That's Us

Ken

I lurched my new (only in the sense that it was new to me the damn thing was almost old enough to vote) black Mustang hatchback onto the curb and willed myself to let go of the steering wheel. I’d only had my license for three months. My heart was pounding, and my mouth was so dry that my braces were starting to stick to the inside of my lips. Those were also new. In fact, everything about me was new. In the year and a half since I’d started high school I had gone from an innocent little eighteen year old girl who could count the number of times she’d been kissed on one finger to a thoroughly f****d rock vixen with a mostly shaved head, bleach-blonde bangs, kohl-caked eyes, and a shiny steel barbell shoved through each and every one of her erogenous zones. I ran my hands up and down the perforated leather of the steering wheel and took one last steadying drag from my cigarette before flicking it out the window with my thumb and middle finger. Oh, I bet that looked badass. I hope Harley saw me flick my cigarette just now or not. That would mean that he’s home and that I’m going to meet him right now. Oh my God. Maybe he’s going to stand me up. But how could he? On the phone, he said he doesn’t have a car. Seriously, I was nauseatingly nervous about meeting a twenty- two-year-old guy who lived in his mom’s basement and didn’t have a car… while sitting inside my car. That’s like Beyoncé worrying about whether or not she’s going to impress Lil’ Kim. That’s like Tom Brady being anxious about going to his twenty-year high school reunion. That’s like…well, you get the point.

Buying myself a little more time, I smeared some piña colada–flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smackers on my pout in the rearview mirror (to prevent that embarrassing braces-lip-snag-thing from happening) and tried to psych myself up for the long walk to Ken’s front door.

Of course he’ll like you. You look smoking hot! Your black eyeliner is smudged to perfection. You’re wearing your signature tiger-striped velour stretch pants and black Dropkick Murphys tank top. The straps of your new red Wonderbra give a nice pop of color. And your s**t-kicking black steel- toed Grinders will let him know that you’re a worthy lay. And that cigarette flick? Forget about it! He’ll love you! Unless your braces are a turn-off…oh God!

Pulling myself away from the mirror, I took a deep breath and opened the car door. As I stepped out into the sunshine my consciousness floated away like a balloon tethered to the top of my head. I watched from somewhere high above my body as my legs—swathed in animal-print velour—lifted, stepped, and fell alternately of their own accord toward Harley’s benign-looking brown split-level. As the tiny figure below me continued to advance, now mechanically ascending the stairs to Ken’s front door, my consciousness began hyperventilating into an invisible paper bag. Oh, s**t, I’m freaking out. I’m freaking out, and he’s going to know. What if he watched me primping in my car? What if he knows this bra is padded? What if he doesn’t know this bra is padded and we fool around? Oh no! He’s a grown man! He doesn’t want to f**k a child, especially not one who also looks like a little boy. Oh my God! Breathe, Jane, breathe. You’re a badass. You’re a badass… I watched with detached wonderment as a black fingernail shakily extended from my body and rang the doorbell. Before returning it to my side, I studied it idly, thinking surely there had to be more to meeting Ken than this. A secret knock or handshake or something. But when I looked up from my cogitation, there, standing before me, was someone even more unapproachable than the mythical creature I’d come to see.

It was Lucas Idol.

Lucas f*****g Idol just answered the door to Ken’s mom’s run- down’70s–style doo-doo–brown tri-level house. With his messy blond pompadour, mischievous baby-blue eyes, and overfull lips pulled to the side in a self-confident smirk, Ken was a dead ringer for my beloved Lucas. The familiarity instantly put me at ease. The rest of him, however, did something else to me entirely. Ken's broad shoulders stretched the well-worn fabric of his faded black Misfits T-shirt almost to its breaking point, and his long, muscular legs were wrapped

in a pair of hip-hugging red-and-black plaid bondage pants, like a Christmas gift that I would definitely not be able to wait until December 25th to open. God, he was perfect. Until he smiled. In an instant my balloon of consciousness popped and came crashing back down to earth, b***h-slapped out of its reverie, by the worst teeth I had ever seen.

Fuck, they were bad. You could have parked a double-wide between those discolored front tusks, and the rest of them looked like they were engaged in fisticuffs, scrambling over each other in a desperate attempt to leap from that hellhole pun fully intended and finally put an end to their suffering. They were horrifying. Horrifying. These teeth would have made Steve Buscemi blow chunks. Oh well, he was still a legend and a damn fine one at that with his mouth closed. As long as he kept his trap shut or semi-shut most of the time, I was thoroughly prepared to overlook this one flaw. After all, who was I to judge? Still in braces, I wasn’t completely rid of my own gap yet.

Besides, you don’t see people not having s*x with Woody Harrelson orMadonna because of a little gap, do you? f**k no! Because they’re famous, and so was Ken Smith, at least locally. But then, he began to speak…Goddamn it!

Ken was a f*****g snaggletoothed moron! I mean, I knew going in that he’d dropped out of school and was transient and all, but I’d thought it was because he was a hardened criminal, not because he had the IQ and processing speed of a three-toed sloth on barbiturates.

Ugh. At least he was nice to look at, especially from the nose up and the neck down, and he was super warm and friendly (which was kind of unfortunate because it caused him to smile a lot, with his teeth), and his voice was every bit as slow and deep and gritty as I remembered from our phone conversation… Hmm… Ever the optimist, I went out for coffee with Ken anyway. If I could just get Lucas to see us together while the lower half of Ken’s face was hidden behind a coffee mug, it wouldn’t matter that he had bad teeth and half a brain. Lucas would know that I was under the protection of the Ken, a gorgeous, grown-ass man who breathed napalm and ate bullies like him for breakfast. At least, that was his reputation, and for my purposes, Ken’s rep was all that mattered. I don’t know if it was because my expectations for the afternoon had been so severely lowered or because Lucas had literally become a stalker on steroids since our breakup, but about an hour into my date with Ken, I realized that I was actually kind of digging the guy. While he looked like he’d just stepped out of a s*x Pistols video and had a voice that sounded like it was coming through the static-laden speaker in the bulletproof visitation window at the state pen, Ken’s vibe was laid-back, affable happy, even. Having been raised by two affectionate, pot-smoking, Woodstock-era hippies, Ken’s calm contentedness was strikingly familiar. This feels nice. This feels right. This man would never hurt me. This man would cherish and protect me. This man is also probably dumb enough to throw down, if need be. Yep, this one might do after all.

Stupid, stupid brain. As it turned out, Ken’s familiar vibe had nothing to do with his spirit and everything to do with the fact that, like my parents, he was just stoned all the time. In fact, I think Ken was physically incapable of being sober. He’d smoked, snorted, and swallowed so many drugs by the time I got to him that I could have probably removed my nail polish with his blood and gotten a contact high from the fumes. In my defense, I honestly didn’t know he was on drugs for the first few months of our relationship. Like I said, my parents were always stoned, too, so his half-open eyelids and inability to tell analog time was nothing new. I just blamed it on his low IQ. Then, one day, after we’d been dating for, like, three months, Ken settled his glassy eyes on my face and casually stated, “Man, I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you when I was sober.” Before I could process the significance of that statement, Ken burst out laughing, throwing his head back and wiping tears from his eyes. It took him a moment to regain his composure before he was able to choke out, “Holy s**t! I totally f*****g forgot I smoked a s**t-ton of weed with Mark before you came over! Bah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” And that was when I realized that Ken had never not been high. In the name of protecting myself from Lucas (or possibly just making him jealous), I focused solely on Ken’s positive qualities. He actually was really cute, discolored Chiclet teeth aside. He had the long, lean body, wardrobe, and drug habit of a legitimate punk rocker, but none of the emotional baggage. Although his rep made him sound like a hardened criminal, to me Ken was just fun, flirty, fresh air. He made me smile, he made me come, and he was old enough to buy me cigarettes and alcohol. At

sixteen, what more could I have asked for? I didn’t care about Ken’s lack of education, intellect, and future. I shrugged at his lack of a car. And I’d even accepted that his living situation involved ’70s-era wood-paneling, mildew, and two grown men sleeping in

side-by-side twin beds. When I first began dating Ken, he was sharing his mother’s one-room daylight basement with Romeo, his younger brother, who worked at thelocal Army-Navy surplus store. Romeo housed an impressive cache of homemade pipe bombs, sawed-off shotguns, big Dirty Harry style handguns, live hand grenades, and night-vision goggles in their closet. He even had what I considered at the time to be a smallish block of C4 but later learned was actually a crazy go-straight-to-Guantanamo Bay-with-a-bag-over-your-

head shitload of C4. (Evidently, it’s really concentrated, like wasabi.) After discovering Romeo’s stockpile of death, their mom (who was on husband number eight and looked exactly like what you’d expect a woman

who’d named her sons Ken and Romeo to look like) decided that it was time to separate her increasingly criminal sons. Even though Romeo was the arms dealer of the pair, Ken was older and less employed, so he was

exiled into a corner of the garage that his stepdad had hastily drywalled off and run an extension cord out to.

It reminded me of how people typically regard a litter of puppies. They’re cute and cuddly but completely incapable of following basic social mores, like not pissing on the floor, so you keep them warmish and dryish in the

garage and visit them when they get loud enough to remind you that they exist.

Ken did have a TV out there, so there was that. But the one thing I never accepted, never failed to be humiliated by, never wanted to acknowledge or admit existed was Ken’s tattoos. Oh my f*****g God, the tattoos. you know I love ink on a man, but these tattoos were an embarrassment to us all. Every time I caught a glimpse of one of Ken’s biceps, I wanted to weep. I don’t even know where to begin. I can still feel the heat rising to my cheeks from just thinking about those crimes against art. I have an actual visceral reaction to their revulsion. That’s how bad these tattoos were are.

Deep breath…okay, here goes.