Dirty Girl, Broken Woman

By Carl Reader

Dirty Girl, Broken Woman is an erotic tragedy set in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America, when the Sexual Revolution was dying and the AIDS epidemic drove a final spike into love’s heart. Narrated by Tucker Brophy, a confused bartender/journalist/writer, it tells the story of Kay Weatherby, a stunning and highly sexual figure who is the dirty girl and broken woman of the tale. She breathes life into Tucker and brings him hope, as the flame of an orgiastic affair ignites between them in the small artists’ town of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Kay, a teacher, is about to receive her master’s in education and has a handsome boyfriend and house in the country, but she is dissatisfied with a certain aspect of her life. She turns to Tucker for fulfillment with the complete agreement of her boyfriend. Their passion burns so fiercely that she and Tucker get more than they bargain for, as the affair again and again turns even more wildly torrid and the relationship between them deepens. But there are ulterior motives lurking, and unseen intentions, and friends who have their own insoluble problems who impede and enable the affair, all while driving the story toward its shocking conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carl Reader
• Release date: Mar 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463884171

Carl Reader

Carl Reader trained as a journalist at Temple University and has worked as a reporter, photographer and editor in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Montana. He's published short stories in literary magazines and on the Internet and has self-published a children's Christmas story called THE TWELFTH ELF OF KINDNESS.That book was partially published in Russia under the Sister Cities program. He's also self-published a novella called THE PERSECUTION OF WILLIAM PENN, which has been well-received in several college libraries. He works as a professional photographer and freelance writer.

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Dirty Girl, Broken Woman

By

Carl Reader

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 Carl Reader

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Dirty Girl, Broken Woman

By

Carl Reader

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of any of the characters to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. While the book takes place in a well-known town, its situations, venues and events are also fictional. They originated in the author’s imagination, as does the entire novel.

Copyright Carl Reader

Dirty Girl, Broken Woman

By

Carl Reader

PART ONE

My Place

1

I fell in love with Kay Weatherby while she was dating Ronald Reagan. I loved her instantly, as soon as I saw her on his arm. As a boy, I admired everything about Reagan, his movie-star good looks and endless charm and especially the beautiful women by his side, so you might wonder why I would do such a thing to him or her. I loved Kay at first sight, and I cared very much for Reagan, until he morphed from an actor into a politician. I realized political heroes are nothing but bums backed by good public relations firms, or as some say, monkeys in cages throwing excrement at each other. Actors are free spirits, open-minded souls, so it was quite a step down from Hollywood to Washington.

Things changed dramatically when a boy sees how badly grown men can act.

Before I go on, I have to say that this is a love story, and an end-of-love story, not a political tale, although it might sound suspiciously political right now. Don’t let that bother you. Politics affects everything detrimentally, even dirty stories, and we’re lucky if we recover from a corrupted story or a lousy politician.  Still, love always shows up in the end, even in stories like this one. It makes up for so much we have to endure. So be patient. Please be patient.

As I said, Kay Weatherby was dating our fortieth president when I met her. That, of course, is somewhat of a fabrication, so don’t be confused by the part of the story I haven’t told yet. She wasn’t really dating him, except on one Halloween night when I first saw her and Reagan together. Although it wasn’t obvious from the way she looked at this version of our president, I learned later she felt the same way I did about him. She called him Ronnie Raygun for his ridiculous Star Wars plans to shoot missiles out of the sky, and she hated his hard heart that bedeviled the poor and weak and favored the rich and strong. That made us kindred souls, but she was more of a jokester about it: I knew Reagan’s tough-guy act was dangerous and destructive. She didn’t know how detrimental he was yet, and mostly laughed at his macho bull. She thought the president was silly.

One of Reagan’s biographers claimed he learned about sexual promiscuity in Hollywood from Errol Flynn, that after Reagan lost the great love of his life in a divorce he was devastated and moping all over tinsel town. Ronnie, Flynn supposedly said to him, you’re rich, famous and still young. Why don’t you be like me? I’ve been divorced, too, but I discovered there are thousands of gorgeous young women in town who are just dying to be close to movie stars. They will do anything for you. You don’t have to fall in love with them, just spend the night with them. Screw the hell out of them until you can’t screw them anymore, and you’ll forget. You’ll learn what they really are, and who you are, and what they’re after, and what you’re after, and you’ll feel a heck of a lot better about yourself when they give you their love for free. It can happen to you every night, if you want it to, and you’ll discover things about this world you didn’t know.

Supposedly, Reagan took up Flynn’s advice about sleeping with strangers to cure his broken heart. He found solace in the slender arms of young girls, many girls, which is one of the things I admired about him when he was an actor. He was out and about in town just about every night, and found his pleasures with those silly girls chasing fame who believed they caught that fame when they slept with a well-known man. Why I mention these episodes in the life of one of our most loved (yes, that is a pun) and one of our most destructive presidents might not seem apparent at first in a personal narrative. At the time I am writing about, the 1980s, that decade of backwards change when everyone was learning the person they should be but was not, promiscuity ruled the day, just a Reagan ruled us as a prude. After the 1970s, which were really what we think of as the 1960s, the 1980s were based on the free love and sexual exploration the previous decade taught us, while wearing a cloak of freedom and responsibility. At least that was the case until Reagan got political and AIDS came along. Then values and ideas and hearts took a turn toward the new phony morality we haven’t yet escaped nearly forty years later. I’m talking about the final years of The Sexual Revolution.

How cold the world has turned since those days of unbridled lust and hypocritical prudery. Now we simply say no to sex, and say no to what we all most want and need as humans.

So, I liked Ronald Reagan very much when he was in the movies. I liked his good looks, smile, nice clothes and sonorous voice and his penchant for beautiful women, but that affection for him changed for me when he became a political hack and decided to give up his practice of adultery. He had remarried by then and was supposedly happy, but I was perceptive enough to realize he embraced family values not because of his happy marriage or some epiphany he had realized, but because the money people who supported him thought it would get him elected. The country still had tens of millions of religious tight-asses who looked into other peoples bedroom windows and didn’t like what they saw there because they weren’t doing it, or were doing the same thing and felt guilty. Leave it to politics and religion to ruin a good man who practiced good, dirty fun. Of course, after the 1970s people were sick of the shallowness and depravity and selfishness of all that kinkiness, they were sick of those who took free love as an opportunity to grab pleasure only for themselves, as I was. They were tired of the sexual exploitation that society and the morally corrupt made of free love, once they experienced it. You can count me among them. We were sick of those who emphasized the free and forgot the love. Once that happens, the whole structure comes tumbling down, and we long for the good old days when despising sex and loving apple pie was the norm. Enter Mr. Reagan, political entrepreneur, who had tired of too much of a good thing, too, and wanted to live in the White House, where he could be bored all the time.

By the way, despising sex and loving apple pie are a couple of reasons why the general population is overweight, I’ve discovered. You do the math. Emotional sickness equates to physical sickness.

Reagan was aided (another bad pun) in his new-found old morality by AIDS. Kay thought so, too. The religious bigots who supported him so wholeheartedly said AIDS was a curse laid upon gay men by God. I have heard such bigots repeat with great glee a terrible joke, and I tell it here with hesitation and repugnance, with the idea of informing about what bigotry is. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to be offended. What does AIDS stand for? Adios, Infected Dick Sucker. I don’t know how many times I heard that joke in the restaurant in which I tended bar. Many old-fashioned and unenlightened people bought the notion that the Deity worried about where you found your pleasures and punished those who attended a different venue. They only vaguely acknowledged that viruses existed, and few acknowledged that viruses caused diseases, or wanted to, since they could not condemn those they hated if viruses, not God, caused all the trouble.

But what does this have to do with a personal narrative about loving so greatly and losing so much?

We don’t live in a vacuum, any more than a virus does. We have to have favorable conditions to live and for our values to flourish. The viruses have the human body to infest: we have the human society, one that’s largely created or manipulated by the men in power. I’m sorry if I offend some with this comparison, but I repeat: life cannot exist in a vacuum any more than a virus can exist outside a body. No one survives alone. We need a favorable substratum. Reagan brought about unfavorable changes to our sex lives, and we little viruses have suffered for it ever since. But he infected us to begin with. We have not cured that infection, although we have made progress in curing AIDS. I wish my dead friends were here to see it.

Ignore the previous personal ramblings if you please, for the real narrative begins here, at a Halloween party. When I met Kay, her boyfriend, a young man-about-town whose name was Paul but went by Raoul because he wanted to invent a new personality for himself, was wearing a Ronald Reagan mask and pointing me out to her from across the room. Paul, or Raoul, changed from one name to the other because he wanted to modify his identity, so it wasn’t surprising he came to the party as Reagan, the ultimate hypocrite. At least I thought it was Paul under the mask, although I wasn’t certain. The mask and the man pointing at me made me laugh, but then, wait, he turned around and he was Richard Nixon. Like the Roman god Janus, he was two-faced, with one masked side portraying Reagan and the other masked side our disgraced former president and criminal. It made me roar. Reagan was taller than me, and he approached and loomed over me silently when he saw me smiling. The stunning woman behind him in a red-sequined flapper dress with red fringes at the hem and low-cut breast-line hung back while he menaced me from above.

Repent, he said.

Sure. The costume’s really cool, I said. But who are you under there? Raoul?

He was silent, looming over me, like the anti-life death mask President Reagan had become. That’s when Kay stepped in, all dressed up as she was with dark cropped hair and big brown moist eyes and blue eye shadow and long straight bangs down into her eyes. She seemed sweeter and sexier than any Halloween candy, and just looked like pure fun. Reagan-Nixon-Raoul walked away, still without revealing himself. Kay had what I thought was a perpetually amused smirk that was the most sensual thing I have ever seen on a woman. When I turned around and looked into her eyes, and her face with that smirk, it was as though a great blast of air went whooshing through my chest and stole my breath away. Boom. Cupid was in the room. Reagan was chuckling at the sight of us. Falling in love with her was that sudden, that overwhelming. I gasped. This was no Hollywood one-night stand, not with that sexual fire written all over her.

You know him. That’s my boyfriend, Raoul.

Raoul was a very good friend, and a silent one. He had a nice manner about him, so that he was good company even when quiet. When we drank together, he mostly sat like a softly clenched fist, his body frozen but still vulnerable. I think that position choked off his vocal chords, but I knew it had more to do with his time in the war. The war shut him up. The damn war made him quiet.

He told me he knows you and you’re a good person to know, after I asked him who that cute silly man was over there that came to a Halloween party without a costume, and he told me your name but I forget it already. I guess I’m a little high.

Now I was choked up. I could barely manage to push my own name out over my lips. That smirk was like a tongue of sensuality licking out at me, and it appeared to be waiting for me to take it.

Tucker.

Question: why aren’t you wearing a costume, Tucker?

The smirk became smirkier, but still oh-so-lovely.

I have a costume on.

You do? Jeans and a T-shirt? What costume is that?

I came as reality. So meet reality.

Could I have been anymore full of it? She struck me so hard I couldn’t help but be an idiot.

Pfff. There is no such thing, and why would anyone bring it to a party? Therefore, you must be a ghost. That’s what your costume is, a ghost, you silly pertson.

She actually said pertson, although I did not know what illegal substance had so tangled up her tongue. I wondered what else that tongue could do.

I recovered my senses a little and my creepy instincts for seduction took over. I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it and then bit the soft flesh under her thumb tenderly. I couldn’t yet say anything serious and poetic, like my soul had fallen at her feet.

Does that feel like a ghost?

Men are blessed when they meet a responsive woman, and she was so tender and impressionable that she responded with a shiver. That’s when I knew we were going to be together. Scratch a libertine and you find a sensitive child underneath. She had reacted, rather than slapping and turning away. Her eyes widened and her head tilted. I had scratched her surface and lit something, a little match, and the wild little girl was about to come out. If I came to the party as reality, I would be leaving it living in a fantasy.

That feels real good, she said. I don’t know how long it’s been since anybody bit me. I love biting. Maybe you are my reality. There’s only one way to find out.

What’s that?

She touched my chest with a soft open palm.

Look under the mask. See the nakedness. But then I see you don’t have one, a mask, I mean, not nakedness, so I can’t look.

I was about to remind her I didn’t need to wear a mask if I was real, but she slipped her hand out of mine and left me longing. I did not get to say what I wished to say but was left alone with my longing for her. She had mastered that art of teasing and walking away, but she did look back over her shoulder at me. I saw a kind of hurt desperation in her eyes, but then she smiled.

Fire in the hole, she whispered.

I don’t know why I didn’t run after her.

We often fell into lust at first sight in those days, but this was something different, something much more. It was the great longing that never goes away, and it was the first time I had felt it. It was free love, too, about to blossom, and I hoped the emphasis would be on love, because like Reagan I was tired of the rest, even though I lusted greatly. She had nicked my surface and brought out what lay beneath, oh-so-close to the skin.

When she whispered at me, I was caught in the net, for I was as tired as our president must have been when he kept losing the love of his serial sex partners, night after night.

I just hoped I would never become so crass as to enter politics.

I hoped, too soon, that Kay was a final stop for me.

2

I was writing a book to show that kindness could still exist in this crass new greedy world of Ronald Reagan’s.

It was a children’s Christmas story, but not really. It was something other than the childish story it told. It was about the last elf of kindness, a magical creature who had shrunk to such an extremely small size from all the cruelty and hat of the world he almost disappeared. When he reached the size of a dime and was ready to flicker out of existence, he found refuge in a little boy’s ear, having just about given up.

The story commenced from there, from the words of knowledge and wisdom the elf imparted to the boy as he spoke from inside his ear. The boy, in the meantime, was helping the elf regain his courage and grow, literally, through kindness. The boy was helping the elf rejoin the world.

Sorry to return to the Gipper here (skip to the next paragraph if you must), but it was a reaction to our president, who forgot kindness and played tough guy for greed and personal power. The kindness of the world suffered for it, along with anyone who needed a little compassion to grow, but Reagan profited from his act, for so many men are uncertain of themselves and have to inflict a fake, overblown masculinity on others to take themselves seriously. He was one of them. It was all so crass.

I had been writing my little book everyday for three months. I rarely produced more than a few paragraphs at a sitting, being strained to the limits by work and partying. Bartenders might as well pry open their eyes with toothpicks in the morning, due to their activities of the previous night. When I was finished writing for the day, I would have a glass of white wine to tune up for work at The Back Door and continue the cycle of fiction-writing, bartending and partying. Tending bar for is a wonderful way of living for a young straight man in a gay town when he has indulged in the product he offers to keep going. It’s the only job aside from wine taster where you’re allowed to enhance yourself with the product you sell while working.

In most cases, at most bars in New Hope, you’re allowed to drink on duty, as long as you don’t get utterly smashed, for the bosses know it makes you blabber, and that makes you better at your job of entertaining customers. I did not say bartenders are allowed to get drunk, mind you, for that makes any kind of work impossible. The idea was to get little stoned before strapping on the bar. A glass of wine before work along with constant sips during your shift, and you’re transformed from a drone dispensing alcohol to a guy with the twisted wit of the grape on his tongue. The world inside the restaurant sparkles for you, with the warm candles on the white-clothed tables shimmering in the lake of the dining room. The adult beverage glasses you serve glimmer and fill your customers with happiness and good cheer. The conversation and laughter dance over everyone like sodden fairies. It’s a wonderful dream world as long as you’re in it and don’t think about it. Then there are the women. There are so many gay men in town that the straight women are starved