A Little Dinged Up (gxg)

I woke up with a start, with a burning in the back of my throat, and bolted for the bathroom. Throwing the lid upwards I stuck my head over the bowl and started to spew what little was in my belly, which was mostly bile at this point. My whole body was covered in sweat, and I was still trembling after the nightmare that had woken me up. I could feel the tears leaking from my eyes as I gasped for air.

Hands pulled back the hair from my face, and then started to gently stroke my back as I started sobbing into the toilet. “I got you Ly, you’re good. Just let it out,” I heard Trish whisper to me. Thank god for her, I don’t know how much more I could take without her helping me out every time I had a nightmare about my father.

Have you ever heard about those people that blame their parent’s deaths on themselves? Like, they were going to a show with them, or their parents were picking them up somewhere when something happened to kill them. Usually, it really isn’t their fault, but just an accident. It still sucks, because the guilt will eat them up, but mine was a little different. I put three bullets into my father’s chest. I killed that fucker dead. I don’t regret doing it either, but I regret the aftermath, and I still have the nightmares.

When I grew up in New Jersey in Atlantic City, my mom was a secretary doing the best she could to hold down the house. My dad was a piece of shit, disappearing for months at a time on benders or in jail for drug possession. I was shocked he was never busted for dealing, because that was what he was actually doing. Personally, I wished he’d stay gone, because when he was home, he would smack my mom around if things weren’t perfect. One day when I was 14, he came home high as a kite, and had some little piece of shit revolver that he hit my mom in the head with, giving her a big cut over her eye.

For the first time ever, my mom fought back. She took a kitchen knife and slashed his hand, making him drop the gun, but then he started punching her until she dropped the knife as she fell to the floor. When he picked up the knife, I picked up his gun. He didn’t even realize I had it, he was only caring that his wife had slashed him and he was ready to kill her. When he raised the knife, I put a bullet into my own father’s chest. He stopped, just staring at me, then took half a step towards me, so I pulled the trigger twice more, throwing him back onto the kitchen table.

And who knows what would have happened if we’d just called the cops right then. But my mother knew my dad had friends. She took the gun from me and fired one more bullet into him so if the cops did a gunpowder residue test, she would have some on her. Then she sent me to the beach on my bike to go swimming and told me to forget everything. She knew that she’d have an easy self-defense plea with her defensive wounds and wouldn’t be arrested. But she never told me anything about those friends that might be angry. Instead, she called the cops about half an hour after I left the house. When I came back a few hours later, a couple of officers were still there, and my father’s body was gone. They hadn’t even taken her downtown, it all looked cut and dried to them, and all was fine. It was a pretty tame death for New Jersey.

Three days later I was on a plane to New Orleans to visit my mom’s sister. She never told me that she’d gotten death threats, and that the visit was more of a permanent move for my safety. Less than two weeks later she was killed in a drive by shooting as she got out of her car in her office parking lot. I won’t say I killed my mom, but she certainly died saving me from the men that would have come after me had they known who had really killed my dad. It almost broke me. My aunt did her best to console me, but she wasn’t the most empathetic woman, so I was mostly on my own. The men who killed my mom weren’t smart, they did it on three different security cameras, so it was an easy conviction. But she was still gone.

The worst thing is, I don’t feel guilty about killing my dad. It wasn’t like he changed when I was a kid, he was always a lousy man that my mom should have divorced had she not still loved him for some reason. But he was never a real father to me. We never did anything together other than the occasional talk at the kitchen table, so I had nothing to miss.

And yet after my mom was killed, I started having nightmares a few times a week that involved me shooting him over and over. It’s been 7 years, and my therapist says they may not stop. Whatever, it is just one more thing for me to deal with. I can handle that.

When I was the new kid in New Orleans, it wasn’t easy to fit in. I was Lylah Hunter the tomboy, and not the southern belle type. Even if my blonde hair and pale blue eyes were attractive to people, my mannerisms were still Jersey. I was also the kid with the dead parents and the weird accent. But it turns out that if you do enough crazy things, you can get people to admire you.

Water moccasin on school grounds? Yeah, I caught it and then let it go out back near the lake the school was near. A big ass tree? Yeah, I can climb that all the way to the fucking top. Want to go into the bayou and find a gator? I’m your girl.

Even better, kids would tape those stupid stunts and then I started posting them on YouTube. Within two years I had over two million subscribers, and I was making some decent money on some of my videos. My channel was growing quick too, and I thought nothing could stop me!

Well, getting kicked out of the house by my aunt when I was 16 didn’t help. Remember when I said it was crazy that my mom never divorced my dad? Yeah, her family didn’t believe in divorce. They also don’t believe in loving the same gender, so when I told my aunt I wanted to ask my friend Zoe to the Homecoming dance, I was out on my ass.

I have no idea if I had other relatives, I certainly didn’t know of any. Maybe I had some distant cousins somewhere, but we’d never gone anywhere to visit them with my dad doing what he was doing. I still had two years of high school, and no real friends, just a bunch of kids who would egg me on to the next stupid stunt. But I had an income with my videos, and I started making my way west while shooting more.

I had enough money to buy a used dirt bike, and I got a sleeping bag and other gear that allowed me to sleep outside if the weather was good. I even splurged on a cool cropped black leather jacket, because in my mind if you had a motorcycle, even a little dirt bike, you needed a leather jacket! The rest of my money went towards food and gas, with the occasional cheap hotel when the weather sucked. But my journey westward, with the occasional stupid stunt jump on my bike, got me more subscribers. It became fun, having them interact with me and recommend places for me to go and stupid things to videotape myself doing.

By the time I made it to San Diego a month later, I had more than doubled my viewers to five million, and was feeling pretty good about myself. The weather was great, it was an entirely different ocean than I was used to, and the sand was so much nicer. I was able to rent a room from an older couple who were empty nesters, so I didn’t have to worry about living out under the stars anymore, and I was making enough that I could start to buy a nice dinner every once in a while. The bike got a tune up and was still humming along, and I was out there looking for any stupid thing I could think of.

In my free time I learned to surf, then do some kickboxing, skydiving, scuba diving and even got into trying to do some improv comedy just to be more natural on camera. I’d given up on school, I was making enough without it. My subscribers seemed to like my antics, especially the wipe outs on the surfboard, and things kept getting better.

I never did go back to school. I was officially a drop out. I figured I’d take the GED some time and at least that way I could go to college if I wanted to. I was having fun doing the crazy stuff though, and as long as my body held up, I wasn’t going to stop.

Over the summer, I got the contact that changed everything for me. A Hollywood suit needed a stunt double for his young starlet, and his daughter showed him my YouTube page. They flew me up to Los Angeles and gave me an interview. Honestly, I think I had the part as soon as the starlet saw me though, because she liked my ass. No, she wasn’t gay unfortunately, but she wanted her ass to look good on screen, and therefore needed a good ass on her stunt double.

It was the first of many stunt gigs that I got, and thanks to that I started taking my stunts seriously instead of just half-assing it and hoping for the best. I still had my channel, but now there were a lot of little things showing me doing my crazy movie stunts. I couldn’t post until after the movie came out of course to avoid spoilers, but it was still cool. My more professional solo stuff now got into a lot of parachuting, gliding, skiing, and anything else I could come up with, it was a fun life.

When I was 18, I told people I was going to scale a pyramid, and everyone on my channel freaked out. Everyone was ready to watch me fly to Egypt, though a few others realized I might not mean the original ones. A group of the fans gathered around the Memphis Tennessee Pyramid, which wasn’t a bad idea. But only one of my fans managed to find me at the base of the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.

Her name was Trisha, or Trish once I got to know her, and there was an instant chemistry. Like me, she had been kicked out of her home for being gay, and she hadn’t finished high school either. She was gorgeous, with almond colored skin, wavy black hair and deep brown eyes. I couldn’t get enough of her curvy body and knew I couldn’t leave her homeless out there in the desert.

The folks at the Luxor had given me permission to do the scaling, otherwise I couldn’t exactly post it, but I may have neglected to tell them it would be at night and without a harness. But it was fun, and I got it done before heading back to LA. But on my way home I had Trish on the back of my motor bike. No, we weren’t u-hauling, but I did let her crash on my couch until she could get herself situated.

That was the plan anyway.

But a month later, I asked her out, and things progressed from there. She moved from the couch to my bed, and then started joining me on my silly stunts. She was as daring as I was, I guess having no family like we did gave us a sense of craziness together. People on my channel loved her, and we had our little ship going. She got her own channel too, and a lot of my subscribers joined hers too. We obviously did a lot together, but she also did a lot of LA tours and things when I was on a movie set pretending to be whichever actress that I needed to be that day. Her channel was full of love and support when she got her GED, and I was motivated to do mine too. I just needed time to study. Maybe some day.

Things were good. I’d told her about my past, and she knew about the nightmares. She was so supportive, always helping me to recover whenever I had an episode. So, with my latest nightmare, she got the shower running to rinse the sweat off my body, and then passed me a toothbrush while I showered so I didn’t have to taste my vomit anymore. She was perfect. I may not have had anymore of my birth family, but to me, Trish was my adoptive family. I had every intention of marrying her someday.

We’d been together for three years, and now at 21 my life was finally where I wanted it. Good job, fans, a loving girlfriend. A little team with an editor, cameraman, and manager that helped us out with our channels, and me with my movies. She had close to 12 million subscribers, and I had just over 20 million. Not too bad for two girls whose families kicked them out on the streets. She was the perfect partner for me in videos, because she was scared but still wanted to do everything. She was also, as my neighbors could attest, a screamer, and so whenever we would do something crazy like nighttime parachuting, she sounded like a space shuttle entering the atmosphere. I loved it!

When I dried off, I found Trish waiting for me in bed, and I crawled in next to her, wrapping her up in my arms as she turned to press her plump ass back into me. “Thanks Trish baby, I love you.”

“I love you too Ly. Get some sleep, you’ll need it.”