That was the first time I cried over the rape. And even then, I wasn’t crying for me. I was crying for her. But that matinee brought the rape centre stage and was the catalyst, along with the breakup from the love of my life, for me to make the conscious decision to cry over it. To cry for myself, for the young girl I had been, for my loss of innocence. From then on, for the next few years, I took every month of April, always a trigger for me with its spring smells, to cry for myself, with the guidance of my long-time therapist. There were Aprils in which I wept every day. On the twenty-sixth, the anniversary date, I would drive away, taking the Sea to Sky Highway north from Vancouver, to Britannia Beach, wailing all the way, as my car, wedged between the ocean and the Coast Mountains, wound its way along the coast. Upon arrival, I would stroll around the tiny hundred-year-old village built for the copper miners working at Britannia Mine, now a museum.
Once, on a late 1970s field trip, I’d entered its tunnels. Wearing yellow hard hats with little lights at the forehead, all of us delighted schoolchildren had taken a trolley deep into its secret places, and I’d thought of the copper miners in Chile, always on the front lines of the struggle, fighting for their rights, many now rotting in jail, tortured, murdered, disappeared, or exiled. Tears had filled my eyes in the dark, unexplainable to my Canadian peers, hence swallowed down. By then I had mastered my dual existence of mainstream Canadian life and Chilean political refugee life. The two rarely met, although each informed the other. Like train tracks, they ran parallel, my ten-year-old self the only point of intersection if I lay down and spread my limbs apart like a snow angel. The mainstream life inhabited my head and lived on my skin, the refugee life in my heart, guts, and womb.
Now it was the turn of the millennium and I was in my early thirties, my solitary Saturn Return taking me back there every spring, walking across the train tracks that lay next to the sea, the same ones that led to the rez where I’d facilitated theatre workshops, taking the path of grief in that mining community that had triggered covert tears the first time I’d visited it. I was confronting the primordial story that lived within me, abandoned but never forgotten, once and for all, there with all my willingness to know it, to really really know it. I was asking my body to tell it to me like it was, giving it the time and space to unfold before me in living colour, calling on the blood coursing through my veins, the oxygen filling my lungs, the cells transmitting messages through my anatomy to bring it forth with all its mighty force through my brutalized, pumping heart. I was ready to re-member it.
Across the tracks sat an art gallery on the Howe Sound shore, a big white wooden house with blue trimmings where classical music played at full volume. I would walk through the rooms admiring the oil paintings made by the family that ran the gallery and worked in their upstairs studio, Germans who painted the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I would take in the landscapes of yellow and red cedars, Douglas firs, hemlocks, and spruce while Chopin’s nocturnes, played by Mami on the piano when I was growing up, or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, listened to by Papi throughout my childhood, emitted from the speakers. Coast Salish masks, drums, paintings, and jewellery also covered the walls, ledges, tables, and shelves, and through the windows one could see the ocean, the densely wooded land across the way, the trees that housed families of raccoons and on whose high branches eagles built nests.
After rambling through the gallery, I would go outside and stand under the conifers, letting the wind whip my hair, gulping down the fresh, salty air, and continue to cry for that scared girl, that girl who had had to make a terrible decision, who had been split open, who had not lain down and spread her legs for a boy her age, a boy she loved, a boy who loved her. That warrior girl who still cowered deep within me, who continued to guard my most sacred places—spaces that no longer needed protecting—with the ferocity of Medusa, turning to stone anyone who came too close. I let that girl overtake me every April from 1998 to 2004; I let her sob and wail and weep and rage and heave in pain. I let the knowing, nodding world be her witness, I let the adult me take care of her, until she was satisfied. Until she’d cried herself almost dry.
In 2009, I told the story of the rape to Oughton’s brother, Marc. A restorative justice group brokered the conversation, and we met at a Greek restaurant on Commercial Drive. Laura and I were there, as well as Allison, who’d been attacked with her best friend when she was eleven years old during Girl Guide camp in Richmond on a Sunday afternoon. Rick came to the meeting, as did the two restorative justice facilitators. We victims, the three of us close friends, arrived a half-hour early to get our bearings, and once we sat down, an older gentleman who reminded me very much of my late uncle Boris approached us and asked,
“Are you Laura, Allison, and Carmen?”
We nodded.
“I’m Marc Oughton.”
His ex-wife arrived a little while later. Still married to Marc when Oughton was arrested in 1985, she was now Marc’s best friend. Once the others got there and we ordered our food, the encounter began in earnest. Marc’s generosity humbled me. He spent two solid hours answering every single one of our questions—queries about their childhood, their parents, the most intimate, personal details of his flesh and blood. He was forthcoming in telling us how his brother’s capture had destroyed his life, and the lives of his children, bullied at school. He’d lost his job and many friends, gone bankrupt, and had to endure dead silence falling over rooms he entered, distasteful pedophile jokes, and anger aimed at him. He’d attended the trial and had shared an elevator once with Laura’s mother, both of them staring into space during the silent, loaded ride.
The meeting with him opened us up even more to the scope of Oughton’s attacks. We’d known the repercussions on our families and communities, on the domain of our city and its suburbs, but we’d never dwelled too long on the effects on his brother, sister-in-law, nieces, and nephews. Or on his lover, a woman he lived with for the entire time he was terrorizing the Lower Mainland. When Marc and Laura’s mother had taken that interminable elevator ride together, neither had been able to reach out to the other as what they both were: Oughton’s victims.
At the end of our inquiry, we asked Marc if he needed anything from us. And he stated in no uncertain terms that he wanted to know exactly what his brother had done to us. So much had been alluded to, so much suggested, so much unspoken, so much left to the imagination during the trial, that he really just wanted to know. And he wanted to know from the mouths of the survivors.
I went first. Marc and his ex-wife-turned-best-friend sat across from me and I told them, including specifics of the rape itself, the one and only time in my life I would do so without sparing a single detail. Their jaws trembled as I spoke, the colour draining from their faces.
“Thank you,” he said in a hoarse voice after I was done.
They’d had no idea the serial pedophile who dominated the news for so many years was the brother he’d grown up with, playing in the fields and ditches of Port Coquitlam. That the man who would arrive unannounced at their home on late Sunday afternoons, tracking moss and dirt, riding his motorcycle and taking his sister-in-law for a spin across the border to Washington, was the Paper Bag Rapist. Once he’d been captured, they realized the impromptu border crossings were his alibi. When a map taped on his wall with tacks marking the locations of the attacks was shown on the news (he’d insisted they denoted the spots where he’d sold hot tubs, as he was a salesman), as well as the guns hanging from their holsters on his bedpost, and the hair dye and disguises in his cabinets and closets, they wondered how they could have been blind to the obvious.
Allison and Laura told their stories, and when we were done, a respectful, heavy silence, like the silence heard at a wake, took over the table. Marc and his best friend thanked us again, he insisted on paying the bill, and when we hugged goodbye, we did so as fellow survivors.
The demographics of our supporters changed over the years, what with divorces, new spouses, and parents and relatives passing away. And now h
ere Laura and I waited, alone, in October 2013, on an overcast prairie day at this Alberta jail, still standing, till the bitter end.
The hearing was held in the gymnasium, which doubled as the multicultural elders’ room. A poster listing the Native American Indian Ten Commandments, a mural of Turtle Island, bear pelts, and bison and deer heads graced the walls, as did beaded dream catchers in an array of animal shapes (buffalo, wolf, eagle, raven) made from wood, feathers, fur, and leather. Bunches of sage, folded-up woven wool blankets, deerskin drums with the four directions painted on them in white, black, red, and yellow, and a lone guitar inhabited the corners. Bowden’s Indigenous population stood at 30 percent. In some Canadian jails, it was 50 percent. In others, 70 percent.
Laura had managed to wangle us seats a few feet behind the parole officers. A first, since we had always been seated behind Oughton, seeing only his profile when he entered the far end of the room, the back of his head once he sat down, a flash of his face when he’d brushed past our knees at our first parole hearing eighteen years before. Once we were all settled, he entered, flanked by three corrections officers. OUGHTON J was written in black block letters on the left pocket of his white shirt, Buddhist beads dangled from his fist, a burgundy Tibetan shawl was draped around his shoulders, and he held a foot-high stack of handwritten papers against his chest. He took his place at the table. His support person, a fellow inmate in his sixties, sat down next to him.
For the first time, we faced him. He was just across from us, close enough for eye contact. I studied his face, the face of Number Twelve from the lineup thirty-two years earlier. The face that had metamorphosed from a rough black-and-white police sketch to a full-frontal Technicolor mug shot splashed across every media outlet when one of the most-wanted men in Canada was finally caught. There he sat, closer than ever before, with his Scotch-taped glasses, wearing a silver stud in his left ear.
One of the parole officers, the only female one, swatted a fly from her face and he warned her about killing the insect, for it could be the reincarnation of his grandmother. As a Buddhist, he explained, he had taken vows against violence. He rambled for the next ninety minutes, covering all manner of topics, from his panic attacks (“I took my medication early today”) to his dyslexia (“I only learned to read fifteen, sixteen years ago”) to his mental illness (“I’m genetically deficient. I have paranoia and depression. I get a shot every month for paranoia”) to his physical ailments (“I have cataracts”) to his dental health (“I need to get my teeth fixed at Minimum”), while a young female corrections officer, one of the ones who had escorted him in, rolled her eyes behind him and let out a conspicuous sigh. Placing his hand on the stack of papers he’d brought in, he spoke of the books he’d written, one called Mountain Thoughts, the other Hysterical Darkness. In the latter’s pages, he explained, he apologized to his victims (specifically, the one who had held a Bible to her chest during the attack) and their families. He stated that he had also written several tomes on psychodynamics, had run a rational living centre for ten years, and was a Buddhist teacher.
When the fly-swatting parole officer asked him point-blank about raping children, he became agitated.
He raised his voice. “There is no physical evidence of semen.”
I wondered at my rape kit. I had always assumed it hadn’t been frozen properly and hence thrown away, but now I made a note to ask Rick about it.
“I am not going to apologize for being mentally ill,” he continued.
“I was called Bugsy as a child and everything you can imagine under the sun for having buck teeth. I was beaten and robbed in Hawaii. White females always humiliated me. They said, ‘One look at your face and I can tell you’re a rapist.’ My victims were all in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had no attraction to them. I hated them. I am not a pedophile. I hate children. I hate my nieces and nephews.”
We made eye contact. Twice.
The fly-swatting parole officer asked him about reoffending if he was released back into the community.
“I’m already in the community. I talk to people. I’m on the phone. I buy and sell real estate. This is just my office. I use my money to help others. I’m actually a very quiet person. Most Buddhists are. I came to the conclusion that no matter what you do, you can’t change the world.”
He pulled his meditation beads off his left wrist and put them around his neck.
Then it was his fellow inmate’s turn to speak. The inmate accused the parole board of behaving like a bad parent and concluded by giving Laura and me counsel.
“I understand there are victims in the room today. I would advise you to watch the National Film Board movie Scared of My Own Shadow.”
We couldn’t stay till the end because I had to get back to Calgary to act in a play entitled The Motherfucker with the Hat, also featuring my childhood friend Lucho. As we were escorted along the outdoor walkway that led to the prison entrance, we passed a Native elder with a silver braid cascading down his back and a very young Native man. They smiled and nodded at us.
Driving south on Alberta’s Highway 2, passing trucks with Bison Transport painted on their sides and pickups driven by men in cowboy hats, Laura and I laughed at the darkly comic nature of the hearing, of his words, of his fellow inmate’s statement. The land stretched out as far as the eye could see, hawks flew overhead, and magpies rested on cattle ranch fences, revealing their white-tipped accordion wings when taking flight.
As we pulled up to the theatre’s stage door in downtown Calgary just in time for my half-hour call (like most actors, I went wherever my calling took me, and that fall it was Calgary for six weeks), we got a text informing us that, for the fifteenth time, Oughton had been denied parole. I walked down the back halls of the EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts, where three theatres were housed, and greeted the Great Gatsby cast, some of whom I’d gone to acting school with twenty years earlier. Thirty minutes later, I stood barefoot in the wings wearing a long black oversized T-shirt with It’s All About Me written across the front, hair in a tight ponytail, generous amounts of emerald-green eyeshadow on my lids, pointy red rhinestoned gel nails over mine, large gold hoops hanging from my ears. The Commodores’ “Brick House” swelled when the house went to dark. I took a deep breath, walked onto the pitch-black stage, and stood on my mark. The lights snapped up, the song went out, and Veronica, a Nuyorican cokehead with a vicious tongue, wicked sense of humour, and heart of gold cleaned her one-room ghetto apartment while talking on the phone with her mother.
I had learned how to interpret other playwrights’ text by doing it over and over again, my second language migrating from my northern head and now firmly anchored in the Southern Cone of my anatomy.
THIRTEEN
The super moon was waning, the first new moon of the fall a couple of days away. Thirty-three years had passed since the rape, and I was walking the Bowden Institution grounds again, on the last day of summer, 2014, only eleven months after the last parole hearing. The sun was rising when we got there, lighting up the big blue prairie sky from the edge of the horizon.
“Why do you want to meet him?” almost everyone had asked.
So I had quoted Laura, one of the wisest, most articulate people I’ve ever known.
“Because I’d like to meet the man I’ve been in a relationship with for my entire life.”
There was also the opportunity to even out the power imbalance between us, to sit across the table on my terms and look into his eyes.
Laura and I had spent the night at the Best Western in Innisfail, the town next to the jail. Wrought iron signs daring you to Walk on the Wild Side hung from the main street’s telephone poles, a red and white revolving restaurant sign offered Western and Chinese Cuisine, and farm machinery ads dominated the billboards. A freight train passed by the hotel, and a group of immaculately turned-out west African tar sands workers down from Fort McMurray hung out in the adjacent Boston Pizza lounge, where a young woman with a Ukrainian accent served us di
nner. At the booth next to ours, eight fishbowls filled to the brim with a slushy orange cocktail were placed in front of eight young white men, perhaps descendants of the Danes who had settled here a hundred years ago, eyes glued to the Sunday night football game playing on the half-dozen TV screens strategically hung around the joint.
Brad and Abbey, the restorative justice facilitators who had brokered our meeting with Marc Oughton five years earlier, sat with us. They had extensive experience, not only in Canada but also in Rwanda and South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation trials they had attended there. Abbey, based in Edmonton, had had several talks with Oughton in the last ten months, in preparation for the face-to-face conversation Laura and I had requested with him. He’d been open to it from the beginning, but plans had stalled when he had two heart attacks in June. Now, three months later, he had recovered enough to see us, and the four of us went over protocol as we dug into massive servings of ribs, fries, poutine, and pasta.
Inevitably, I had made the connection between Oughton’s double heart attack and the ending of my play The Trigger. I’d hammered out the first draft—always the hardest, often likened to childbirth—in the dead of night at that drafting table in my Los Angeles room in 2003. Norah Jones’s “Don’t Know Why” had played on repeat on my boom box, and the sunrise had sometimes caught me still at the table. While I wrote, a hawk visited during a particularly difficult passage, the one about the rape itself, landing on the edge of the roof of the house next door. It looked right at me through the window, and stayed there for a long time, the flap of its wings when it took flight an echo of the eagle’s on the day of the rape. The passage flew out of me, my fingers on the keyboard barely able to keep up with my stream of consciousness, and remained the same in subsequent drafts, needing only minuscule edits.
Victims who’d never gone to the parole hearings came to The Trigger when it premiered in February 2005 in Vancouver, and waited to speak to me after the show, along with their parents, friends, and partners. In the end, I had written a non-linear work for five female performers with movement, trapeze, and a live musical score. I played the rapist (referred to as “He” in the play) and the main victim, “Carmen.” An actor/dancer played “Macarena,” and the remaining three, actors and musicians, were a variety of characters, including other victims, cops, the hypnotist, doctors, nurses, schoolmates, friends, parents. The play ended with “Carmen” delivering the following words directly to the audience:
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