Strip

by Andrew Binks

  I sipped my beer.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “One more time—you and me in ’83.”

  “Et vous aussi, chèr ami. Hey, it rhymes. Now, don’t change the subject.”

  “New Year’s. Ha. You were icing bruises, and I was watching the skin peel off my arms. Fuck. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Things can only get better.”

  “I’m with you,” I said, and then in my harshest French, “Je suis en accord avec voooo!”

  After I showered, I squeezed into Kent’s bed and, in retrospect, I see now that that evening, for the first time in my life, I made love to another man. Real love. We were naked against each other and I kissed his beer-and-cigarette-scented mouth so deeply that I barely knew where he started and I stopped. I was hungry for his closeness. Would he know this was love, or just think I was improving my technique?

  When I woke in the morning, I lay quietly with him beside me and thought about the previous evening. I believed the dream to be a dancer had finally left me. Kent was right, I had nothing to offer and my dreams were rooted in a selfish ego. I had put in my time, deservedly and passively hoping I’d move up the ladder, but maybe my motives had never been clear enough, or had gotten sidetracked. Did I want to impress someone other than myself? Did I have to prove something? I really was my blank stare. Kent snored, and I slipped downstairs to buy a normal coffee among normal people, like a normal person.

  That night, Steve wanted to have a meeting in the washroom. “What’s the matter, chèri? This isn’t like you.”

  “I’m tired. I’m tired of everything—winter, cold floors, city buses, four-hour sleeps, this shit-stubborn back, having to find another job, again—and not even being…”

  “Excited? About this?”

  It felt so wrong. I had become a different person overnight. I had no idea who the new person was, but he seemed to see the old one quite clearly.

  To add to the confusion, when we left the can, Guy, Steve’s Guy, was waiting in his Iroquois costume. He was a truly gorgeous man, not a bathroom thrills slut kind of guy that I had become. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. It was simple. I was evil and he wasn’t.

  So the two of them went off to have their own drama, leaving me to get into the new costumes Marcel had made: velvet lapels and cuffs for me, and dyed-black wild turkey feathers for Bichon and Sugar. He had obviously pulled out all the stops, gone way over-budget as they say.

  Bichon and Sugar, the two of them looking like a cross between Marie Antoinette and Big Bird’s widow, pecked away at our situation like it was the end of the world, taking it to heart when they didn’t have to worry because they’d be back in Montreal in a few weeks. Perhaps they cared about Marcel in a way I could not. When they finally tired of creating alternatives and options for Marcel’s future, they focused on me with advice and warnings. “You can’t forget your technique,” Bichon said. “Watch out for the talkers,” Sugar advised.

  “Stalkers?” said Bichon, face scrunched in misunderstanding.

  “Talkers, for shit’s sakes. And don’t do that to your face, it cakes your foundation. The talkers will still be talking fifty years from now, about dreams and plans, and watching like hawks to see what everyone else is up to.”

  “Even if you never get back into the ballet,” Sugar said, “you make great chorus boy material. Can you sing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have a dream?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, but yes, of course. I am auditioning for Trockadero, and Sugar is going to audition for Caracas. I mean shit, she’s the right colour.”

  “Really? But you two said you weren’t suited for it.”

  “Baby, that’s our shtick. And this is just a shtick shtop, a favour.”

  But my auditioning for anything didn’t make sense since my new revelation. And add to that the fact that the whole new show had an overriding feeling of darkness, and I might as well have called everything quits; the lights were dark, the costumes were blacks and reds like a dark Marie Antoinette meets Darth Vader to both go to hell, with Bichon in a huge black hoop skirt covered in feathers, looking more like a beaver lodge than a showgirl. Everyone was glum, Marcel was still sour, Sugar was still pissed at Marcel for constantly pouting, and everybody bickered.

  Fortunately we all started drinking during the shows, heavily, thanks to an old regular. He’d send trays of cognac downstairs. Some nights we ended up doing the whole show just for him—and do it drunk. He’d toss us flowers. We’d clap for him. He’d clap for us. He’d send down more drinks, and when he forgot to oblige us, we would treat ourselves. Soon word got out that the show was closing, and everyone started buying us drinks. Things got messier, though it didn’t matter, since no one in the club seemed to notice us; we were background noise as far as the strippers and Louis the owner were concerned.

  The low point of it all was the night I slipped under Bichon’s immense igloo dress before she went onstage. She made her entrance, curtsied, and then I grabbed her fishnet thigh causing her to jump out of her skin, and the audience to wake up and laugh. But she didn’t laugh. In fact she belted me in the chin hard enough for me to hear and feel my jaw compress, see stars and taste blood. “Don’t ever startle me onstage. I don’t care what we do back here, surprises are fine, but a drag queen with a broken heel is gonna be hell for you. I’m just warning you. I can’t audition for the Troc with a broken ankle.” With her permission, the number turned into an even sloppier and predictable piece after that—lacking originality—with me ogling from under her skirt and usually tumbling out eating something, like a banana. Like life, it wasn’t that much fun without the spontaneity. And, like life, we never really enjoyed working together after that faux pas. We both knew I’d been careless.

  A week later our contract was firmed up for the Soirée Chartreuse, an international hairdressers’ convention at the Chateau Frontenac. It was also the weekend of the Canadian Dental Association’s annual general meeting. My parents, with little warning, decided to pay a visit. They had called when I wasn’t home and Kent had provided enough vague information to keep questions at bay but to make them sufficiently curious. He said he was my roommate, he said I was extremely busy with two jobs.

  At ten there was a knock on the door, and heart blasting at the thought that it was my parents, even though I told them I would meet them at their hotel, I pulled myself together while Kent hid in the bathroom. I hit the buzzer and opened the door to run downstairs to be met by seven fresh-faced, snow-covered bankers and accountants stomping up from street level. “We drove all night,” said the chubby one who led the way. Until that moment I had completely forgotten the call, or even what day it was. “Where’s your tan?” the first one asked. I couldn’t recognize them in their parkas, since I had earmarked each one by a specific fashion faux pas.

  “I’ll show you.”

  I explained it all to Kent once they’d dumped their stuff and gone out to be tourists. His only reply: “You met seven men and not one of them looks fuck-able, how do you do it? No wonder you’ve only had six in your life.”

  As for my parents, they stayed in a big hotel a stone’s throw outside the wall, close to that locale where I had spent a majority of my time—the bus stop. Dad was busy all day with seminars at Laval and interviewing possibilities for a few Edmonton residency spaces. Mom slept. I made reservations for the two of them at the restaurant Kent worked at, and to keep things animated, made a big deal about the Internationale Soirée Chartreuse the next night. While I was getting ready to head out to work I asked Kent to take good care of them. “Could you get them a bottle of champagne or something, not too pricey? I’ll pay.”

  “If I can go in on it with you, I’ll get them pricey. How’s that? Life is too short, you know…”

  “Will you be waiting
on them?”

  “You are looking at the wait staff.”

  “Good luck. I hope they stock rye. My dad gets ugly without a warm-up cocktail or two.”

  “Good rye.”

  “He likes the cheap stuff.”

  “Now you go be cheap and stop worrying.”

  Kent was a charming man when it came to socializing, and, although they had some pretty ingrained prejudices—male roommate was suspect—I was sure he would charm them.

  He must have won them over, because that night just as I was packing up from a table dance for the seven Caribbean carnival–goers boarding chez moi, who had arrived early—still on Toronto time—to get a good seat, Kent and my parents, having dined and amply wined, showed up.

  Kent wasn’t all bad; he made sure word spread throughout the club—faster than you can translate venereal warts—that my parents were in the house. I packed up my drink tray and my box and got my g-stringed ass off the floor. I vowed to murder Kent, but only after he paid me what he owed me in lost tips that night. I joined the three of them in the audience and from there, with my behind actually on a chair, and fabric between my bum and the fake leather seat, I noticed how bland and sedate a Saturday night crowd really was. All the activity must have only been going on in my self-centred mind. It was a backwash of middle-aged women in wigs, dentures, slacks and blouses, and men in cardigans and grey flannels. They all looked so much more sinister when you were over them or getting drinks or dancing at their tables. And among them sat my parents looking like the Duke and Duchess of Strathcona. But when I noticed my father’s teeth glowing, I realized that for all those years, the man who I thought had perfect teeth was a capped and crowned fraud. How obvious. Under those many nights of black lights, I had learned the truth about fakery, as my mother’s hair glowed green.

  “I can see his thing,” my mother giggled. “Oh my goodness.” She took out a tissue and wiped her nose. Yes, she saw Guy’s thing, and yes, oh my goodness, even though it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t hard to miss halfway across the room. This seemed to give her the upper hand in a silent war with my father.

  Fortunately Kent made sure they continued to have lots of liquor, suggesting with some intent that I fetch a bottle of bubbly in an ice bucket. When we did our show, with them as drunk as us, they probably didn’t recognize me or even know I was on the stage at all. Besides there were better things to look at; my father sat open-mouthed and wide-eyed as the girls showed their goods to neighbouring tables. I should have introduced the entire corps de ballet to him. He would have appreciated that. He may have secretly hoped these women would turn me into a red-blooded male.

  Marcel and Louis both stopped by to share a drink. Marcel had a way with people’s mothers, and ordered another bottle of bubbly. He was an approval suck and my mother, no different from anyone else who enjoyed being the centre of attention, responded. If anything could have devastated her that night it would be the vague connection between her own broken dreams and whatever the fuck it was I was doing. Soon a naked yet supple rear end got dangerously close to my father, and it was time to have Kent take them home.

  “It’s burlesque,” I told them, breaking the silence, “like you’d see in a Parisian music hall.” (I had no idea.) I shivered, waiting with them for a cab. Couldn’t they just admit they’d had a bit of fun, even if it was at my expense?

  “Nothing like it where we’re from.”

  “You wanted to be a dancer,” my mother said, as if she understood, more so than I, that this was part of the deal; satisfied that I would see the light as I dug myself out of this hole.

  I shivered, rubbed the goosebumps on my arms, and watched the cab skid away. As I went back inside it struck me what made working in there tolerable: the touches, the smiles, the passing nudges, the pats on the back when I was exhausted at the end of the night or at the beginning of a shift. Mihalis winked at me as I squeezed past him.

  As I looked across the smoke-filled room, busy and noisy now that alcohol had softened everyone up, I could easily have driven myself crazy if I had looked at this place, not to mention my life, with my parents’ perspective. How could they ever understand a moment of my happiness, or one of my small victories?

  After cabbing it home with the boys, and everyone getting tucked in, sharing the floor, the mattress and the foam, and dousing the flames of the one I may have had sex with on the beach, and taking in stride all of the lewd comments the others were making in the hopes of having a story to take home about a wild orgy with a stripper in Quebec City, I crawled in with Kent. The next morning the apartment looked like the end of Act One of Sleeping Beauty, with all the lords-in-waiting snoring up a storm in various stages of sobriety. Without disturbing any of my suitors, I called my parents who miraculously hadn’t immediately left town, and met them for brunch at their hotel. On the phone my father said, “Don’t bring him.” Well that was fine because “him” was still asleep, after I had given “him” an early morning beneath-the-sheets morning glory while others slept on. I ran cold water on my head, tried to take down the swollen eyes of a deep, short sleep, stepped among the revellers, and headed over to the hotel.

  We sat at a banquette and served ourselves Sunday brunch. I noticed their clothes. I had become so used to makeshift and second-hand and moth-eaten. They wore first-hand cashmere, wool, tweed, lovely new threads from stores where you could eat off the floor—Holt Renfrew. I thought of that musty rat sauvage coat that I was so proud to find. After mopping up hollandaise with a bit of English muffin, my mother finally broke the silence. “Don’t they have any self-respect?”

  “Some of them are paying their way through college,” I said, and it was no lie—there was at least one girl I knew of who would come down from Montreal one or two weeks a month and use the money to pay for her studies in anthropology. But I knew they didn’t believe me; people had very specific ideas about strippers. I went on. “When you find what you really want to do, you’ll do it, no matter the cost, even if no one offers support.” I wondered if they made the connection. “Some are mothers. One is even pregnant.”

  “The shrimp salad is lovely,” my mother interrupted. “Do you want another mimosa?”

  “I’ll coast.”

  “This room is really elegant. The French have such taste.”

  But I’m sure it was cookie cutter American Hilton. “It’s nice.”

  “Now if you two excuse me while I powder my nose, you can get caught up.”

  After my mother excused herself, I felt no need to explain anything to my father, but I knew that he knew. In fact he probably imagined much worse. We sat in silence. All he could do was bite his lip and keep from asking the too intimate, Are you happy? “Don’t worry about her,” he said, then he smiled to himself.

  “Any prospective residencies? How did your interviews go?” He knew what I thought of his so-called interns. They were always young and attractive. He raised his eyebrows, looked thoughtful, but didn’t speak.

  After long moments of playing with the stem of my glass, I watched my mother weave her way back to the table.

  “Tonight should be fun,” I said. “There will be fashion, press, lots to drink.”

  That afternoon I played tour guide for them, on foot, exhausting them with walks up and down the narrow streets. There was a thaw, and we stepped over melting snowbanks and around puddles. We finally stopped for tea at the Clarendon, which became drinks at the Clarendon, and out of the silence my mother spoke, “Kent seems nice.” This was my mother’s seal of approval for at least one part of my life. Nice people were important to her; it meant they would see her for the long-suffering good person she was.

  “He is. He is a genuinely nice person.” And for the first time in months, I felt proud of making a good decision. My father took a newspaper off a neighbouring table, looked down at it. Did he notice it was in French?

  “Why is he here?” she
continued. “Kent, I mean.”

  “Like me, Mom, it’s a step along the way. He got tired of the direction things were going for him.”

  “It’s a step? This is a step?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Later the two of them dined at the Chateau Frontenac—where once upon a time I had dreamed of being a busboy—while I got ready for the show.

  The Montreal models didn’t like how much our group was drinking—with regular deliveries from the bar coordinated by Bichon and Sugar—compared to their one complimentary glass of champagne. But two drinks might have floored their fragile frames. They refused to share changing space and frankly, we didn’t want to, after one of their light bulbs blew up because one of the model-idiots had thrown a wet facecloth on it. We were worlds apart. They were vapid, high heel chic, and we were barefoot in tribal wear and seething with drama. Nadine didn’t show up, which put a hole in things, but we faked our way through Marcel’s choreography exactly like all his other numbers: walk, walk, walk, turn, pose, pas de bourée, pivot step, pivot step etc. etc. etc. I wore one of Merla’s leopard g-strings and a deafening and blinding crêpe paper lion’s headdress, while the Amazons, Bichon and Sugar, stood over me in stilettos and latex. My father must have approved. Even I had trouble believing they weren’t female. They didn’t have to do much to pull focus.

  Guy ambled like the sex god he was, as Tarzan in an eye-catching, jam-packed g-string and not much else, and used his prop—a papier-mâché spear—to accidentally (he said) draw my blood. By the look on his face he did register some surprise, but I had it coming to me.

  Regardless of the fun onstage, the audience was too busy checking each other out to care. The seven bankers, eager for some fun, sat next to my parents, and my parents stared blankly at the runway in front of them, not knowing what the hell to expect. The time change, drag queens, drinks and dinner had all worked to slowly soften their composure: father probably pretending he didn’t want to have a go at one of the tigresses or angry French models; both of them inwardly hoping that the other must be angry as hell that their only child turned out this way. Sadly, that concern combined with What will our friends and neighbours think? was their world. Were the Rottams cursed? Was I continuing to tarnish our name? Meanwhile, where was that waiter with the chartreuse ’tinis?