Daily Archives: January 18, 2015

My policy on this blog is not to post trigger warnings; in this case, I make an exception.

If you are a survivor of sexual violence, think carefully about reading this post.  It contains graphic images of sexual predation, and could be triggering to anyone who has suffered sexual violence.  Please be careful.

Some of the following is included in my upcoming memoir, A Runaway Life, and in my novel-in-progress, The Beanbag Chair.  I’m sharing it with you here because I know that for every survivor of sexual violence who seeks treatment, there are untold numbers who don’t, and who live with the horror, shame, and destruction of the integrity of the self and the soul that sexual violence begets.

My first personal encounter with a Male-factor–as we used to call them during my tenure as expert examiner on child sexual abuse cases for a State District Attorney’s Office in a Northeastern state in America–was at age sixteen.

Earth Day, April 22, 1970.

I knew nothing about sex beyond veiled inferences gleaned from “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” swiped from my parents’ library and read over and over, to try to figure out what all that language was referring to.  I had seen the heifers in heat mounting each other in the pasture next door, but had no idea what they were trying to accomplish.  I had no frame of reference.

I was sixteen.  My interests were Latin, natural science, poetry, music, and art.  At sixteen I was permitted to date, but the boys in the country backwater school I attended were either brutish dolts or eggheads like myself who tended to stay at home trying to teach themselves Greek.

My mother continued her perennial assault on my self-image via an uninterrupted stream of verbal, psychological, and sometimes physical abuse.  My depressions grew blacker, my desire for relief by any means more intense, until finally I despaired of ever finding truth in living, and debated within myself whether this life was actual reality, or perhaps was a construct by some demonic mind for whom I was a toy.

An older man I met in the burger joint where I worked on the weekends admired my legs and asked me for a date.  I was flattered.  Someone thought I was attractive.  I got my mother’s permission–she was thrilled–and I went with him.

The details of that date have been published elsewhere.

“Don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt.”

I woke up to those words, still muzzy from the drug he had slipped me.  In the dark basement, his hand clamped over my mouth, my back squashed painfully into the cold concrete floor covered with moldy carpeting…..and the searing pain jolting through my body until at last he tore through, not through my hymen, but to the side of it, so that for many years I had not one but two openings there.  (At last in my 40’s I had the courage to take at least some of my body back, and had that part surgically removed.  Later I had a second surgery to try to repair the damage to the muscle between my vagina and my rectum, but that has mostly failed.)

After he finished with me, he bundled me back into his car and let me out in the dirt circle that stood in for my parents’ driveway, my blood soaking through my new spring coat.

That was my initiation into the cold, dark terrorism that is rape.  My virgin sex, shredded beyond repair.

I ran away from “home,” hoping to find relief, but ended up homeless, being raped when I asked for bread, for shelter, for medical care.

I look at the few pictures of myself from that time.  I was so young.  I looked thirteen at the most.  I had no figure, even though my mother’s pet name for me was “fat-ass.”  The eyes looking out of the delicate triangular face were hollow and haunted.

Fast forward two years, and I was living with a kind and honest couple who had taken an interest in helping me pull myself out of the life on the street.

The Viet Nam war was still raging, and I was a dedicated anti-war activist, a still-passionate Peacenik who believed that Good could triumph over Evil if only The People would shout it out loud enough.

Young Mr. Doctor-To-Be frequently managed to take time out from his medical studies at Boston University to help organize rallies.  We were Peace Rally Comrades, nothing more.

That time, I had incapacitating menstrual cramps in the midst of a rally on Boston Common.  The rally had such a huge turn-out that the riot cops were exercising their batons.  I was fainting and nauseous.  Mr. Not Yet Doctor fanned my sweaty face with his poster and proposed that we go to his apartment, where he had some medicine that would relieve my cramps.  Even though I had recently come off the streets, I did not doubt his intentions.  Have I told you that I’m Autistic?  I’m Autistic.  I can’t read intentions.

He half-carried me to his apartment.  I remember a dark stairwell, and being “helped” up the stairs.  I remember the small white bedroom with its unremarkable furnishings.  I remember being told to take off my panties and lie down.  I remember wondering why that was necessary, but he must certainly know because he was the Almost-Doctor.

I remember his voice as he hissed in my ear:

“Don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt.”

He took something out of his shirt pocket: a penlight, such as all doctors have in their pockets.  I thought he was going to look at me with it, and froze.

He raped me with it, and as he did, he masturbated, and when he was finished he told me to go.

I climbed down from his bed, numb and bleeding, fumbled my way down the dark stairway and into the bright-white sunlight, dazed, blood running into my sandals, squish, squish.

I was in a part of Boston I had never seen before.  I managed to get home somehow, my long skirts hiding the blood.

Fast forward three years and many events less dramatic than those.

Irish flute master classes with a famous and now dead Irish flute master.  (NOT James Galway, thanks to G-d.  And NOT Cathal McConnell.)

One day he refused my payment for my lesson.  I thought that was odd, but did not understand the implications.  I Am Autistic.

He got his tween coat, and off we went to the Custom House Tap, where we played duets for Black-And-Tans until we were both solidly drunk.  He invited himself to my place for tea.  We had not even got off the sidewalk when it started.  This part I cannot write, for it is too triggering for me even to remember.  But I didn’t run away.  I was like a rabbit transfixed by the hard gaze of the wolf.  I went along.  I let him into my apartment.  It got worse.  Then it got horrible.  Then he left me, gagging and bleeding, and I never heard anything more from him.  Several years ago I went about trying to find his whereabouts.  No purpose in mind; I just wanted to know.

The obituary said he had drowned while taking a swim off his private dock in Martha’s Vineyard.  The pit of my stomach was cold: just as cold as that night that he rammed himself down my throat until I lost consciousness, waking choking on my own blood and his disgusting fluids.

Why do I wonder that it’s so hard to trust?  Why do I feel as if around every corner there is something huge waiting for me, a muddy black smudge beckoning, threatening to take me over and obliterate me again and again and again?

Why do I feel a terror of closed spaces, a dread of not being able to escape?  Why must I always have my back to a wall, facing the door, and know every escape route?

Why, when I think of being imprisoned, does the panic rise in my throat, and thoughts of suicide race through my head?

“Don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt.”

I swam 30 laps in the Y pool yesterday.  Fat girls rock.

SoulCollage card “The First Way”

I’m too tired to make a real blog post, so I’ll just say: Abilify at last! Yay!

Co-pay: $25 YAY!!

1- Thank and link the person(s) who nominated you on your blog.
Thanks on the rocks! I can’t resist memes with questions.
2- Post the award in a visible area.
Okay.
3- Answer the 10 question’s you will be given.
Okay.
4- Nominate 7 other lovely blogger’s.
Nope, I don’t want to startle the horses.
5- Make sure you write out 10 new question’s for your nominees to answer.
Okay I will just in case anyone feels like it.
6- Don’t break the rules
Don’t lecture me. Your apostrophes need fixing.

1. If you could turn back time, would you? Why or why not?
No, I really don’t like Cher. Okay yeah I would actually. I’d go back and give my mother much less of a hard time about my sexuality and suicidality. I’d leave the other conflicts, just those two things.
2. What is your all-time favorite song?
R.E.M. – Wall of Death (the answer will be different day by day.)
3. Sweet or Salty?
Both together is yummy. If there is a gun to my head, salt.
4. Biggest fear?
Loss.
5. Best Childhood memory?
None.
6. Turn on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, or what have you, and randomly shuffle through to the third song. What is it? How does it fit in your situation right in this moment?
Nick Cave – Brompton Oratory
The reading is from Luke 24
Where Christ returns to his loved ones
I look at the stone apostles
Think that it’s alright for some
Nick is my favourite Christian in the world, I think. I am an atheist, but I love the poetry in religion and the compassion and serenity of followers (good ones). So … the song relates enormously to memory for me. I bought Boatman’s  Call in Nottingham and Brompton Oratory was my favourite song on it fairly fast. Idk how long later, I was au pairing in Knightsbridge for a French family with 264548 kids and we walked to Brompton Oratory for mass on xmas eve. And and and. Returning to the present, it’s about loss and intense grief – and so am I.
7. What movie best describes your life at the moment?
Three colours: Blue (Trois couleurs: Bleu)
8. What was the deciding factor in finally starting your blog?
I needed to write. I needed to process my diagnosis. Oh look, another clang assoc.
9. Religion, Spirituality, or Science? None? Combo?
Science and mystery.
10. You are given the choice between living in your dreams or living in your reality. What do you choose and why?
Reality, unless I can take all loved ones and dogs to dreamland. My dreams are safer, but my reality is beautiful despite a few wounds.

1. Who are you and what are you doing on my blog?
2. What is the meaning of life?
3. I’ve just set fire to your home, you can take three non-living things – what do you pick? Don’t worry, your family and pets are safe.
4. You have just won ONE MILLION DOLLARS (of the US variety), what will you do with it?
5. You can go back in time and change one historical event – what, why and how?
6. You can be someone else for a week – who and why?
7. You can hook up with your dream date – who and where?
8. Who do you respect the most and why?
9. What’s your guilty pleasure?
10. Does my ass look fat in this?