I MET K

I met K.T. in the locker room of a strip club. One of the places I liked to take a break besides the dressing room was flat on my back on the carpeted stairs outside of it, by the lockers. My “spot” was right next to K.T.’s locker. I had already been told “uh oh, K.T. is going to LOVE you.” Why? “Because you are a teenager with big tits. K.T. is a chickenhawk.” (K.T. was in her early 30s.)

K.T. was, in my opinion, exquisitely beautiful. She had amazing high-contrast coloring, like Snow White or something: jet black hair, ice blue eyes, pale as a thalanopsis orchid. And a perfect heart-shaped ass. She regarded me with heated close interest, and started in with seductive monologues about how I was going to be her dog, what my water bowl would look like.
I exhaled smoke from Camel unfiltereds and laughed at her. “You might have better luck if you spun a tale about how I am going to be your cat, bitch.”

What won me over to going on a date with K.T. was her treatment of our coworker, Misha. Misha had been badly abused as a child, and was severely bulimic. She was very beautiful, very quiet, and very feared & ignored, like trauma is contagious or something. K.T. did not ignore Misha. She was pretty much the only one who paid any attention to her. She teased Misha, but it wasn’t mean spirited. She kept an eye out. She told people, “Don’t leave your leftovers out!! Misha will eat them just to throw up!” K.T. brought Misha into the human family with her teasing—sometimes you’re so fucked up you eat just to throw up. It happens. It’s not that alien. Misha liked K.T. and binged less if she was around.

Misha committed suicide by pouring gasoline on herself in a bathtub, and lighting a match. She burned herself alive. K.T. was morose.

On our first date, shortly afterward, we went to the movies. She arrived at my doorstep in her pickup, which had Harley Davidson bumper stickers. She told me her mom died when she was little, and she was raised by her dad in a trailer park in South Florida. They were close.

By the time she was 15, she knew she was gay. When her dad found flyers from gay dance clubs, he kicked her out of the trailer. She came home from school one day. He had found the flyers and placed them in a stack. He was sitting at the trailer’s kitchen pull-out table with a glass of whiskey and a gun. He was crying. He told K.T., “Because I love you, I am going to give you a running start. Go. I’m going for a drive. If you’re still here when I get back, I’m going to blow your queer head off.”

K.T. called her older girlfriend, who had a motorcycle. She got drunk, took off her shirt, and careened topless on the back of the Harley towards Canada, where they had heard you could get a job in a strip club without ID. The cops arrested them and threw them in jail. In jail, the women self-segregated into a “white house” and a “black house.”

“Come over here into the white house, Honey” the crowd of misdemeanants exhorted K.T. K.T.’s girlfriend was black, so she stayed in the black house and gave them the finger.

I adored K.T. but the mad sexual impulse wasn’t there. Things dragged on; she was unfulfilled by and disappointed with me, the absence of frequent hot sex. One day she sobbed and told me, “I had to go to therapy because of you!” I was silent. I stopped taking her calls. I felt like such an asshole. There’s no neat or redemptive ending to this story; nothing else to say. Sometimes it’s fine to wonder if you’re an asshole, and keep wondering.