CW: Roe v Wade-related, patriarchy, sexual assault, personal narrative
That moment when you’re scrolling through Facebook and you realize it’s the birthday of a guy who almost raped you. You wonder (a) when did you accept his friend request ‘cause you certainly didn’t request his and (b) why are you saying “almost raped you” instead of the truth: he sexually assaulted you.
“Happy Birthday to the best man I have ever known. I am so lucky to have you in my life!” One post reads. This would be his current girlfriend or wife, you don’t waste your time finding out. You simply suspect that she is, in fact, not very lucky to “have him.” You notice at a glance that her face looks about ten years younger than his, In her profile picture, a family photo: little brothers, mom and dad. “Gah,” you think to yourself. “He must’ve picked her up in the parking lot of a school dance.”
In his profile picture he looks just the same as he did in high school, except for an entire extra chin. After you write about him, you vow, you will unfriend him. How he even came back into your life, you do not know. It was an “almost rape” stored up on the shelf in the way back of your mind—almost not memorable enough to be right up front with the others. But in retrospect, it really was memorable.
You think back to the night it happened. You realize now why you didn’t want to remember this one. You have to dust off the almost-rape and remember the details. It doesn’t take long before the memories undress themselves.
*
It was Junior year and I was in-between boyfriends. I think my steady boyfriend was mad at me for, I don’t know, smoking or drinking or both. We were on a break. We showed up at the same party but we ignored each other, not really fuming this time, just content with what it was.
What did we call that place? The sticks? The desert? It was a twenty-five minute drive out someplace near Gleeson, Arizona, that only undocumented immigrants and Border Patrol agents ever went to. Naturally, we were more concerned with the BP cause they more closely resembled cops. So we watched for headlights.
We were out there binge drinking around a big fire. It was a standard Friday night. There was a massive red dirt hill which all the pick-up driving teenage boys liked to try to summit with their rigs. I rode in the back of one such pick-up with a bunch of other kids cause we genuinely thought we could not be harmed, if only for the fact that we were seventeen and popular. It wouldn’t have taken much to roll the rig, in retrospect. Everything in retrospect.
It was possible that I hadn’t eaten dinner that night.
I was used to chugging beer—Keystone Light and Budweiser—but not hard liquor like Schnapps or 99 Apples. Someone had brought some hard liquor and we all went at it, taking turns, both teenage boys and teenage girls, the music blasting through someone’s car stereo.
My on-again-off-again boyfriend didn’t drink much and at some point he drove home; I barely registered this out of the corner of my eye. He possessed somewhat of a moral compass, which made him feel out-of-the-loop with the rest of us I am sure.
A girlfriend of mine recently got a job at a burger joint in a nearby town so she couldn’t make it, but her boyfriend was there. They were the couple, that couple at school who’d been together for years. I didn’t think I’d have to keep an eye on him for her or anything like that. He loved her. He showed it in big displays of affection on Valentine’s Day and they were attached at the hip, always…so why was he following me into the backseat of a car?
It was late, late, and the liquor had gotten to me. The liquor had gotten to me in a bigger way than any liquor or beer had ever gotten to me before. I’d been in an earthquake when I lived in California and even though I was in Arizona now the ground similarly rose and dipped beneath my feet.
“I’m too drunk, I’m too drunk, I’m too drunk,” I announced, stumbling my way toward my grandmother’s SUV, climbing into the backseat to lie down. I tried to close the door behind me but someone was on my tail. What did not happen next is one of those high school boys telling me, “You’re going to be OK. Just sleep it off, here, have some water.”
No. What happened next is that one of those boys climbed in the front seat, watching me as if I were some sort of show. Then my friend’s boyfriend climbed in the backseat, which appalled me. By this point, I had one door propped open and was vomiting violently into the dirt outside, my body splayed across the backseat. The boyfriend had wriggled his way in, closed the door behind him, and was moving his hands up and down my legs, my shoulders, and my back. “What? No,” I sputtered back at him, “Stop.”
I vomited again. I vomited until long noodles of yolk-colored vomit hung from my lips. Later I learned this was called bile and it meant you had nothing left in your system, no fluids or foods, to throw up. It is essentially the lining of your stomach.
I felt like I was under water. The earth was still moving. In slow motion, I looked back at my friend’s boyfriend, someone I had said maybe ten words to in all of my life. But I was from California, which explained everything. I was easy, it meant. I had slept with other guys as proof.
“Stop,” I croaked, as he ran his hands all over the crotch of my jeans, grabbing and prodding and trying to unbutton my pants with the snap of his fingers.
“Stop,” I tried again, feeling weak and suffocated by bile and hot desert air. There was sweat on my forehead and neon vomit on my forearms. I looked at the boy in the front seat, pleading with my eyes. In retrospect, he wasn’t watching. In retrospect, maybe he was waiting his turn.
If this really happened, I thought, I would lose one of my best friends. She should have never gotten that job at the burger joint.
Then suddenly, as if my body was resisting what was happening in every possible way: I farted. Not once, but twice, not questionable—but in an assertive, no-question-about-it kind of way. Time stopped. In that instant, I sobered up, mortified. Then I vomited again, then farted again. This was not me. I would not choose to do this front of the high school quarterback, I would not choose to do this not at all. And this was the high school quarterback, like in real life. He stiffened. I glared. I glared at the guy in the front seat too, dagger looks, and then heaved a big giant breath in and I whimpered, embarrassed, sick and defeated. I surrendered. Proof it was going to be rape: they didn’t even laugh at me. Piece by drunken, broken, mislead piece, the boys scattered. They were embarrassed for me and not because I was going to be raped, which was the sick part, but because I had done something girls were just not supposed to do, I farted. Double whammy on me. I wasn’t even sexy enough to rape. Awesome.
Meanwhile, he had a boner. You know what a boner is? It’s a weapon. I had already learned that about men and their bodies. The things are as hard and long as batons.
I locked the doors on the SUV. I felt embarrassed, but spared. I drove home at dawn past desert mesas and one-horse towns. I had a headache, yes, and I worried about the dirt that covered my vehicle. How did it get so dirty if I was just at my girlfriend’s house down the street? My grandmother would want to know. I stopped off at a car wash and rinsed my vehicle clean, the water quickly evaporating in the already hot sun. No evidence of nothing. Doubly spared. Nothing to talk about. No one to tell. Nothing to see here. No harm, no foul. An almost rape, shelved.
*
I was caught off guard with your birthday, quarterback. I never would’ve known. The event was shelved in the back of my consciousness along with bad birthday presents I never really liked, the components of long division, trivial interactions at city bus stops, and hours logged at part time gigs. But it wasn’t not being raped, quarterback, but it was me being molested. You, running your hands all over my crotch, like other hands had done even after I had said a clear no. And out of shame-slash-believing the lies I had always been told about myself—that I had asked for it somehow, being a Californian, not being a virgin—I didn’t even tell your girlfriend about it. I told absolutely no one, ever. I suspected that out of shame-slash-believing the lies that your girlfriend had always been told about herself, that she would go back to you either way, and that I would lose a friend.
This story reminds me of one of my girlfriend’s similar experiences. Both stories reveal how women are so conditioned for abuse or subject to unjust ownership of our bodies that we struggle to address these issues head on but instead we come around to it in ways that it is acceptable for us to do—personally and culturally—something expected, like vanity, “Oops, I farted. Now leave me alone!” Or, in my friend’s case, “You did not just say my ass was flat, I’m leaving now!”
In my friend’s experience, she was travelling alone abroad. An attractive traveler who was also alone chatted her up. They had lunch. They had dinner. The next day they went to the beach together. They had lunch again. They were staying at the same small hostel. She took the evening to herself and stayed in. But that didn’t stop the young man, the only acquaintance she had made, from knocking on her dorm room door late that night.
“Yea?” She questioned, wondering: Crap, did I lock the door?
She hadn’t.
The man approached her bed and she stiffened. The light was out, it was dark.
After some small talk and him feeling around on her bed, holding her hand and touching her leg, she kindly asked him to leave. “I’m not feeling well,” she told him, she lied.
She was young. He was cute. This was supposed to be a thing, a normal thing, but he had crossed a boundary, no doubt. The next morning she saw him in the lobby. “Are you going to the beach?” He asked. And before she could answer, “I am too,” he said, following her.
Down on the shore my friend shook out her towel. She lay down and turned her head away from him. She wished she could vacation in peace. She wanted nothing more than to be alone again.
“You do have a flat ass, don’t you?” The man told her, as he stared at her in her bikini.
It was then, and only then, that she stood up, figuratively wagged her finger at him, and ran away. If my story was, er— divine intervention, hers was an example of what women have been conditioned to react or underreact to.
For the record, my friend didn’t give a damn what he thought about her ass. She was only concerned with being dominated, possibly even raped, by this stranger. She was, admittedly and naturally, underprepared for how to address it. Her reaction (like my farts) were in an attempt to reach him, to get her message across, to Speak Man, and hopefully, to survive.
