In my previous blog post, I addressed some of the sexual harassment, discrimination, and attempted assault I have faced in my lifetime. What I left out was the part where a guy had a successful attempt. Yes, I was raped. Yes, I am aware that this does not make me special because countless other women have been, too. No, I did not report my rape. Yes, I tried to rationalize what I could have done differently so that it didn't happen. It happened 28 years ago and I like to tell myself that I'm over it, but the truth is, I'm not and I'm probably never going to be completely, but I'm making strides every day. Those are victories and I claim them. But I'm going to confess that I don't plan to share a link to this yet because I'm still a bit of a chicken shit and I know very few people read my blog. I'm going to own my fear, but I'm not going to apologize for it.
I've stated aloud and in writing that I was raped. Only a handful of people know the details. Like I said previously, because this blog gets little to no traffic, I'm relatively certain there will still just be that handful of people who know the details. Maybe writing them down instead of occasionally replaying them in my head will be cathartic. In that case, it won't matter if anyone else reads this.
Yes, I'm digressing. I'm playing Scheherazade and telling one thousand and one tales to keep myself alive, or sane, or something. The devil is in the details. I suppose I need face the devil and state the details, but I'm going to confess that I'm afraid that I'll be illegitimized. Lately, I'm a little more fragile than I care to admit. However it is possible to be broken and strong at the same time. I just need to stop procrastinating and just do this.
I was living in a building that was like a co-op, but not. It was two blocks north of Michigan State University's campus. The building to the south of where I lived was a house that had been split up into a couple of apartments. We shared a driveway. To the right was the parking lot for my building and to the left was the parking lot for the house next door. The neighbors decided to have a party with live entertainment and the music drew me and one of my friends from the not a co-op to the small parking lot. It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone smoking pot out in the open, outside. There was an obligatory keg and various bottles of liquor and the also obligatory wine coolers. Even though I was not yet twenty years old, I indulged and had a few wine coolers.
He and I started talking, rather screaming at each other above the din of electric guitars. When the electric guitars were traded for acoustic guitars, we were able to talk without straining our voices. He was smoking cigarettes and taking my empties back to the returnable bottle bins, each time bringing me back a fresh, cold cooler. The drinks were refreshing on that late spring evening and he was so handsome and I'd never had someone that handsome approach me out of the blue and just start talking to me. He was finishing his degree and planned to go on to law school.
My voice became raw as the evening danced on. Between the yelling to communicate, the cigarette smoke, and the alcohol, this came as no surprise, but the kiss he planted on me was. The night morphed into a display of beauty and charm like I had never encountered before. It was exciting. Even though I desperately wanted him to kiss me, I was still stunned when he did. When he asked me to go back to his apartment, I did not hesitate even though I knew his apartment was about three miles away from where I lived.
We went back to his apartment and made out for a while. This turned into sex. I wasn't a virgin; I'd had sex once already. I'd been sexually active for two whole months by this time. His kisses stirred up a libido I wasn't aware I had. It was a long and fairly pleasant night. He drove me back to my place in the morning. I was happy, sated; I was convinced I was in love.
Later in the week, he called the friend I'd gone to the party with. She had a phone in her room and I couldn't afford one. She had given him her number, unbeknownst to me. He wanted to come by. I was elated and told him to come to my friend's room because mine was a wreck. He did and he and she and I talked and entertained my friend's three year old daughter. After an hour or two, he asked me if I wanted to go back to his place. I jumped at the chance. I ran back to my room to put on a pair of shoes. He came with me just to see what my room looked like. It looked like the wreck I told him it was.
We walked down the upper left line of the U that shaped my building. He had parked out front which was at the bottom line of the U. I was actually proud that my not a co-op mates were going to see me leaving on the arm of Mr. Tall(er than me), Dark, and Handsome. When we got down the stairs, he kissed me in the room that served as both lobby and living room. Then he held me at arm's length away and wrinkled his brow. "Weren't you wearing that last week?"
That should have been a warning sign. I laughed it off and confirmed that he was correct. I assured him it had gone through the laundry. I confessed that I had purposely changed into it when he said he was coming over because I kind of considered it my lucky outfit.
This was late May 1988. Crop tops and neon were in. What I was wearing was a short set consisting of a pair of jersey knit mint colored shorts, not too short, and not too long. It had a matching crop top which didn't look cropped so much as like a mistake because I'm so short-waisted, there was little gap between the bottom of the top and the top of my bottoms. My breasts were perky back then and I never wore a bra with that ensemble because the bra straps just never seemed to line up properly with the straps of the crop top. I looked fine without a bra, F.I.N.E., FINE. I was just starting to get comfortable with the fact that I had nice breasts so my foray into wearing shirts that showed off the girls was still fairly fresh. I wore black ballerina flats. I looked cute.
We got out to his car and had a brief make out session there before he put the keys in the ignition and we took off. The conversation was mostly one-sided. He expressed disappointment that I wasn't wearing makeup that night. He'd raised the issue earlier in the evening. "I've had a long day at work. Would it kill you to put on some makeup if you knew it was going to make me happy?" I told him that I, too, had had a long day at work and that was why I didn't feel like putting on makeup just for him. He dropped the topic, and I was grateful.
This night, we started the festivities in the living room. Heavy petting and kissing were taking place. He began to undress me right there on the couch. The lights were on and I was uncomfortable with it because I was still too self conscious of my naked body. I told him this. He responded with all the platitudes about my body being perfect just the way it was. He told me that if I was not comfortable with him seeing me naked, that I should close my eyes because he was enjoying what he saw. I let him remove my top, reluctantly, but I let him. I did convince him to move it into the bedroom where it was dark. He reluctantly agreed, and sent me on ahead of him. He was going to put on some music and the album he wanted was in the living room.
I walked into his bedroom a little apprehensive and a little excited. I removed my shorts and crawled under the blankets to wait for him. He turned off the lights as he came back to join me. All I could see when he got to the doorway was the red embered end of his cigarette as he drew a puff off it. He turned on a light by the stereo so he could see to put the record on. "Do you like Clapton?" My affirmation was met with enthusiasm, even more so when I agreed that Slow Hand was my favorite album of Clapton's.
He turned off the light, walked to his bed, and undressed at the side before climbing in next to me. "Cocaine" came with an explanation between kisses. He wanted to make sure I knew that Eric Clapton had once had a serious coke problem. "Wonderful Tonight " was next. We were moving from kissing to coitus. He was inside of me when "Lay Down Sally" prompted him to laugh mid-thrust and sing, "Lay down Suzy..." He pulled out at the beginning of the next song and declared he wanted a blow job.
No fanfare. Just, "I want a blow job." I said, "No." I told him I'd never done one before and I wasn't ready to have anybody's penis in my mouth. He was straddling me, trying to cajole me into it. "It's like licking a popsicle. There's nothing to it." And I declined again while keeping my terrified eyes on that erect penis looming ever closer to my mouth. I was kind of trapped, but he was a nice guy, right?He had a beautiful apartment fully furnished with his parents' hand-me-downs compliments of his mother's need to redecorate every few years. He was in college. He was going to be a lawyer. So I tried to reason with him, but I was basically carrying on a conversation with his cock. "I licked you, so now you should lick me." Eric Clapton's "The Core" spun around the turntable while my head spun around trying to understand how the fuck I'd gotten in this situation. His penis was poised at my refusing lips. I made the mistake to open them to plead one more time. He seized the opportunity and the back of my head so I licked.
And I cried. And I asked him to take me home. He told me that he didn't feel like driving, but I was welcome to walk myself home. My shoes and top were around there somewhere, but he wasn't going to say where. He'd give them to me in the morning. He rolled over and fell asleep. I laid on the other side of the bed, my back turned to his back. Slow Hand finished playing out then the needle found its way back to "Cocaine" and repeated what was to become the soundtrack for one of the most horrible nights of my life.
I laid there feeling rejected and dirty and somehow at fault for not being cool and just giving the guy a blow job. After a while, minutes, hours, I don't know, he rolled over and spooned me. "OK, so you don't do blow jobs. I guess I can live with that." He touched me in all the right spots and said what I believed at the time to be all the right words. So I grasped at the acceptance and let him give me a "pearl necklace" thanking my lucky stars that he hadn't kicked me out and hoping that maybe he was in love with me like I was with him.
Sunshine was forcing its way through the closed blinds when he woke me up, a lit cigarette and a glass of iced tea in his right hand, my top and shoes in his left. "C'mon, let's go. I've got to get ready for brunch with my parents." I mistakenly thought he wanted to get me home so I could change and go to brunch with them. But when we got to my building, he stopped only long enough for me to exit the car, a late model maroon Grand Prix, then he took off as soon as I closed the door.
By the end of the next weekend, I was calling both him and his car, "grand pricks". He invited my friend and her three year old daughter to his apartment complex to swim in the pool with us. I got to watch the toddler in her water wings while my friend and the guy I thought was my boyfriend flirted with each other. My period let me know of its presence by stabbing my uterus with incredible cramps. I called my friend from her deck chair to explain that I was going to need to get out of the pool and back home where my maxi pads were. He was annoyed. Why was I being so difficult? Still he mustered us up to his apartment where I asked if I could take a hot bath to try to alleviate my cramps.
I sat in the tub in my bikini resting my cheek on the cool tile while I tried to steam the pain out of my uterus. I heard the toddler saying, "Why won't she wake up?" He came to the bathroom with my friend, handed me a damp towel and said, "Don't be so melodramatic. You're scaring the kid." I had passed out in the tub, but he didn't want to hear it. I asked him to go to the store to get some pads for me. He dug around under his bathroom sink and handed me an open box of tampons. I questioned why a single man in a one bedroom apartment had a box of tampons. He said his ex-girlfriend had left them when she moved out and he didn't see a need to get rid of them. I would find out a few months later that he didn't have an ex-girlfriend. He had a live-in girlfriend who was gone over the summer. Grand. Prick.
It wasn't until 1991 when I was talking to a woman who would eventually become my fourth roommate for the year that I realized there was such a thing as date rape. I had been consoling her after what she had called a disastrous date. As she told her story and I was convincing her that she had in fact been raped, she said, "But Suzanne, my story is so similar to what happened to you and you said you weren't raped." We were in the lobby of our dorm on the way to our rooms when it hit me that she was right, that I was right, but it took someone else hearing my tale for me to grasp the reality. I had said, "NO." I was forced to perform oral sex against my will regardless. It was a revelation. It pissed me off.
It took me years to be able to listen to Slow Hand after that. One night, someone had asked me to dance to "Wonderful Tonight" and I declined. I told him I had some bad karma from that song. He was nice about it and respected my space. In the late 90s, I bought myself the "Slow Hand"CD and found I was able to listen to the whole thing without it triggering me into curling up in the fetal position like the leaves of that sensitive plant where if you brush the spine of the leaves, they close in to protect themselves from your touch. I could sing along with the songs, happily, joyfully, thankful that one of my favorite albums had been returned to my soul.
It took even longer, but thanks to the compassion and kindness of a former boyfriend, I was able to play around with performing oral sex. I came to discover that I rather enjoyed it. All was well and good til the 2016 Trump campaign and audio tape of him admitting to sexual assault. Then just after the election, while gracing a friend with a blow job, "The Core" shuffled onto my iPod. My internal dialogue immediately started telling me that I was over the rape, but my brain shut that shit down and I told myself that I didn't need to listen to that song while doing that thing to that guy who has never forced me to do anything. So I excused myself saying,"Don't ask, but I need to shuffle past this song. I'll be right back." He didn't ask. I didn't tell. It all turned out OK. And maybe one day I'll be able to listen to that song while I'm sucking on some guy, and maybe I won't, but it's all going to turn out OK. I'm OK.
The sad part is that if you asked the guy who raped me, he won't think he raped me. Donald Trump doesn't see where his behavior is that of a sexual predator. Sadder still, there are a lot of women who think I was blowing Mr. Trump's words out of proportion. Boys will be...locker room talk...it's not that big a deal...Oh, but it is. It is and we need to have this discussion because boys need to understand that girls have no obligation to reward them with sex, or even a smile if they so choose. We need to make it safe for women to come forward to report sexual assault because a big reason why so many of them don't has to do with the fact that every facet of their life will be examined and as victims they are not only shamed, but blamed. Rape isn't about sex. It's about power. It's about disrespect. It's about time we talk about it openly so we can stop it from happening in the future.
