Shameless

by Nina Lemay

  SHAMELESS

  Copyright © 2014 by Nina Lemay

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Najla Qamber Designs

  Edited by Kim Graff

  Formatting by Caitlin Greer

  For more information about the author, visit:

  ninalemay.com

  The weirdest thing customers say to me isn’t, I think the way your ribs stick out is sexy, or, how much is it to buy your panties?

  The answer to the first one is a big smile and thank you, because I thank people when they compliment me, that’s how I was raised. The answer to the second one is no, you can’t do that, and by the way that’s fucking weird.

  But the weirdest thing I get told is, you don’t look like a stripper. They say it to explain why of all the girls working the floor at Cabaret Le Secret tonight they picked me, small, scrawny, flat, tattooed, pink-haired me, pale and pasty like the watery Minnesota peach that I am. Apparently that’s not what a stripper is supposed to look like.

  At first I thought it was insulting, then hilarious. Now, like most things, I don’t give a fuck.

  I also get asked my “real” name a lot. No one buys that an exotic young thing like me could really be called Alicia—pronounced the French way, not Aleesha but Aleesia. That’s why I have a fake real name, Natalie. I lean over, letting the bleach-fried tips of my pastel hair brush their shoulder just so, and whisper it in their ear. And just like that, I’m their new best friend. They love me and that means they’ll gladly hand over the entire contents of their wallet, so for me, it works.

  I also have fake biographies for myself that I thought up during dead Sunday nights while sitting at the bar dangling my six-inch heels into emptiness. Sometimes I take them farther, test their limits, see how much bullshit I can get away with. You’d be surprised.

  My real biography is boring as fuck, just like my real name.

  Maybe one day, one hypothetical day that I’ll probably keep putting off till I’m old and too wrinkled to strip—one day I’ll quit and change my plain old name to Aleesia, for real.

  For now I’m just trying to make the best of the late-August slump. The weather’s still good, the hockey games at the arena adjacent to the downtown core haven’t started yet, it’s a Sunday and the club is so dead I wonder why I even showed up. I could have stayed home except the manager would have given me crap or threatened to fire me. Maybe I should have stayed anyway—fuck him. But I don’t want to have to get used to a new club, to learn everyone’s names and shit. I have other things on my mind. School starts tomorrow, and I haven’t set aside quite enough for tuition over the summer.

  I’ve been slacking. The apathy of not having to wake up and be somewhere at a specific time every morning, of not having things to hand in and deadlines to meet, has sucked me in like a black hole. I killed the summer away day by day in my empty loft, sweltering with the faulty AC—she makes several bills a night and she can’t afford a new AC, that’s what you’re thinking, I know. I just wasn’t in the mood to go to the hardware store. I’d need a car to bring the new AC back home, and for that I’d have to go and be nice to someone who has a car.

  I’d rather lay on top of the damp bedsheets, fan directed right at me, and only crawl out at night when the heat had abated.

  Tomorrow is August 31st, and I have to get my ass in gear for another year. I’m ready to embody the cliché of the stripper-paying-for-her-education.

  Although no, for that cliché to work I’d have to be in med school, or law, or at least engineering. And I’m in the Fine Arts program—it’s at Mackay, which is prestigious enough, but still.

  Almost two years have passed since I filled out the online application forms and mailed my hopeful portfolio, which I was still convinced was pure genius, to every school in North America with even the smallest art department. My grades had slipped in the last semester, with all the shit that went down, so of the slew of applications, only one fat envelope came back: Mackay University, Montreal.

  My mom threw a fit. She wanted me to stay home and reapply to the local college or at least one in Minneapolis. She threw stuff and threatened to cut me off. But I went. I still went because I knew there was no way in hell I was staying in that town for even a heartbeat longer than I had to.

  So here I am, the embodiment of all her worst fears about me come to life.

  The truth is, I’ve been toying with the idea of dropping out. The school, the art program, even independent life in this city of a somewhat deserved debauched reputation—it didn’t bring me back to life the way everyone said it would. The art program was my last-ditch attempt to get back to the thing I used to love the most, painting, but instead it killed the little drive I did have. The classes were either too restrictive or too liberal; the tyranny of total freedom of medium and subject made it impossible to put anything down onto the blank canvas. And suddenly I found myself surrounded with Quebecois girls, barely eighteen, with more talent than me in their manicured little finger.

  The only reason I have yet to go down to admissions and fill out the pink slip of withdrawal is because I don’t want to be any more of a cliché than I already am.

  So here I am, on a Sunday before my first day back. It’s nearing midnight and only two tables are taken up. Two more people at the bar. One of them is that regular all the new girls trip over, like a rite of passage. Makes you talk for hours, flashes his cash and then doesn’t get a single dance. The other looks so ancient I’m afraid he might die right in the private booth.

  I pause in front of one of the full-length mirrors lining the club walls and adjust my two-piece outfit. Today it’s my least favorite one, because no point in wasting a good outfit on a Sunday night. It’s an off-the-shoulder tank top cropped to just below my boobs and matching French-cut panties, all made of a cheap gilded fabric that has already lost a lot of its luster in the wash. But in the dim lights of the club, no one can tell—not that anyone cares, anyway. Guys never notice stupid stuff like outfits, or jewelry, or whether you had your nails or your pedicure redone within the last month. They come here looking for one thing, and that ain’t your airbrush nail designs. If they wanted nice lingerie, they’d stay home and jerk off to their wife’s Victoria Secret catalogue.

  So I go see one of the tables. Two guys, Typical Strip Club Patron prototype: middle-aged, not in great shape (that’s being generous), and since it’s Sunday, jeans and ratty sweaters.

  “Hi guys,” I say, and lean over the table seductively, giving them a view down the plunging neckline of the tank top. That means pretty much everything short of my nipples. Subtlety has no place here either.

  They both glance up at me, with those lazy evaluating looks that roam me, unsubtly, from head to toe. I say one of my generic go-to phrases, how’s your night or where are you from or whatever seems fitting. They answer with something equally generic, unenthusiastic. I ask them if they want a dance, as a last-ditch effort: it’s clear the answer is going to be no.

  “Sorry. Maybe in a little bit?” offers up the one closest to me. That means no. But still he feels the need to reach out and put his hand on my forearm.

  I give him a smile that never reaches my eyes. “All right, I’ll drop by after you’ve had a few drinks.”

  I start to stand up, extricating my arm from him. But then he grips my forearm tighter and ad
ds:

  “Sorry, sweetie, but that’s probably not a good idea. No offense but you’re just not my type.”

  Okay. I intend to walk away without acknowledging him—all part of the game, no accounting for taste and all. But he pulls on my arm, so abrupt that I teeter on my heels for a fraction of a second, and whispers loudly:

  “Is there anyone here who’s not so flat-chested? I mean, a girl with big tits. I really like a girl with big tits, could you call her up?”

  I yank my arm free. The clasp of his watch scratches my skin, enough to leave a burning trail.

  “Find her yourself. I’m not your secretary,” I snap.

  He stares at me for a moment, jaw agape. “Sheesh,” he says as his face returns to its default lazy, cocky expression. “Just asking. I mean, it’s your job.”

  “My job is to dance,” I say through my teeth. “For people with money who want dances. So fuck off.”

  I don’t wait for his answer, I just turn around and walk away without a backward glance. At that moment the song playing overhead starts to fade out and I hear him mutter:

  “…anorexic bitch.”

  I wonder if I should tell the manager they were trying to take pictures or asking for sex or something. Have them thrown out. But part of me just refuses to give a fuck. Insults that would have had me crying in the bathroom for an entire period back in high school, that had me simmering with rage and humiliation for hours when I first started, now fade within seconds with nary a memory. It’s always something. Anorexic bitch. Fat bitch. Flat-chested bitch, fake-titted bitch, bottle-blonde bitch, ugly bitch, tattooed bitch.

  After working here awhile, it becomes impossible to ignore how much most men really hate women.

  Not that I didn’t already know that. These days you don’t have to be a stripper or a call girl or a porn star to realize it.

  You can just be an ordinary, slightly dorky girl in a small-town Minnesota high school, the one in the back, the one no one notices.

  You just have to be a girl, period.

  Stripping was logical for me. One fall day last year I just bought some cheap high heels and a bra-and-panties set from the discount rack at the lingerie outlet and showed up at my first club. I didn’t get coerced into it, there was no moral dilemma, no lying awake at night being tormented by my downfall. It was, in a way, unavoidable.

  Montreal’s clubs line Ste-Catherine Street in the touristy shopping district, mixed in with the high-end boutiques and fancy department stores, cinemas and restaurants. You walk down the street in the middle of the day and there are their blinking neons, lit photos of blond pinup girls beckoning to you: a strip club next door to a maternity clothes store, a massage parlor sandwiched between a Forever XXI and a smoked-meat place, a seedy sex shop next to a five-star hotel or a student residence, and no one bats an eyelash. I passed three strip clubs every day, on the way from the shitty dorm I shared with two other people. I could see the blinking neon legs from the windows of one of my classrooms, going up and down, up and down, ticking away the seconds like a metronome.

  But somehow other girls managed to escape the pull of it, to keep walking right past it without their eyes straying from the sidewalk, their minds focused on the day ahead, on their classes, their assignments, their deadlines. And me—I slipped right in like I belonged there. Maybe my mom was right, maybe everyone in my class was right—there always has been something about me. I was born missing some crucial lobe in my twisty, unknowable artist’s brain.

  Maybe this missing lobe is what allows me to erase every night from my mind as soon as the clock strikes three, obliterating the faces and names and cologne smells with laser-guided precision.

  It’s not till one AM that the place starts to fill up. By now I’m lethargic, my motivation evaporated. I sit at the table in the back of the club, the one no one wants because it’s too far from the stage, and flip open the mini sketchbook I always carry with me. I tap my stub of a pencil—too short to use in class, but just perfect to fit in my tiny work purse—on the blank page. Nothing comes. I’m so used to it. There was a time when my head was teeming with images, pictures, swirls of rich color and pattern. With ideas just begging to be put down onto paper in generous strokes. Lately my head is just empty.

  I draw two vertical lines, close together, through the center of the page. A pole. Against it, I sketch the mere outline of a silhouette, a girl leaning on it, back arched to the extreme, head thrown back, her hair brushing her lower back. I start on the details of her face when someone calls my name.

  My head snaps up and, by sheer instinct, I snap the sketchbook closed, just like back home when I’d get caught drawing in the middle of algebra or history. But it’s just Maryse, another girl from the club.

  “Hey! Alicia. There’s these guys in the last booth to the right, they said they wanted two girls. Wanna go?”

  There’s two hours left in the night, and I made zero dollars beyond what I need to take the $15 cab ride back to the loft. Oh yeah, and the first of the month is tomorrow. Doesn’t look like I have a choice. So I put away the sketchbook, get up and follow Maryse.

  Of the booths across from the stage, only two are occupied, and Maryse leads me directly to the last one where four guys are sitting on the tacky red faux-leather U-shaped couch. A bucket of ice on the low table houses a bottle of champagne: the Dom Perignon. I know all the items on the price list by heart: it’s $800. Maybe the night isn’t going to be a total loss.

  “This is my friend, Alicia,” Maryse announces, leaning forward as she climbs onto the seat next to a guy with cropped grey hair and glasses. She curls up like a cat, with her legs tucked under her, displaying her curvy-in-the-right-places figure at a flattering angle. It’s the glasses guy who has the money here, this much is obvious.

  He regards me with a look I learned to recognize: slight disappointment. I’m not what he had in mind. He wanted another girl like Maryse, a bleach-blonde with a tan and something to hold on to. But for whatever reason, he opts out of brutal honesty.

  “Alicia,” he says. “That’s nice. Where are you from?”

  “From here,” I say, trying not to show my discouragement. Another question everyone’s obsessed with: where are you from? No, I mean where were you born, what’s your ethnicity? And they refuse to give up until you’ve given them an answer that goes with their vision of you—with the little fantasy they’ve built inside their heads.

  Ideally, if the guy is from out of town, or from the States—they want a local, one of Montreal’s notorious “hot French chicks.” In that case, my “real” name becomes Natha-LEE instead of plain old Natalie, emphasis on the last syllable. The locals, they want something exotic.

  I hate the word exotic. I’m about as exotic as a strawberry pop tart. And apparently small-town Minnesota just isn’t sexy, however you spin it. They start to wonder if you’re some wayward little cousin of someone they know. Which kinda ruins the fantasy.

  So I say I’m German, Dutch, Eastern European—whatever comes to mind, and whatever I think I can get away with.

  But right now, I’m just not in the mood for all the dumb questions that follow. Did you come here to strip? Were you trafficked? Do you like it here? So for now, I’m a Montrealer born and raised.

  “Those are nice tattoos.” He goes to grab for my arm and I dodge him. A no-no. I’m supposed to let him examine my tattoos in detail while he takes the opportunity to discreetly fondle my shoulder, run his fingers over my back, my hip.

  I expect to be asked to come back later any second now, but instead he reaches for the wallet at his side.

  “Listen, I don’t want a dance right now,” he drawls. Here we go. “But I want you to take care of my friend right here. His name is Emmanuel, and he just moved back to town after five years living in freaking Abitibi, so we gotta give him a warm welcome, all right?”

  I turn: the guy he’s talking about is sitting at the other end of the U-shaped couch, on the very edge, his hands on his knees.
He seems young, the youngest in the group. He doesn’t look like he even wants to be here, much less like he wants a dance.

  Grey-haired guy hands me a $100 bill. “Take good care of him, okay?”

  I feel a shiver of discomfort as I take the bill and tuck it away into my purse. I don’t like dancing for someone who’s not into it. It’s just awkward as hell. Most of the time, though, it’s some guy with his girlfriend who pretends to be cool with it but clearly isn’t, or some unlucky bachelor who’s just trying not to throw up after his 20th shot of tequila. Usually if you pay someone to sit on your lap in a G-string, it’s because you like it.

  Still. I’m not in the position to turn down money.

  I move, taking tiny steps in my heels, until I’m facing the guy. Up close, I realize he’s probably in his early thirties—he only looks young next to the others. His hair is thick and dark, and messy, but I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or he just didn’t bother. He’s cute. He has one of those French-guy faces, with the cheekbones, a strong jaw, the hint of a cleft in his chin. His eyes are his most striking feature—deep and slanted so they’re sad-looking, probably even when he isn’t sad, and fringed with lush, dark lashes.

  He tenses as I lean over him, gazes up, and the edge of a tattoo peeks above the collar of his black button-down: the swirling, broad strokes of a dark vine with sharp spikes of leaves. I look him over: his fingers start to tap nervously on his thighs, and he has some kind of letters tattooed on his knuckles. I normally hate knuckle tattoos, but I’m not repulsed, just curious. It’s too dark to make out what the letters say, and the angle is wrong.

  Suddenly I’m overcome with the kind of girly awkwardness I usually leave at the door when I come to work. My character slips, and I become plain old Hannah Shay again, who can’t even muster the courage to talk to a boy she likes.

  “You’re coming with me,” I say. My sexy voice fails, but the music is loud enough to disguise it.

  He gazes up at me with a mournful look in those sad eyes. “Oh. No, thank you. I don’t want a dance.”