Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat

by Victoria Fedden

  The proofs from my calendar shoot came back that afternoon. Velouria was so excited that she even made a rare appearance on the main floor to bring me the contact sheets and a mock-up she’d done of the final calendar spread.

  “I’m so pleased with these,” she said, looking even more glittery than usual.

  I stared at the glossy contact sheet. Printed on the slick photo paper were probably thirty-something little squares, horizontal rows of mini photographs, all of me, each one a little different from the one before it. Some were circled with a wax pencil. I studied those more closely because those were the ones Velouria had liked the best and there I was pouting, preening, vamping it up for the camera. There I was half naked, completely bared, bent over. Had I not known this was me, these pictures could have been lifted right off the pages of any dirty magazine. I made a convincing x-rated model, that’s for sure. Who knew?

  “You were the only model we didn’t have to airbrush,” Velouria said, “You should be proud.”

  “Wow,” I said, because I couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. I supposed I was proud, in a sense, perhaps.

  She showed me the calendar mock-up that would soon go to the printers. I was Miss August, a month I had no connections with. October would have been more appropriate when I thought about it. October: the month of Halloween, masquerades, when we dress up, becoming someone else for a short while to try and scare away the demons that haunt us. And October had been the month, which seemed like years ago now, when I’d first stepped through those mirrored doors, onto the well-trodden red carpet of the lobby and taken my seat at the register. I’d been so scared and nervous then. The girl in the calendar didn’t look scared of anything, though she was, of course. Velouria had chosen a photo of me sitting up, crisscross applesauce, against an amethyst background, pink and baby blue saris strategically draped to camouflage my problem areas.

  “I went more conservative,” she said. The picture she’d picked only showed one bare breast. My curls tumbled off my shoulder to the left, coyly hiding the other and the silk scarves pooled on my lap, shielding the rest.

  “I’m glad you did. You made a good choice,” I replied.

  “I had a copy made of the final portrait so you can take it home,” she said, handing me an 8x10 in a manila envelope.

  58

  After the day that I threw myself into the sea, I vowed never to call Evan again and I’d kept that promise to myself, though at times the urge to dial my old Atlanta number to see who would pick up, to hear his voice, or her voice was so powerful that I knew that must be the exact feeling that torments an addict in the throes of withdrawal. Many months later, falling off of the wagon, I reasoned with myself and justified what I did next by saying that I maintained my promise. It wasn’t the same. I didn’t call him. I emailed him.

  And I attached a file containing a scanned image of the portrait Velouria had given me.

  The instant that envelope hit my hand I knew that Evan had to see this picture of me. I couldn’t explain why and I felt nothing but shame, not over the picture itself, but over my desperation to show it to him. Still, I headed to Kinko’s straight from work to have the picture scanned and saved on a floppy disc and when my mother went to bed that night, I snuck out to the family room, to the grinding, thrumming row of computers and fed the disc into the drive so that I could send him the picture and I attached the file to the blank draft before I’d even composed the message that would accompany it.

  I agonized over the subject line. Subject lines have always annoyed me anyway because unless your email is business related, and few of mine ever were, it’s sometimes hard to narrow or quantify the exact subject of a casual email. My default was “Hi.” I typed that in and backspaced over it at least fifteen times. “Hi” somehow seemed too, I don’t know, cheerful and lighthearted, like I was trying to say “Hi! Look at my boob! Woohoo!” and that is not what I wanted to convey at all. Evan and I were not on friendly email terms and this was all about revenge. Why did I want Evan to see the picture? Because I wanted him to see that he’d been wrong about me, that I wasn’t uptight and frigid, that I was hot, that I was desirable, that this, this sultry pin-up, was what he’d rejected and I wanted him to regret everything he’d done to me. I wanted him to miss me. I needed him to want the girl in the picture, with her long fingers threaded through a chain of beads, each one shimmering in the camera’s flash like a teardrop, her shadowed eyes downcast yet gazing coyly upwards, glistening lips barely parted.

  Re: Me

  I couldn’t think of anything else.

  I don’t remember what I said in the body of the email. My fingers shook with adrenaline as they scattered across the keyboard trying to compose a coherent line of “I thought you might like to see what I’ve been up to lately.” I clicked send and the message with its attachment spun out into the electronic ether, even more impossible to retrieve and unsend as an envelope dropped into the mouth of one of the blue mailboxes on the sidewalk in front of the post office.

  Well, I had done it and it was one ‘o’ clock in the morning which meant absolutely no instant gratification because Evan was asleep and the email had gone to his work address because that’s all I had, so I’d have to wait until after nine am the next day when he’d settled into his office, kicked on his computer and checked the front page of Yahoo News before scanning his inbox for new messages and deleting all the spam, before he read my note and looked at my picture. What would he do when he saw it? Would he call me? Reply? Would he say I looked good? Apologize? Tell me to come home? How long, I wondered, would he stare at my image and would he save it to look at when no one was around? Would he fantasize about me and all he’d had those seven years that he’d thrown away for a girl who didn’t care about sleeping in the bed that had once been mine, the girl, as he said, who would just take his dick out and suck it?

  For three days straight I checked and rechecked and rechecked my email to see if he’d written me back and “You’ve Got Mail!” only referred to a sale at the Gap and some Nigerian royalty who wanted to wire two hundred thousand British pounds into my bank account.

  He never wrote me back.

  59

  It had been a year now, a little more, since I’d left Atlanta and was I happy? I couldn’t say yes to that, but I was, at least, less sad, and I understand that that’s not saying a whole lot. I’d gone from suicidal to just mildly depressed, but maybe happiness was too much to ask at that moment in my life. I was something else though, something outside the flighty realm of emotion, something more important. Joy and sorrow ebb and flow. Our feelings surge and dip in the course of our lives, a fact I inherently understood and so I didn’t expect happiness. The bigger deal, I realized, was not that I should be leaping exuberantly out of bed each morning, because lord knows I wasn’t, but that I was free and that my freedom, unlike my emotions, was now a constant. I could do whatever I wanted with my life. Every possibility was open to me.

  With Evan I’d been trapped and I can’t blame him entirely for that because ultimately, I’d caged myself. I’d locked my own cell, the bars of which were my fear of change, shyness and a lack of confidence. Evan wasn’t the cause of my problems. He was just a symptom. The funniest thing was, I’d been free all along, but I’d never realized it until I’d ended up in South Florida, sleeping in my parents’ guest room and working the door at the Bubblegum Kittikat. When Evan stole my house and sent me packing, he’d given me the gift of a blank slate so I could rewrite the story of my life and maybe I’d maybe only gotten the first sentence down so far, but introductions are always the hardest and it was a start.

  A few years before, Evan and I had gone on a ski vacation to Colorado. Now, I’d spent most of my life on the flat, coastal plains of the East Coast and mountains were an entirely new thing to me. I’d never skied. The idea of sliding down several thousand feet of packed snow and ice with two sticks attached to my feet seemed a bit irrational, but I liked snow and I liked being o
utside, and it had been something I’d always wanted to try, so I went along. Evan had grown up skiing. He could whip around the black diamond runs like a pro and he promised to teach me. Because skiing was easy, he said. Packed into one of his mom’s old ski suits and clamped into my rental boots and skis, I convinced myself halfway up the lift, that this was definitely the way my life was destined to end and once I’d stood up from my face plant in the snow off the lift, I’d had the panic attack to end all panic attacks. I could barely remember how to breathe, so there was no way I was going to be able to learn to ski to get myself back down to the bottom and into the safety of the lodge where it was warm and where there were waiters who would bring me grilled cheeses and hot chocolate.

  He swung his ski pole like a baseball bat and it landed across my back, knocking me to my knees in the fine powder and then he yelled at me to get up and stop acting like such a baby. But I couldn’t get up with the skis twisting my ankles at painfully unnatural angles. Lightheaded from the altitude and out of breath, all I could do was cry silently and open-mouthed, terrified.

  It had been the enormous scope of the Rocky Mountain landscape that had overwhelmed me; the sheer height and vastness I saw from the snowy summit. I’d never seen anything so big and the bottom was impossibly far away. I could never make it down on my own and why couldn’t he understand that? I just couldn’t do it.

  Evan’s forearm, cold and sleek in his parka, met my bare face and the force threw me backwards with my arms and legs splayed like a tragic snow angel.

  “Get up! Get up!” he barked.

  I cried.

  The mountaintop was mysteriously empty of people, which is why Evan could get away with treating me this way. He’d never have hit me in front of an audience.

  I sat up with my arms outstretched like a baby wanting to be lifted, so he could help me up, but he said I had to learn to get up on my own, so I continued to weep, the snow melting and seeping up under the cuffs of my gloves, a feeling I’d always hated. Evan speared his poles into the snow, kicked clods of white ice into the pines. He stamped his skied feet, ripped off his hat and hurled it to the ground.

  I heard the airy slice of skis skimming the frosty ground behind me. Thank God, I thought, someone else.

  “I saw from over there,” said a man’s voice, “it looks like you guys needed some help.”

  Dressed in head to toe red, the ski patrol had arrived.

  Evan grinned broadly, his perfect teeth as white as the snow, and laughed. If you didn’t know him, he’d have sounded charming. He pointed at me and whispered “first time” like it was all a big joke while I blubbered to the ski patrol that I was just scared is all and I couldn’t get down from the mountain because I couldn’t ski.

  “I see it every day. What you need is a good lesson,” the patroller said and then he handed me a red plastic sled, instructing me to get on and he’d pull me by the sled’s leash down to the lodge at the base of the mountain.

  “She could do it if she’d try,” Evan tried to argue, but the patrol told him it wasn’t a good idea.

  “She won’t try,” I heard Evan say as the ski patrol glided away with me plopped in an ungraceful heap on the sled behind him with my skis tucked under my arm.

  I was mortified and disgusted with myself and not just because I’d been too afraid to even try to ski down on my own, though that was part of it.

  When Evan and I broke up it was as if I was stranded back on that same terrifying peak all over again, not knowing how to ski. I was overwhelmed by the idea of a life on my own. The vastness of the unknown and the possibilities of everything that could happen, might or might not happen in that life alone overwhelmed me and I’d wanted only to be saved again, for life’s equivalent of the ski patrol to show up conveniently and pull me to safety on a red, plastic sled. But no one had come. I’d waited and waited and no one had come to my rescue, so I’d had no choice but to start learning, a little at a time, how to save myself.

  For the three years after that trip to Colorado, I regretted not trying. I wished I’d kicked my fear in the teeth and learned to ski up there on Vail Mountain. Finally, I realized that this was it. This was my do-over. I wasn’t off the mountain yet, that would take years, but I was figuring things out and acquiring the skills I needed to live confidently and to be free to create whatever life I wanted. It had taken a year, but I’d finally dug myself out of the avalanche. I was standing up on my own, wobbly yes, but I was up and snowplowing inch by inch down to a better place. The enormous vista of possibilities no longer scared the living shit out of me. I’d started to relax and enjoy the view, and how could I not? It was filled with naked women.

  60

  I’d saved the photographer’s business card, wedging it into the frame of the mirror above my dresser where I could see it every day. I could call any time, he’d said, and he’d promised to make me a star. I’d doubted this until I saw the final shots. Everyone at the club (and even my mom) agreed that mine was among the hottest in the calendar. I really did look like a professional model and it wasn’t a big leap to imagine those pictures gracing a centerfold or a print ad, but the big question was this. Did I seriously want thousands of horny men, a group that could include everyone from pervs and convicts, pimply teenaged boys, my friend’s boyfriends and my dad’s business associates, jerking off to naked pics of me? And of all the products and services that I could represent in the world, did I really want to be the face of an operation that promised men “good time and a big friendships with busty eastern European beauties queen?” Do I really need to answer that question?

  Mad at five am, crashing after two Red Bulls had worn off, I came home, ripped the card jaggedly into five or six pieces and flushed it. The register was short again and my Bubblegum Bucks ledger was one big discrepancy though I’d been meticulous. Chris had been livid and said he was taking me off of Bubblegum Bucks because he was sick of it. Patty had recently gotten her wish and was the Buck Girl on my nights off and Chris said her cash always added up.

  “Funny how mine doesn’t on the nights we both work,” I remarked.

  I never went so far as to accuse Patty of sabotage publicly, but I’d wondered for a while if she weren’t behind this. I don’t know how she did it. Maybe when I was on break she’d pretend to need something from the cabinet and go in there and wreak havoc on my bills and everyone trusted her since she’d been a Kittikat veteran all these years, so it wouldn’t have been hard for her to do. I don’t know, to tell you the truth, and I have to be open to the possibility that it was all a big coincidence and that I wasn’t cut out for life selling fake, strip club money. Like I said, I’d been in remedial math classes since elementary school. That I’d repeatedly fuck up what was essentially book keeping work, wasn’t exactly far out of the realm of possibility and I owned that. I sucked at math and this was nothing but.

  I’d never strip. I didn’t want to be a nude model, as exhilarating as it had been. I’d been knocked from my post as the Buck Girl and I found myself planted right back at the front door.

  Another day shift in summer and I’d have rather been at the beach, but hey, whatever. I’d be gone in a couple days anyway, floating languidly on a raft in the Caribbean. My Jamaican vacation was almost here, though it couldn’t come soon enough, so if Brent needed me to fill in on a Monday afternoon, no problem. I hadn’t finished the Time Life books yet and I no longer gave a single ounce of fuck if Patty complained to management about me reading on the job, though she’d kind of laid off the bitching and glaring since she dethroned me from Bubblegum Bucks. Let her have it, I thought. She had no other options in life. I did. Patty wasn’t to be hated. You had to feel sorry for her.

  Same with Candy. If she thought anyone would believe she was thirty-five, as she limply claimed, she deserved genuine pity. She’d been an installment at the Kittikat even longer than Patty. From far away, in a dim room with flashing strobes, if you’d had one too many and if you really squinted, perhaps you cou
ld trick yourself into thinking Candy was thirty-something but I guessed that she was closer to sixty and a walking cautionary tale. I wanted to take every pretty young girl who came in, fresh out of high school with stars in her eyes and drag her across the floor by her pony tail to watch Candy dance and I wanted to say “Don’t let this be you. One day you could be sixty and alone with no family and a set of jacked up looking, calcified breast implants barely able to shake your rump because you’re so old you need a hip replacement.”

  I’d never talked to Candy much. She kept to herself and she’d occasionally buy a pack of Virginia Slims but she never said anything more than a soft thank you until that afternoon when she noticed me leafing through the community college class catalog. I liked reading the class descriptions. Some of them sounded so fun like Children’s Literature, Abnormal Psychology, Creative Writing, Child Development, Environmental Science, American Literature.

  “College student?” Candy asked me.

  Her voice was high and cutesy like Snow White or Betty Boop. She’d probably started talking like that because she thought guys liked it and it had become a permanent habit. She rolled her neck and opened her mouth in a stretch and shook out her waist length pony-tail. It was platinum blonde and obviously fake. She wore it cascading from a blonde coil at the crown of her head “I Dream of Jeannie” style and she looked a lot like Barbara Eden, or rather like she was trying to look like Barbara Eden or if Barbara Eden had baked her skin into a leather hide in a tanning bed and then had systematically mutilated each of her facial features with bad cosmetic procedures. Candy was more of a “Nightmare of Jeannie.”

  I shook my head, “Not yet. I’m thinking about going back. Maybe to become a kindergarten teacher.”