Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered

by Karen Kilgariff

  And when I say underfed, I mean it was the ’90s in LA and I wasn’t eating. But truthfully, it wasn’t due to the ’90s or LA, although I wish I could just blame the time and place. Blaming inanimate stuff is so much easier than taking responsibility for your actions! My eating disorder has been a lifelong affliction, even though I didn’t know starving yourself to be prettier was a problem or abnormal until I was much older. I grew up with the typical suburban WASP ethos of: a woman’s job is to make men love her or else she’s worthless, and men only love women who are beautiful and thin and don’t complain a lot. Suburban WASPs don’t spell it out like that, but if you’ve watched one episode of The Real Housewives of Wherever the Fuck, you know it’s basically their motto. So at eight years old, I was alarmingly skinny. The kids at school called me “the Ethiopian.” Hurtful and culturally insensitive at the same time! Kids are so clever!

  In my tiny still-forming mind, there was nothing worse than gaining weight. Where did little kid Georgia learn such bullshit? Cut to my mother’s room: She’s standing naked in front of the mirror and grabbing a handful of her soft belly. I’m right there, and she calls herself “fat” with absolute disgust dripping from her voice. I watched her hate her body, and it’s impossible for an eight-year-old not to pick up on that type of behavior. And society was fucking brutal to her because not only did she DARE to have a body with curves, but she was … (looks left, looks right, lowers voice) … a single mother. The nerve! And her socially unacceptable single mother–ness resulted in isolated loneliness that she was told, like all women, to blame on her body.

  Consider yourself lucky if you never joined the club of kids from broken homes who had the unsettling experience of being privy to our parents’ dating lives. For most of us card-carrying members, it was our first glimpse of how human our parents actually are, an earth-shattering realization at any age.

  My parents divorced when I was five, so I had front-row seats to my mother’s dating life. I’d best describe her style as “I Need to Find a Husband or I’m Going to Turn into a Witch and Be Burned at the Stake.” My mother was (still is) a timeless beauty—she’s also smart and funny—but when she was dating someone, I’d watch her turn werewolf-style from a competent, determined authority figure into this entirely not-her version of herself: a desperate, overly flirtatious, subservient ding-dong for shitty men who’d inevitably dump her and leave her in tears. And yes, this is harsh, but this type of personality-corrupting toxic masculinity bullshit didn’t spring up from within her out of nowhere. She was taught to do this, taught that acting sweet, deferential, and noncombative was her best chance at securing a man, aka happiness.

  I watched her cycle through emotionally unavailable single fathers with mustaches and Volvos. They all promised her the world and charmed the crap out of her by being nice to her weird kids: Asher, Leah, and the angelic youngest … me. But eventually all those dads realized we were a hot-mess family of hyperactive neediness that presented itself as a bottomless abyss full of red wine (Mom) and daddy issues (us) (and maybe Mom, but let’s not go there).

  And hey, just so you don’t feel bad for her, one of those emotionally unavailable single fathers with a Volvo became emotionally available and stuck around. She’s been with John for fifteen years, and all us hyperactive kids adore him.

  When dudes started paying attention to me around junior high, I mimicked the behavior that was modeled to me: egregious availability and an open willingness to do anything for affection. I used to be so embarrassed about how I lost my virginity that I lied about it to everyone who asked, even guys I dated, through my twenties. I always wished I had a sweet, romantic “losing my virginity” story, but that’s just not how things go sometimes.

  The decisions I made back then about sex and drugs (see “Georgia Gets Her Nipple Pierced for All the Right Reasons”) didn’t come from a place of self-care and growth. Those were foreign concepts.

  It was a dark time. Most of my decisions came from a place of believing the garbage that found its way into my head that, despite ample evidence otherwise, insisted I was ugly, stupid, and worthless. And that narrative told me I didn’t have the right to take things slow, or insist we use a condom, or even to just say, “Stop.”

  That self-advocacy stuff wasn’t for girls like me, girls who were taught that their worthiness was determined by who was in love with them.

  Quick break from the super dark shit to say: don’t worry! Loving myself and deciding my own worth were concepts I finally learned after many mistakes, and billions of hours of therapy (see “Georgia’s Top Ten ‘Holy Shit!’ Moments in Therapy”). I’m like 99 percent healed now.

  By the time I turned sixteen, I’d started to find confidence by embracing my inherent weirdness. The angry, in-your-face defiance of my local punk movement helped. I wore Doc Martens and torn-up tights, and one morning before school, I pierced my eyebrow with a safety pin because fuck you, that’s why. I found other misfits from broken homes who were sick of trying to fit into our cookie-cutter suburb town where everything was painted different shades of beige and eggshell, and together we all reveled in being outcasts.

  This one Saturday afternoon, I went with my lifelong next-door neighbor Sanaz, a dreadlocked hippie who wore patchouli oil in lieu of deodorant, to a fund-raising event for Food Not Bombs. It was at my favorite local music venue, Koo’s Café (RIP). Koo’s was essentially just a dilapidated two-bedroom craftsman house in a bad part of Orange County. Looking back, I really should have died there. Such a fire hazard. But at sixteen, it was a mecca … a mold-infested, decaying mecca.

  Touring and local bands would play in the bare living room where you’d sweat and shout-sing along, then head out to the front yard to smoke bad weed and talk shit. On the day of the charity, there was a spoken word show, and I wandered in while a girl from the Seattle punk scene spoke to a small crowd sitting cross-legged in front of her, like a classroom of children. She wore the mid-’90s grunge uniform, an oversized flannel over a cute baby-doll dress and ripped tights, kid barrettes in her ratty hair and too much eyeliner, an old tin superhero lunch box as a purse.

  She talked about female empowerment. That women were capable and deserving of so much more than the subservient mind-set we were taught to adopt. That if wanting and striving for more made you a “bitch,” then so be it. That feminism wasn’t a bad word; it was a vital pursuit and would be until girls were raised to believe in themselves and the importance of their contribution to the world the same way boys were.

  It was feminism, which I’d been led to believe was a bad word at the time, but delivered in a punk rock package. They called it Riot Grrrl. Fun fact: one of the origins of the name of the movement was based on the fact that if men were treated for one second the way women have been treated throughout history, there would be a riot. I was on fucking board.

  After a childhood of low self-esteem and kowtowing to exclusionary popular girls with starter credit cards and a strict preppy dress code, I gratefully adopted the punk rock female empowerment message I so desperately needed. I read third-wave feminist zines and binge-listened to “girls to the front” bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney.

  The confident version of myself buried deep down shook her fist in triumph and I finally started to like myself, which was a brand-new sensation. I embraced all the things I had once hated about myself—my hyperactive weirdness, my flat chest—and stopped needing to be liked by other people to the detriment of my own power.

  Eventually I graduated high school, moved to LA, and I felt unfuckwithable. I’d made some new friends in beauty school and started waiting tables at the breakfast spot in Santa Monica. Soon enough I was part of a work family, which included a few regular customers I eventually knew by name and, more intimately, by their regular order.

  Lawrence was one of those regulars. We’d joke around a lot during those slow, overcast weekday mornings. He was an older guy, maybe fiftyish, and heavyset with a deep voice. He was like three tim
es my size but had a gentle demeanor. He just came off as this genuinely sweet guy that lived with and took care of his elderly mother. His regular order: over-easy eggs and bacon with a short stack of blueberry pancakes, fortified with tons of coffee. He’d grown up in the neighborhood, and the other waitresses seemed to adore him. He told me he was a professional photographer, so on a particularly slow morning, I asked him if I could take a look at the large portfolio he always carried under his arm. He gestured for me to sit next to him at his usual counter seat. I wiped up a spill of coffee and syrup from the countertop and he opened the large black leather book to show me his photographs.

  They were gorgeous. A mix of the touristy yet seedy neighborhoods that made up the beach town he’d always called home. The shots were framed and lit in a way that evoked the dreariness of an overcast ocean-side morning, but with a focus on the humanity of his subjects. Through Lawrence’s lens, the rude old asshole always standing outside his gaudy jewelry store on the promenade, who’d only take the wet cigar out of his mouth long enough to catcall, became a contemplative representation of hope and community.

  So you can imagine how honored I felt when he closed his portfolio and asked if he could photograph me sometime.

  Look. I know what you’re thinking, and you don’t have to say it because I’m already yelling it at nineteen-year-old Georgia, the girl who thought she’d outgrown naïveté. I’ve been yelling it for years: “A dude you barely know asking to photograph you is a HUGE. RED. FLAG.”

  Look. Listen. The Riot Grrrl in me was screaming in protest at the obvious creepiness of it all, but the little girl in me who’s my mother’s daughter was flattered and said OK.

  On the day of the shoot, I showed up, not because it would have been rude to decline; yeah, it was a little creepy, but I was excited to have my picture taken! The idea of fucking politeness hadn’t occurred to me because I wasn’t being polite, I was looking forward to it. And in an effort to make sure that Lawrence wouldn’t have second thoughts once he got a good look at me outside the café walls (a.k.a. in something other than overalls), I’d dressed up for the occasion. I put on a tight, ruffly top with a cherry blossom pattern, capri pants, and way too much makeup. To fake some height, I wore my very ’90s platform sandals, which were super in at the time despite the fact that they regularly made your ankle twist out from under you and toppled you to the ground. I threw on a choker and doused myself in glittery apple-scented body spray. I was basically a Gwen Stefani / Spice Girl hybrid and I was Feeling. My. Self.

  Lawrence and I planned to meet at the café. I figured we’d walk around the neighborhood using the storefronts and graffitied walls as a backdrop, but when I got there, he was waiting out front in his car. He motioned for me to hop in. Into his car. Alone with him.

  Hello, red flag number two, thank you for joining us!

  But nineteen-year-old Georgia didn’t even see that red flag. Without an objection or question, I got in. It turns out a couple of years of confidence and self-esteem weren’t enough to override my basic instinct to go along with whatever the guy I’m with is requesting.

  Have you ever been in a car that just made you sad? His car was basically a man-child on wheels. It wasn’t that it was an old car—my car was an ancient hand-me-down that I loved—it was the vibe of the car that made my heart sink, and that was my first real jolt of red-flag realization. A vibe.

  Trash was everywhere, and the upholstery was stained and frayed. The cloth on the ceiling of the car was stained and ripped. How do you even rip the ceiling of a car?? And it had this musk reminiscent of my brother’s room when he was a kid. It’s that bad breath, farty male smell that builds up around unshowered men when they never open a window (guys, you know what I’m talking about). Add to that the sweatpants and dirty white T-shirt Lawrence was wearing. Had he always dressed so slovenly? I’d never noticed it in the safety and familiarity of the café.

  But, and here it is, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to be an elitist by judging him or his car, so I told him how excited I was and just smiled politely. Maybe I was even trying to convince myself at that point, trying to crowd out those doubts and reservations I was having by using fierce optimism. Cut to me screaming, “Everything is fine!” at a charging bear.

  Plus it was too late, right? (Wrong, that’s the politeness talking, but I couldn’t see it at the time.) I was in his car and he’d already suggested, or really, informed me, that there’s a perfect lookout point in the Santa Monica Mountains so we could use the ocean as our backdrop, and by then, we were already winding our way up a narrow two-lane road into the hills.

  As we wound up the empty road, gravel crunching under his frayed tires, it truly hit me what a huge mistake I’d made. I was in a strange man’s car, all alone, with no way to let anyone know where we were heading. The now-common practice of faking an emergency text from a friend wasn’t possible because this was the late ’90s, kids. Cell phones were new and not affordable on a waitress salary.

  I was stuck, with the mountaintop looming ahead and any change of mind far back in the past. I hadn’t told anyone about this photo shoot, and looking back, it must have been because deep down I knew. I knew it was a mistake and that whomever I told would’ve called me on it and then I would have to tell Lawrence that I couldn’t go with him and he’d think I was a jerk. Better to just pretend everything is fine than have an awkward moment and someone thinking badly of me!

  My hands clammed up and my heart raced, and my normal nervous habit of talking a mile a minute took over.

  I tried to take hold of the situation by using my secret weapons: my Riot Grrrl confidence and the tactics I had learned from my already years-long true-crime obsession. I had picked up tons of questionable survival techniques from watching overly dramatized reenactments on America’s Most Wanted and terrible Lifetime movies where stalkers had to be fought off in life-or-death battles and abusive husbands always got their comeuppance. I fortified those shows with real-life accounts of survival in books from our true-crime lord and savior, Ann Rule.

  In my mind I opened up my toolbox of survival tricks and grabbed at the first one I found: tell him more about yourself so he’ll see you as human, which will probably make him less likely to want to hurt you. Humanize yourself but make it kinda tragic so you don’t seem like a snob.

  At rapid speed, I prattled off my tragic ancestry: Jews from Eastern Europe who had to leave behind everything they owned to escape persecution and after years of being nomads and almost dying all the time finally immigrated to America and made a pretty OK life for themselves with hard work and gusto. I’m the result of the American Dream! You can’t murder the American Dream!

  Just as I was getting into the darkest details of my foray into meth and rehab, we were pulling over at the intended crime sc—errr, photo shoot location.

  We got out of the car and I meekly followed Lawrence up a trail away from the main road, keeping a few extra paces behind but wishing I could turn and run.

  It really was a beautiful spot, though. It was a sunny, balmy day, and the sound of the ocean was calming and familiar. At the top of the trail was a sharp cliff that looked over the Pacific Coast Highway, and far out into the ocean I could just see the silhouette of Catalina Island.

  To the left was the Santa Monica Pier and its towering Ferris wheel that I had only been on once, when I was a kid with my father, and although it wasn’t in sight, I knew that up the coast about twenty minutes to the right was the Jewish camp that I had attended every summer during my childhood. How tragic, I thought, that I was going to maybe possibly probably die in the same mountains where I used to sing camp songs about Israel.

  Once again, in my mind it was too late. There was no turning back at that point. I know now that no matter how far into something you are, how many times you’ve agreed and moved forward, you can always decide to turn back. It’s often not easy or comfortable, but you get to choose. But back in the mountains, I was just sta
rting to grow my “fuck politeness” wings; they hadn’t yet fully developed, and so I thought that I was obligated to stay and deal with the situation I was in. I’d gotten myself into that mess, so it was mine to suffer through. Maybe if I had a little more confidence, or if cell phones and Uber were a thing, I would have felt better about making an excuse and leaving, but probably not.

  How insane would it look if I turned and ran down the mountain screaming? Plus, he hadn’t done anything wrong yet, right? I was just being paranoid, right?? So I decided to ignore my gut and go with the flow.

  He told me to stand with my back to the ocean, and as he got his camera equipment ready, I took some deep breaths to try to calm down. I spotted some surfers bobbing on the waves below and thought of how much I’d rather be there, down on the beach, than stuck on this secluded mountaintop with a grown man I hardly knew.

  With a jolt, the name Linda Sobek came to mind. Just a few years earlier, in 1995, the beautiful, kindhearted model had agreed, against her better judgment and her own strict rule of never going alone with a photographer, to accompany freelance photographer Charles Rathbun to a secluded spot on the outskirts of Los Angeles where he brutally raped and murdered her before burying her body in the dirt.

  I had followed the trial that had resulted in Rathbun’s life sentence, my heart fucking aching for Linda and her family. One decision to trust the wrong person after a career of safe decisions was all it had taken for her life to be put in the hands of a monster. For her to not get a lifetime of experiences because of one moment of not trusting her gut made me so angry. I wondered what she would have said to me if her ghost could visit me on that mountaintop.

  When Lawrence put the camera up to his eye, my intuition told me I’d been right to be afraid. It was terrifying. In my life, I’ve never had a more intuitive, gut feeling that something was off, and I’ll never forget it or ignore it again. The eye that didn’t look through the camera, the one that was trained on me, went black and scary. An intensity that suddenly matched his size and the problematic request to have a teenage girl alone with him in a secluded spot was evident in his glare. I thought of Linda and all the other girls who’d been fooled into this exact same scenario by countless men over countless decades. I couldn’t believe I was staring down the barrel of becoming one of the unlucky ones who fell for the trick of a seemingly gentle man who turned out to be a monster, all because I had dismissed so many opportunities to trust my gut and fuck politeness.