Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [79]
When I opened my mouth to form the words that would excuse me from participating, nothing came out.
So Mr. IFAP took his place as the second guy in the sex parade. To be fair, despite his advanced age he was a much better partner than the Mechanical Man. Yet I was still left wondering what it was about the act of intercourse that had captivated the souls of writers and poets for centuries.
The third guy I had sex with broke into my apartment the night after my big date with the Internationally Famous Art Professor.
I was asleep in my Murphy bed, in the farthest of the three rooms that stretched out in a row from the front door, when I awoke to a strange noise. I thought it was the wind rattling a window in the living room. When I stumbled out to fix the problem, only half awake, I saw a guy in a dark jacket standing beside the sawhorses. I froze as I tried to make the image compute, thinking, What about this don’t I understand?
Before I had an answer, he had moved toward me, grabbed me, and put his hand over my mouth. A wild electrical charge went through my brain, an exploding flashbulb. Who is he? What is he doing here?
And then my very next thought, swear to God, was Jesus Christ. He’s here to steal my power tools.
But I guess the guy must have had his own electric sander and band saw because he appeared to be ignoring my workbench entirely. The feeling of his big warm hand covering my mouth was an awful sensation.
I remember him saying something about having a knife as he dragged me to my bedroom and threw me on the bed. My mind was racing, searching for a strategy, a plan of escape. In the Abnormal Psychology 101 class I was taking, I had learned that rape was not about sex but about power. If subduing a struggling woman was a turn-on, then I would pretend to pass out. That might buy me some time.
So I went limp.
When he moved one of my arms or legs, I let it fall, like a corpse. When he started pulling off the T-shirt I was sleeping in, I let my lower jaw hang open, my tongue fall out until it was resting on my bottom lip. Keeping my eyes closed during all this was the real challenge. My eyelids didn’t want to relax. But I guess it all worked, because only a few minutes after it had begun, he got up and left the room.
Had he gone to get the power tools? Had he gone to get some water to throw on me to try to revive me? I didn’t wait to find out. His blue nylon windbreaker was still on the edge of the bed when I jumped up, locked the bedroom door, and started to scream.
Then I called 911.
By the time the police arrived, I was in my bedroom alone, sobbing, dressed in the first clothes I could find … the ones on the floor by the bed: my short T-shirt dress and a pair of high leather boots. The policemen barely spoke to me as they dusted the walls for fingerprints. I wondered if they thought of me as another stupid, weird Berkeley chick. I wondered if I was one.
Next thing I knew I was boarding an ambulance.
I barely recognized my reflection in the thick glass door as I was escorted into a county hospital emergency room somewhere in Oakland. With my hair sticking out at odd angles and my makeup smeared, I looked like I’d been trick-or-treating.
Taking a seat by the wall in the waiting area, I settled into staring. I had no attention span for paging through Redbook, the only magazine in the room and one I’d never liked under the best of circumstances. That the whole incident had even happened was just beginning to sink in. It was still hard to believe. I felt sad and alone, but there was no one I could think of to call. Most of my friends had gone home to some other state for the summer. I definitely didn’t want to involve my parents in this and take on their predictable rage. I could hear my father’s “beardo weirdo” rants echoing over the cacophony of my mother’s hysteria. So I sat very still and gazed, glassy-eyed, into the middle distance, seeing nothing, occasionally looking over at the young mom directly across the room from me, who was waiting for someone while keeping