by Ivan Coyote
I have thought a lot about this moment in the many years since, flipped these few minutes over and studied their underbelly. Asked myself all the questions I could come up with. I was never in love with my best friend Janine. I never stared at her body when we were swimming or getting changed, I wasn’t attracted to her in that way, ever. I only looked at her body to compare it to mine, which I always found lacking somehow. I was skinnier than her. I was paler. My chest was flat. So was my ass. I didn’t like my body much, but I didn’t desire hers either. I had sexual fantasies, but they were less to do with body parts of any particular gender and more to do with what I recognize now was my burgeoning kinkiness: I jerked off while thinking about that scene from Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston is wearing a collar attached to wrist restraints and a dirty loin-cloth and he has to stand there in front of a tribunal of orangutans in leather and try to convince them that he is in fact a cultured man from another planet who can speak. Or the part where the gorillas chase him on horseback with bullwhips. Or when they catch him in a rope net. Needless to say, I kept these details to myself.
I have wondered many times about why I did what happened next, and what fueled the fear that curled up cold from out of my belly and made me jump to my feet. I can’t remember if I mumbled an excuse or an apology or if I said anything at all.
I only remember leaping on my new bike and pedaling home as fast as I could. I remember barely stopping to lean my bike up against a post in the carport and fumbling to get the front door open. I kicked off my shoes and bolted through the kitchen and upstairs into my bedroom and slammed the door behind me.
Then I let the tears flood over my bottom lids and down my face. The hot, burning kind that make you make a sound in your chest you don’t recognize as your own, a sound that catches at the top of your throat and tears a hole there before it escapes your mouth.
I didn’t want to kiss my friend. Her lips were puffy and covered in butter and I didn’t know how we would look at each other after, or what we would say, but that wasn’t it. That wasn’t what I was crying about. I wouldn’t know for six more years what was still stuffed way down inside of me that scared me so much.
I BELIEVE YOU
My Rob Brezsny horoscope for this week, the week of my forty-sixth birthday, reads as follows:
“What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?” This question was posed by Leo author Ray Bradbury in his book Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. Even if you’re not a writer yourself, you will benefit from responding to his exhortation. It’s one of the best things you could possibly do to activate your dormant creativity and intensify your lust for life. This is one of those times when working with your extremes is not only safe and healthy, but also fun and inspirational. So do it, Leo! Get excited and expressive about the best and worst things in your life.”
So. I’m going to write about one of the things that scares me the most to write about. How do I not write like a victim? Will he sue me if I write about what happened? It was so long ago, maybe I should just leave it be? I’m going to reassure myself with the fact that if the guy I am about to write about sues me for libel, it would mean him admitting that he is the guy I am writing about. He has some kind of a job in politics now, I’m not sure what, since I try not to know much about him. Hopefully just the threat of a scandal will keep me safe. I already know that he is not a good man.
When the Jian Ghomeshi scandal broke last year, the case where the popular and handsome-to-some national CBC radio personality came under the spotlight after years of rumours and investigations by journalists for numerous assaults on multiple women, I found myself having an unexpectedly strong reaction every time anyone I knew insisted that we wait until the guy had his proper say in court before we found him guilty.
I got into a fight on the phone with one of my favourite cousins about it, in fact. My position was that we always wait for justice but it rarely comes, and in the meanwhile, predators continue with business as usual. I told my cousin that every time he said on Facebook that Ghomeshi was innocent until proven guilty he was telling all the women in his life—his wife, his daughter, his nieces, his mother, his female friends and co-workers—that he is not the guy to tell if they are raped or assaulted or sexually harassed. That he is not a safe harbour. Not a confidant, and not in their corner.
At first I couldn’t figure out why every time I read another article supporting or calling for patience or facts or more proof against Jian, or Cosby, or Woody Allen, the tears welled up so hot and easy, why my stomach knotted itself into itself and wouldn’t come undone for hours after.
Then it came over me in the shower one morning. The stream of hot water burped a little and turned cold for a few seconds when one of my neighbours turned their dishwasher or washing machine on, and the truth jumped into my chest like a frozen boulder and stayed there, making it hard to breathe or think about anything else.
I was date-raped in grade ten by a popular boy at school. Let’s say his name was Kevin and he was a basketball player. Neither of these things are true, but let’s say them anyway. Let’s protect him even to this day, because this is what we do. We protect him as a means of surviving ourselves.
He was in grade twelve. He had a group of friends, the definition of a clique, who were athletes and got good grades and were handsome and all going to university. They drove their own cars to school and had new sweaters and backpacks for the first day of classes.
I don’t know why he asked me out. I was two years younger, I had no boobs and hung out with a different crowd, and my friends had all come to the only high school in town together from the junior high in Porter Creek. Maybe it was because we both played the saxophone? Or maybe he played the trombone, but I’m hiding the truth in here somewhere so I can write down what really happened. I don’t know. We didn’t date for very long.
His parents worked out of town a lot, and his older sister was away going to school somewhere down south. He often had the house to himself, which was unusual. He would never let his friends talk him into big crazy my-parents-are-away-for-the-weekend parties like some kids threw though, he was too smart for that.
It was winter, and cold. Maybe early December? I can’t remember the details now, just that it was cold and dark. Snowing a little. We were in his basement in the rec room, on an old couch. He wanted me to give him a blowjob, but I was freaked out. His dick was pushing at the buttons on his Levi’s 501 jeans, and he popped the buttons open and pulled his underwear down and took it out. It was crooked. I remember thinking it was crooked, and was that normal? It was the first hard penis I had seen in real life up close.
“Just put it in your mouth,” he said. I don’t remember if I ever said yes or not. What I do remember was him on top of me then, me on my back on that old orange and brown and mustard coloured plaid couch and his dick all the way inside my mouth and down my throat and gagging and pushing him off me and spitting it all out and then bolting up the stairs to the front door and grabbing my parka and snow boots and running down the sidewalk in the cold and white and silence of a Yukon winter.
I heard him behind me, swearing and calling me a bitch, and starting his car, the engine gunning as he backed up down the driveway and then drove off. I ran, the frigid air feeling clean and burning my nostrils and the back of my throat. Ducked into an alley and squatted down behind a little frame that held two old garbage cans. His headlights scrolled the garage door above me and then kept on driving. I could hear the tires on his hand-me-down-from-Daddy car squeaking on the fresh snow as he drove slowly past the alley and turned the corner.
I waited there, crouched down and heart thumping against my ribs, tears freezing on my eyelashes and cheeks and then melting again when I blinked. My nose was running and I felt like I might throw up.
After a while my toes started to burn in the cold because I wasn’t moving, wasn’t keeping the blood flowin
g through them. Finally I stood up and peeked around the corner of the old wood-sided garage to the sleepy street. Nothing but snow falling and the blue glow of television sets in the living rooms of the houses on the silent street. A raven cackled from a power line and I jumped, and then laughed at myself a little. I pounded my hands together inside my mitts and stomped my feet. I was okay. I was fine. I was okay. Better to figure out now that the guy was an asshole than later. I ate some fresh snow off a fence post and swished it around in my mouth and spat it out. All I had to do was get home.
To this day the bus service in Whitehorse sucks. I pulled back the fur cuff of my parka and checked my watch, even though I already knew the answer. The last bus had headed downtown an hour ago, easy. Service up to Porter Creek where I lived had stopped much earlier than that. I pulled up the hood of my parka, wiped my nose on the back of my mitt, walked down to Lewes Boulevard, and stuck out my thumb. I knew there was a chance that Kevin would drive past. Just let him try to get me in his car, I thought. Let the fucker try. I dare him. I took stock of which of the houses close by still had their lights on.
A light blue Honda Civic hatchback pulled over right away. A girl I sort of knew from school was driving it. She had gone to one of the other junior high schools, but now went to the same high school as I did. She was in my chemistry class. She was nice enough. Let’s say her name was Leslie, and that she played volleyball. Only one of these things is a lie.
She leaned over and pushed the passenger door open. “Get in. You must be freezing.”
I got in. That song “Shout, shout, let it all out” was playing on the radio.
“You going downtown?” she asked me.
“Porter Creek, actually, but I will go as far as you can take me.”
She met my eyes with hers. “You okay?”
I looked back at her. Tried to make my face a mask of nothing. I didn’t know her. Didn’t know who her friends were. Didn’t know who she knew. The volleyball team. Not my people.
“I’m fine. I just missed the last bus and I need to get home.”
“I can drive you all the way. I’m just going to get my brother from his hockey practice at Takini Arena. I’m early anyway. My dad was driving me nuts so I just left.”
I sat back in the seat with a huge sigh. Pulled my mitts off and held my fingertips up to the heating vent in the dash.
She talked non-stop all through downtown and up the highway, sitting up too straight in the driver’s seat like she was still nervous to be in control of a vehicle. Stopping fully at all stop signs, and not going too fast once we hit the highway. Windshield wipers thump-thumping, casting intermittent shadows across her wide face as the streetlights came and went above us.
She eased the car into our driveway. No one had shovelled it yet, that was my job.
“You can talk to me, you know.” She put the car in park but didn’t turn it off, and turned the radio down. “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band. “I can keep my mouth shut,” she said.
I don’t know why I didn’t trust my initial gut instinct and just keep my mouth shut. I can’t even let myself think about how different the next three years of high school might have been for me if I had just kept my mouth shut that night in the volleyball player’s car in my driveway.
“Kevin kind of … crossed a line with me tonight. Made me do something I didn’t really want to do.”
“Kevin your boyfriend Kevin? From the basketball team? Cute Kevin with the curly hair?” Her eyes were wide.
I regretted the words already, while they were still hanging in the air between us.
“Just forget about it,” I said. “It wasn’t a big deal. Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it.”
Her face shone white under the motion detector light that kept coming on and switching off above us. I had helped my dad install it a couple summers ago, passing tools up the ladder to him and listening to him explain about photovoltaic cells. She narrowed her eyes at me and leaned in.
“I wouldn’t say anything if I was you. He’s the assistant captain and will probably be the valedictorian this year. We’re only grade tens.”
I nodded. “Forget I said anything, okay? Thanks again.”
She didn’t smile, didn’t say goodbye, just put the car in reverse and backed slowly into the street, looking both ways. Her face all serious and still.
I took a very hot bath and that is when the real tears came. Down my face and into the bathwater.
I told my mom the next morning that I didn’t feel good, which was not a lie, and stayed in bed until everyone else had left the house for work and school. It was a Friday.
I didn’t go out much over the weekend, which is why I didn’t find out about the brand new couple until Monday morning in the cafeteria. Leslie and Kevin. Everyone was talking about it. How they got together at Brad’s party on Saturday night. Everyone told me how good I was taking it. “You don’t even seem that upset,” Wendy who played oboe wrote me a little note in French class and passed it to me.
“Because I’m not,” I wrote back.
I never told anyone what happened that night, not for years. Leslie and Kevin spent the rest of that school year making sure I was not invited to any of the cool parties, and things only got nominally better when he graduated and left town for university the following September.
The summer I turned nineteen, I ended up in the bar at the Klondike Inn on my birthday, drinking pitchers of draft beer and listening to a cover band do a pretty decent version of “Radar Love” by Golden Earring. I would have liked the band better had I not known that the lead singer had given a young woman I worked with at the Westmark Hotel waiting tables a nasty dose of chlamydia.
There were about fifteen of us loosely seated at a cluster of tables. At any given time a handful of us were up dancing or getting a drink. All of a sudden I found myself seated alone, and Kevin sat down at the table next to me. I had not seen him come in. He was wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt with the collar popped up. He was furrier, his eyebrows thicker, and he had too much stuff in his hair. He still wore the same aftershave.
He grabbed an empty glass and stared at the dregs. “I heard you’re a dyke now. Is that true?”
I picked up the full pitcher of beer from the middle of the table and made like I was going to pour some for him. He held the glass up. Then I redirected, and emptied the entire pitcher right into the crotch of his jeans. He jumped up with a furrowed brow and his wet mouth open.
“Fucking bitch. What’s wrong with you?”
“I heard you’re a rapist now. I know that’s true.” I spun on the grass-stained heel of my work boot and left the bar.
Kevin went on to work for the government. I never told anyone what he had done. I didn’t tell anyone until just recently. Sometimes Facebook suggests we should be friends. He is balding and still has the same thick, wet lips. I don’t click on his profile. I don’t want to find out that he has a pretty wife and teenage daughters now. I don’t want to see him smiling at barbecues with guys I went to school with. I thought about blocking him but that would involve clicking on his profile, and sometimes I still entertain fantasies of sending him a well-worded and eloquent message threatening to write his wife and boss and tell them what he did that night in Riverdale in his parents’ rec room. What he did that night, and what he did after, too. I don’t believe that he turned himself around, that inside he was truly a good person who just made a mistake and that he has spent the rest of his life respecting women and working to make himself a better man. I don’t believe any of those things.
It was the Jian Ghomeshi case that unlocked my mouth about it. I couldn’t stand it anymore. All those asshats saying that there wasn’t any proof. Guys I knew, guys I used to trust saying shit like that. That she was just doing it to get back at him for spurning her. That it was professional jealousy. That it was consensual. Why didn’t they come forward sooner? they said. Like talking about this shit is easy. Like being called a slut in the commen
ts is nothing. Like putting your private life and pain out there to be mocked and questioned and made into headlines doesn’t cost you.
As if there is any possible thing to gain except for lifting the dirty truth off of your chest so you can finally breathe.
I’m saying I believe those women so I can believe myself. I’m saying I know what happened because I was there, too. I’m saying I understand their silence because I’m finally just writing about this thirty years later.
FRENCH KISSING
I got pretty serious about playing that saxophone. Played my scales in my upstairs bedroom until I bit a permanent dent inside my lower lip where it curled over my bottom teeth and pressed into my mouthpiece. I took home records and copped the saxophone solos off them, carefully transcribing the notes on music paper that my mom bought me special from the music rentals window at the back of Hougen’s Department Store on Main Street.
Sometimes before my Mom quit drinking, she and her girl-friends would wake me up in the middle of the night, smelling like white wine or gin-and-tonics and laughing until they swore they were about to pee themselves. My mom would flip the light on in my bedroom and I would sit up, squinting and confused, trying to focus my eyes and figure out if it was morning already or still night time.
“Play ‘Misty’ for me,” she would say, her words just a little bit slurred and her eyes wet. “Or the new song, with the sax bit, guilty feet have got no rhythm. Play us that one.” So I would, I would spread my sheet music out on the blue and white shag carpet in my bedroom and play “Misty” for my mom and her friends, sleep-sweat sticking my pajama shirt to the skin between my shoulder blades and my hair all flat on one side until they got quiet and nodded and then went back downstairs and turned up Gordon Lightfoot or Abba and refilled their drinks.
