I believe Christine Blasey Ford

I think the place I wondered into for dinner was called the Mad Rose. A good place to go on the night when you are mad and going to see a movie about a mad king.

I watched her testimony. I watched Kavanaugh's. That night when I'd had enough, I took myself out to dinner and to the Fathom Events' "King Lear" with Ian McKellan--a film of the play from London, captured live. "Lear" is a typical Shakespeare tragedy, by which I mean almost everyone dies. It felt like a party. Popcorn and my silent cheers every time another manipulative character met his/her bloody end. Though I flinched and squirmed when Cornwall gouged out the good Gloucester's eyes. Earlier in front of the TV, I'd felt like gouging out my own.

Christine Blasey Ford walked into an environment where she knew no one except the small coterie of lawyers, husband, and maybe another few persons that she'd brought with her. She was in a room mostly populated by men to talk about being sexually assaulted. In a strange city. In a different time zone. Participating in a process she knew so little about that she was surprised to learn just a few weeks earlier, that she'd need a lawyer. She was there to tell what had happened to her 36 years  earlier. A story of assault and how she'd feared for her life. A hazy story with many of its details lost to memory's inherent failings while other details had drilled themselves into her being.

Dr. Ford suffers from anxiety. Check. She suffers from claustrophobia. Check. She's afraid to fly. Check. Yet she flew to D.C. to appear at the hearing. Check. While the fear of flying yet flying conundrum seemed to puzzle a few people, I wasn't one of them. I am afraid to fly. Flying is anxiety and claustrophobia combined. But I have to fly if I want to get to the places I need to go. I need an aisle seat. Near the front or the rear of the cabin. I need booze. I need the strange man sitting next to me not to touch me. Not his leg against my leg. Not his arm against mine. I need more booze. I need something completely engaging to read. Preferably something somewhat terrifying. Though not something terrifying about flying. Terror to cure terror. A weird homeopathy.  I might watch a movie if there's an appealing one offered, but if there's genuine emotional content, often I will sob uncontrollably--like I did recently when I watched the the Mr. Rogers movie on the way back from Minnesota. Love and its companion emotions  move us in the face of terror. Those are the moments during the hearing that Christine Blasey Ford cried.

Bret Kavanaugh was in his element. D.C. Familiar faces. Scores of men ready to believe him, rooting for him, the esteemed federal judge. Yet he came in full of bluster and protest. He would not or could not answer many questions directly. I might believe that he believes that he did not attack Dr. Ford. But that doesn't mean that he didn't attack her. In the best case scenario that I can imagine the Bret Kavanaugh of then and the Bret Kavanaugh of now might not know one another, but there was a struggle going on inside the weeping man blustering and bullying in order to protect his honor. A knock-down, belligerent, eye-gouging battle wherein the now Bret would pluck out the "vile jelly" in order to not see the past Bret.

I was such a stupid 15-year-old. I would not have survived the wild 80s in a big anonymous suburb brimming with affluence and influence. But I know how boys can be boys. In 1970 I went to a party in the woods after prom with my date. A bonfire, the night night sky through the treetops. Stars in my eyes. Romance. A perfecting ending to big event of senior year. But the only other girl was leaving just as I arrived. "Hey, why don't you pull a train for us?" one of the football players asked minutes later. I didn't know what that phrase meant. I'd never heard it. The look in that boy's eyes told me. The laughter of the other boys told me. I remember all their faces in the firelight. And their names. I remember how my date escorted me back to the car and we left.

I want to hear the testimony from the other women who've accused Kavanaugh and those who have told about his drinking. There are so many survivors of sexual assault. I want those stories. Terror to cure terror. Voices to give voice. Every time a woman speaks, another woman will speak. I have to believe that story by story, vote by vote, jail sentence by jail sentence, impeachment by impeachment, change will push its way forward. And I believe that the good men, even those who have suffered from the madness of not understanding, of not believing will, like Lear, come around to see the truth of their own tragedy.

Get thee glass eyes, 

And like a scurvy politician seem 

To see the things thou dost not. 

---(Lear to the blinded Gloucester)

#whyididntreport

I don’t remember the name of the colleague who almost strangled me.  Not his first name. Not his last. I remember he had a wrestler’s body and that he could vault over the couch on the set of the play we were in like a gymnast. I remember that he had me pinned to the front seat of my car before I knew what hit me. 

I don’t remember the name of the person who had the cast party. Or the name of the street that it was on. Only that the house was severed from the street and the street from its neighborhood by the Hollywood Freeway.  It was a no-man’s land. Dead-ended. A cluster of marooned houses reachable only by a dark broken-up path.  

I don’t remember what year it was. 1975, or 76, or 77. I don’t remember the name of the play. I can tell you the name of the theatre though, and so with some investigation these other details could be found out. What I remember is how terrifying it was to feel his thumbs pressing hard into my windpipe. Come with me to my place. You have to come with me to my place now, he said. I couldn’t muster enough breath to dissent.

I don’t remember what I was wearing exactly. Maybe a skirt. But probably pants—jeans, I think. What I remember is my black silk shirt, soaked with sweat and fear. I remember knowing that if I could manage to scream, no one would hear me over the freeway’s roar.

I don’t remember how I drove myself home when I was able to talk him out of his plan. But I remember that my boyfriend at the time dissuaded me from taking any action. The police probably won’t do anything, he said. And it would be your word against his. Why don’t you just avoid him?

***

I remember my rapist’s first name. It was Jerry. We’d just met. He was the Pepsi bottler sponsoring the show I was in. He was supposed to take me out to dinner, but he was late. Very late. I waited for him at the hotel bar. The drinks were strong. He and the bartender seemed to know one another. But I can’t prove anything. 

I remember this was in Indiana. 1979. Maybe South Bend. Maybe Indianapolis. I don’t remember the name of the hotel. I’ll walk you to your room, Jerry said. With a shove, he was inside. Another shove, and he was on top of me. You know you want it he said. You know you want it--until he was through.

I didn’t want it. But I wanted my job. I wanted the money I was making. I wanted my success. I remember what I wanted and what I didn’t want.

I didn’t tell my boyfriend. I already knew what he would say. Your word against his. And weren’t you drunk?

Some things are easy to remember. Some are easy to forget. Some things must be pushed to memory’s deep dark places if you want to survive.  People question what you don't remember and confuse it with what you want to forget. 

Boys will be boys, people say. You must be mistaken, they say. Pillar of the community. Rising star. Don’t ruin his career. Don’t ruin his family. So we are the ones who are ruined. Senators tearing off our clothes. Orrin Hatch holding us down. Chuck Grassely’s thumbs pressing into our windpipes. But somehow we must fight until we are heard. 

I voted.

Early Puberty in Girls Raises the Risk of Depression

Light Sentence for Rape Case

What Does a Lifetime of Leers Do to Us?


I cast my vote in the California primary today.  Maybe filling out that ballot will lighten my heart.  Maybe I'll feel just for a moment like I might be changing the fate of girls and women in this embattled country of ours where we still don't have an equal rights amendment and rape too often goes unreported or unpunished.

The three articles I've linked to above are all related. All the personal trauma riled up by them lies tangled together in my heart and gut while my head asks why in this day and age we have not yet put an end to rape culture.

In my small-town Catholic culture, it seemed that girls carried some intrinsic stain beyond the taint of Original Sin. Purity was a prize but our bodies were somehow construed as dirty and the prize always lay just beyond reach. I was ashamed when the meanest boy in my second grade class chased me across the playground and I ran so desperately that my shoes slipped off and my white socks ended up caked with mud. Why did you run from him, Sister asked. I could have said that he had already pinched and tickled me under the arm whenever I raised my hand,  but even then, at age seven, I remained silent. I was the dirty one.

Later I learned that girls were prick teases or jail bait.  Damned if we did. Damned if we didn't. Boys couldn't be trusted, but we were charged with maintaining our safety. Feet on floor. Skirts not too short. Eyeliner not too heavy. Watch yourself. It's your own damn fault because you know that you were asking for it. The term date rape was decades away from its first utterance.

Life in the big city was even worse. You didn't know who the wild boys were in a city of millions. Any car might carry a threat. It's one thing to make a stupid mistake in a place where everyone knows everyone else, but on a dark street full of strangers, a mistake might be a death sentence.

But it wasn't a stranger that pushed me down onto the seat of my car on a dead end street in the City of Angels and held his hands around my throat. I used to say that I escaped unscathed, but I know  now that I didn't. That attack attached itself to the man who groped me on the parking garage stairway which mingled his sour breath with the crazy-eyed motorcyclist who grabbed onto my car door handle one midnight which settled into my bones with the propositioning boss, the pawing acting teacher, and with the nicely suited man who motioned for me to roll down my car window like he was lost that sunny afternoon and asked, do you want to fuck? I could go on, of course, but if you're a woman you don't need my stories. You have your own. You probably had a job where you traveled for business and a business associate insisted on one more drink and the next thing you know you were on top of your motel bedspread, him whispering in your ear, you know you want it. And maybe you actually had lunch with him the next day because he terrified you and you couldn't  let  him know it. Maybe you woke up one morning with dirt or pine needles in your hair, your underwear missing, blind from a headache, resolved to just go on, go forward, survive, and get tested for STDs and try not to blame yourself too much. Maybe your darling baby-faced husband throws a chair in your face and blackens your eye and chips a tooth and only then after years of hiding his abuse do you cry in the arms of a friend.

We tell our daughters that their periods are part of life, that it's a beautiful good thing to be a woman,  that they're young women now, that they can get pregnant so let's get you on the pill if you fall for someone and want to do that, but don't do that right now. We tell them they are beautiful and that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and that they are perfect and loved, but how do we warn them, really, of the terror? How do we take away the shame of being objectified into breasts and cunts and thighs that might or might not have a gap? And how do we take away the dirty words they don't even know whispered or shouted or graffitied? How do we make them blind to the leers and the gestures and not blind to themselves? How do we explain less money for the same job when they are just as smart and just as qualified and just as good? How do we convince them that they can have careers and be mothers and have daughters and and say something, anything that their daughters can believe? How do we convince them to press charges, to be heard, to remain whole and wholly themselves when there are wolves that want to tear all of us to pieces.