by TJ Price
I’m going to have to change the names in this story, but not to protect the innocent. As the telling would have it, none involved in the following can claim that status, either objectively or by adhering to the legal definition. I can’t tell you why he did what he did, or what about what I did made him do what he did, and I can’t tell you why his friends did what they did, either. I can’t explain the policies or procedures of law enforcement at the time, nor fathom the way in which the trial unfolded; neither am I in contact with anyone mentioned any longer, to confer over shared memory.
There will be some description of physical assault and sexual aggression in what follows. If these things are something to which you are sensitive, please be advised.
It probably will also end on a mostly unresolved note, so please also be advised those of you sensitive to lack of catharsis.
Sadly, that’s just how things like this go, most of the time.
This will serve as the first part of the story, as the writing of it has gone on much longer than I’d anticipated. The conclusion will be posted in four weeks’ time.
1.
It was in the fall, in New England. The way most stories in this time and place begin is with a skirl of autumnal leaves and the crisp, austere smile of winter beginning to curve over the land. This year, though, there had been more rain than normal, and I remember that everything was shiny and wet. It hadn’t got cold enough for anything to freeze, and yet the world had a glossy, plastic sheen already. Some nights, ice crept in around the edges, but only hesitantly, and never with a bold intent to stay.
Still, there was a sense of something new in the air for me. College was finally becoming something that had a purpose to me—in my sophomore year, I’d declared my major. It was a lot less dramatic than I’d thought it would be, requiring more in the way of paperwork than any kind of actual declaration, I thought. A pretentious teenager, my idyll of higher education had involved vaulted cathedral ceilings, immense libraries, hushed veneration of the Pursuit of Knowledge—I’d imagined some kind of solemn ceremony for the declaration of one’s major, but was disappointed. I should’ve known it from the first visit, driving states’ worth of road to get there and being greeted by an array of desultory, squat buildings that resembled the uninspired façade of high school (all over again!) moreso than anything venerable, I thought.
Perhaps fittingly for such a dramatic idyll, the major I’d declared was theatre. The stage fascinated me—had, for years. The idea of entertaining in disguise struck close to the marrow; I was uncertain of myself, and sensitive to the needs of others. I was impressionable, and aware of it—I did not want someone else’s hands to shape me before I’d had a chance to mold myself, and aware was I as well of a seemingly-diminishing amount of time associated with that chance. I had no desire to label myself as any one thing; I wished to be protean, chameleonic. I never wanted anyone’s gaze to be able to linger on me for longer than a moment, else they be able to see—perhaps—too much. It’s obvious, then, to see why acting appealed to me, and continued to be a draw.
I didn’t end up an actor. Someone who is painfully aware of themselves cannot be an actor; they cannot get past the idea of themselves on a stage. To act convincingly requires a certain ignorance of oneself, I think—or at least, a selective blindness. (The best can turn it on and off, or at least bluff, effortlessly, and it is this very duplicity we admire that also causes us to be wary of them.) I am not such a good liar. Lying mandates confidence in oneself, a blind faith that whatever one says is true for them, and such is the power of their own convincing that it radiates outward and blinds those in the immediate vicinity, too. These folks are often also possessed of such charisma that it’s nearly pathological, another trait that I lacked—perhaps due to my intense feelings of self-doubt.
Still, I wanted to act. What my therapists have called “mentalizing,” billed as a cognitive distortion, I once thought was some kind of talent—less projection of my own concerns and neuroses and more something akin to “mind reading.” You see, from an early age I’d always felt I could intuit someone else’s feelings or state of mind just from interpreting their demeanor. I was too young to understand things like “micro-expressions” (or else they hadn’t come up with a word for it yet), but how to “read a room” seemed obvious to me, but felt like a dimension many others often struggled to understand. (When I was being charitable, I thought of it that way; when I felt pessimistic, I would say they didn’t care about it enough to look.) I was able, from an early age, to get into the skin of another person, even if only imagined. I was well-read, and lonely. I spent most of my time in my own head—still do, to some extent—pretending I was anyone other than myself. Unfortunately, this activity did not translate well to acting, for the reasons already mentioned, and I found myself quickly becoming disheartened at my lack of success.
A brief ray of hope came when I was cast in a one-act on the main stage that glossy, sodden fall. It was a realist play, a two-hander script meant to depict the fraught atmosphere of male-to-male relations in the early 90s. I’d had my own with this particular cranny of identity, and so perhaps it was a fait accompli that I ended up in the role of the artist, opposite a sinewy, tan guy double my age playing the artist’s first real infatuation with another man—a boxer, now retired, who has commissioned a portrait. The entire play was set on a beach: for the set, the designer had chosen to build a 10×10’ sandbox, and it was within these bounds we kept the action—except for one crucial moment, when my character was to dash offstage into the “ocean,” and return soaking wet.
Rehearsals were fun, at first. I relished the idea of losing myself in this character, with whose backstory I could relate. It hadn’t been a boxer, for me—hell, even twenty years later, I can’t think of any one definitive moment—but at some point, I realized there was a polarity inside of me more triggered toward men than women, yet another fun discrepancy to widen the divide between myself and what felt like the vast majority of others. To add to that, my attraction felt strange, mutated, unnatural, shameful—something to hide. My stepfather—the only real source of actual masculinity in my life—despised me, couldn’t relate to me, and who could blame him? I even overheard him talking to my mother one night, saying that I was “goofy,” which was his chosen derogatory phrase, synonymous with “weird” or “stupid.” (On another occasion, that I had “book sense” but no “common sense,” for which I was ostensibly to be punished—not only by him, but my life, time and time again. Whether or not that has proven true, I can’t say, and neither can I say it would even if I’d done anything different.)
Most of the time, my infatuations were rooted in envy. The guys I wanted were guys I wanted to be, not be with. I had no interest in sex. All that sticky fluid and sweat and slapping of flesh; all that heated, humid darkness, all that fetid breath and fingers, tickling all over, invasive and insistent and out of control; all that rapacious hunger—sure, it starts with a nibble, but it quickly progresses to gnawing and chewing and I’d heard those noises coming from my parents’ room and no thank you. Why would anyone be moaning “no” so loudly in the middle of something pleasurable? I couldn’t understand it. There was nothing about the loss of control of my own body that I liked—let alone that same phenomenon in the company of others! My own nocturnal excursions into onanism were hurried, furtive things; the pleasure derived therein shrank quickly in the monstrous wave of shame that bloomed afterward.
But still, guilty fascination with men wasn’t that far from my own experience, and so I felt like I could slide into character fairly easily. The dynamic of the two characters—the artist and the boxer—flowed naturally for me, from beat to beat, most of the time, and especially when just beginning to sketch out the beginnings of our movements on stage, known as “blocking.” But then it came time to actually start rehearsing the play as it would be performed, and there was a rather intimate portion of the script in which my character had to take off his shirt, and consent to be buried in the sand. I had convinced myself, through all the weeks of rehearsal that led up to it, that it wouldn’t be an issue for me. I didn’t like to take off my shirt, never had, and I didn’t want to do it onstage, and certainly not with another man hulking behind me, his hand crawling like a flesh-colored spider over my shoulder. I tried. I’d like to say it was a “valiant” try, but it was not. The moment the line was delivered, and I felt his fingers tightening on my skin, I lost control and broke character. I ran offstage, down the aisle, and out the back of the theater, leaning against the brick and breathing in the wet mist of the afternoon.
Shortly, Iris, the stage manager, came out after me. Iris was a self-described “dyke,” infamous for having recently produced and directed The Vagina Monologues, as well as creating an enormous felt puppet of the titular organ used in its staging. She walked toward me, and offered me one of her Parliament Lights, the ones with the recessed filter. I told her, I don’t smoke, and she shrugged, still holding the cigarette out to me. Pretend you’re James Dean, she said.
I took the cigarette and she lit it for me. It didn’t make me feel like James Dean. It made me feel lightheaded and dizzy. My whole body tingled. I felt like something heretofore kept chained to a perch was now giddily swooping and diving inside my skull. And she asked me what was up, and I told her how I hated to be touched, and I didn’t want to take my shirt off, and it all came boiling out of me. Iris was sympathetic, she nodded and frowned in all the right places, and when I was spent, we both stood there in silence for a moment, trails of our cigarette smoke smudging the air around us.
There’s a guy who might be able to help, Iris mused out loud. I think you know him. And she told me his name, and I was surprised—he was the RA for my floor, in the dorms. He’s great at giving massages, Iris explained to me. I think you should hit him up, see if he can help you get over your fear of being touched.
I didn’t really know this guy at all, beyond the first time we’d had a floor meeting at the beginning of the semester. He seemed nice enough—I’d had no interactions with him whatsoever, other than a friendly wave in the halls from time to time. I knew he was a music major, but I didn’t know what he played, and his name had come up once or twice due to the presence of various overlapping majors—the university had recently created a musical theater major—a pilot program which only a few had declared, one of which was my roommate, at the time.
In the end, Iris scribbled down his AIM handle on a piece of paper, and thrust it into my hand. I thanked her, and resolved to think about it some, but felt dubious. Despite the doubt, the show was going to go up in a matter of weeks, and I was nowhere near comfortable enough to be fully in character. I had to do something.
That night, with my roommate already asleep, and my face lit by the anodyne wash of the computer screen’s glow, I typed in the name on the scrap of paper and composed a message.
It took me about an hour to find the right words, and I wish it had taken me longer. I wish I’d trusted the delete key, the X in the corner of the window; I wish there’d been a sudden and inexplicable power surge that fried the circuitry within and made it impossible to ever use the machine ever again. I wish I’d quit the play like I’d wanted to, despite the consequences to the show, or to my professional ambitions.
But I didn’t. I hit SEND, and that was the first fatal mistake.
2.
I knocked on the door. On his whiteboard, someone had drawn a goofy face, with rolling eyes and a bulbous nose and a tongue waggling out of an elongated smile. The face had thick black glasses and a rudiment of spiky hair; it was clearly intended to refer to the room’s occupant, the RA, who also had these characteristics. I was not attracted to him, to be clear—first of all, he was “out,” and there was something about the flamboyant insistence on sexual preference as identifier that I didn’t feel drawn to; the act itself repelled me, let alone making it public.
I’d like to add here briefly that I describe personal and subjective feelings of a twenty-something sophomore here, and they do not in any way contribute to how I actually feel about someone doing such, nor making it a part of their personality. It’s just not something that I felt attracted to at the time. The same went for the RA himself—he was not my type. A bit bigger around the middle than my usual preference, kind of bearish, with an oily sheen on his blotchy face and a rayonnée of spikes protruding from his skull, gelled so thickly that I could see the pinkish scalp between. He wore a hemp necklace with shells braided into it, a small silver ring in the lobe of one ear, and he wore far too much Axe body spray, or else some brand of cheap cologne.
When Ricky opened the door, the lights in his room were dim, and softly colored. I remember being amazed at how big it seemed—I’d only ever been able to live with a roommate, never had a “single” dorm room to myself before. (My first experience in the dorms was actually in a “forced triple,” which meant I shared the room with two other guys—both of which happened to be hockey players who, in one awful instance, each brought a girl back to the room and had sex with them at the same time, while I was forced to listen.) He was playing a familiar song, though I couldn’t remember the name of it off-hand right at the moment. Such a simple, descending melody, with a curlicue accompaniment. Strings. I was too distracted by the hundredfold ways I needed to keep vigilant, stay guarded, even with the stage manager’s approval of this guy’s skill.
“So, why don’t you just sit down on the bed, here,” Ricky said, and grasped me by the shoulders, steering me toward that very spot. I stiffened in his hands, and he instantly took a step back, chuckling. “Whoa, okay, no need to get defensive,” he said, and I crimsoned.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I told you it was bad.”
“I see,” he said, rubbing his goatee with one hand. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes sparked. “I’m going to have my work cut out for me with you, aren’t I?”
I managed a smile, but I was nervous. I didn’t want to be a challenge. We’d spoken briefly on AIM; I told him about my issue, and why I needed to get over it, and I told him that Iris had recommended him. He laughed a little, which I didn’t understand, and which I decided to ignore, given the circumstances.
“Well, go ahead and sit down. And don’t worry,” he said, wagging his finger at me with a grin. “I won’t ask you to take your shirt off.”
“Thanks,” I said, half-relieved. The tone of his voice, though, suggested an unvoiced yet, which didn’t exactly inspire me to safety. “I appreciate this, by the way,” I said, sitting down at the very edge of his bed.
“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” he said, and I felt his weight sink the mattress as he got up onto the bed. I could feel the bulk of him, on his knees behind me, radiating heat like a mountain of new slag. Then, the pressure of one fingertip, pressing into the nape of my neck. Instantly, I recoiled, my breath zipping itself up inside of me as quickly as a threatened turtle, or a barnacle abandoned by the sea.
“Okay, first things first,” Ricky instructed. “You gotta breathe.”
“Okay,” I said, but didn’t unclench.
“And lower your damn shoulders,” he laughed. I tried, but I didn’t know how. They felt locked in place. I closed my eyes, trying to mentally visualize them lowering, like a drawbridge after the passage of a large vessel. I felt them give, maybe a centimeter, but even that minor gap was enough to flood me with some kind of optimism. Maybe there was hope for me! I tried harder, seeing that bridge in my mind’s eye again, slowly lowering. I fantasized I could even hear creaking and grinding; I knew I needed patience. If I did it all at once, it could break—
And that’s when pressure fell on both of my shoulders, a heavy, flattish thing that landed with a shocking amount of gravity. I was so taken aback by it that I almost fell off the bed, and I would have, had it not been for Ricky suddenly grabbing me around the stomach with one arm, the limb as smooth and sinuous as a boa constrictor, and—in the next moment—it tightened, so alarmingly that I thought I might throw up.
“Whoa there,” he said, still chuckling. I felt like a total fool. I tried to laugh along with him. What a goof, I tried to say with my laughter. What a goofy, goofy guy! Ha ha!
But like I said, I’m not a very good liar, and an even worse actor. Despite my flawed performance, Ricky continued to hold me in that position, awkwardly half-on and half-off the bed. He drew me closer to him, and I felt the thrush of his breath on the backside of my ear.
“Relax,” he said. He’d been chewing spearmint gum, a scent I associated with my stepfather, whose jaws were always masticating a stick of the same flavor. “Relax,” he repeated, with emphasis that felt both encouraging and judgmental.
I tried. Lord, did I try. But every performance I put on was less well-received than the last, and soon it became clear to me that this was not going to be successful. I started flashing through my options, even as Ricky continued to try to wring two decades’ worth of stress and worry from my muscles. “God, it’s like corded steel,” he remarked at one point, and I murmured some kind of assent, paired it with some kind of self-deprecating comment. I had to get out of there. This wasn’t going to work. I’d have to quit the play.
It took too long, maybe. The song kept playing in the background, the melody having become a dolorous arrangement of notes, played as if through molasses. The very air seemed to congeal; I felt like I was becoming encased in some kind of non-Euclidean gel, and every effort I made to fight out of it only resulted in its increased impermeability. Panic began to leach into my mind, and desperation, and finally, I worked up the nerve to say something.
“Thanks, you know,” I said. “I appreciate this, but, uh, I don’t know if it’s really working.”
“That’s because you haven’t relaxed yet. C’mon. Breathe in and out for me. Can you do that? Inhale… hold it, then exhale. Do it with me. Inhale…”
Maybe he was right. Either way, I figured obliging would be the best way to end all this. Maybe if he saw I couldn’t even do that, he’d give up on me as a lost cause. He’d agree that I was a lost cause. Agree with me, agree with my stepfather, agree with everyone else who’d ever known me. I inhaled.
In…
I closed my eyes. Imagined the bridge again.
… and out.
I exhaled, and with that breath, I was stunned to see the bridge in my mind hit by a meteor, evoking a scene like a disaster movie. The structure buckled in the middle; twisted, collapsed. I heard dim shrieking as imagined cars and passengers plopped into the murky river below.
“That’s it!” I heard Ricky exclaim behind me. “There you go! See? Was that so hard?”
Relief, marvelous and unfamiliar, wound through me, like a secret key had been threaded into a secret lock. I felt like weeping, and almost let myself. Ricky’s hands were firm, kneading my flesh still even as I felt myself buckle and break under the force of finally allowing myself to touch me—without the need to defend myself.
Was it what he did, or was it how I reacted to what he did? Did I allow him in, or did he press his own way in? Either way, victory was mine! It made me giddy. This proved that I could go on stage, I could act (to the best of my ability); I could let myself be touched by the other actor, I might even be OK with taking my shirt off—though that last bit still felt a bit uncertain. It didn’t matter. I’d conquered something I didn’t think I could, and the rush was a particularly heady feeling. I could go, now.
I opened my mouth to say something. I was going to thank him, I think. I was going to shake his hand and I was going to walk down the hall back to my room and maybe cry quiet tears of release, so as not to wake up my roommate. I was going to be mended, I was being mended.
And then a meteor hit me. The pressure on my shoulders changed, altered swiftly, and I found myself tossed awkwardly backward and to the side, my head just aslant one of Ricky’s pillows. I was looking up at the ceiling, one leg still akimbo off the bed, one twisted up underneath me. Ricky adjusted me like a ragdoll, flopping my limbs this way and that. I was too stunned, really, to fight back, and instead, I laughed. I laughed—a horrible, piteous bleating—the memory of which, to this very day, causes my entire body to seize with recalled embarrassment.
Then he was on top of me, his round, grinning face hovering like a bloated moon. He pressed his hands against my shoulders, pinning me to where he slept every night. He made a joke. I don’t remember what it was, because I wasn’t in the room anymore. I was here, right now, in the future moment, with my present self, curiously observing the words as they appeared on the screen. I was—am—curled up next to myself right now, murmuring something about at least I can write about this, at least I can use this—
But even now I understand that I can’t allow myself to stay in this moment, so far removed from the moment that is happening. I tell myself that it’s all right, it’ll all be over soon, and gently dispatch myself back to that moment, the same moment when Ricky’s face is descending toward my own, lips parted, his smell coming with him as though he had gathered all of its dispersed particles to himself to surround himself in its concentrated, noxious cloud, before the plunge.
And yet, moments before contact, I jerked my head to the side, and his attempt was thwarted. The moon of him rose back up into the sky, its expression cratered with perturbation. I made a joke. I had to go, you see, had to get up early, had a geography exam the next day, or maybe history, something about Napoleon.
“Napoleon can wait,” Ricky said. I’ll never forget the way he said it. That, and the twinkle in his eye once again, betrayed his intent. The muscles in my neck had already twitched, readying for the next time I’d need to escape his descent, but this time he came down too quickly for me. His mouth squashed down upon my own, but I’d be damned if I was going to open up for him. His lips were chapped—I felt pieces flaking off as he mashed down; felt his tongue seeking, probing, like a hostile alien lifeform, behind them.
He lifted his face again, and this time I could see that his confusion had molted fully into frustration. Was I doing something wrong? Was this … part of it? Did I sign up for this? Did I sign up for this and not fully read the fine print of what I’d signed? That was possible—maybe it was all a misunderstanding.
“What, you don’t think I’m hot?” Ricky pouted, pooching out his lower lip.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, even then. On the other hand, the answer was emphatically NO. I wanted to shape my entire body into the word NO, but I couldn’t even get my mouth to form it—and the moment I tried, down came the moon again—but this time, it did not come alone. One of his hands flew from my shoulder, forming a hideous pinch to either side of my nostrils, then clamped together, cutting off inflow.
Slowly, one last time, his face rose, and this time, the moon was polluted with the awful trench of his victorious smile. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. Time said it all for him.
I held out as long as I could. My vision started to foam with stars, and pain blossomed in the middle of my skull. I think it was more reflex than anything which forced my mouth to open, greedily gasping for oxygen, and it was at the same moment that Ricky saw his opportunity.
I cannot adequately describe the sensation of his tongue in my mouth. It was short, stubby, and vainglorious. It couldn’t prod much further than my incisors, but it still came garbed in spearmint. I almost vomited on the spot, and part of me wishes that I had, even if it might’ve led to certain aspiration.
Apparently that was all he wanted. After, he withdrew, leaving a faint trail of translucent slime from my lips to his. He licked at his lips and smiled at me.
I was the embodiment of an earthquake. He didn’t try to stop me as I got up and swung my legs off the side of the bed. He said something lazy, something playful, but it was clear how bored he’d become. I didn’t want to look at him, for fear I’d see he’d suddenly sprouted long, curving fangs.
How did I escape? I don’t remember. Some awkward stammering. When I closed the door of his dorm room behind me, I didn’t feel any safer than I had moments before. He was just down the hallway, after all. I’d have to see him every day. Have to avoid him, every day. What about floor meetings? What about, what about? Would he make that same curling smirk at me? Would he dangle it in front of me, like a taunt? Would he dismiss it? Did this happen all the time?
Is this what guys … did?
I had a difficult time getting to sleep. The notes of the music from Ricky’s room kept spiraling in my head, wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t be until years later, having just begun to watch Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser for the first time, that I’d remember the name of it. As a grassy field, tossed violently to and fro by the invisible hand of the wind, came into view, music both somber and forlorn began to play, the simple descending melody unmistakable. The caption read:
[ ♫ pachelbel – canon in d ♫ ]
I whitened, my hands turned into fists, and I began to tremble, but I didn’t have to leave the room until words in German appeared on the screen, superimposed over the manic grasses:
Hören Sie denn nicht das entsetzliche Schreien ringsum,
das man gewöhnlich die Stille heißt?
Or, in English, as the subtitles so helpfully translated:
don’t you hear that terrible screaming all around,
which men customarily call silence?
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.