Read ‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol for Free Online Page B

touch, I got a job dancing at the Kit Kat Club in Manhattan twice a week. I got the job obviously for the money, but equally as importantly, because I felt attractive, which I really needed as a woman at that point in my life. I danced under the stage name Karen, and hid my dance costumes in my dresser. I told Dick I’d gotten a part-time job working for a bridal company, selling merchandise to their stores. When I’d get home after shifts with a lot of money, I would hide it from him naturally — which felt good — but it didn’t buy my way out of any of the many problems between us. So for every self-esteem boost I might feel coming off a dancing shift, when I got home: this chauvinistic asshole was waiting like Archie Bunker, saying shit to me like, ‘You need to learn how to cook.’
    On top of that, aside from my dancing earnings, we never had any money, which was hard to believe because we’d make an average of $3000.00 from a given antique show and on a bad day, at least $1000.00. Of course, he never gave me any of it, so on my own, at one point, I started collecting vintage Barbies from the 1950s through the 1970s, which was a lot of fun. I bought most of that collection with dancing money, and honestly, they were better company at that point than Dick was, because every night he’d go out with his friends drinking and leave me at home alone. I felt like he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. In the meanwhile, Tommy was doing everything he could to get me to leave Dick for him. He was a very sweet and sensitive guy for being such a bad ass, and would pick me up every night after work to make sure I got home safely. He was always begging me to move in with him so he could take care of me. I couldn‘t cut loose of Dick for one simple reason that only another battered woman reading this would understand. The fear that is beaten into you as a victim of domestic violence is what leaves the most permanent mark — not the bruises.
    By that point, Dick’s physical abuse had deteriorated slowly but surely from his yelling at me to just hitting me when he felt I hadn’t done something right. Every day, he’d come home, go out to the strip clubs with his friends, or sneak out of the house when he was home to make calls to girls from payphones. And of course, whenever I attempted to call him on it, he’d smack me or slam my head into something. I still have a mark on the back of my head from one time when he slammed me into a closet door. At that point, in addition to being scared to leave him, didn’t understand why he was doing this to me, and on some sad level a lot of women reach, I felt it was my fault in some way what he was doing to me. I just wanted to have a normal relationship with my boyfriend — wanted to be loved by someone outside of my family. Even though I did all the right things, it never worked. So as the months rolled on, our dysfunctional routine continued with Dick going to strip clubs every night with his friends, hitting me whenever I made noise about it and making me feel so shitty about myself that I kept dancing to cling to any basic sense of self-esteem. The Kit Kat Club had become Flash Dancers by this point, and they had started doing features, which sounded interesting to me, and honestly, I was in need of the money going broke between paying for his student loans and my one, which I’d taken over from my mom.
    After a while of this vicious down cycle, I guess Dick slammed me hard enough in the head to finally see clearly that if I didn’t leave him, he might honestly have killed me.
    It’s sad that I had to feel my life was in danger before I was willing to try and change it, but I finally did, moving out of his apartment and back in with my mom, and he moved back in with his own. I still to this day don’t know where it was okay for me to tolerate that kind of treatment by him because no one in my family did that. He was very controlling, sort of like my mom, and