She is used and abused.
In a vacant car lot next to the Egyptian Theatre, she gives blow jobs for just a few bucks. The men come in all shapes and sizes. When they lower their pants or open their flies, she smells the evil in them. They come unwashed, young and old alike. She retracts the foreskins and licks away the smegma, swallows them with her eyes wide open. Soon, she has a regular clientele, all modestly content to be fellated by the tall English chick, who will eat cock to their heart’s content, but no she won’t fuck. She doesn’t do that, dear. She could open an art gallery with portraits of men’s appendages. Soon they all taste the same and she grows used to the salty streams coursing down her throat. They like it when she swallows and some pay her more.
Some local prostitutes object to this outsider taking business away from them. They ambush her one night and kick her badly in the ribs and the face. Cut large chunks of her hair off, but she has wild curls to spare. She hurts for weeks and accepts the needle from some biker on Capitol Hill. It helps. Blanks out the hours. The memories. The guilt. The biker shares her with some friends. She needs the dope and indifferently becomes their plaything for a while. Deke, the leader, brands her, an inverted swastika on the inside of one thigh, she’s property. She sleeps with three bikers in one filthy bed, they take turns with her. The session lasts three days as they move from orifice to orifice like a sexual tag-team, violating her without feeling, playing with her like a raggedy doll, inserting objects, bottle tops, Swiss army knives, fruit. To keep her submissive they feed her the heroin. Needle marks, punctures on her arms would scare away the punters, oh yes they have plans for her, so they teach her to inject the dope into her cunt lips. The high is phenomenal.
My adventures as a whore, she reflects in a rare moment of lucidity. Might even be a book in it, she thinks. Kate in the land of cunt.
A businessman picks her up one evening while she is cruising Mercer Street. He’s good to her. Convinces her not to return to the bikers. Even accepts to provide her with the now necessary junk for her habit. He sets her up in a small apartment. He’s married of course. He visits her three times a week. Gives her some spare cash. She starts buying books again. But she’s too passive and he soon tires of her. Takes her to a leather club and offers her in exchange for some form of life membership. She is trussed up, whipped, fucked in the darkness by one man after another until she is sore and her lower lips actually blister, she can’t see any of them as a latex mask covers her face. She is roughly handled, fisted by men as well as women, tied to a rack, pissed on, slapped. In the cold morning they let her go. The businessman has taken back the keys to the flat. He’s out of her life. She wanders the wet streets.
There’s a reading and signing at the Elliott Bay Bookstore. It’s a British mystery writer. She once met him at a party at some conference she’d had to attend in Nottingham. He doesn’t actually recognize her but takes her back to his hotel afterward. She’s pleased to follow, having nowhere to go. He’s very full of himself, actually reads her a new story he’s working on once they’re in bed together. The story’s okay, but the editor in her does feel it still needs some more work. He’s obsessed by her arse, fondles it with genuine awe and affection, but draws back when she presents her damaged sex, and refuses to make love to her. Scared of catching something. He leaves her sleeping in the hotel room when he departs very early in the morning for his next gig in Vancouver. She has a mighty breakfast on the room. His publishers are probably picking up the tab, anyway. She smiles, the industry at least owes her this; she was bloody underpaid…
Her cunt heals. It’s a resilient body part.
She finds a job in a peep show cum strip joint on the corner of First and Pike, facing Pike Place Market where they sell English papers, only a few days old. She does a girl-girl show, anonymously Frenches these other chicks while the thin audience sip their microbrews against the roar of the rock music on the sound system. One of her co-workers takes a shine to her, but Katherine easily convinces her that on stage it’s fine, a job, but she has no further interest in women. The woman, her name is Judy, dolefully accepts this and they become friendly. Judy keeps on raving about the sheer beauty of Katherine’s body. It’s unusual, not common, she points out, you’ve got style, girl. She convinces Katherine to go in for a piercing. Judy sports a ring in her navel. The guys love it, you know, you’ll get much better tips. Body jewellery turns them on. In the basement of a record shop that specializes in vinyl, she slips her knickers off while Judy smiles at her. The heavily tattooed owner guides her to an operating table, lowers it and places Katherine’s ankles into stirrups. He rubs ice over her cunt. Says it’s better than an injection. His fingers part her and he presses against the thin hood of her clitoris, the membrane swells. Nice, he remarks. Nice and plump. As Judy, whose idea it all is explains, you’ll see Katherine it’s even more spectacular than the navel, hands him the sterilized needle and walks across to hold Katherine’s hand. The universe explodes inside her head when he threads the needle into and straight through her clit hood. Hold on, one of them says. The pain doesn’t last long. Fucking Jesus. Her lower stomach is on fire. She clenches all her vaginal muscles, breathes deep, relaxes one moment, breathes deep again, expels the air, her sphincter lets go and she feels a thin stream of shit extruding out of her back orifice. She blushes deeply. Don’t worry kid, the guy says, I’m used to it. But already the localized pain is less intense. She feels all wet around her thighs. God, has she also peed over herself? The guy wipes the black plastic table. He threads a small pearl onto the needle and it slides down to lodge itself between the fleshy hood and her bud. It’s beautiful, Judy exclaims. Suits you fine says the man with the tattoos. More ice to dull the sensation. Katherine finally manages to relax. Don’t touch yourself down there for a few days, the guy says as he later releases her from the table, the pearl now fixed in place, this foreign object peering out all shiny and precious from between the lips of her sex, this adornment, this jewel inside her jewel.
Judy is right. Men do like it.
A Japanese executive takes her to his suite on the top floor of the Madison-Stouffer. All Puget Sound and the islands beyond are spread out, a Cinemascope vision, beyond the bay windows. Apart from the Sky Needle, there is no way you could be any higher in all of Seattle. He strips her, places her against the tall windows, flattens her against the glass, spreads her legs, an offering to the sky outside, she has to close her eyes for fear of vertigo, only the plate glass separates her nudity from the void outside and the ground fifty or so floors down. He licks her rear, caresses the thin pale hair at the small of her back, her breasts are squashed against the glass, he slides his head in between her parted thighs, advances his tongue and inserts it from behind into her gaping cunt. He licks the pearl, chews her bud until the orgasm races through all five foot ten of her from top curls to toes. Later, he offers her an expensive jade necklace after inserting it one piece at a time into her vagina, then pulling it out with deliberate slowness, every piece bathed in her juices which he proceeds to clean with his tongue.