Content warning: sexual assault

            It was a cloudy rainy day turned sunny, a rare warm San Francisco spring afternoon.  I was riding the bus home from downtown after tending to some business.  I admired the varied Victorian homes passing in and out of my view while riding on the Fulton Street bus headed west toward the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park.  I decided to get off the bus at Stanyan Street to take a walk through the park on this now lovely afternoon.  I pulled the cord, the bell rang, the bus stopped and I jumped out. 

            I walked toward the entrance to the park.  There were several paths before me to choose from. These dirt paths looked like a smashed up three pronged fork, one directly in front of me, one that curved a little to the left of that, and one to the extreme left.  I noticed a blurry figure in the distance at the far end of the path straight ahead.  Something registered in my stomach, a little gnawing of ‘wait a minute.’  But, I didn’t listen to my gut.  Why should I?  It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I was in a public space.  I wasn’t going that way anyway.  I took the extreme left path, the most direct route towards my apartment on Carl Street.  I snapped my umbrella tight and stepped onto the path. 

            As I walked along I amused myself with singing songs to the beat of my feet, inhaling the aromatic smells from the foliage dusted after the spring rain.  I got a little intoxicated from the pungent odor emitted by the Eucalyptus trees.  All of a sudden I heard the sound of twigs crushing in the dirt behind me.  I turned my head to look, too late, the figure in the distance was now up close.  He pounced on my back and dragged me into the bushes, out of sight.   He was a big and muscular guy, no competition for my 115 pound female body.  As he pushed me to the ground, he covered my mouth and said:  “If you make a sound I will cut you up with this knife I have here handy.”   I did as I was told, although I did struggle at first to break free, to get him off of me, with no luck.  He pulled down my pants and my underpants with one violent tug and then tried to stick his thing up my vagina as he pleaded over and again:  “Pretend like you mean it.  Pretend like you love me.”

            Well, I did have ambitions of becoming an actress, but this was not a role that I’d envisioned.  How could this be happening to me  - an intelligent white woman with two years of college garnered through odds that I would never even graduate from high school?  I was known as being pretty smart too, earned a membership in the Phi Theta Kappa.  This didn’t mean that I had  street smarts, but I had become somewhat of a scrapper from my earlier youth, having to fend for myself soon after my father’s death when I was just ten years old.   

            So this rapist is threatening me with a knife, has me pinned to the ground under a bush in Golden Gate Park.  He’s going up and down between my vagina and my underpants, never really getting inside me, but thinking that he is.  Is this rape?  Yes. Yes it is.  How would you feel?  I was terrified, violated and my life was being threatened.  Then he comes with a little squeaky groan and his cream goes into the dirt and I feel like I have to throw up.  He gets up and quickly zips up his pants, towers over me and frantically shouts, his spittle spraying into my face: “If you ever say a word I will find you, and carve you down to nothin’.”  Then he runs away, disappearing out of sight. 

            Devastated, I swiped his spit off my face with the back of my hand.  My consciousness slowly re-entered my body.  I got up and tried to gather myself back together, pulled up my pants, and brushed off my once beautiful unstained red velvet jacket.   Through the blurred corner of my right eye I noticed a piece of black leather in the dirt.  I bent down and picked it up.  It was the rapist’s wallet.  I opened it, and there it was, his name before me on his school ID.  He was just a kid, maybe fourteen. No wonder he thought he was inside of me.  Was I his first rape victim?  Jesus Christ on a crutch, this makes my stomach churn just gurgitating up this horror in order to push the letters of my memories down into sense on my keyboard.  I dropped the wallet into my bag, took a few deep breaths to stifle tears, still attempting to put myself back together.  I ran out of the park. 

            As I reached the sidewalk at Stanyan Street a car noticed my mess and stopped to offer me a ride.  I guess my stomach said okay because I slipped past the open door onto the front seat.  I just wanted to disappear off of the street, off the face of the earth, to just get home.  I wish I’d known a magic trick at that moment  - poof -  gone - disappeared - whatever happened to Janine?

            It was a man who stopped to offer his help.  Was I crazy?  No, it turned out he just wanted to help me after he saw my chaos, me juggling my umbrella and purse, struggling to hold up my pants while trying to put on my jacket which was hanging from one arm slid into its right sleeve. What a state I was in.  He tried desperately to persuade me into going to the police, but I knew better.  This was before women’s crisis hotlines, and the second wave of feminism was just taking hold in the Zeitgeist.  He kept insisting and I kept saying: “No!  Please, just drop me home.”  After one last plea, he finally gave up.  We rode on up the hill, I pointed the way as a weighty awkward silence settled in the air between us.  He took a right a couple of blocks past Kezar Stadium onto Carl Street.  I pointed again, he pulled over to the curb. I leapt out of the car, ran up three flights of stairs to the safety of my apartment and double locked the door behind me.

            I could have bathed in the stream of tears that I could no longer hold back.  The shaking in my whole body created a haunting rhythm in my bones as I tried to expel this nightmare on the pathway to home.  I threw off my clothes and headed into the shower and stood there until the waters ran cold and I went numb.  Then I jumped into bed, pulled the covers over me, spent a turbulent night listening to the fog horns in the distance against a backdrop of jazz music playing on KJAZ radio over in Alameda. 

            I didn’t step a foot back onto the wooden floor until after sunrise the next morning.  For days I walked around in my apartment in a daze, attempting to calm myself, trying to heal from this invasion of my body, my spirit, my soul, trying to understand what I was feeling, what had just happened to me.  Questions rained through my misty mind. Was he just beginning his career of raping women during their walks in the park in the mid-afternoon?  Had he just gotten off school for the day and thought, gee:  “I think I’ll go to the park and terrorize an unsuspecting female and beg her to pretend she loves me while I stick a knife into her terrified into silence throat?”  I kept his wallet for a couple of days and finally chucked it into the trash.  Although I’ve never forgotten his name and twisted into the mix of my unnerved state was a little sorrow for him, his shaky voice pleading to be loved. 

            It took time attempting to accept what had just happened to me.  I gradually adjusted, just stuffed down the experience.  I had to.  Work was calling and bills needed to be paid.  But advancing shame began to sprout roots that tangled with the veins and arteries within me, merging with my pulse.  It was like a far away ocean swell that sucks up the sand into an undertow as its waves approach the shore. The swell entangles you, shoves you under, smacks your face into the sea floor.

            Going to the police was out of the question for me.  I was aware enough to know how women were dismissed by the police, not being believed when they reported being raped.  I had listened to women’s stories about when they did go to the police, how they felt like they were raped all over again.  For me, any idea of the police as protectors of citizens disappeared after an earlier experience of being picked off a curb near Dupont Circle during a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC.  The police were chasing two men, the men got away.  As a consolation prize, they grabbed me by the neck, roughed me up a little, then arrested me, just for being there, standing on the corner, witnessing.  This was a quick eye opener, a close up look at how much out of control power police have at their fingertips.  This experience sparked my political awareness and activism.

            Eventually, I settled back into my normal routine, but it took a few months.  One evening I had a date with a friend.  We were driving along Divisadero Street when I suddenly yelled: “Stop, stop, pull over, pull over, that is the man that raped me.” His brow knotted, his brown bushy brows raised as he sent me a wary glance over his wire-framed glasses.  He pulled over to the curb and stopped the car.  There was no one in sight.  My mind had played a trick on me.  As we drove along in silence, I began to realize how deeply this rape experience had moved into my subconscious and into my body.  Soon he dropped me off at home, gave me that dreaded pity look and sighed.  I never heard from him again.  “So What!” as Miles Davis would play.

            After this hallucination began a setback.  I again passed days and nights sitting, standing, pacing, aimlessly gazing out of my living room and bedroom windows.   I followed the sun’s travels across the city landscape, the fog rolling in, the fog rolling out, getting hypnotized by the night lights of the city that glowed in the distance.  I went round and round, over and over about what had happened.  The shame was slapping me around, having me go over every foolish miserable mistake I may have made in my life to deserve this.  I even considered the passing thought of my umbrella acting as a defense on walks could be a reason - that I drew this upon myself. 

            I’ve heard that we feel guilty over the things we have done and shame over the things that have been done to us.  I was beginning to decipher the difference between the two.  I experienced guilt over not reporting this rape to possibly prevent, protect other women, but I just wasn’t able to talk myself into going through dealing with the police.  The sounds of the N Judah trolly rolling up and down Carl Street would guide my mind back into the room, back into the present moment. 

            During one of these escape excursions my mind drifted back to grade school.  We were living on Penwood Road in Four Corners, Maryland.  It was a sweaty summer afternoon at the recreation center at Pinecrest Elementary School.  I had just finished braiding a key ring holder out of purple and gold gimp, proud of a job well done.  I cleaned up my area, said my good byes and headed across the daisy dappled school lawn for home. Four boys from St. Bernadettes jumped in my way, grabbed me and forced me into grove of pine trees.  One blindfolded me and then each of the four grabbed a leg and an arm.  They pulled up my blouse to expose my just developing breasts and swung me back and forth like a slab of meat while they laughed.  Once they had terrorized me to their satisfaction, they dropped me to the ground and ran off.  Good catholic boys!  I knew two of them, they were two grades ahead of me at St. Bernadettes.  I raced home, to the shower, to my room.  I didn’t tell a soul. Unfortunately this was just one of my first experiences of internalizing violence against women, against me, just a pubescent girl.  It wasn’t until years later that I shared this trauma with a friend who knew these boys.  One of the perpetrators had served in the Vietnam War.  Shortly after he returned home from the war he killed himself and I will admit, for years I could not pull up any compassion for him.  Ironically, I did muster some compassion for that kid in the park soon after he raped me.  Maybe it was my age, I was no longer a twelve year old, now twenty-three with more life experience to draw upon.

            And so it went.  I woke out of this reverie and dove into another restless night.  Another tossing and turning night, hiding under the comfort of the twilight blue sheet stamped with delicate white lilies of the valley hugged between their green stems.  Me compulsively pressing my feet together, rubbing them back and forth, left foot on top, then right foot on top, rubbing, mimicking my rummaging mind.   Back and forth throughout the night, mulling, blaming not blaming myself, blaming others, trying to make sense out of this shadowy other worldliness that I now inhabited.  Me and my best friend, jazz.

            It’s late.  As I lay there, the keys of Thomas “Fats” Waller begin to dance across the room from my radio.  His melody, his harmony, his humor unlock my shoulders, lend a little crescendo of relief with one of his best: “Jitterbug Waltz.”  Me and my best friend.  Jazz, once again soothing me through another murky night.  The music awakens my courage to meet the sunrise as its beams beckon though my bubbly glass windows, the music reminding me to greet this morning glory with a genuine smile on my face.  Deep down, I knew I didn’t deserve these violations of my body and my soul.  But while lying there in the dark, it was hard to erase that dissonant dirge echoing between my ears: “Pretend that you mean it.  Pretend that you love me.” 

            And here I am all these years later, still trying to explain away why I should be raped at two o’clock in the afternoon because I just wanted to be out in nature, just because I wanted to have a nice walk through the park on my way home.  Now these memories are part of my stride.  And the seemingly unanswerable what ifs sit at the foot of my bed.  What if  I had only listened?  What if I had only heeded the call of my intuition on that spring afternoon?   Hell, this story goes at least back to the Bible, doesn’t it?  The temptress Eve causing the fall of ‘man.’  Eve tempts Adam, not that Adam is weak and goes ahead and takes a bite into his appetites, his desires.  Original sin, still weighty, still living upon the shoulders of Eve’s decendents.  It’s an uphill challenge for the female from birth. How many other women live sleepless nights rolling over with similar questions?  The what ifs… and if only I had…?

Janine Theodore lives in New Orleans, soaking up its rich culture.  Writing is her passion and she spends her hours with her pen and paper with jazz music as her muse.  Her work has been pubished in the Porter Gulch Review.