate wants a word wid you.”

I drag myself into the tiny dressing room. Kate looks at me in disgust over her old-lady secretary glasses and frizzy brown hair. The House Mom, huge and resplendent and immovable, tuts loudly and resumes knitting. Knitting was a new craze among the girls. Everyone was knitting. The ugly Russian girl was crocheting G-strings to sell to the other girls. The tiny skinny dark girl was making a jacket for her dog. The House Mom seemed to be knitting for the hell of it, for a break from Us Weekly and People magazine and naked girls whining for tampons and eyeliner. Kate lifts a decaying hand up to her mouth and places a Tootsie Roll on her tongue, which she proceeds to grind slowly in her jaws like a cow chewing cud. Apparently she’s an actress. She’d make a fucking fortune in snuff movies, that’s for sure. The dressing room is buzzing with girls fixing their hair and makeup, gossiping and laughing drunkenly. I glance at the clock. A half hour to go. In the background I hear a conversation between Diamond and Desire, two of the older dancers from the Bronx.

“I tell y’all about that fuckin’ new girl?”

“No, what happened?”

“So Hank makes me go and fuckin’ apologize for tellin’ that bitch to kiss my ass. You know what she did? Saturday night, I enter the restroom. She’s in there, door wide open, takin’ a shit, and it stinks. Fuckin’ stinks. So I tell her to close the door and she ignores me. So I tell her again. Nothin’. So I go on in there and tell that bitch she gotta fuckin’ change her attitude. I don’t see why that wrong. I can’t have bitches treatin’ me like that, givin’ me no respect. I don’t wanna smell no fuckin’ shit when I go in the restroom, you know?”

“Oh honey that’s terrible.”

Kate fixes me with her snuff-movie stare.

“Mimi, we’ve had complaints about you fingering yourself in front of guys, sticking your finger up places it shouldn’t go, moving your G-string aside and showing guys—your pussy.”

She whispers the last word as if the girl standing next to her currently examining her anus in great detail for signs of excrement might take great offense in the unanatomical name for one’s vagina. I sigh and attempt a defense.

“Look, you know that’s bullshit. Some fucking bitch is making that shit up because I’m making money. You know I don’t do that shit.”

Snuff-movie stare again.

“Look Mimi. You’re treading a thin line.

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