The Pathetic Story of Evil Kim

[Some context: There is some information in my unpublished autobiography that precedes the events recounted here, so I apologize for any lack of clarity in the beginning of this tale.]

A true story...

In the spring of 2001, if my age-addled brain recalls correctly, I started working for a gym in northern Tucson. I hadn’t been in a gym for a while and this was a big local chain so I was a little nervous at first. The income and hours were good, though, and I really enjoyed the personalities coming into the gym. My time was divided between working the front desk, floor training, making some sales, and providing massage therapy. These varied work experiences would have taken my mind off my desire for companionship at the time except for, you know, all the attractive women. Yet I felt like I owed something to my French ex-girlfriend and made an effort for us to get back together.

 

'Frenchy' believed me when I told her I never did anything more than kiss another woman while we apart. It was the one of the few times I wasn’t bullshitting and someone believed me. Naturally, it took a few weeks to rebuild some trust with her before we re-consummated our relationship, but it was worth it at the time. It led us to looking for our own apartment to rent which we found in midtown.

 

And for a while it was good, until I started wanting to have a drink with the boys from work after hours, an idea to which she was very hostile. Her penchant for wild mood swings - being one of her characteristics that broke us up - became more frequent which contributed to a long, eventual decline (as I did not usually handle those mood swings maturely). I did want our relationship to work, especially since she had no other family in the U.S. and she had but few friends of her own. This made me feel like something of a savior to her until I figured out that trying to be someone’s hero isn’t enough to make a relationship last. That, and again, I didn't have the level of maturity necessary at the time to handle our situation. Our interactions grew colder and occasionally hostile until we both acknowledged that we had no real future. She eventually moved out and that was that. With Tucson being a small town we’d run into each other every now and then and it was always uncomfortable, mostly because she was so beautiful I’d always ask myself why we broke up. I knew, though, that not only had we burned that bridge, we’d destroyed it up with a nuclear missile. The fallout undoubtedly lasts to this day for probably both of us.

 

My only real life post-Frenchy was the gym. It wasn’t long after our breakup before I'd worked my way up to assistant manager, mostly by showing up and showing up on time, qualities not readily had among gym employees it seems. I’d also taken up bodybuilding, making me more confident about my looks. And my sister was getting ready for her wedding to her terrific fiancé in six months, too, so I was feeling good about my family as well. I was feeling quite good about many things despite the fact that for me many women at the gym didn't seem to be good relationship prospects. The time had come in my life to stop seeking companionship and focus on myself. I wouldn’t have known it to be possible prior to this but I had stopped worrying about companionship and just decided to live my life. Concentrate on yourself and everything will fall into place; isn’t that what they say? Sure enough, life was going quite swimmingly until I met an evil young woman named Kim – evil, Evil Kim. Did I mention this girl named Kim was evil?

 

Evil Kim was ten years my junior. The sound of her voice alone was enough to turn me into an adolescent boy who had just discovered girls. (That is, horny and confused.) Her voice was practically angelic, but more accurately demonic in hindsight. And I remember clearly the first time she'd walked into the gym; that was the first time I’d ever seen and woman and based on looks alone said, “Wow.” To me, she was the physically perfect dream woman. And like my ex-fiancé Leila before her, she had that girl-next-door vibe that shut down any defense mechanism I might have had. But these qualities of hers had a downside – every guy wanted to be with her.

 

I knew I couldn’t simply ask Kim out; I’d just be another number and I didn’t want to settle for that. She was special so I wanted to be something different to her. I began talking to her gradually then more and more with each visit of hers to the gym. Eventually it would seem like we were beginning to know each other. Some of my coworkers knew my true intentions, though, and remarked that I stood no chance. One of my female colleagues even had the nerve to tell me that I had no game! Although I know my coworker wasn’t trying to be mean – and as true as it might have been – her comment really got under my skin and I told her in response, “I don’t know how. I don’t know when. But some day I’m going to get that girl.” I knew though that if I was going to land Evil Kim, I was going to need a miracle.

 

That miracle came in the form of two other women who were interested in me. One was a coworker, Sandra, and the other was Andrea, who was even younger than Evil Kim and almost equally beautiful. Sandra I had no interest in but the attention she gave me rose my stock enough to pique the curiosity of Andrea, whom I’d always been friendly with. In being Hispanic (assuming there was something cultural going on to my benefit), Andrea liked that I 1) was an older man and 2) a gentleman who was courteous, holding the door open for her and not cussing in front of her, for example. Andrea and I eventually found ourselves on some late night coffee dates after I closed up the gym which never wound up going back to either of our places, honestly because I was too hung up on Evil Kim to pull that trigger. Fortunately, Evil Kim did catch the two of us out one night getting coffee which I know alarmed the woman of my dreams.

 

How do I know? The very next day Evil Kim WOULD NOT leave me alone at the gym. Every few minutes she looped around from whatever she was doing to check on me, or maybe to see who I was with. By hook or by crook – or by jealousy – I now had Evil Kim’s attention. A week later I asked her out proper and she accepted without hesitation.

 

We went to go see a movie, The Princess Diaries, which was not something I would ever go to see on my own. My cousin from New York who had moved in with me for the summer even remarked that this woman I was going on a date with must be a goddess for me to agree to do such a thing. So I had Evil Kim come to my place before the movie, really so my cousin could see why I had agreed to see the movie. My cousin simply laughed that Evil Kim and I had the same spikey black hair and that’s why I was enamored with her, because I was vain, which I had never considered until now and realized it might be true. After the movie we went back to my place again to find my cousin had cleaned off a whole bottle of wine by herself, which I remembered impressed Evil Kim. (That should have been a red flag.) After a few drinks ourselves, Evil Kim asked if she could stay because she had too much alcohol to drive.

 

As I got into bed with Evil Kim, I thought about being a gentleman and not taking advantage of the situation. The God honest truth is that I didn’t want her to be with me just because she was drunk. But we found ourselves making out anyway which led to clothes being stripped off, which led to touching, which led to disappointing sex. Disappointing because I’d had too much to drink myself and was psyched out about whether I really wanted this to happen the way it was happening. (In other words, I was overthinking the situation while being in the situation and this never produces favorable results.) I actually told Evil Kim all this post-coitus to which she was dumbfounded. We found ourselves awkwardly spooned in that friends-with-benefits kind of way that at least one of us didn’t want. She left early the next morning.

 

Evil Kim called me the following day to tell me no guy had ever said anything like that to her before, about a guy not wanting to take advantage of a situation like that. Allegedly, this left quite an impression. The cat that was out of the bag, though, was that I unequivocally wanted to be with her. yet my desires appeared to be an inconvenience to Evil Kim, who - naturally - was still hung up on an ex-boyfriend who was also a felon. A felon? Yes, her latest ex had recently gone to jail for grand theft auto (not the video game) and I think to her that he was what she was to me. I got mostly friend-zoned.

If by now you're at all wondering why Kim is evil, it's starting right here.

 

I say I got mostly friend-zoned because Evil Kim would still call me and want to hang out, or make out without going all the way. I knew she just wanted the adoration and I knew this would only end badly for me but I just couldn’t say no and she knew it. It would take me months to gather the willpower to weaken her grip on me and I did this by spending more time with Andrea again. This led to one of the most wonderful, fantastically shallow moments of my life.

 

It was not unusual for Andrea to flirt with me at the front desk at the gym, but Evil Kim walked in one day while Andrea was doing it. Evil Kim's went wide-eyed in either disbelief, anger, or both. She immediately left the gym and disappeared. She came back twenty minutes later with her adorable white cat which she sat on the front desk, demanding we play with the cat together. Andrea, who was still with me, gave Evil Kim a look and I swear I thought there was going to be a cat fight without the actual cat. For about the next ten minutes the two of them vied for my attention in front of a score of people. I couldn’t help but feel like a badass even if I had no idea how I came to be the center of attention, especially as my co-worker who said I had no game watched on and ate her words. To say I enjoyed watching them spar would have been an understatement.

 

But now I had a choice to make. Andrea wanted to see me that night but so did Evil Kim. If I went with Evil Kim, she promised to make it worth my while. If I went with Andrea, who knows, but it'd be the smarter choice. So obviously I told Andrea I had already committed to seeing Evil Kim that night. (Strangely, or maybe because she was liberated, Andrea didn't seem concerned that Evil Kim and I might be an item.) That night Evil Kim came over and I seduced her with some Jedi mind tricks I’d picked up from my sister’s fiancé’s friend, a guy who was nothing short of a scoundrel. We had sex and it was…not what I hoped for. Completely sober sex, it was kind of like being with a dead fish.

 

Despite all this disappointment, she was still The Next One in my eyes, though I thought it wise to pursue other women as a potential date for my sister’s wedding in a month. When Evil Kim somehow got wind of this she said she wanted to be my date and insisted I not pencil her in, as I told her (which I should have done because of our history and her general flakiness), but that I pen her in – in no uncertain terms she would be my date for the wedding. I thought this would turn the corner for us in our ‘relationship.’ Maybe the sex we had was bad because she hadn’t committed to us? Surely a wedding would change that.

 

The morning of the wedding I couldn’t get a hold of Evil Kim. I called and left two messages and thought about leaving a third but then thought that would be overkill. Had something bad happened to her? That’s what I wanted to believe because I didn’t want to believe she had simply flaked out on me. When I did reach that conclusion, I called around in a desperate attempted to fill that void, with no luck. I went to my little sister’s wedding feeling awful, mostly because of the empty seat next to me. I had told my sister I had a date, to make arrangements for that, and now I felt like a fool when I should have known better. I was so mad at myself I couldn’t even be happy for my sister. I was a sourpuss the entire time. I beat myself up about that to this day.

 

The next day Evil Kim called to apologize but I didn’t call her back until the day after that. She explained that she (just happened to have) had a chance to visit her ex-boyfriend in jail; it was the first day he was allowed to have visitors. So like any normal person, Evil Kim went to go see him on the wedding day and didn’t tell me that so, I dunno, I couldn’t call in a back-up. I told Kim how furious I was and that I couldn’t speak to her anymore. After hanging up with her I didn’t see her at the gym for nearly a month.

 

When she did reappear, she was sheepish but brave enough to say that we should talk. Reluctantly I agreed, you know, as I assisted her in stretching since she asked for help warming up before her workout. (I was such a goddamn idiot.) During our solemn conversation, we concluded that ‘we’ would never be a thing and that she was sorry for that and claimed it was really her fault. (Agreed.) BUT we could still be friends and crash at each other’s places from time to time seeing how sleeping alone is often so, so terrible. Would I settle for breadcrumbs? I didn’t love myself enough not to. But this idyllic arrangement wouldn’t last forever.

 

It wasn’t long after this that Evil Kim told me she was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child, who I guess wasn’t ‘ex’ enough to avoid having sex with him in jail. Upset because she was too young for this, she told me through tears that she wished it was my child. This blew me away. The sincerity was misconstrued on my part, though, as she explained a few days later while I talked about us being together someday that she said it not because of her undying love for me but merely because I’d be a responsible parent. God. Damn. It. I wanted things to be done with her by this point.

 

More time went by during which we hadn’t spoken much. Then out of the blue Evil Kim called to say that she wanted me to come over to her new place so we could hang out, just us, which she seemed to go over the top in making clear since she usually had other people over whenever I was at her place. Interesting, I thought. I go to her place and naturally she’s practically throwing a party. I was really ticked off but didn’t let it show. Instead I flirted with some of the other girls with no success and chatted with some of the guys. Eventually everyone else left and it was down to me, another guy, and Evil Kim. Pretty drunk, I didn’t know if she was planning something wild or what, but it was clear she wanted to be with this other guy while unclear she wanted to be with me. I didn’t bother finding out. I made up an excuse and left, incensed. I went straight home wanting to tear someone’s head off and wrote perhaps the greatest putdown email ever written. I tore her to shreds over what a shitty person she was for lying to me when she knows how I feel about her, why no one else has ever treated her with respect, how she’s a fool for loving her felon ‘boyfriend,’ and even why her parents don’t love her half as much as her brother (which was true; she just didn’t understand why, but I did). Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of that email which is still probably the best thing I’d ever written, if not the most cathartic. I’m proud to say we have never seen or spoken to each other since.

 

As terrible as all of it was, I learned never to let any woman (or person) have that much control over me ever again. My life – my sanity – wasn’t worth the kind of trauma Evil Kim put me through. What made it so bad is that we both knew what she was doing to me and she did it anyway knowing I was vulnerable to her charms. So, as much as I still hate her I know we’re both to blame. I’ll never allow that to happen to me again. And neither should you.

All Rights Reserved (c) 2019 John J. Vinacci