***If you get triggered by images of sexual assault,
definitely skip this series. Plenty of kittens and snuggles to come, I promise.
***
This past Sunday, my therapist helped me to begin the
process of confronting the teenage trauma that’s unfortunately one of the
defining factors in my psyche, in the hopes of making it perhaps less so. After
I told her the story, she tasked me with starting a dialogue with my
sixteen-year-old self, with the goal of reaching some kind of…forgiveness isn’t
the right word…acceptance, understanding, amends? Maybe embrace. Last night
after I wrote the story on paper and put it in the Box of Things to Be Worked
Out Later By Unseen Forces (What, you don’t have one?), I actually could feel
my young self, ragged and feral, holding onto me for dear life. Maybe I can
write her to safety, since I couldn’t fight our way there.
It’s possible that such a process might repair some of the
holes inside me, break down the walls of anger, defensiveness, and detachment
that come between me and self-love.
Before I can start the dialogue with the girl (Let’s call
her S.) I have to tell you what happened. I’ve written it here before but I
think it’s important to tell it from where I am now, from a place of processing
rather than panic. There are many echoes of the story in the present-day
one—sometimes I’m very proud of the ways I’ve relived and rewritten it, how I
came from a place of helplessness and shame and somehow became a person who
wins at parties, gets rescued by the Cutest Boy, who smacked the shit out of
the guy who put an unwanted hand over my mouth before I figured out I liked it.
But before all that, there was this. If you read it, thank you in
advance—you’re easing the project along and easing the burden.
One spring when I was in high school, my body woke up and
made me antsy. Because I didn’t count myself among those who could have
relationships, I opted for quick and anonymous sex with any good-looking man I
could get my hands on. The basketball court, conveniently located in the park
three doors down, was an easy place to pick them up, and I still kind of envy
myself the ease with which I took them home, fucked them, and sent them on
their way.
I’m not introducing the story of the trauma with the fact
that I was slutty in order to suggest any cause and effect relationship (though
I admit, for years I did) only to give you an idea of what people thought I
was, what I kind of thought I was for in a situation where it might’ve been
helpful to see myself any other way.
My best friend told me that her boyfriend had a friend who’d
fuck me, so we set it up for a Saturday night. We did the classic thing of
telling each other’s mom’s we were staying at another friend’s house and went
to meet the guys. They picked us up at the grocery store, of all places.
They took us to a park on the outskirts of town. My friend
stayed in the car with her guy and me and the friend hiked up a big hill that
overlooked the lights of our suburban town—I wanted to leave on my glasses to
enjoy the view, but he didn’t like the way I looked in them, didn’t really like
the way I looked at all, I don’t think, but he fucked me anyway, doggie style,
maybe so he wouldn’t see my face. I enjoyed letting out yowls that echoed
through the hills, felt both pleasured and degraded, mostly kind of coldly successful
at life.
When the guys were all done with us, it was only 12:30 and
we’d told our parents we were at Kristi’s house so we really didn’t have
anyplace to go. We sat in the little park by my house, thinking about falling
asleep on a park bench, when a pickup full of whooping partiers stopped to see
if we wanted to join them.
I felt absolutely no hesitation, enjoying the idea of how
horrified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup.
They drove us to a nice, neat apartment complex with “green” in the name.
I can’t say for sure that I was drugged, but I do know I was
way more drunk than the number of beers I had. They were drinking some Cisco and
could have slipped that in, too. We were sitting around playing quarters and I
was barely able to sit up when the ugliest, most snaggle-toothed of the men
said “So, which one of us are you gonna fuck?”
I said nobody, that I’d had enough that evening, but they
kept pushing and said I had to pick someone. They kept insisting and I did feel
like it was who I was, like it was something I had to do, like I couldn’t
escape them or my slutty self. So I picked the cutest guy there, who I also
figured wouldn’t do anything because his girlfriend was with him. But he sent
his girlfriend home.
He took me in the bedroom and closed the door, made me strip
off all my clothes. I was kind of a sex robot. I lay beneath him and tried to
do my job of making noises, but he put his hand over my mouth. I don’t remember
what the sex felt like, really, just remember scrambling around after my
clothes because he left the door open after so anyone could see in.
I did get most of my clothes on but after that I couldn’t
really move and I started throwing up everywhere. I passed out and when I came
to, everyone was hitting me, atleast 5 people including one girl, with what
turned out to have been tennis rackets, blows coming down everywhere in the
pitch black and I still couldn’t move. They were all calling me names, yelling
at me for throwing up, telling me I was a stupid slut and in between saying
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry” I was screaming my head off so that some blessed person heard
and called the cops. Otherwise, those might have been my last moment on earth.
The next thing I remember was seeing my bloody face in the
bathroom mirror, the girl who’d been helping to beat me up was making soothing
sounds and cleaning me up. My favorite shirt (a bright mod swirly thing in the
manner of De-Lite front woman and my style-hero, Lady Miss Kier) was spattered
with blood.
As the police put us in a circle and questioned us, it
dawned on me that my best friend had been in the front room, all of this time,
standing by while those things happened, that she had let it happen.
I refused, no matter how many times they asked, to tell the
police or anyone the sex part of the story. In no way did I think it wasn’t my
fault for being drunk and slutty. I’d never seen The Accused, but I’d seen a review of it on Siskel & Ebert and I knew well enough who the accused would be.
The not-telling is the part I feel most horribly ashamed about, the guiltiest.
Some of them did go to jail for what happened, including the guy, but not for
rape. I’m very, very sorry for not having done what I could to try and protect
other women from that experience; I wish I could go back and do the right
thing.
The following weeks were a family nightmare. My mom,
horrified that I’d chosen to dye my hair the same purple as the bruises beneath
my eyes, upset that it made her look like a bad mother, held my head over the
tub and tried to bleach it out with Clorox. In the culmination of a fight with
my mom, my dad pushed me down to the floor a week after the incident, kicked me
and punched me, called me the same names the other people had and blamed me for
bringing this violence into our family, though of course it had always been
there. He pushed my mother down the stairs and the next day, she had bruises to
match my own.
A newish friend, an artsy dykey girl I totally had a crush
on, came and rescued me that night, but there wasn’t anyplace safe to be until
I was shipped off for a few weeks that summer to my Catholic aunt’s house in
the Maryland countryside, which had always been my favorite place in the world.
I learned how to make homemade pop-tarts and fell in love with a boy from her
church, who’s as gay as the day is long, but that didn’t stop us from kissing
in the waves and whispering sweet nothings with the wild ponies of Chincoteague
island. I took comfort in his innocence and it took me through that horrible
year, but the wall of refusal and dread inside me was otherwise insurmountable.
I’d already been a damaged girl, but now I was very often nothing but fight.
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