It seems like ages ago, in another lifetime belonging to someone else and in truth, it was. It feels like it happened to another girl, someone I didn't know very well, and in a way it did. Perhaps it was just my denial kicking in, but thinking on it a few days after, it was as if I'd been watching a play when it happened, watching a stranger from a distance, watching some other chick I knew only vaguely but for whom I felt a strange kind of empathy and an awful lot of sympathy as her horrific experience unfolded before my eyes. Yes, denial is my best friend and most cherished ego defence mechanism, now and forever, but I digress.
My life had always felt like a book of differently textured chapters, all mixed together with neither rhyme nor reason, kind of like a mismatched patchwork quilt, something which starred a cast of singularly defined characters; so radical was every incarnation through which I lived, from that of the next. And my rape was just another episode on yet another typical night in the NYC Punk scene.
First some background: in the beginning, there was the intelligent but bored and lonely little girl who rode the subway from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village after school only to run away from home and end up cross-country – 3,000 miles away in California – when I was nine. Yes, I was nine when i first left home, thanks to the kindness of much older Beatnik strangers with whom I'd hooked up in the Village.
A year later, when the police returned me to my distraught parents, the notoriety at school gave me the nearest feeling of acceptance I'd ever had, but the attention didn't last as long as I'd have liked. All too soon, things returned to normal and again I was a friendless, straight-A student and thanks to that, I got the shit beaten out of me by my more stupid, jealous classmates. I was deeply unhappy because once the glamour of Leaving Home wore off, it was back to the usual: no one wanted to have anything to do with me. When I looked in the mirror I couldn't blame them cause there were little girls way smarter than me, but they were pretty and nobody dared touch them.
Me? I couldn't see past my thick coke-bottle bottom'd glasses which made me look like the nerdiest of nerds, which I guess I was. As well, I'd always carry a book with me and it wasn't a textbook; it was always some adult-type non-fiction book I'd gotten from the library, any book into which I could escape as well as learn. At this point I can't remember how many times I got beaten up and whatever book I'd be carrying would maliciously and purposely be torn to shreds and I'd end up having to pay the library for the book I'd 'lost' (that's what I told them, rather than recount how these greaser girl gangs would take delight in ripping up whatever book).
My mother spoke of 'inner beauty' but that was never any comfort; I knew that there was something very wrong with me – no one ever seemed to like me apart from my teachers. I wrote reams and reams of self-pitying poetry and went through endless notebooks (which I called journals); my allowance was spent on books, more notebooks and after age 12, records from England. But books were always my best escape and for the longest time, my drug of choice. No matter how large my own personal library grew, it was never enough; I always wanted more (and that was always the problem).
Most kids spend their free time hanging out with others but I was curled up on my bed every weekend reading my head off in a habit still with me today: the penchant to read four or five books at a time and remember where I left off with each one, no matter how disparate the subject matter. The nearest I came to feeling any joy was when a library was built round the corner from my parents' because I was there every day after school, that is, until i began taking the subway down to Greenwich Village and lying to my parents about it. Criminal and Abnormal Psychology and 20th Century Art were my favorite subjects but I haunted the rest of the non-fiction aisles as well; I was interested in everything. Desultory reading was my specialty and if I had my way, I would have lived in that library, any library.
That is, any library until I discovered
Grand Army Plaza:
and its magnificent
library –
'...The building resembles an open book, with the spine at the main entrance on the plaza, and the two wings running along the avenues. Construction began in 1912 and was completed in 1941...'
After a couple of visits there, it occurred it was just about a ten minutes' subway ride away from Greenwich Village. and so, I began to bullshit my parents that this libe was much more in tune with my personal literary pursuits. What they didn't know was, I found it way easy to stay on the subway and on to the Village with no one ever the wiser.
I would occasionally surface from my little dream world and knew that it wasn't enough, but life was just so depressing that I would sink back into whatever book I'd been reading and soon forget about the real world around me. The thought that I was alienated would occur to me every so often but I didn't like to think on that; I knew I had no one to talk to and I tried not to let that bother me even though most afternoons found me in Washington Square Park, reading my head off, alone on a bench.
My parents took a more drastic approach and insisted I see a psychiatrist which forced me into his office (and away from my beloved library and the Village) one afternoon a week, after school. At that point thanks to all my reading, I could analyse myself much better than he ever could and after a couple of useless sessions he knew it so I quit on the same day he sent me home with a note.
This note explained to my parents that I was way beyond his help. And the note required both my parents' signatures, as if I wouldn't tell them that. Oh how I laughed when I opened the envelope and read what he'd written. In all actuallity, I was overjoyed this waste of my time was over. Once each of my parents read and signed, Daddy cried. Mom got angry and hit me which made Daddy cry more. I woudn't give her the satisfaction of turning on the tears so I stood there, waiting for the next smack to the head and pulled nasty faces at her, egging her on. Incorrigible, moi? You had to be me and thank your lucky stars you weren't. Aren't. Whateverrrr.
When I was fourteen I decided that enough time had passed for my parents not to be too suspicious of my travels out of the neighborhood and so, I informed them there'd be no more library after school and began hanging round the Village again. Things had changed considerably since I was nine; I found others my age with whom I could actually talk and relate and for the first time in my life, I felt accepted. We all felt we were outcasts and at that time, in all truth, we were.
We had to leave our immediate homegrounds to be our True Selves and get away from the straight-thinking majority which included narrow-minded teachers, the greaser types so fond of beating the shit out of us and other such non-thinking wackos. One of the cohering factors which drew us together was the fact we were all into British music which distanced us from those others at our respective schools. And at that point, I thought my poetry improved dramatically just about the time I discovered TS Eliot and started dressing in black and bingo – I changed lifestyles once again.
I became baby-beatnik as opposed to the hippie masses now congregating down in the Village; a few years later I was called a freak by my very own cohort – still wearing all-black and in skin-tight trousers, not the hated bellbottoms the masses had on, because I refused to go with the hippie flow and totally didn't desire to dress like them, especially since mass market upscale places like Macy's and Bloomingdales were now trumpeting the Next Big Thing: the Swingin' Sixties by way of London: bellbottoms and flowery shirts, all to which my ever-shrinking group of friends and I would turn our noses up in disdain. In secret we called them all The Mod Squad. Original? Nah, but very fitting as we watched them trying to outdo themselves.
A few years after that, I morphed into a scholarship-winning college student but of course, that still wasn't enough. I had been fooling around with drugs for years and I finally hit upon a formula that seemed to suit me quite well: I smoked reefer from the moment I got up in the morning until bedtime – one of my fave things to do was roll a jay and get behind the wheel of my car and fly down the highway, ripped off my face. As well, I shot heroin as often as I could afford but not frequently enough to give me a habit. The first drug I used that required a needle was LSD (but that's a whole 'nother story).
Thankfully, my first foray into the Land of Acid was painless and the trip was way joyous. Anyway, that particular chapter lasted longer than I'd anticipated but at the time I thought it exciting to have such a shameful secret whilst being simultaneously trusted to grade papers in the English Department of my Uni, be on the Dean's List every semester and counsel students with emotional problems but yet again, I digress. I graduated with honors, won a scholarship or three and was up for being Valedictorian, one of the faculty's more foolish choices as I showed up to give my speech in a tanktop and cut-offs and black tights and boots and was immediately stripped of that particular honor. AFAIC, it was no great loss and once informed, I skipped the entire Graduation Ceremony and soon after, moved myself back down to NYC where I took up residence on the Lower West Side (the original Greenwich Village).
After the move, came a stint as a callgirl (or 'escort' as my clients preferred to term it) whilst working as a secretary during the day and managed to buy a major share in a lower Fifth Avenue jewelry shop, all to mask the double life I found myself leading since I was still fooling around with dope and was determined to hide any and all traces of that particular element of my life. And I did so admirably; no one was the wiser even though I ran myself ragged being a workaholic of sorts.
Occasionally I would shoot cocaine with some of the doctors ('clients') I met at night. And yes, it's true; doctors do have access to the best pharmaceuticals (amazingly enough, so did my clients who were attorneys). On my nights off (or after I was done), I would go to after-hours clubs on lower Third Avenue to hear punk rock bands and it was on one of those nights that I managed to get myself raped.
At this point I have to describe the clothing I was wearing because there's still the very tiresome issue of blaming the victim; something I always thought was ludicrous. No matter what the situation, to me it has always seemed apparent that the transfer of guilt and blame, both commingled with a lack of responsibility, is used to target the innocent. It's easy to say, to believe, 'she asked for it' instead of holding a man responsible for his own deplorable behavior; holding him responsible for not having the discipline to curb his hatred or his violence towards women. Then again, I'm sure that many will still think that, dressed as I was, I was asking for it. Yeah, that was me –
'Please rape me, kind sir...'At the time, the Lower East Side was the centre of new music, design, film, fashion and everything British and we all had the feeling that anything was permissible, anything was possible. I moved there from the Lower West Side (traditionally called 'Greenwich Village') because the area seemed as if a chick like me could have limitless possibilities.
This was way back before chain stores like The Gap and K-Mart and Starbuck's moved in; before the yuppie corporate types decided the Lower East Side was The Next Big Thing. At the time I moved crosstown, the neighborhood was a homogenous mixture of long-time Polish, Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants who'd lived there since the early 1900s – straight off the boats at Ellis Island – as well as Puerto Rican families who'd made their homes there since the 1950s, and the more and more ubiquitous artists and musicians who'd discovered a diverse neighborhood where the rents were still cheap enough to live there comfortably and go out every night.
And the thing of it was, EVERYONE GOT ALONG, newcomers like us and the oldtimer immigrants. Of course, there was an abundance of drugs on the streets, but if you were fairly well-informed and watched your ass, you could live pretty safely and stay high and healthy. Funnily enough, during my worst times of addiction were the same times I ate most healthily and joined the gym. Talking to others, I found out the same. Coincidence? Nah... I think not. But yet again, I digress (I do that a lot – I blame the ADD actually but hey).
Anyway, at the time, there was a clothing store which catered to bands; in their front window was a huge sign stating 'Be a Musician Or Just Dress Like One' and some people, especially out-of-town tourists, took that sign seriously. And so, there was a fine line between what the musicians wore both onstage and off and what their audiences had on and it's still true today but to a lesser extent.
Whenever I found myself above 14th Street I would be subject to an awful lot of leering and nasty comments but below 14th Street, no one would look at me twice. At the same time, there were a lot of models and hookers hanging out with the bands and to the uninitiated, I guess, all groupies and rock & roll chicks looked very similar. If my mother could have seen my nightly wardrobe, she would've passed her usual judgement –
'You look cheap' – something I'd heard my entire life but for the most part, it was always based on the length of my skirts. I think she would've dropped dead on the spot if she'd ever seen me going out dressed the way I used to every single night (think garters and panties showing whilst teetering round on way high stiletto heels).
Anyway, back to my rape. It was right before midnight and on that particular night, I'd seen two of my regular clients beforehand and had just about 500$ (earned the easy-peasey way) stashed in the waistband of my knickers. I'd just left my boyfriend Gordy at our fave hangout, The UK Klub, in order to run up the street to buy cigs since we were out and the club's machine was broken, or so the sign said.
Some guy pulled over to the curb on the corner of Third Avenue and 13th Street and motioned me over, like to ask for directions. I leaned over to talk to him and the next thing I knew, I was roughly pulled by the arm and shoulder, through his rolled down window, over his lap and into his car. Then he took off with me screaming my head off, totally freaking out till he smacked me right across the face. This shut me up, but only for a second or two. Then I commenced screaming again and then he began to beat my head in.
I didn't know it at the time, but Gordy had just emerged from the club to tell me the cig machine was now working and he caught the entire scene and had the brains to memorise the first three numbers of the guy's licence plate. As it happened, Mr Rapist turned out to be an off-duty cop who was raping and killing women he assumed were hookers, but here I am, doing my usual – getting ahead of myself.
nb: top illo and illo illustrating The UK Club by
Tomar Hanuka.
To be continued.
what's blasting:
Rape Robbery & Violence (by K.M.F.D.M. & PIG – buy
here).
☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂ ☁ ☂
).
