in my life — at the world — and at anyone who got in my face in even a remotely confrontational way. I was developing a hardened emotional shell to a world I felt at the time was very cruel to me for reasons I couldn’t understand. I never felt like a victim, but I definitely felt what I was getting — from Dick, from my mom, from my father dying — was undeserved, and I was truly confused as to why I had that coming. And it kept coming and coming, next up in the form of an asshole named Kurt. We’d started dating late in the next spring of 1993, and I’d met him under the auspice that he was a construction worker. When that veil was eventually pulled back, the truth would expose me to a world that both horrified and fascinated me in the same time…
Part i V
Kurt the Construction Worker a.k.a. Gay Stripper/Porn Actor
Let me state at the outset of this new nightmare that Kurt was an asshole, flat out. I am unfortunately one of those girls who is attracted to bad boys, and even in the beginning — operating under the assumption that he was a construction worker — he still had DICK written all over him — I just had no idea at the time how much so. I’d first met him working at Flash Dancers.Typically I as a rule would NEVER date customers, but we ended up going out for pizza and everything seemed fine on the surface. He told me he was in from California on some sort of big business deal for his family and he had the build and look of a construction worker, so I assumed he worked for some kind of family business along those lines. He had a real muscular, hero build, only he didn’t have long hair or like heavy metal, but I was willing to go against type at that point for the chance it might be different with this guy. I felt maybe I would finally bring someone home my mother would accept, and at that point I felt desperate for any kind of approval from her, which also made me additionally vulnerable. The next time we went out, it was at a restaurant in Mid-town called Charley O’s, unbeknownst to me also down the block from a GAY STRIP CLUB! The latter will come into play a bit later, but basically in the middle of the meal, Kurt excused himself and told he needed to pick up some money up the block at the Marriott for his father. Technically this was true. But what he failed to mention was that, in reality, he was off picking up the money with his ASS CHEEKS on the stage of a grimy Times Square GAY strip club called The Gaiety, where it turned out he was known by the stage name Scott Randsome. Well, I thought nothing of it at the moment, until that moment turned into more twenty minutes, and then began to wonder. Had something happened
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to him? Had he ditched me? My self-esteem was at such a low point I would have believed anything, and I did when he returned after almost a half-hour covered in a marathon run’s worth of sweat. He gave me some bullshit excuse I was more than happy to believe as I was so relieved he came back at all. Experiences like this were an unfortunate pattern in my life that had first caused me to begin dancing, seeking the attention and approval of men. After Dick, my ego was reduced that much further and my desperation in turn had grown that much greater for the approval of any man I was interested in. In the case of Kurt, I took it to a new low — starting that night when we walked past the Gay Strip Theatre following dinner and a guy asked Kurt ‘So how much money did you make?’ He blew the guy off, but in hindsight, it was clear the gay bouncer had been speaking to Kurt.
Kurt returned to California a day or so later, and naturally, the distance fueled longing, and built up my hopes that much higher, putting myself in yet again the vulnerable position to have them knocked down that much farther, and with that much harder to fall. My mother apparently wasn’t having any of it, disapproving of any dating scenario after what Dick had put us through. I guess I