Times Square in New York City is not what it used to be just a few years ago. Even under the strictness of Mayor Giuliani's anti-porn drive starting in 1999, though, there were still peep shows, places where a guy could pay some money and watch a naked woman behind a window. Peeps shows are still there. To them in 2006 came Sheila McClear, a college graduate who fled a punk collective in Detroit and just wanted to see New York. Her experiences in the booths, the guys on the other side of the window, the women she worked with, and the men she worked for are all subjects in _The Last of the Live Nude Girls: A Memoir_ (Soft Skull Press). McClear thus joins the memoirists of the sex trade like Lily Burana and Diablo Cody, but her experiences in New York are unique, and she recalls them with clarity and even sweetness, a becoming objectivity (perhaps borne of that glass shield between herself and the outside world), and good humor, and also without a shred of judgmentality. This is hardly an uplifting account, but is superb as readable memories of a time, place, and shared activity that are worth preserving.
With zero money and zero prospects in the big city, and having failed to find work as a waitress, barista, or telemarketer, McClear answered a Craigslist ad for dancers, and failed at lapdancing because it required too much socializing. It was easier to get in the box at the peep shows. The deal is, there is the woman in a closet-sized booth with a big glass window. There are curtains or other devices to obscure the view from the customer until he pays. Send money through the slot and the curtain gets raised for a few minutes. "My survival was based on hustling, convincing the neon-overdosed tourists and curious college boys and ghetto kids from the Bronx and Mexican laborers and guilt-ridden street preachers - plus the natives, the sundry damaged goods of Times Square - to pay $35 to watch me take my clothes off, with the bare minimum of enthusiasm, behind glass." There are other girls, quirky, silly, and sad, all of whom are doing their best to get by in this extraordinarily strange career. It was never erotic. "I never felt sexual. I felt like I was working at a hospital or a nursing home or a factory where they have those big slabs of meat." It was not all so bleak. McClear's book is shot through with funny writing, and funny stories. A man came in, for instance, and asked to see both her and her friend Ruby, together, specifying, "And will you, um, fight? You know, call each other a bitch and stuff?" The customer is always right; Ruby asks McClear, "Your booth or mine?" and then in mock anger yells at her from coming into her booth. They call each other names, but both of them were trying not to laugh. McClear was delighted when the window went dark and the "exhausting awkward improvising" was finally over. And yes, it might have been awkward, but the customer got off on it.
She left the peeps and went into journalism, and this is her first book. Toward the end of her stay, she says, "I realized that things never changed in this world. I could hop from city to city and from club to club, but there was no geographic cure, and no upward trajectory or arc or hope for the future. There was simply the grind, and the money. There would be $500 nights and $50 nights." By the time her spell in the booths ends, McClear has survived and come out stronger and more curious about her fellow creatures. She makes clear she still has awkwardness and reserve: "Stripping hadn't cured that." Her unique experiences are written with amusement and melancholy, and as with any good memoir, the reader is likely to feel grateful at her generosity in sharing it all with us.
