Crippled KarenWritten by Jonathan Blaque
Her name was Karen, and we first met in Psych 101.
She was gnarled young thing; wheelchair-bound, head cocked permanently to her left, crusty fingers twisted into half-knots, long, atrophied legs, a seemingly endless trickle of spittle running from the corner of her mouth.
Despite her physical curse (MD, compounded by palsy), she was intelligent and very funny, and always added lively, insightful input to class discussions. One might say she stood out from the crowd, in more ways than one.
About the third week in, I began to notice Karen staring at me from across the room. Each time our eyes met, she’d shyly curl her thin, purple lips into a smile — the sort of smile that said "I know I’m a hideous, drooling freak but, please, Dear God in Heaven, won’t you please smile back?"
Out of pity, I smiled back.
By mid-semester, Karen and I had become friends. I’d wheel her into the quiet hallways of the student center and we’d talk for hours about life’s injustices, about our radically different child- hoods, about health, about disease — about the future. I often found myself weaving whole-cloth tales of my "hard" childhood, if only to buffer the sting of her heart-wrenching tales of a little girl with a incurable, crippling disease; the brutal taunts of the other kids, the endless hours of tests, treatments and therapies — all of which she’d recount without a hint of self-pity.
As the winter passed and spring approached, Karen and I became exceedingly close, despite the suspicious leers of her roommate (a particularly bitter cripple named Jen) and the barbed guffaws of my beer-soaked buddies, who couldn’t understand why I — the most selfish, wretched womanizer on campus, would spend so much time with this diseased, rotting husk of a woman. We started studying and shopping together. I helped her pick out her clothes and try them on, cooked for her, even helped her in and out of the bathtub and scrubbed her back. And, although she consistently referred to me as the "big brother she’d never had," I could see, very clearly, that she was pining for more.
Needless to say, the thought of making love to Karen had crossed my shallow, polluted little mind on occasion, but was each time snuffed by the inescapable mental image of her pale, twisted limbs, her labored breathing, the stringy, clouded saliva running from her mouth… the image of fucking a sideshow attraction. There were times when we were together that she charmed me to the point I wanted to take her in my arms and ravage her — let her feel my hot, pounding heart against hers — but the Images would flood as if through a shattered dam and submerge me in guilt-ridden disgust.
One hot night in July, my roommate, Captain Forehead, and I were hosting a keg party at our mobile home — a gigantic, aluminum monstrosity we’d dubbed "Phi Kappa Trailer." The festivities were in full swing when I found myself, quite inexplicably, thinking about Karen, undoubtedly sitting alone in her dorm room. With a few drinks under my belt, I put on my Good Samaritan mask and decided that she might enjoy herself, so I picked up the phone and invited her to come to the party as my "date." She giggled like a child, accepted, and I hopped into the old Dodge Charger to pick her up.
Once back, she asked Cappy (who, by now, had also grown quite fond of her — tho’ he stilled privately referred to her as "tire tread" — don’t ask me why) for a glass of beer from the keg — the first time I had seen her show an interest in booze. After assuring Cappy that the alcohol wouldn’t cross-fuck the effects of her meds, he tapped her a tall, frothy one. It would be the first of quite a few, much to my surprise.
As the party went on and the drugs and booze flowed, the usual antics abound — a fistfight out front, a visit from the Carbondale PD, a complete stranger taking his squeeze into Cappy’s bedroom for a quick shag, some drunken Chinese guy going into our medicine cabinet in search of who-knows-what (Sidebar: Cappy regularly mined the cabinet with a rat trap before such parties. Sure — and audibly — enough, the fucker got his fingers snapped just prior to Cappy literally
throwing him out of the trailer and onto the front lawn, head-first).
There I sat as the hours went by, getting drunk as a widowed Irishmen next to Karen, whose usually ashen complexion was now rosy with alcohol. She drank her fill, laughed at the jokes, flirted with the guys and did her damnedest to be a part of it all, but I could see her broken gaze eventually returning to the other girls at the party — scanning their figures, studying their shapely, limber legs…
As the night began to give way to morning, the last of our guests stumbled out the door, and I found myself coked to the gills on the couch with Karen dozing on my shoulder. Cappy had long since passed out in the backseat of his Impala out front with some skanky local broad who’d wandered in, and our neighbor, Crazy Dave (RIP. old soldier), was busy throwing up in the kitchen trash can.
I lifted Karen up and took her into my room, settling her gently on the bed. As I turned to leave, she stirred.
"Checks?" she mumbled, "Let’s do it."
I froze in my tracks, unable to turn toward back toward her – waiting for those vile, monstrous images to flush over me — waiting for an excuse– any excuse — to get the hell out of that room.
For whatever reason — the booze, the dope, my conscience (perish the thought of the latter, eh?) — the excuse didn’t materialize. The images didn’t come. Instead, I found my face flushed, my temples pounding, my cock swelling and throbbing in my jeans. God help me, but I wanted her, diseased, mangled, pathetic creature that she was…
I wanted her.
I turned around and faced her in the reddish glow of the sunrise, filtering through the two-dollar curtains and leftover cigarette smoke. My hands and voice trembling in perfect sync.
"Karen — you’re drunk. Get some sleep, hon," I stammered.
"Checks," she said again, more urgently. "I need you to do this for me. Please."
"But, Karen, I…."
I saw in her eyes a precarious, triangular balance between desire, desperation and total defeat. I couldn’t fight it. Somewhere between animal lust and human pity, I knelt over her and kissed her. Her lips parted wide, and my tongue slipped deep into her steaming, sour mouth. She gasped and pulled me down on top of her with her gnarled arms, running her twisted fingers along my temples, through my hair…
Before long, I had wrapped myself around her atrophied frame, and was peeling her clothes off. She was grunting and panting like a coyote in a leg hold trap, licking my neck, sucking my earlobes, whispering how wonderful it felt to be held …
Fighting off an army of swirling psychological demons, I pulled her jeans and panties down with one, swift tug and tossed them to the floor. An instant later, I was licking and sucking her flattened, pasty breasts, trailing down her sagging, pock-marked belly with my tongue, forcing my face between her lifeless, white thighs, and kissing – then sucking — her mushy, reeking snatch. She reached up and tried to hold fast to the nightstand as I lifted her legs over my shoulders and dug in with my chin. My tongue, numb from the combination of cocaine and vaginal acids, ran wild circles inside her as her bushy pubes filled my nostrils. She began to shudder and sob for air as I ran my face under her ass cheeks and let my tongue part her sweaty black bunghole with wet, darting thrusts.
"Put in in my mouth," she whispered, as she lost her hold on the nightstand, and her arm, like a withered autumn tree branch, quivered and bounced to the side of the bed. I stood at the headboard and, cradling the back of her head with one hand and her chin with the other, slid my cock between her lips. A thin, sticky stream of spittle leaked from the corner of her mouth and onto the pillow as she drew me in, purring hungrily as I pushed the shaft in, running along the inside of her cheek and distorting her already twisted features. I stiffened as her teeth clumsily scraped a layer of flesh from the head, and she looked up at me like a frightened child.
Cock stinging, I pulled out and ran the bottom of it along her face and over her lips; she gently soothed and kissed it, then drew back, grinning up at me like one of Jerry’s Kids at the telethon fireworks show.
I climbed back over her and lifted her bony white legs into the air.
Slowly, I slid my cock into her and began pumping — slowly and gently at first, as she smiled nervously up at me, then furiously hard as I felt my stomach knot and my throat close…
I pulled out just in time to splatter her belly with jism — to swat the dive-bombing demons from the air — then collapsed in a drug-marinated heap beside her, panting for breath in the unbearably thick mixture of mildewy summer air and sexual stench…
I laid there for an hour as the cocaine filtered from my system — cursing the dented, aluminum walls, cursing the demons… cursing myself…
Cursing her.
….
That afternoon, As she waited in the car and I, pale and ill, folded her wheelchair into the trunk, Cappy stuck his head out the bath- room window and looked down at me with a wide-eyed, almost horrified gaze.
"You
didn’t!, he whispered.
"No," I fired back, "I didn’t. Asshole."
"Prob’ly could’ve," he sneered back, and disappeared behind the window.
"Yeah. Probably could’ve."
….
Karen and I remained close for the next two years, until she transferred to a special school for the handicapped out east. We still exchange an e-mail now and again (God help me if she ever runs across this story). Her condition has gone, quite predictably, from bad to worse — though, as was always her style, she takes in all in stride, even joking about it. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, but tells me of a lad in her physical therapy group that she’s got her eyes on.
We never really talked, face-to-face, about what happened –which, to this day, leaves me to wonder what she thought of the whole experience… and who, indeed, was the one most deserving of pity.
