What are you looking at? Yea, I'm talking to you... The slack jawed idiot with the terrible tattoo. I really don't care what you think. I'm not as young as I look you know. I'm sorry, maybe I should introduce myself...
I'm Khalee Baxter, the only female artist at The Black Hole Tattoo Parlor. And I'm twenty-four years old, thank you very much. I can't help that I'm only 5'2". But that has nothing to do with the whole story.
I was born to my parents Ryan and Jada in Baltimore, Maryland. My childhood was pretty average. My parents had a house in the suburbs. Dad worked a desk job for an investment firm and mom stayed at home till I made it too high school... Then she decided to pick back up with her middle school teaching job.
I think my parents saw me as one big disappointment after another. I didn't get my mother's red hair or my dad's green eyes. I'm certainly not tall like my father. (I think he was hoping for a child to relive his high school basketball fame.) My mother, being a teacher, was hoping for the next Einstein.
She definitely didn't get that. I wasn't exactly a model student, I probably spent more time hiding in the bathroom or behind the gym than actually sitting in the classroom. Yea, yea... terrible I know, but I really don't want another lecture about my education right now.
My father hoped for an upstanding daughter who went to church on Sundays and had the poise to follow him into the business world. I swear he almost busted a blood vessel when I came home with my first piercing. He broke my bedroom door the night he saw the tattoo on my lower back. Don't get me wrong, he'd never lay a hand on me, but damn he was mad.
My mother hoped I'd see the error of my ways and dragged me too church as often as possible. I guess that was one more disappointment. Because I'm sure as hell not Christian. My mother cried the day I refused to go to church, tell her I was a pagan. I'm not sure how serious I was about that, I'm not big into the whole religion thing.
The day I saw my father cry I knew I couldn't stay any longer. It really wasn't my fault. I thought they deserved to know the truth about me and the girlfriends I'd been hiding for years. It didn't go over so well. The next day they were trying to drag me to psychologists to prove that it was just a phase... To prove that I was just messed up. To prove that it wasn't their fault. That was about all I could take.
I packed everything I wanted into a duffle bag and was on the next bus out of town. I've made some mistakes in my life, but I really don't think that leaving was one of them. I learned a lot of things living on the road. I learned to defend myself, learned to survive. I also learned to draw and my passion for having tattoos became a passion to create them.
Getting a license was rather difficult, not having a high school diploma and all. But I managed, we all need a steady source of income after all. So that's what I do now, work at a tattoo parlor and party of the weekends. I don't think I've really settled down, but here is good for now. I'm single, but that doesn't matter as much as people think. People are transient, relationships are fickle. If something good comes up, I might consider it. But for now I have my friends and that's all I need to keep me going.
The rest is pretty simple. I have my own apartment in the city. I work nights and sleep most of the day. When I'm not at work, I'm at the clubs... You can find me there if you're feeling adventurous. Now unless you want a tattoo, get out of my chair! You're wasting my time...