by A. J. Rich
I was a middling high school student dreaming about becoming an artist, an actress, a poet, in the tradition of clueless youth, without giving any consideration to whether I had talent. I took a Greyhound to New York City shortly after I graduated and arrived at Port Authority at 2:00 a.m. on a rainy summer night.
I had planned to stay at the YWCA, but I met a girl on the bus who had already done what I was planning to do. She had been visiting her mother in Cleveland and was going back to Brooklyn, where she’d been living for six months. She was waiting tables until she could get modeling work and invited me to crash at her place. She lived in a first-floor studio looking out onto the Navy Yard. The kitchen was makeshift—just a hot plate and minifridge. The walls were bare and the institutional sea-green paint was scuffed. I slept on an air mattress, while she took the sofa bed.
Around six the next morning, I heard a key in the lock. A man let himself into her apartment. I called out to my friend, Candice, and she said sleepily, “It’s just my boyfriend, Doug.”
Doug said, “Hey,” to me, and then to Candice, “Hey, babe.” He sat on the edge of the sofa bed and took off his Frye boots. He wasn’t wearing socks. And for some reason, that alarmed me further.
I started to get off the already deflated air mattress. “I can head out now. Thanks for letting me stay over.”
“No need to go,” he said, taking off his shirt. “I’ve got to be at work in a couple of hours.”
My duffel bag was on the other side of the room and I would have had to pass near him to get it. I’d chosen to sleep in just a T-shirt and bikini underwear.
He took off his jeans. Without taking my eyes off my duffel bag, I could see in my peripheral vision that he had also forgone underwear. He climbed onto the sofa bed beside Candice and I told myself to calm down, I was in New York and I was lucky for the place to sleep.
The air mattress was a mere six feet from the sofa bed, so of course I could hear Candice tell her boyfriend to quit it, but she wasn’t angry when she said it. I hadn’t yet gone all the way, but I’d been on enough double dates to know what was going on. Those were the actual words that came to mind—going all the way. I was already constructing the story for my friends back at New Trier in Winnetka, the high school famous for talented and precocious students such as Ann-Margret and Rock Hudson, though my friends were the late bloomers.
I closed my eyes, placed my pillow over my head, and pretended that this kind of thing happened to me all the time. At some point their activity died down and I fell back asleep.
I woke up coughing, and the pillow seemed to be the reason. It was still covering my face, but pressure was behind it. I couldn’t get enough air, and when I tried to remove it, I felt the arms that were holding it in place.
“Oh, for God’s sake, you dick, leave her alone,” I heard Candice say. But the hands didn’t let go. I began thrashing and kicking.
“Let her breathe at least,” Candice said.
One hand let go of the pillow and I gulped in air before the free hand pinned my arms.
“Get her feet,” Doug called to Candice.
“I don’t want to get kicked again,” Candice said, but I felt her grab my ankles anyway. By now the air mattress was only as inflated as a sleeping bag.
“I told you the air mattress had a leak,” Doug said. “This is going to be hell on my bad knee.”
“You were at Walgreens yesterday.”
“So?”
“They sell air mattresses.”
Despite what was happening, their inane bickering made me think I might still be okay.
“If you let me up, I can go get you a new air mattress.” I felt the effect of my words as his grip slackened, then tightened harder.
“You think we’re stupid,” Doug said.
“Candice,” I pleaded, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me.”
“She’s not doing it, I am,” Doug said.
I revised my hope of getting through this okay.
“I won’t say anything if you just let me go. I don’t know where I am. I just want to go.”
“Babe, get the duct tape from under the sink.”
His body was on top of mine, pinning me down. The pillow still covered my face but I could breathe. I twisted my head and saw Candice was dressed as I was, only the T-shirt was Doug’s. She was tearing off a strip of the silver tape.
“Hold her head,” Candice told Doug. Then she squatted beside me and covered my mouth with it. She was so close to me that I caught the sudden scent of Doug’s ejaculation. If it wouldn’t have choked me, I would have retched.
“Tape her wrist to the radiator,” Doug ordered.
Doug took my right wrist and held it against the metal. As Candice tore off another strip and then wound it around my wrist, Doug hummed “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” When she finished securing my other wrist, this time to the leg of a bureau, Doug slid down the length of me, removing the bikini underwear as he did. I heard myself make a sound of protest through the tape covering my mouth.
Doug said, “Babe, can you get me a beer?”
“I’m not your servant, and anyway we’re out.”
“What the fuck, you were supposed to get some.”
“Oh, when was I supposed to do that? I just got back from fucking Cleveland.”
“Then go get some now.”
“Like anything is open at six a.m.”
“The Walgreens is open.”
“They have beer?”
“Yeah, they have beer!”
I prayed that Candice would not leave me alone with him.
She pulled on leggings, then went through Doug’s pockets for some money.
“She was so eager to buy us an air mattress, let her pay for the beer,” Doug said.
Candice picked up my jeans and took all my cash, $300.
“You should really get traveler’s checks next time,” Candice said to me, then shut the door behind her.
“It’s a shame to cover such a pretty mouth,” Doug said. “Tell you what, how ’bout I take off this tape and you stay quiet.”
I nodded.
“This is going to hurt a little.” I thought he would rip it off like a Band-Aid, but he pulled it off slowly, as though this were foreplay. “You had a lot of boyfriends?”
My eyes teared up.
“Or just one special fellow? I bet you let him go to second base.” He lifted my T-shirt and pinched my nipples. “Candice outdid herself this time.” As he began rubbing his erection between my breasts, his cell phone rang. He picked it up and looked at the number before he answered. “Yeah? Now what?” While he listened, he rubbed the tip of his penis against the nipple he’d pinched. “I don’t care. Coors.” He hung up and said, “Shit.” He climbed off me and went to the window. He was no longer fully erect.
He started rubbing himself, and when nothing happened, he walked back to me, straddled my chest, and said, “Help me out with that pretty mouth.”
I reflexively turned my head away, but he grabbed my jaw and opened my mouth. He forced himself inside. I gagged and tears rolled out the sides of my eyes.
This appeared to be a turn-on because he was hard again. “I usually wait for Candice, but I don’t think I can wait this time.”
He pulled out of my mouth, pried my legs apart with his knee, and in an instant I was no longer a virgin. He finished quickly and I was still alive. He was inside me when the door opened—Candice with the Coors.
“You fucker, you were supposed to wait.”
“Well, if you hadn’t dragged your ass getting back . . .”
In spite of that, she cracked open a can and handed it to him. She cracked a second can and took a long gulp. She then opened a third and put it on the floor beside me.
“What, you’re a hostess now?” Doug asked.
“She’s got to be thirsty, too. Right, Morgan?”
Without ceremony, she produced a Swiss Army knife and cut one hand free. I was able to sit up, and whe
n I did, my T-shirt dropped to cover me. The thought of having a beer with them was sickening, but I could not risk provoking them. I reached for the can and made myself swallow a small amount.
Candice looked at the alarm clock on the bureau I was still taped to. “You better think about heading in to work.”
“I got a clean shirt here? Don’t tell me you’ve been in Cleveland.”
Candice went to the small closet and threw a long-sleeved shirt at him.
“Are you going to have time to drop her back at the bus station?” Candice asked.
She cut my other wrist free, gave me back my duffel, and I was hustled into a white panel van. On the drive to what I hoped would be Port Authority, Doug kept the radio on to an oldies station, one power anthem after another. I was grateful I didn’t have to talk to him. I was sitting in the rear of the van watching him nod his head in time to the music.
When we reached Port Authority, Doug turned off the radio. “When I let you out, don’t turn around until the count of sixty. Unless you want to see me again.”
I didn’t turn around for the count of six hundred.
• • •
The moment the lecture ended, Amabile took my hand. “Come with me.” He pulled me away from the classroom before anyone had a chance to talk to me. He said he had an extra helmet for me and offered a ride to Rikers on his Harley. He and I both had patients this time each week, and I had a lot of catching up to do. I had never intended to be a practicing psychologist, but seven hundred clinical hours were required for the degree. Rikers wasn’t a prison; it was a jail, which meant that the inmates were there awaiting trial or serving less than a year. My patients were guys hoping that by seeing a shrink, the trial judge would look on them favorably. Since most of the Rikers population (fourteen thousand on an average day) was awaiting trial, everyone there was “innocent.”
I held fast to Amabile’s waist as we sped over the unmarked Francis Buono Bridge from Queens—the only access to the island. In the orientation session we had learned that Rikers Island had been a military training ground during the Civil War. It became a jail in 1932.
In 1957, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashed onto the island shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, killing twenty and injuring seventy-eight out of a total of ninety-five passengers and six crew. Shortly after the crash, department personnel and inmates alike ran to the crash site to help survivors. As a result of their actions, of the fifty-seven inmates who assisted with the rescue effort, thirty were released and sixteen received a reduction of six months by the NYC parole board.
We also learned that a drawing by Salvador Dalí, done as an apology because he was unable to attend a talk about art for the prisoners, hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981, when it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. The drawing was stolen in 2003 by some guards and replaced with a fake.
The facility was something of a small town. There were schools, medical clinics, ball fields, chapels, gyms, drug-rehab programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a Laundromat, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a print shop, a bus depot, and even a car wash. It was the world’s largest penal colony.
I saw my patients in a small annex off an overcrowded ward where the fluorescent lights were on 24-7. A TV played from 7:00 a.m. to midnight. The men were dressed in orange jumpsuits and looked as if they had been living in a Greyhound bus terminal waiting for a bus that never came.
After Amabile and I were ID’d, searched, and cleared, we walked the maze of hallways with bars over the windows, and doors that only the guards could open.
My office, which I shared with three other degree candidates, was six feet by eight feet, smaller than a cell, and contained two identical folding chairs and a gym locker.
My first patient was a skinny white guy with a buzz cut and a cauliflower ear sentenced to nine months for exposing himself at the Metropolitan Museum, in the Greek-sculpture wing. He had stationed himself at the end of a line of marble nudes and waited for schoolgirls on a field trip. He showed no remorse and contended that he was innocent, that his fly was open without his knowledge.
He always started our sessions with a joke to try to rattle or charm me, I couldn’t always tell which. It was more than that—he only responded to my questions with jokes.
“Prisoner,” he began, “ ‘Look here, Doctor! You’ve already removed my spleen, tonsils, adenoids, and one of my kidneys. I only came to see if you could get me out of this place!’ Doctor, ‘I am . . . bit by bit!’ ”
“Are you asking me to get you out of this place?” I asked.
“A man escapes from a prison, finds a house, and breaks into it, looking for money, but only finds a young couple in bed. He orders the guy out of bed and ties him up in a chair. While tying the girl up to the bed, he gets on top of her, kisses her on the neck, then goes to the bathroom. While he’s in there, the husband tells his wife, ‘Listen, this guy is an escaped prisoner, look at his clothes! He probably hasn’t seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck. If he wants sex, don’t resist, don’t complain, just do what he tells you. If he gets angry, he’ll kill us. Be strong, honey. I love you.’ ‘He was not kissing my neck,’ the wife said. ‘He was whispering in my ear. He told me he was gay, thought you were cute, and asked if we kept any Vaseline in the bathroom.’ ”
“Are you frightened of being raped in here?”
“A psychiatrist makes his rounds in the mental hospital one morning. ‘How are you feeling today?’ he asks the first patient. The patient is naked, his penis is erect, and he is dropping peanuts on it. He turns to the shrink and says, ‘I am fucking nuts. I’m going to be here for a while.’ ”
“Are you accepting the fact that you are going to be here for a while?”
“You know, Doc, I think I’m allergic to your face.”
I awaited the dreaded punch line.
“Yeah, my dick gets swollen every time I see it.”
“We’re stopping early today,” I said, signaling through the reinforced window in the door for the guard to relieve me.
I remained on the folding chair reminding myself why I agreed to do this work. If only Bennett had been as obvious as this exhibitionist joker. How many sociopaths does it take to change a lightbulb? One. He holds the bulb while the world revolves around him.
• • •
I saw Doug and Candice one more time.
I served them omelets and home fries and Doug asked for hot sauce. They didn’t recognize me—a combination of my waitress uniform and my cut and colored hair and their generally hungover condition. When Doug dropped his knife and asked for another, I brought a steak knife and considered plunging it into his chest, two inches below his clavicle, where a natural gap exists between the ribs. Maybe it was my mother’s hand that stilled mine in this defining moment. Or maybe I realized that stabbing Doug would just be the form my self-destruction would take. Then there’s the fact that vengeance requires incrementally larger acts to satisfy the avenger.
I found a share with two medical students in Vinegar Hill, one of whom was Kathy. I’d taken the waitressing job at this diner in Bushwick to finance an extension class in poetry at the New School. Poetry felt like the most natural form for me, and in fact, I had written a couple of poems about Doug and Candice.
Their breakfast cost $21.12; they left me a tip of less than a dollar.
• • •
I saw one more patient at Rikers that day—a walk in the park compared to the exhibitionist joker. After, Amabile dropped me back at my apartment and asked if I wanted him to go in with me. I said I was okay and thanked him for his kindness and concern. We had stopped seeing each other when I had met Bennett, and I was glad we had remained friends.
After he drove off, I walked to Mother’s and got a veggie burger, sweet-potato fries, and a Diet Coke, aware of how pointless it was to drink Diet Coke with fries.
I opened all the apartment windows because the smell of the cleaning solve
nts was still pervasive. A Buddhist friend offered to come in and “smudge” the place to neutralize the horror, but could I continue to live here even after such a ceremony? I felt dizzy and found that I’d been holding my breath. I put the bag of takeout beside my computer, had a couple of fries, and checked my Hotmail account.
I’m the person you’re looking for. There are others, too. You are not the first woman to comment on the familiarity of my experience. The man I knew as “Peter” is about five-feet-eight, carries a little too much weight for that height, is dark-haired with a small scar across one eyebrow—not particularly attractive but it didn’t matter. He has an assurance about him that is charismatic. Did the man you were involved with fall for you very quickly? Did he bring you Bvlgari Green Tea perfume and insist you always wear it? Did he hate your pets? If you want to talk, I’d prefer to do it in person and in a public place. Are you in Boston? I can meet you at Clarke’s bar right outside South Station on the Atlantic Avenue side. I’ll be wearing an orange hand-knit scarf. Is this convenient for you?
The next morning I took a train to Boston.
Clarke’s bar was closed. Not for the day, forever. A FOR RENT sign was in the window. I couldn’t remember if she had said to meet her inside or outside, but when I saw the sign, my memory settled on outside. I stood there for thirty minutes. Why? The same reason I walked up and down the rue Saint-Urbain looking for Bennett’s omelet place. I noticed a policeman on the corner and started toward him, then realized that I wouldn’t know what to ask him. I had no name for her, only knew that she worked for the police department and that she had fallen for the same man.
