My Life With Kari Ferrell

Posted: April 16th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: con artists, kari ferrell, Movies, seattle | 34 Comments »

Editor’s note: If you haven’t read about Kari before, some of her further adventures are being discussed here.

I met Kari Ferrell six years ago, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. She was sixteen then. She almost got killed trying to save a kitten from getting run over by a mail truck. The truck swerved and the driver shouted. Kari stayed there, kneeling in the street, holding the kitten to her face and sobbing. I helped her up and offered to walk her home. She kept the kitchen clutched in her arms. A few steps later, she named it Mahatma.

We hadn’t made it past Pike and Broadway before some heroin-chic suburban high-school dropout accosted us and asked us for spare change. The kid walked alongside us, muttering some ridiculous story about lung cancer. Kari stopped, opened her purse, and gave the homeless kid everything she had, which looked like it amounted to about two hundred dollars. When I realized what was happening, I tried to stop her, but the scammer had already taken off. (I saw him in line later at Dick’s, waiting on a hamburger.)

As we walked on, I stole glances at this beautiful kid walking beside me. She had so much heart, so much potential. She could be anything, really. But I also knew it wasn’t going to be long before the cold cruel world swallowed her up. I figured I’d do something nice for Kari, while I still had her in my orbit.

“Do you like movies?” I asked her.

“I’m not allowed to see any,” she said. “I’m being raised on a commune run by a sociey that hates all technology. I just ran away yesterday, because it finally got unbearable when –”

“Oh, shaddap,” I said, giving her a friendly smack on the back of her round little head. “I’m gonna teach you a few things, kid.”

My girlfriend at the time worked at The Grand Illusion, an indie theater/production house in the U District. They had a projector hooked up to a VCR (much more tasteful than it sounds). I left Kari talking to my girlfriend in the lobby full of flush vintage furniture, sipping a latte. I took a quick drive up to Scarecrow Video, where I picked up a selection of old favorites.

Then we had a little screening. I knew it was going to be a late night, so I invited a few friends to join us and lend their moral support. My friends were, of course, mostly tattooed and pierced and wearing tight concert t-shirts and well-kept vintage shoes, because we were film geeks in Seattle, and that’s how it was.

We watched The Grifters, sure. And also Matchstick Men and American Buffalo. But I also threw in some oldies, like Paper Moon and even Scarlet Street (which was a remake of La Chienne, you know).

Naturally, this session required a bit more stamina than young Kari thought she had in her. After a few hours, she started to say things like “Well, this has been nice,” and “My parents are probably wondering where I am,” but we were having none of it. We plied her with espresso to keep her focused. After six hours, she stopped resisting. She sat and watched the screen, occasionally twitching. My friends sat beside her in shifts, offering their tattooed arms for support during the more emotionally difficult moments, like that part in American Buffalo where the kid from Fresh gets smacked in the face with an old telephone. Kari shuddered when that happened. And then she asked to see it again. But, we assured her, there was no going back; only forward.

I came by the next morning to see how it was going. House Of Games was playing, and the hipsters were sipping orange juice and munching croissants. Kari wasn’t allowed to have any, of course.

I knelt in front of her. I could see the light from the screen reflected back on her tear-streaked face. I took her hand in mine.

“Do you get it now?” I asked her.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, I surely do.”

I signalled the projectionist to shut off the movie and bring up the lights.

“Let’s go celebrate,” I said.

“But…” Kari said, ever so earnestly, and yet with something new, a tint of – dare I say it? – mischeviousness, “isn’t there more? I thought there would be so much more.”

“Oh, there is,” I said. “But it’s out there in the big wide world. You have to find it on your own.”

She nodded. The group of us walked to a tattoo parlor on The Ave, and we all pitched in for Kari’s first piece of skin art: a beautiful dragon all across her upper torso. She was a bit disoriented and had to be restrained. But when it was over (seven hours later; that’s a fucking big tattoo), we put her in front of a mirror, and you could tell by the look on her face that something deep inside her had definitely changed. She wasn’t going to rescue any more kittens, that was for damn sure.

My friends and I said goodbye to her at Gasworks Park. We embraced her and wished her well, one at a time, while she stood there stone-faced, her eyes fixed on the far distance.

I was last. As I hugged her, she reached up and dug her fingernails into my neck.

“I’m going to get you,” she hissed into my ear. “I’m going to get all you self-important pseudo-intellectual motherfuckers.”

I gave her hips a little squeeze.

“I know you will,” I said.

She turned and walked away. A light rain was falling.

Update: Kari Farrell Escapes, Revealed As TOK Series Terminator

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