by Jake Brown
4 0 what the hell was i thinking?!! he yelled at me for it in front of everybody. I also got hit in the face two days later. Dick called me a whore because the kid had to give me the 50 cents to play the pinball game because my asshole boyfriend wouldn’t give me any of the $7000 he had on him from the convention earnings. That one really confounded me, even looking back at it now. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to say that there were times where if I breathed wrong, he would get upset at me.
That summer was when the physical abuse began in our relationship. One particularly vicious incident came during a convention weekend when I’d gone out to lunch with a friend of mine named Andy, who dressed like Paul Stanley, and was a local at the Kiss conventions while Dick was out of town. I got busted on that one, and the irony was two-fold in that. First, Andy HAD A GIRLFRIEND, and second, my mom was the one who busted me instead of Dick, but ended up telling him about it anyway. It was nice to know where her loyalties were. It may as well have been Dick though the way she tore Andy’s head off on the phone, accusing us of sleeping together and all sorts of nonsense, telling him I had a boyfriend, and in essence, defending Dick in the process.The worse part was that she told Dick about it when he got back from Chicago and concocted some paranoid story that I was sleeping with Andy, and Dick beat the LIVING SHIT out of me for that one. I ended up spending the night in the hospital, and I still blame my mother to this day for that, because I’d told her Andy was gay, and she still saw fit to let Dick know anyway. Of all the guys I dated, Dick was the worst, and yet he was the only one my mother accepted. After a while, it even seemed like she and he were conspiring together to keep me under one large thumb. If he wasn’t keeping his eye on me, my mom was, and would report back to him from time to time if she imagined something was up. And that’s just what it was, IMAGINATION.
It’s still ironic to me that Dick was the only guy my mom was ever really cool with me dating, who turned out to be the worst guy she could have picked to endorse my going out with. He was the first guy she ever trusted me with, be it the TOY conventions we went away on, or even a trip to Cancun. While we were there, my mom even went as far as to take a day off of work, get on the bus, go into New Jersey, and enroll Dick in Community College classes he’d forgotten to register for. I think the fact that I thought she was actually going to accept a guy I brought home for once was among the reasons why I deemed it necessary to stay with Dick for as long as I did. My mom’s acceptance was very important to me, and in time, Dick’s was as well, in spite of how shitty both of them were to me for my efforts. I thought, perhaps if my mom approved of Dick, maybe she’d finally approve of me in the process. Unfortunately, for the most part, that hasn’t happened to this day. If my mother is reading this book, this will be the first time she learns about the nightmare that Dick Pelicanose put me through, and even then, I fear her reaction would be to criticize my judgment in men, not hers. The irony of that is she’s responsible for my lack of judgment where men were concerned when I started dating Dick because she’d never allowed me any room as a teenager to develop that skill like normal girls my age would have. It came to plague me in my relationship with Dick, and while I don’t blame her for it, that’s a luxury I don’t have to afford her. I choose to spare her that guilt, but hope in time she understands the role that lack of experience played in other decisions I’ve made in my life that have disappointed her.
Anyway, during this same summer, I was still seeing a lot of Tommy, who didn’t know about Dick, and after a while, started to get a little suspicious as to why I wouldn’t go out with him exclusively. So I told him I was seeing someone. I can’t, to date, honestly say why I didn’t leave Dick for Tommy, who treated me worlds better. I guess deep down I was afraid of what Dick might have done to me physically, but more afraid of what Tommy might have done to Dick had he found out. Dick by this point was going out to go-go bars, drinking with his friends, and as I found out later, just fucking anything that he could get his hands on. Still, on the other hand, Dick and I would take a lot of trips to upstate New York together to the Catskills, going to a lot of these collectible conventions. Then I made the worst mistake I could have and moved in together after a few months into this shitty garden-level apartment in Union City, New Jersey. At that point, Dick also coaxed me into investing $2000, which I borrowed from my father, into this antiques business together, so I thought in some warped part of my mind that the relationship still might have hope. It pissed my mom off when I moved out of the house, even though she didn’t know it was with Dick! Even after moving in with Dick, I was still seeing Tommy, which got that much more complicated. But he was very sweet to me, always paid for everything; bought me all these little gifts. He was very nice, and it was nice to be treated that way for a change.
Back on the Dick front, we’d started an antiques business together that basically consisted of buying vintage toys and collectibles, character collectibles, model kits, and stuff like that. We made most of our money at these conventions we’d travel to on the weekends, and during the week I was commuting into New York to attend Columbia, which almost felt to me like leading two lives. And as time went on with Dick and my living together, things just worsened. He kept this odd hole in his closet where he displayed all the girls he’d gone out with before, which was really fucking insulting. Then one night, he didn’t come home at all, till 11 the next morning. He lied about it at the time, but I learned later he’d gone home with some slut named Ginger from this bar called the Naval Base. Why I didn’t leave him I don’t know to this day, I didn’t know any better, and he really took advantage of my lack of self-esteem. Plus I had just invested this money with him in the antiques business, which turned out to be just another situation for him to take advantage of me in. In truth, our ‘running’ a business together meant me doing virtually all the set-up at our booth, then him leaving me at the table alone ALL DAY, while he walked around and flirted with girls in front of me. When he did stop by to check on things, it was usually only to take whatever money we’d made selling our items and then to disappear again. He gave me no spending money, and got only that much more controlling as time went on. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone other than customers buying things, and he’d regularly yell at me in front of everyone when I didn’t set something up the right way or the way he wanted to, or didn’t know the price. I guess that made him look cool in front of his fellow grease balls too, because no one ever came to my defense among his friends. Anyway, as I suspected, when I finally told Tommy about him, Tommy wanted to take a knife to his throat while he slept which of course I didn’t allow to happen. Dick definitely was starting to deserve it by that point though.
I guess looking back on it now in hindsight, I continued to try and believe in Dick, reasoning that if I put more effort into the relationship things might work out, which is why I had invested with him in the antiques business to begin with. Anyway, another stupid decision on my part along these lines was to co-sign the loans for him to go to Bergen Community College; loans that he eventually defaulted on and fucked up my credit. Around this time, we moved from the shithole in Union City to a place that was a little nicer in North Bergen, New Jersey. At this point though, I was going broke, because he wasn’t giving me any of the money from the antique shows and my mom paid my tuition at Columbia. So in some desperate attempt at an escape or maybe just to have something for myself, that was mine and that Dick or my mom (or anyone for that matter) couldn’t touch, I got a job dancing at the Kit Kat Club in Manhattan twice a week. I got the job obviously for the money, but equally as importantly, because I felt attractive, which I really needed as a woman at that point in my life. I danced under the stage name Karen, and hid my dance costumes in my dresser. I told Dick I’d gotten a part-time job working for a bridal company, selling merchandise to their stores. When I’d get home after shifts with a lot of money, I would hide it from him naturally — which felt good — but it didn’t buy my way out of any of the many problems between us. So fo
r every self-esteem boost I might feel coming off a dancing shift, when I got home: this chauvinistic asshole was waiting like Archie Bunker, saying shit to me like, ‘You need to learn how to cook.’
On top of that, aside from my dancing earnings, we never had any money, which was hard to believe because we’d make an average of $3000.00 from a given antique show and on a bad day, at least $1000.00. Of course, he never gave me any of it, so on my own, at one point, I started collecting vintage Barbies from the 1950s through the 1970s, which was a lot of fun. I bought most of that collection with dancing money, and honestly, they were better company at that point than Dick was, because every night he’d go out with his friends drinking and leave me at home alone. I felt like he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. In the meanwhile, Tommy was doing everything he could to get me to leave Dick for him. He was a very sweet and sensitive guy for being such a bad ass, and would pick me up every night after work to make sure I got home safely. He was always begging me to move in with him so he could take care of me. I couldn‘t cut loose of Dick for one simple reason that only another battered woman reading this would understand. The fear that is beaten into you as a victim of domestic violence is what leaves the most permanent mark — not the bruises.
By that point, Dick’s physical abuse had deteriorated slowly but surely from his yelling at me to just hitting me when he felt I hadn’t done something right. Every day, he’d come home, go out to the strip clubs with his friends, or sneak out of the house when he was home to make calls to girls from payphones. And of course, whenever I attempted to call him on it, he’d smack me or slam my head into something. I still have a mark on the back of my head from one time when he slammed me into a closet door. At that point, in addition to being scared to leave him, didn’t understand why he was doing this to me, and on some sad level a lot of women reach, I felt it was my fault in some way what he was doing to me. I just wanted to have a normal relationship with my boyfriend — wanted to be loved by someone outside of my family. Even though I did all the right things, it never worked. So as the months rolled on, our dysfunctional routine continued with Dick going to strip clubs every night with his friends, hitting me whenever I made noise about it and making me feel so shitty about myself that I kept dancing to cling to any basic sense of self-esteem. The Kit Kat Club had become Flash Dancers by this point, and they had started doing features, which sounded interesting to me, and honestly, I was in need of the money going broke between paying for his student loans and my one, which I’d taken over from my mom.
After a while of this vicious down cycle, I guess Dick slammed me hard enough in the head to finally see clearly that if I didn’t leave him, he might honestly have killed me.
It’s sad that I had to feel my life was in danger before I was willing to try and change it, but I finally did, moving out of his apartment and back in with my mom, and he moved back in with his own. I still to this day don’t know where it was okay for me to tolerate that kind of treatment by him because no one in my family did that. He was very controlling, sort of like my mom, and never paid any attention to me, and I guess the fact that he really used to beat the shit out of me was so surreal I didn‘t accept it as reality until I‘d left him. Being home was at least a relief from that to some degree but then I had my mom on my ass. On top of it, Dick had taken my entire Casper the Ghost collection and anything else he could steal of mine and moved it all back into his mother’s. I was afraid of ghosts growing up. It may sound stupid to some of you, but collecting Casper memorabilia — which included board games, bobbing heads, wooden pull toy from the 1940s, hand puppets, the talking dolls, comic books, puzzles, costumes, and all types of odd items — helped me overcome my fear of ghosts. It was an odd form of therapy, but also the only escape and thing I’d had for myself while I’d been under Dick’s vicious thumb.
Thankfully, I got my Barbie collection out, but he just kept driving me deeper and deeper into debt in one form or another. So I started doing this Robin Byrd show in New York, and dancing at Flash Dancers because I really enjoyed the attention a lot. I don’t know to date if my mom ever knew explicitly what I was doing in terms of dancing, but I do remember once she threw out one of my $500 costume gowns, which I had to replace while saying nothing about it. Don’t ask me why, but after a few weeks, I started seeing Dick and trying to make that work thinking the distance might have helped. I remember he called me one night and said he’d been mugged and beaten up, which I still to this day think Tommy was behind, so I broke things off with him as a result. Tommy was very sweet to me, but I think that scared me a little, knowing Tommy would have been capable of that with Dick. Anyway, it was very sad. Tommy was in tears when we broke up. It was upsetting for me because he made my life happy at that time, but I guess I thought I had more invested with Dick, and needed to see that out to what turned out to be its bitter end. Tommy was the perfect guy for me at that time and I will always cherish the time we had.
After breaking things off with Tommy, I kept working at Flash Dancers, and was looking into feature dancing at this point. So I would hide my gowns from my mom, and my schedule during the week usually involved working a 12-8 shift after I got out of Germany or Philosophy class at Columbia, or I would work one night shift which ran 4-12, or 8-4 in the morning. I would do a couple of those. For the day shifts, I would usually tell my mom I was studying and I brought home the grades to prove it. For the night shifts, I told her I was out with friends. During the weekend, she was usually gone to North Carolina, where she had a store, so that was easier. It was exciting to me to have such radically contrasting worlds to co-exist within. It honestly was the foundation of my acting career I think, because I had to play two entirely different characters, and the only time I got off from keeping both worlds running full-time was when I slept. Still, I never changed who I was as a person in either, just learned how to let people see what they wanted to see. That was a survival instinct of mine by that point, and one that would serve me greatly in my future career.
When I wasn’t working during the weekends, Dick and made slow progress toward a reconciliation. We would take trips to Pennsylvania to do the conventions, and at one, sadly, a toy dealer had allegedly seen me dancing at the club, and that finally got back to Dick. Well, as you can imagine, he didn’t take it very well. When I tried to be honest with him about it, explaining it was to help make ends meet, and to feel better about myself, things went right back down the toilet with his reply that I was ‘a fucking whore.’ Of course, he concluded his reaction by punching me in my mouth, in front of his friends, who were all laughing. After that, I was that much more motivated to keep dancing — and OPENLY — just to spite him, not to mention the money I was making. I would pull down $350 to $400 on a bad day and anywhere from $500 to $800 on a good night although I never did lap dances or anything like that. This was strictly from the stage. After a while, Dick even started to begrudgingly shut the fuck up about my dance gig because I was struggling to keep both of us in school, paying his and my loans. I guess I still felt Dick loved me somewhere in my own twisted view of things.
My one protective mechanism against Dick’s temper was that, following our split, I was living at home. On the weekends, Dick and I would go away to do these conventions in Pennsylvania or Chicago, and he’d make me sleep in the van in the freezing cold. When he did wake me up, it was at 3 in the morning to go set up, while he’d either go back to sleep, or go off and smoke a joint and walk around with his friends while I did all our set-up work. Ironically enough, for as much as my mother liked Dick, the whole time we attended these conventions together she would tell me ‘You’re way too elegant and classy to be doing that with them, traveling around like this.’ During this period, Dick tried a couple times to bust me at work too, and fortunately, both times he walked in, I ducked and was able to avoid him because he never knew my exact shifts. Before too long, he was back to his old self, and he’d managed to hook me back in just enough to keep me around. By t
his point too, when he wasn’t beating me or bossing me around, or forcing me under the threat of physical violence to pay his school loans, he spent the rest of what would have been any other normal couple’s free time together out cheating on me. When he wasn’t cheating on me, he would routinely check out other women in front of me and put me down physically on context of their looks. It got so sewer-like at one point that he came home with some kind of bacteria infection he passed to me, so I was sick from that for a week. Thankfully, it got cleared up, but that fucking infection had more class than he did.