Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  My parents did ok most of the time, but they weren’t in the big leagues like Ray, who’d supposedly just given Mohammed a half a million dollars to invest. We lived near the beach, in a regular, grey ranch house, which they’d recently renovated, not a gaudy mansion. My parents, who again were not like other people’s parents, made deals. They were an odd combination: a country girl from Delaware and a sophisticated Israeli, but they had a love of money and adventure in common. They hustled. They invested and bought and sold whatever they could to make a buck and they’d always been that way. Neither of my parents, ever once in my entire life, ever had a job where they had to work for someone else. They never received paychecks or punched a clock and this probably had something to do with my own aversion to office work. Sometimes they had a lot of money and sometimes they didn’t. A lot of times they were above board, but every once in a while they had some legal issues to sort out. When they met in South Florida back in the late 70s, they’d been drug dealers. While I was growing up, they started a cosmetics company selling lipstick that changed colors with your mood, they had a mail order business selling Romanian, anti-aging face cream and they even briefly owned a junk store. They’d bought and sold closeout merchandise, had a booth at the flea market and dabbled in a few telemarketing ventures. Currently, my dad was trying to market a special radiation free headset for cell phones that one of his fellow Israeli friends had invented. They wanted to open kiosks in malls across the country. My mom though, was trying her hand at Internet marketing and this was in the days when it was newer, uncharted territory. She’d converted her garage into an office with a row of PCs and every night she’d work on her promotions. Supposedly she was making a killing and she wanted to grow her earnings, which was why she was interested in this Mohammed dude, because he promised her he’d make her crazy rich.

  That night, while my parents were out living it up in the Champagne Room, whatever that was, I sat home and watched Young Frankenstein and cried and you know you’ve got problems if you cry during a Mel Brooks movie. I ate most of a pint of Haagen Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond and by most of the pint, I mean all of the pint except for one bite which I left so that I could technically say I didn’t eat the entire pint. I was hideously alone and even my little sister was gone. Even the dogs, who were at least now used to me enough to let me roam freely around the house without attacking, didn’t like me enough to cuddle on the couch. I should have just gone out, I thought. I should have just gone to the Bubblegum Kittikat, I mean, what harm could it do to just see? But I was scared.

  4

  I have what one might call a fascination with abomination. I just love, and simply cannot resist, a good train wreck, a freak show or anything which shocks and appalls. I’m certainly not alone in this. Note the popularity of talk shows which then gave way to the more popular reality shows. Talk about abomination. I like observing absurdity and I always have and despite the fact that I act like such a goody-goody most of the time, darkness is my magnet. To a point. Oh will I ever watch the crazy and perverse when given the chance. Oh will I ever seek it out just to watch it, but participate? Hell no. Had I lived in ancient Roman times I would have definitely been a regular at the Coliseum watching the gladiators getting ripped to ribbons by some tigers, but I’d be way up in the nosebleed section safely distant from any actual danger and when I’d had enough, I’d go back home and organize my closets or something equally dull. I like to keep my toga free of blood spatters, so to speak.

  The way this had played out in my life so far was that I had a secret passion for watching Jerry Springer. I liked edgy, artsy films, scary movies and books with dirty parts. As a teenager, I’d frustrated my parents by seeking out the wrong crowd of kids to run around with. My first boyfriend had a nose ring and played in a band. My friends went to wild parties and experimented with drugs. The thing is that I didn’t. I’d tag along to the wild parties, but I’d never get involved. At twenty-six, I’d never even once gotten drunk and I had no intentions to. My nick-name was “One-Drink Vic.” In Atlanta though, I’d outgrown the wild bunch and my best friend Rachel, who I missed terribly, was a preacher’s daughter who liked tea parties and ribbon embroidery. She and I met up on Thursdays, the day when the High Museum was free, to lunch at a French café and look at modern art. As I sat and considered just visiting a strip club, I realized that it had been a long time since I’d experienced anything kinkier than the straight and narrow outside of a TV screen or the pages of a book in, well, years. Or ever. Ok, I thought, maybe it was time to break out a little.

  My friend Olivia found the whole idea hysterical when I ran it by her. It was late afternoon and I was in the passenger seat of Olivia’s car. We’d just picked up Cuban take-out, which we planned to eat back at her apartment, where I’d help her with a poster for one of her classes. She needed my art skills. We were just pulling out of the Pollo Tropical drive-thru and onto Federal Highway when I blurted out that I’d potentially been offered a hostessing job at the Bubblegum Kittikat.

  “YOU? At a strip club? Please!! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” she howled, wiping her eyes and trying to catch her breath. She laughed so hard that she could barely drive and had to swerve at the last minute to avoid hitting a pick-up truck filled with landscapers.

  Olivia was the first friend I met when we first moved to Florida when I was in eleventh grade. Back then I’d immediately been drawn to her punk haircut and black clothes. She loved The Cure and had tripped on acid and was always full of fascinating drama. Now, she had an ordinary blonde bob, bought her clothes at Banana Republic and waitressed in a sushi restaurant as she tried to finish her degree in special education. That much had changed, but Olivia was still fun and fascinating. Social Olivia liked going out and her calendar was always full. Since the beginning of summer, she’d taken me with her to clubs, parties and dates in three counties and she was always a phone call away when I needed to vent, bitch or obsess and I did the same for her as she was currently trying to date a commitment phobic, millionaire, semi-pro golfer who took her to meet his mom, sent her dozens of roses and repeatedly told her he didn’t want a girlfriend.

  “I know it’s not, like, my usual thing, but it could be interesting,” I argued.

  “Look, you’re coming out of a seven-year abusive relationship. You’re living with your parents again. You’re probably not in the best place to be making decisions.”

  “I haven’t made the decision. I’m just thinking about it and I need money, like a lot of money and fast and I have nothing but a GED and a semester of community college so it’s not like there’s a lot of jobs I can get,” I explained.

  “You won’t last ten minutes in a strip club. Those places are gross. You’re not that kind of girl. I’m not that kind of girl. You know what kind of people work in strip clubs? You freak out if I want to smoke a bowl so you think you can handle a bunch of drunk strippers snorting coke all night and shaking their asses all around you?”

  I shrugged and she went on.

  “Victoria, think. Use your brain. I tried to take you to South Beach to a normal club where people dance for fun, not for dollar bills in their garters and what happened? You ended up in tears! You went back to the hotel room and went to bed and it was barely even past midnight. I take you out with me and you just stand there and look around. You hate going out. You hate loud music. You hate crowds. What do you think a strip club is like?”

  “Umm. Loud music, crowds and…boobs?”

  “Very funny. Ha freaking ha. But yes. And you’ll hate it. You’re way too uptight. You need to just work in a restaurant or something.”

  For as long as I could remember people had been telling me I was too uptight. Evan used that as an excuse for cheating on me. I was no fun, he’d said. I had no sense of adventure and worst of all, I was terrible in bed. Frigid, he’d called me. Neurotic about my body, he complained. I wouldn’t let him see me naked and we had to have sex in the dark under the covers. He said I refused
to experiment and I didn’t even know what he meant. What if by working in a strip club I could prove them all wrong? Could working there teach me to be sexy? Could it help me to be more fun? Could it at least keep my mind off my break-up and everything that was wrong with my life? Could anything?

  5

  Listen to me, for the love of God, when I tell you that if you are ever going through a traumatic break-up, that you must have the dignity not to call your ex. Learn from my mistakes. Don’t pick up the phone.

  I called him in the middle of a Saturday afternoon almost three months after I’d left Atlanta. I’d woken up late that morning pining for the days when Evan and I went to our favorite coffee shop on Ponce for cornmeal pancakes and big Fiestaware mugs of cappuccino, so I’d moped over to the diner down the street, where they’d charged me for, yet forgotten to give me, hash browns. When I complained, the server argued that I’d eaten them already and that she wasn’t taking them off the check. Jeez, I sure wasn’t in Georgia anymore. Southern Hospitality doesn’t exist once you go far enough south.

  When I got back from my solo breakfast I went into my room and saw the lawsuits, pages of them, fanned out on my unmade bed and I wanted to know how and why and what had I done to deserve this. How had my life gotten to this point? I needed answers that only Evan could give me, so I went for the phone.

  I knew better than to call, but I did it anyway.

  My friends in Atlanta called me often with reports of what Evan and his new girlfriend were doing in MY house while I lie awake all night crying silently in my parents’ guest room.

  My friend Rachel had phoned before breakfast with another report.

  “Remember those black capris you had, with the pink roses embroidered around the hem?” she’d asked when I picked up. Rachel didn’t live in my neighborhood, but she’d ridden by on a reconnaissance mission for me.

  “She’s wearing them,” Rachel reported.

  She was wearing my clothes. No, for real. She was wearing my clothes. I mean, why not, since I wasn’t allowed in the house to get them. I guess she figured someone should wear them. I couldn’t fit into the black capris with pink roses around the hem anymore anyway. They were a size two and well, let’s just say that I was not a size two. At one point, I was a size two, but it was only for about a week and a half after I had a wicked stomach virus and that was the week I’d joyfully run out and bought those pants, which I think I wore once.

  Picturing this girl, whoever she was, strutting around my former neighborhood in my size two, black capris with pink roses on the hem sent me into fits of self-loathing and misery. I had fantasies about flying to Atlanta and burning the house down with her in it, but instead of burning the house down, I decided to sit and torture myself. How could a girl move in to some other girl’s house and wear her clothes? Why didn’t he want me? What was so great about her, besides the fact that she was a size two? What was so terrible about me? Why did I let myself stay engaged to someone who made it clear to me that the only reason he bought me a ring was because my parents pressured him into it because we were living together. He’d told me over and over that he didn’t believe in marriage. It was just a piece of paper, he repeated when I’d cried and begged him to set a date.

  “You wipe your ass with a piece of paper,” he’d been fond of saying.

  I had to know the answers to these questions, so I called my old number in spite of all good sense that told me not to, praying she would answer so I could tear her a new asshole about wearing my pants while I festered in Florida with only a suitcase of tee shirts and flip flops. I would have paid every cent I had to tell that whore off. I would have cashed in savings bonds and taken out a bank loan to do it.

  “What do you want?” Evan answered. Great. I forgot about caller ID.

  “How-” I started, but he interrupted me, something he’d done a lot when we were together.

  “How? You want to know how? I’m happier than I’ve ever been before in my life, that’s how.”

  “Why?”

  “Because YOU were a bitch.”

  “Why?” it came out as a whimper.

  “You constantly complained, you tried to control everything I did – Keisha wakes up smiling every day. You never did anything but work. Keisha takes care of me. I can’t wait to marry her.”

  “You said you didn’t believe- You never wanted-”

  “I just didn’t want it with you.”

  I think I could have lived a little better knowing that it really wasn’t me. If I believed he didn’t want to marry anyone, maybe I could have gotten over it, but no. He didn’t want to marry me.

  Jeez, I was so pathetic, but all I could do was bleat out the same pitiful question, “Why?”

  “Because you were never happy. You were a high maintenance pain in the ass. Keisha and I go dancing. You’ve never danced in your life. You’re scared to death of everything, nothing is ever fun with you. All you want to do is have your perfect little Martha Stewart dinner parties and put up your Laura Ashley curtains. You never even got drunk. You’re such a fucking control freak. You have to be in control all the god damned time. You’re fucking miserable and you were horrible in bed. You know, sometimes Keisha just takes my dick out and starts sucking it, for no reason. I had to beg you to suck my dick. It was like pulling fucking teeth to get a blowjob out of you and then you never wanted me to see you naked, you’d never show your tits. Keisha sleeps naked. We walk around the house naked. So you want to know why. That’s fucking why!”

  “So all you want is some dirty whore to do that to you and walk around naked and get drunk and go dancing? That’s what you want and that was worth throwing away a seven year relationship for? Some blow – ORAL SEX? What kind of person are you?”

  “You need to look at what kind of person YOU are, and I don’t need to listen to you talk shit about my girlfriend. You’re just a lonely, sick, jealous, little person and you’ll never be happy. I can’t believe a disgusting bitch like you ever worked with children.”

  He hung up on me.

  Looking back, I see this as more of the manipulative, abusive bullshit that I endured during the seven years we lived together, which he obviously learned from his father, a man, who once, in a drunken rage, came home and destroyed all of the family’s furniture with a chainsaw. At the same time, and I knew this then, Evan told me a cruelly worded version of the truth. His intent had been to make himself feel justified in cheating on me, lying to me, leading me on and then suing me. He meant to hurt me, and there was no doubt about that, but there were shards of truth amid the vitriol. I was lonely and jealous. I was a control freak who had never once, even danced or proudly embraced her own sensual curves. I was a fucking mess and I wanted to die because at that moment I saw no other way out and the dogs were barking, my mother wouldn’t stop smoking, my father was frying more onions to Led Zeppelin and my sister, eight years my junior, was now dating a guy older than me and calling from college threatening to pierce her tongue. I hated the entire world, myself most of all. I hated. I cried. I scratched at my thighs in rage and desperation. I looked out the window wishing for the comforting shade of ten story, Georgia magnolias and saw only sharp, dry palm fronds whipping in the hot wind. Florida was so ugly and I was stuck here.

  I decided to throw myself into the sea. With a strong and unusually calm sense of resolve, I put on my bathing suit and walked out of the guest room and through the family room where my mother sat at her desk smoking. A leopard print towel wrapped around her body, hair twisted in a faded scrunchie, she played Tetris on her computer, stubbing out cigarettes in a diet Pepsi can. The dogs fought over a pig’s ear. Papers, business cards, soda cans and dog-mangled stuffed animals littered the room. Canine slobber dried on the green vinyl couch and the dull drone of Fox News hummed from the big screen TV. My parents were big Republicans and all they, and the pundits they loved, talked about was the upcoming election. Polls, Gore, Bush. Gaining. Falling. Mistakes. I surveyed the scene and confirmed
my decision. I no longer wanted to live in this world, a world where my parents were persuading me to take a job in a disgusting strip club.

  “Where are you going?” my mother asked, not looking up from the falling puzzle pieces on her screen.

  “To throw myself in the sea.”

  “All right,” she said dully, never looking away from her game.

  I walked out the door with “Korabushka” trilling in the background.

  My parents lived about three blocks west of the beach, so it was a short walk to throw myself into the sea. I stalked out of their neighborhood, now sobbing and passed a neighbor’s mango tree that had ripe fruit hanging from its branches, swinging in the breeze. Something about the mango tree stopped me for a second. The mangos were velvety, purple, green and orange – colors that should never look pretty together, but they did. I didn’t care for mangoes, which grow everywhere in South Florida. They were sticky and sappy and tasted like turpentine. I’d never been a fan. Hand me a Georgia peach instead any day.

  I crossed A1A, beachfront avenue and I realized this was totally absurd, but I could not think of A1A without thinking of “Ice Ice Baby”, which always made me laugh. So there I was crossing A1A on the way to my death, thinking of Vanilla Ice and I realized the pathetic-ness of this whole scene. Vanilla Ice. My last thoughts, which no one would ever know, were of Vanilla Ice. In my haste, I hadn’t written a suicide note. I was wearing a red Brazilian bikini and I carried with me a beach towel.

  Still thinking of Vanilla Ice, who also made a mess of his life and ended up stuck in Florida with no money and, I think, nothing but a llama if I’m not mistaken, I marched across the sand. Enormous, scary waves, white capped, rose and slammed into the eroding shoreline. The sky darkened to a weird, night-blue near the horizon. A squall was kicking up. The beach was abandoned. There were no lifeguards or sunning vacationers - nothing but a man sweeping a metal detector over the blowing sand, looking for someone’s long lost class ring.