As I close in on narrating the final days of my strip life at FlashDancers Finishing School for Young Ladies, I feel the need to take time to wrap up some odds and some ends, and some odd ends. What follows is a kind of character sketch of a kind character, a man called Nunzio. If you're interested in reading more about the strip life, here's the whole index, and here's the very first post.
Nunzio was the night manager of FlashDancers, but that statement really doesn’t give the full import of the man. The other two managers for day and for weekends were the brother and the sister of Barry, the sometimes corpulent and always visible owner of Flash. To them, Barry’s flesh and blood, his betters, educationally at least, for they both had an M.A. in something less lucrative than the running of a titty bar—and what isn’t, really, Barry, who left school in tenth grade to mop jizz in Times Square jack-off booths, gave the management of the lesser shifts at Flash. The greater shifts, those of the moneyed weeknights, went to Nunzio. This division of labor alone speaks to the importance of this man.
To Nunzio, Barry gave the important shifts: Tuesday through Saturday nights, five nights a week, from around 7:00 p.m. until the money was counted in the wee hours of the morning, a time by which we strippers were snug in our beds or discoing around Manhattan whacked out on coke or whatever it was we did after work and before daylight broke a new day.
Nunzio always looked as if he had been styled by John Gotti’s classier cousin. He was invariably impeccably dressed in a suit, a discreet pocket square in his breast pocket, a subdued shirt, a coordinating tie. His white hair was always exactly the same length, as if it was groomed so often that it neither grew nor was cut. He always looked the same: unruffled and unflappable, a calm grandfatherly eye in the lurid Flash storm.
Nunzio had come to Flash a package deal with the property. He had been bought by the oft-times muscular Barry and his posse of invisible backers when they had purchased the club. In an almost mythic union, Nunzio had begun his relationship with the subterranean night club in the 70’s as a manager when it had been a disco, had stayed manager through its days as a gay dance club and was now the feckless captain of its strip-bar incarnation. I imagine that he will always be there, no matter what the club becomes in the future, a form of some epic penance for enraging some small demi-god of the semi-underworld, or some fairytale reward for doing some small sprite a tiny happiness.
In any case, Nunzio seemed attached to the room itself. Watching him work, I’d see him glide with unfathomable poise through the crowd; it parted compliant before him. I’d see him emerge from the secret room walled behind the row of tables in the back, a fortress of shiny black plastic and mirrors making nearly indictable its existence next to the Champagne Room, and wonder what secrets he was privy to. What he knew from watching monitors, from reading ledgers, from unearthing the undoubtedly hoary secrets of FlashDancer’s murky depths.
I can only imagine, really, for he would never be one to tell me.
Nunzio’s voice sounds a lot like Robert DeNiro’s as the kindly father in The Bronx Tale. He has those Bensonhurst-Mulberry Street-Arthur Avenue flattened vowels, those tell-tale dropped final consonants. He sounds like he has lived a life looking forward to a pot of gravy and pasta on Sundays, and he has. I, unlike most of the Flash girls, took time to talk to Nunzio—I talked to Barry too, and to the DJs, and to anyone who would tell me his or her story—and so I learned the bits and pieces. I learned his Flash history, found out the bare bones of his family (one of his many sons graduated from the school where I did my Ph.D.), discovered where and how he lived, as much as I could, which wasn’t nearly enough.
One thing I knew: Nunzio had an unshakeable faith in aspirin. No matter what ailed you, Nunzio advocated aspirin. Headaches, heartaches, backaches: aspirin. Aches of the spirit, bouts of nihilistic darkness, clouds of ambient anxiety: aspirin. Occasionally, he would also advocate a drink, but mostly his go-to panacea was aspirin. Which I suppose speaks to the generation that Nunzio was from more than anything else—he may have been dragged along for the new millennium ride, but he was clearly a man of the pre-counter revolution 60s. Nunzio was a very sexy man, but he clearly didn’t swing.
A good thing, too, for more than one strip club has lost its bearings when its manager has lost his lust, or his control over it anyway. No one knew if Nunzio found any one girl more attractive than another, for he treated all of us pretty equally. Clearly, he liked some of us more than others, myself included. He liked me quite a bit.
“CeeCee,” he’d tell me as I had come to him once more to advocate my going home early, or to present my side of some inequity I’d suffered at the ham-fisted hands of patron or bouncer, “you should be a lawyer.” And then he’d smile indulgently.
Once I remember I came to him, one very boring night when I was just not making any money and my feet hurt and I couldn’t, just couldn’t, play the strip game any longer, not one moment longer, not one second, and I raised my hands in front of my chest like a begging dog and whined.
Hmmmm…. Hmmmmm… I pleaded, making a puppy face.
Nunzio looked me up and down. Pulled his head back, raised an eyebrow. “All right,” he said, “you can go home provided you never do that again,” and in one sentence he both gave me what I wanted and communicated his deep personal disappointment in me, so much, in fact, that I felt shame as I packed my dance bag and tripped off into the night.
Not that Nunzio was always fair to me. One time, during my body of death phase, when I had arms that made gay guys ask me how I got them and a six pack of abs, he waved me over to the Manager’s podium. “CeeCee,” he said, a grin twitching his lips, “Some guy just asked me if you were a man.”
No way, I said.
“Really.” Nunzio said, “he took one look at your arms and thought you were a man.” And then he laughed. I never was sure if it really happened, or if he just thought, early sixties Kennedy-era Italian grandfather that he was that I was getting a bit too butch for my own femmey good.
Another time, I was dancing for this older man at a table of just awful Israeli men. They were all talking about me in Hebrew, cackling and barely hiding rude body gestures. I kept my distance, my dancer radar going all haywire, but when I turned my back and bent over, a standard move in my table dance repertoire, the nasty man I was dancing for slipped his finger inside my g-string and ran it down the back, along the cleft of my ass, brushing his knuckle along my anus, my vulva, my clit.
In one motion, I stood, turned and slapped him across the face. Tony, the big and ugly brick wall of an Indian bouncer, saw the whole exchange—the evil group, the nasty grope, the ensuing slap—and yelled across the room, “Nunzio, CeeCee slapped a guy.” I was spitting with rage. He was supposed to be protecting me, this misogynistic lump, and he was tattling on me? What the bloody hell?
I grabbed my dress and stomped off to Nunzio in a nearly naked huff. Tears were spitting from my eyes, I was so angry. I had been grabbed before. I had had my breasts mauled. I had had my ass bitten. I had been pulled by the hips to sit on a naked erection. I had had men spooge through their khakis and onto my back. I had never, ever, felt the unwanted touch of finger on my genitals. And to have my protection tattle like a Nelly Larson was just foul icing on the already putrid cake.
“CeeCee,” Nunzio said, “you can’t slap people.” In his calm face, I blurted out what had happened, this incoherent story of abuse and betrayal, a foreshortened inarticulate tale of epic emotion. Nunzio listened and then said, “CeeCee, slapping is not the answer.”
I stared at him levelly. I could see in that moment the toll this job took on him, his self control at having to battle his own sense of decency in this mock universe where regular rules did not apply, the endless and ceaseless sound of girls whining, the long hours, the wife’s mistrust, the children’s embarrassment, the nocturnal life of an essentially decent man who happened to be the manager of a subterranean titty bar.
I narrowed my eyes and said nothing. “Go have an aspirin,” Nunzio said, and I did.
One Sunday in Chelsea, while sitting outside eating brunch with Wiley, a stripper pal, I saw Nunzio by daylight. He was wearing a polo shirt. He was wearing shorts. He was, as ever, dapper, each garment pressed within an inch of its life. Accompanied by two of his sons and one of their babies, he recognized us, smiled a big genuine grin and came over to talk.
We made small talk. He handed me his grandson to hold. Not because I’d asked to—babies always make me feel a bit uncertain what to say; I want to make conversation, but there is so little we have in common—but because he wanted to see me with him, I think. Maybe to make me uncomfortable, but maybe too to make me part of his normal life, his sunlit life, if only for a moment, if only until the baby’s mother came, and seeing me for what I did, all supertan and extrablonde and Russ Meyers busty, whisked her child out of my arms, as if I would somehow harm it by association.
Nunzio, though, he had no fear of me. He knew me for what I was, which was what he was too, a good human, regardless of where we worked. He knew the job did not make the man.
Rather, the man elevated the job, if he was a good man, and Nunzio was always and ever the epitome of a good man.