‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (4 page)

as a small child; Jasmin with her mother as a little girl; Jasmin in early school years; Jasmin in grade school.

Jasmin as a Metal Head Teen.

While I was still in college, I met the aforementioned asshole, Dick, who worked in a store called It’s Only Rock n’ Roll in the Village (he was the first of many dysfunctional relationships) which was like a record/ collectibles store.The owners were Mark and Debbie Zacharin, and they seemed pretty cool. I would pass by there every day on my way to and from my job at the
Jersey Journal
in Jersey City, New Jersey, where I took classified ads over the phone. I was 18 at this point and one day I went into the store and we actually started talking more personally, beyond just hello and ‘How are you?’ kind of stuff. For whatever reason, I thought he was cute. He had black, curly (poofy,) long hair, and a LONG, railthin nose, like a Pelican or a coke-addict’s (although I didn’t know one way or the other if he did that shit at the time.) He wasn’t a bad boy, but thought he was. His mother was deaf, and was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he lived with her in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Anyway, Dick worked directly for Mark in various capacities, one being he was driving errands for him for Mark’s side business, which was dealing marijuana. That was a back-of-the-store operation, so Dick did a mix of things — legal and otherwise — for Mark. Anyway, I would go into that store every day after work because I was hanging out in the Village a lot at that point — it was a hip, happening place, where Heavy Metal was king. It was maybe the closest thing you would have found at the time to the Sunset Strip in L.A. but nowhere near as exclusively themed around hair metal. Still, for New York, it was a very cool place to hang out.

New York people try not to mix with Bridge and Tunnel people (i.e. those from New Jersey and Long Island.) So one day, he asked me if I wanted to go out to lunch and ‘hang out,’ so he had a pretty cool Pontiac Firebird at the time, so I thought that was cool enough to hang out for a day, and the dick ALMOST ended up standing me up. He claimed he’d gotten home late from work, and after waiting on him for about an hour, I was ready to leave the store when he called, and begged me to wait for him. Having no self-esteem at that point in my life because of my inexperience with men, I — like a jackass — agreed to wait some more for him. Finally, when he showed up another hour later, he showed up with a flower and then we went to some Howard Johnson’s-type shithole to eat. So that was our first date. So we started hanging out after that, and I think on our second date, basically went from the store straight back to Fort Lee, New Jersey to his friend’s house, had sex, and that was it. He wasn’t my first sexual experience, but only the second guy I had been involved with physically up to that point. Anyway, he seemed more into hanging out with his friends at that point than anything else and this became a running theme in our relationship in time. His friends were scum bags, and basically after we’d finished having sex that day, he drove me almost immediately back to Manhattan and left me there feeling like total shit about myself.

Our next date was basically the same routine — I’d meet him late at night after work or somewhere late on a Saturday, but I put up with it because I thought he was the best I could do for myself at that time. There really wasn’t ever much for us to do, we usually went back to New Jersey, hung out, had sex and listened to records. It was really boring, and though I hadn’t done an extensive amount of dating up to that point, the guys I had dated were much more exciting than he was. What was more frustrating as time went on was finding out that he regularly cheated on me with all these slutty, trashy women — and I don’t say that out of some lingering bitterness over it — they were truly ground hogs. These were all girls he had dated before me, but he would keep their numbers and photos around, in open, plain view of me. It was truly pathetic, on his part to do it, and mine in that I tolerated it. So for the first two months we were dating, this was our routine. Then I met this Westie named Tommy, an Irish Mafia member, who I started seeing on the side because Dick wasn’t giving me enough attention. He’d only see me on the weekends and Tommy was an authentic bad boy, which I was very attracted to, but also wanted to spend every waking minute with me. He had long, brown hair and tattoos, very cute, and he basically beat people’s asses for a living for the Irish Mob. I remember one day I had to stitch him up right on 5th Avenue after some fight. He had some nasty gash in his chest, and told me to meet him with Butterfly stitches, but I was very attracted to that bad boy aspect. Anyway, I started dating Tommy on the side in July and did so while seeing Dick for 3 or 4 months into the fall. During this period, things only got worse with Dick. He got me pregnant at one point, made me go get an abortion
(I HAD NO OBJECTIONS,)
and then that same night, made me go with him to some trashy Jersey bar and openly flirted with other women in front of me. He was a real piece of shit. That was probably one of the shittiest feelings I’d ever had in my life and I obviously couldn’t tell my mom about it, because she would have disowned me.

Between she and Dick constantly criticizing me, I rarely got a break, which I guess is one of the reasons I kept seeing Tommy because he was my escape from all that. For a 19 year old girl who was pretty naïve to the world to begin with, even growing up in New York, trying to carry a full load at Columbia, juggling two men, dodging my mom whenever possible, ( in terms of keeping tabs on my life) plus keep a job, I definitely had my hands full. Dick and I over the summer had started the bizarre pastime of attending a lot of antique/collectible conventions, where every item you could possibly imagine was sold or traded. In our case, it was usually rarity pop culture items — be they Barbie or Kiss Dolls, and I learned quickly that there was quite a market for this business. It’s one thing to see it in a Village specialty store, but these shows went on every weekend all over the East Coast, and Dick regularly dragged me along to them. Anyway, since I was being dragged along to these without a choice, I figured I’d express a genuine interest to see if it would help our relationship improve — maybe thinking Dick would take more of an interest in me? I don’t know, but he was still his regular old piece-of-CRAP self, flirting with other girls at Kiss Conventions in front of me, you name it. I did like going to work the Kiss Conventions because I loved the atmosphere, there were a lot of cute guys with long hair there, which was a nice distraction from asshole. He never let me talk to anyone though, other than when I was making sales. I remember one convention, in particular, when Dick had disappeared as usual, and at some point in the day, I wound up playing pinball with this little nerdy kid who had bought a bunch of stuff from us. It was funny to me, because the kid was a zit-faced teenager who could have been my kid brother. He was 15 at the oldest, and our crime was playing a Kiss Pinball game. Well, needless to say, when Dick saw this

he yelled at me for it in front of everybody. I also got hit in the face two days later. Dick called me a whore because the kid had to give me the 50 cents to play the pinball game because my asshole boyfriend wouldn’t give me any of the $7000 he had on him from the convention earnings. That one really confounded me, even looking back at it now. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to say that there were times where if I breathed wrong, he would get upset at me.

That summer was when the physical abuse began in our relationship. One particularly vicious incident came during a convention weekend when I’d gone out to lunch with a friend of mine named Andy, who dressed like Paul Stanley, and was a local at the Kiss conventions while Dick was out of town. I got busted on that one, and the irony was two-fold in that. First, Andy HAD A GIRLFRIEND, and second, my mom was the one who busted me instead of Dick, but ended up telling him about it anyway. It was nice to know where her loyalties were. It may as well have been Dick though the way she tore Andy’s head off on the phone, accusing us of sleeping together and all sorts of nonsense, telling him I had a boyfriend, and in essence, defending Dick in the process.The worse part was that she told Dick about it when he got back from Chicago and concocted some paranoid story that I was sleeping with Andy, and Dick beat the LIVING SHIT out of me for that one. I ended up spending the night in the hospital, and I still blame my mother to this day for that, because I’d told her Andy was gay, and she still saw fit to let Dick know anyway. Of all the guys I dated, Dick was the worst, and yet he was the only one my mother accepted. After a while, it even seemed like she and he were conspiring together to keep me under one large thumb. If he wasn’t keeping his eye on me, my mom was, and would report back to him from time to time if she imagined something was up. And that’s just what it was, IMAGINATION.

It’s still ironic to me that Dick was the only guy my mom was ever really cool with me dating, who turned out to be the worst guy she could have picked to endorse my going out with. He was the first guy she ever trusted me with, be it the TOY conventions we went away on, or even a trip to Cancun. While we were there, my mom even went as far as to take a day off of work, get on the bus, go into New Jersey, and enroll Dick in Community College classes he’d forgotten to register for. I think the fact that I thought she was actually going to accept a guy I brought home for once was among the reasons why I deemed it necessary to stay with Dick for as long as I did. My mom’s acceptance was very important to me, and in time, Dick’s was as well, in spite of how shitty both of them were to me for my efforts. I thought, perhaps if my mom approved of Dick, maybe she’d finally approve of me in the process. Unfortunately, for the most part, that hasn’t happened to this day. If my mother is reading this book, this will be the first time she learns about the nightmare that Dick Pelicanose put me through, and even then, I fear her reaction would be to criticize my judgment in men, not hers. The irony of that is she’s responsible for my lack of judgment where men were concerned when I started dating Dick because she’d never allowed me any room as a teenager to develop that skill like normal girls my age would have. It came to plague me in my relationship with Dick, and while I don’t blame her for it, that’s a luxury I don’t have to afford her. I choose to spare her that guilt, but hope in time she understands the role that lack of experience played in other decisions I’ve made in my life that have disappointed her.

Anyway, during this same summer, I was still seeing a lot of Tommy, who didn’t know about Dick, and after a while, started to get a little suspicious as to why I wouldn’t go out with him exclusively. So I told him I was seeing someone. I can’t, to date, honestly say why I didn’t leave Dick for Tommy, who treated me worlds better. I guess deep down I was afraid of what Dick might have done to me physically, but more afraid of what Tommy might have done to Dick had he found out. Dick by this point was going out to go-go bars, drinking with his friends, and as I found out later, just fucking anything that he could get his hands on. Still, on the other hand, Dick and I would take a lot of trips to upstate New York together to the Catskills, going to a lot of these collectible conventions. Then I made the worst mistake I could have and moved in together after a few months into this shitty garden-level apartment in Union City, New Jersey. At that point, Dick also coaxed me into investing $2000, which I borrowed from my father, into this antiques business together, so I thought in some warped part of my mind that the relationship still might have hope. It pissed my mom off when I moved out of the house, even though she didn’t know it was with Dick! Even after moving in with Dick, I was still seeing Tommy, which got that much more complicated. But he was very sweet to me, always paid for everything; bought me all these little gifts. He was very nice, and it was nice to be treated that way for a change.

Back on the Dick front, we’d started an antiques business together that basically consisted of buying vintage toys and collectibles, character collectibles, model kits, and stuff like that. We made most of our money at these conventions we’d travel to on the weekends, and during the week I was commuting into New York to attend Columbia, which almost felt to me like leading two lives. And as time went on with Dick and my living together, things just worsened. He kept this odd hole in his closet where he displayed all the girls he’d gone out with before, which was really fucking insulting. Then one night, he didn’t come home at all, till 11 the next morning. He lied about it at the time, but I learned later he’d gone home with some slut named Ginger from this bar called the Naval Base. Why I didn’t leave him I don’t know to this day, I didn’t know any better, and he really took advantage of my lack of self-esteem. Plus I had just invested this money with him in the antiques business, which turned out to be just another situation for him to take advantage of me in. In truth, our ‘running’ a business together meant me doing virtually all the set-up at our booth, then him leaving me at the table alone
ALL DAY
, while he walked around and flirted with girls in front of me. When he did stop by to check on things, it was usually only to take whatever money we’d made selling our items and then to disappear again. He gave me no spending money, and got only that much more controlling as time went on. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone other than customers buying things, and he’d regularly yell at me in front of everyone when I didn’t set something up the right way or the way he wanted to, or didn’t know the price. I guess that made him look cool in front of his fellow grease balls too, because no one ever came to my defense among his friends. Anyway, as I suspected, when I finally told Tommy about him, Tommy wanted to take a knife to his throat while he slept which of course I didn’t allow to happen. Dick definitely was starting to deserve it by that point though.

I guess looking back on it now in hindsight, I continued to try and believe in Dick, reasoning that if I put more effort into the relationship things might work out, which is why I had invested with him in the antiques business to begin with. Anyway, another stupid decision on my part along these lines was to co-sign the loans for him to go to Bergen Community College; loans that he eventually defaulted on and fucked up my credit. Around this time, we moved from the shithole in Union City to a place that was a little nicer in North Bergen, New Jersey. At this point though, I was going broke, because he wasn’t giving me any of the money from the antique shows and my mom paid my tuition at Columbia. So in some desperate attempt at an escape or maybe just to have something for myself, that was mine and that Dick or my mom (or anyone for that matter) couldn’t 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.’