Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  “I would prefer you to spend the night with me,” he said.

  I said I would. We had known each other for five weeks by then if you counted the first week of emails and phone calls, so I figured it was fine, plus he knew where I worked and it didn’t seem to be a concern. He had already spent at least a thousand dollars feeding me fine meals and I hadn’t had sex in way too long so doing the deed with Michael was the logical next step, and hey, my mom endorsed it.

  Doing it with Michael was as formal and as lacking in intimacy as everything else with him. In his immaculate white bed, I was afraid that I was going to leave a smudge and mess up the colorless perfection and I just wasn’t feeling very passionate no matter how hard I tried to get into it and believe me I tried.

  A couple things were really weird. The first thing I noticed when Michael took off his shirt was that he was HAIRY. Normally I like some nice masculine chest hair, but this went beyond anything I’d encountered. I’m pretty sure Michael was a Sasquatch. They do inhabit the Canadian wilderness after all. The hair covered his body like a crewneck sweater, stopping only around his neck where it was obvious that he shaved. His back and chest were solid hair. You’ve heard the term hairshirt? Michael was wearing a hair overcoat. Well, I thought, who cares. I’m not perfect either and he can’t help it, right? I’m sure he didn’t choose to grow a grizzly’s coat and lord knows there were plenty of physical attributes that I would have rather traded in on myself. It’s not healthy to be so neurotic about the human body, although I have to admit that running my fingers through his back hair while he was on top of me was not on my list of turn-ons.

  Also not arousing was the fact that Michael refused to kiss with tongue. Normally I don’t like a mouthful of strange spit either and I don’t want some fool slobbering all over me like a Great Dane who needs to be neutered, but making out with Michael was disturbingly dry and entirely too clean.

  The third really weird thing was that when we were involved, I had a hard time enjoying it because certain parts of my anatomy had gone completely numb. I don’t mean it just didn’t feel good, and I don’t even mean it didn’t feel like anything. I mean my entire vagina went numb like someone had shot me full of Novocain. Numb Numb. Root canal numb.

  After we’d had sex, I spent the rest of the night lying awake imagining that I had acquired some horrible gynecological disease wherein I had nerve damage that would prevent my ever feeling anything down there ever again. By the time the sun rose I had worked myself into a total panic and was ready to go to the emergency room weeping that my vagina was dead.

  As the pink light of dawn seeped in through the windows, I looked over at Michael who snored away beside me, shirtless and sleeping on his stomach. I caught a better view of his back and I was more than a little alarmed. Not only was it hairy, it was blonde.

  Michael’s chest hair was black like the rest of his hair, but his back hair was platinum blonde, Marilyn Monroe blonde. And it had dark roots. He had been getting his back hair bleached. And it grew roots. His back hair grew root! And my vagina was numb!

  I calmed myself. I was being silly. Clearly he was embarrassed about his back hair, the poor guy, and trying to hide it, although it wasn’t working. I couldn’t draw more attention to it by freaking out or acting as if it repulsed me. That would be mean and the fact that he had taken the time and effort to bleach it, or had gotten someone else to bleach it as the case may be, because how could you possibly bleach your own back hair, proved that he was already self-conscious. Maybe this was his only option. With a pelt that thick, waxing would be unbearable. It would probably rip off the top layer of skin and I don’t even want to think about the infected follicles and ingrown hairs that would fester up when the hair started growing back.

  I don’t know how I could eat after that sight, but we had a beautiful breakfast. Michael had croissants waiting and he made a perfect pot of tea with milk and honey, but then he insisted that we go to the beach, where everyone on both the sand and in the sea stared at Michael’s back hair with its dark roots. People laughed and pointed. I pretended to ignore it, though I was appropriately mortified on Michael’s behalf. Before I left, because I had to be at work at seven, we showered and had sex again. He wanted to and I thought maybe the night before was a freak thing. Sometimes the first time with a new person is awkward and strange and it takes a while for attraction to deepen but again, my vagina lost all feeling. You could have drilled it with a power drill and I would never have known the difference. A jack hammer couldn’t have produced even the slightest sensation of arousal. The worst part was that it took forever. I mean an eternity. At least forty-five minutes, which is practically a decade in sex time, because sex time works differently than real time. You can have sex for what feels like an hour but when you look at the clock afterwards you’ll see that only about seven minutes have passed, so imagine then what forty-five actual minutes of intercourse felt like. I was so bored I kind of wished the TV were on so I could have watched a sit-com over his shoulder, but since I had no other entertainment, all I could do was focus on the lack of feeling between my legs.

  I was convinced I had a disease. I spent the entire week after that weekend fretting over what was wrong with my crotch and finally I broke down and made an appointment with the gynecologist.

  The next weekend Michael and I had dinner again. Fancy Chinese this time. Who knew there were fancy Chinese restaurants?

  “You should have never slept with me,” he said, “We only dated a few weeks. You must be a slut.”

  “What?” I said. “I thought you wanted to!”

  “It was a test,” he said.

  “I guess I failed then. So how about this. How about we don’t do it anymore,” I suggested, my face burning and not from the Kung Pao chicken.

  “It’s too late now. I think you’re lovely and you always dress appropriately. You have very good manners, you’re charming and pleasant company, however, you can’t be my girlfriend. You aren’t my soul mate. I want you to know I will continue to take you to dinner as often as you wish and you can sleep at my house. I will make you breakfast and occasionally take you shopping until I find my soul mate, but you may not call yourself my girlfriend,” Michael informed me.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked in horrified disbelief, “I didn’t call myself your girlfriend anyway.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No and I’m not going to and I don’t want to be your booty call. This arrangement isn’t going to work for me.”

  He looked genuinely sad.

  “I’m really sorry. I have a lot of issues, don’t I?”

  “I think you’re nuts,” I said, “I don’t even want to finish dinner.”

  “So are you. You have sexual problems,” he said, “You can’t have an orgasm.”

  I neglected to tell him that this was because I had an incurable vagina disease that made my crotch go numb. I guessed he was probably right. I had sexual problems and what do you say back to someone who accuses you of being frigid?

  “Can we please get the check and leave?” I asked.

  I had to go back to Michael’s house to get my overnight bag before I went home and I had to pee before I drove forty minutes back to Fort Lauderdale after having downed three glasses of jasmine iced tea. There wasn’t enough toilet paper. Ugh, of course there wasn’t and I didn’t want to drip dry so I opened the cabinet to get another roll and there it was…the cause of my horrible vagina disease. It was called Maintain.

  Maintain is a product, as I learned from reading the label, that is a male numbing agent. It’s for men who finish too fast, and it prevents premature ejaculation. I think it’s probably Lidocaine that they rub on their penises and it makes them go numb so they don’t feel anything. Apparently Michael used a lot of it because the Maintain leaked out of the condom and made me go numb too, thus defeating its own purpose. I cannot tell you how relieved I was to learn that I didn’t have a horrible vagina disease. I couldn’t get away from
Michael quickly enough.

  On the drive home I thought of a million comebacks, a hundred clever quips I could have tossed at him as I left, but I’d said none of them and could have kicked myself. I never mentioned the back hair with its terrible dye job, his apparent OCD, the Maintain, none of it, but I should have. Maybe I was a wuss or maybe I was just a whole lot nicer and more polite than he was.

  “You’re never going to believe this,” I told my mother who was still up and hadn’t expected to see me until the following afternoon, “You better light a cigarette for this one.”

  She did and I told her what had happened.

  “Do you think I’ll ever find someone to love me?” I asked.

  She lit another Vantage Ultra Light as she stuffed the butt of the first one into her Diet Pepsi can.

  “Put on Fox News. Quit watching this depressing shit,” she answered.

  I was trying to start to DVD player so I could watch Magnolia again.

  “Fox News IS depressing,” I said.

  “Would you just put it on? I don’t want to miss O’Reilly.”

  “It sucks Mom. I’m like a dating retard or something.”

  “Quit feeling sorry for yourself. It’ll happen for you. Love always comes when you least expect it,” she said.

  It’s a horrendous cliché right up there with the ubiquitously annoying “everything happens for a reason” but in this case it was true. The very next week I found, quite literally, love in a most unexpected way and in the most unlikely of places.

  40

  “Did you see the kitty?” one of the dancers, Charlise, asked me excitedly.

  I’d just clocked in and was in no mood to be there, which was unusual because lately the Bubblegum Kittikat was the only place where I felt relief from boredom and loneliness. Tonight though, I didn’t want to watch Shasta whipping her head around like a stringy, blonde propeller while she pranced across the stage to Kid Rock’s “Cowboy.” I had a sinus headache from a nagging cold and that morning I stepped on the scale to find that I’d gained exactly fifteen pounds since I left Atlanta in June. It was the end of February and in eight months the cookies had caught up to me.

  Working in a strip club, there were several jokes I could have made to answer her question. Usually if a stripper asks you anything about seeing a kitty you can expect to be out at least twenty five dollars before all is said and done.

  “No,” I said “I did not see the kitty. I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Oh my God, it’s adorable. It’s out in the parking lot. Brian found it and he’s carrying it around.”

  Brian was the parking lot attendant who stood outside every night waving the two Mag-lites directing the cars into parking spots they could have easily found on their own.

  All night the strippers and cocktail waitresses were running back and forth from the parking lot to the club because they wanted to pet the kitten and finally, curiosity got the best of me and I broke down and decided to go see the kitten too.

  “You want to see the kitty I bet?” Brian asked me.

  It was a chilly night and I wrapped my arms close around my chest to stay warm and nodded.

  He made a kissing sound, bent down and snapped his fingers and a tabby kitten, big-eared and skinny, trotted out from under a Buick. The kitten was so tiny that I imagined she’d barely been weaned and when I scooped her into my arms, because I couldn’t resist, her purr drowned out the bass thumping from inside the club. I couldn’t even hear the traffic speeding by on Federal Highway.

  “You want her?”

  “You’re not keeping her?”

  “Naw, I don’t want no cat. She’s a friendly little thing though. Sweet. Make somebody a good pet if she don’t get run over out here in this parking lot. She ain’t a wild cat, that’s for sure. Somebody musta dropped her off.”

  I took the kitten into the break room, which accomplished two things. It kept the dancers inside and it prevented the kitten from getting hit by a car. The kitten was naturally thrilled with the attention she received, along with several pieces of take-out sashimi. All night, whenever I could get a bouncer to cover the register, I checked on her.

  “Somebody’s got to either put her back outside or take her home at the end of the night,” Velouria said.

  I couldn’t take the kitten home though. It wasn’t my house for one. Maybe if I was on my feet more and had my own place, but there was no way I could have a cat at my parents’ house. Not with that Doberman. It would never work out. I left my cats in Atlanta with Evan for this very reason. They loved the backyard of my old house. They sunned themselves on the back deck and chased chipmunks under the pine. I couldn’t take them from their home. I knew how it felt to be ripped from a place you loved and forced to live somewhere you didn’t and I figured if I had to suffer, it wasn’t fair to drag them along with me. I’d had two cats. One of them since the sixth grade. My mother bought her for me at a pet store when we still lived in New York, a few years before we moved down to Florida. She’d bought me the cat because she said I needed something to love. That cat was sixteen years old and I abandoned her, thinking she would be better off without me. I didn’t deserve another cat after that. I didn’t want another cat. I didn’t need something to take care of with the litter box, food, vet’s bills. I hadn’t even managed to take care of myself since Evan and I broke up. It had been eight months and I still lived in my parents’ guest room. I still worked at a strip club. I didn’t have a boyfriend and since Angelina and Olivia both disappeared with their newfound loves, I didn’t really have any kind of friend for that matter and dammit, I couldn’t stop thinking about that fifteen pounds. The list of things I wanted was long and a cat wasn’t on it.

  But still, I had to call my mother and tell her about the kitten.

  “Do you want it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Someone has to take it, at least for the night. Maybe I can find it a home.”

  “Let me come get it right now. A kitten doesn’t need to be hanging around in a strip club. Lord knows what can happen to it.”

  She had a point there.

  The first night, I didn’t want the kitten in my bed as cute as it was with its tawny coat striped with black and nothing but fuzz. I made it a shoebox to sleep in on the floor, but it used its tiny, pin-like claws to hook on and climb up my mattress, where it curled up on my pillow beside my head. I let it stay. I’m not heartless after all.

  The kitten, which I didn’t name because I was absolutely not keeping it, followed me everywhere. It wanted to be as close to my face as possible at all times, furiously head butting, bunting against me, even climbing up my pant legs to get into my arms. And it never stopped purring.

  The second night the kitten got sick. It knew to use the litter box in the bathroom attached to my bedroom, and it had bad diarrhea. I could relate. I found streaks of blood and mucous in the box. Again, the kitty wanted to sleep by my head, but in the middle of the night it woke up and cried out in a moan I could tell was from pain. She stopped purring. The kitten vomited and couldn’t control her bowels the poor, poor little thing and all night long I held the limp kitten close to me, trying to get her to lick ice cubes so she didn’t get dehydrated.

  “It’s ok, kitty. It’s going to be ok,” I told her, not knowing if that was a lie.

  Her breathing was ragged, yet she managed to tick out a few beats of a weak purr every time I talked to her.

  In the morning I took the kitten to the vet, where she stayed for two days. They put her on an IV, dewormed her and gave her antibiotics.

  “Ma’am, you realize this kitten is a stray. She’s very ill and since you say she’s not your cat, we could save you a lot of money if we euthanize her. You do know you are financially responsible for her medical bills if we treat her, right?” the vet told me.

  “I don’t care what it costs. Just make her better.”

  I paid almost two weeks’ worth of tips without even a consideration and in two days the kitte
n was well.

  Celeste, a Korean cocktail waitress, wanted her. She had a house with a screened in porch that the kitty could safely hang out on and two Himalayans already. A big cat lover, Celeste was ready for a new addition and made arrangements with me to pick the now healthy tabby kitty up from my parents’ house. Because Celeste was a big heavy metal fan, she’d already named the kitten Pantera, a name I found horrifying and profoundly unfitting.

  “She’ll get along great with Slayer and Stryper,” Celeste assured me over the phone.

  Slayer and Stryper? No. I couldn’t do it. Celeste was a nice girl. She still rocked some high bangs and though I never saw her out of her corset, I had a feeling that acid washed jeans figured prominently in her wardrobe. This was all good and well. People have different tastes you know, but seriously. Stryper? Weren’t they a Christian heavy metal band from the 80s that dressed like bees? That shit is inexcusable. To what life would I be subjecting this baby kitty if I let her go? What if she didn’t like death or thrash or even power ballads?

  I paused and inhaled as if I were smoking, although I wasn’t.

  “Celeste,” I said, “Let me give it a try with the kitten and if it doesn’t work out then I’ll call you again. I’m really sorry to get your hopes up. It’s just that kitty kinda grew on me.”

  “Oh they’ll do that to you sweetie. I completely understand. Cats are as bad as men. You say you don’t want one and next thing you know you’ve got one in bed beside you.”

  I laughed, relieved.

  “I’d love to have a man in bed beside me!” I said.

  “Didn’t you say you were doing that online dating thing?” Celeste asked. I heard her puff on her real cigarette.

  “Yeah, but you know,” I said.

  “Be careful. There’s a bunch of psychopaths on those things.”

  I’d always been optimistic, but I was beginning to think that Celeste was right. Any time I mentioned online dating, most people had the same reaction: axe murderers. Luckily no one had tried to kidnap or kill me, at least not yet, but sometimes I thought being stabbed in the throat might have been preferable to some of the dates I’d been going on. Since my fling, if fling it can even be called, because fling suggests some excitement, with the hairy Canadian, I’d vowed to carry on and continue my tireless dating campaign and it wasn’t going well.