by Amy Asbury
Two weeks later I met another long-haired boy at school named Matt. I don’t remember if I liked him or he liked me or how it happened, but I think he just came up and asked me out. He asked me if I wanted to go to a party on Halloween weekend. It was exactly two weeks after my first date. My parents didn’t stick to their “you’re grounded” rule, because they let me go with him.
This boy was a senior. He was not a Hollywood guy, but what the hell. He had long, brown hair and blue eyes and looked like he could have been a bad rocker kid but he was actually somewhat of a nerd. He drove his vintage Mustang up to my house and came to the door as my mother wanted. It was all shot to hell though, when my father told him, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” in a joking manner, with a wink-wink ‘between the guys’ tone. He more or less gave his blessing for the boy to screw me. I was so confused. Is this okay with him? My father?
I wore an all-white dress and really high white stilettos, trying to look like Tawny Kitaen in the Whitesnake “Is This Love?” video. I didn’t realize that fifteen-year-olds, shit, even twenty-five- year-olds were not dressing like that. I may have been dressed appropriately for a Hollywood party, where ‘over the top’ was a necessity to stand out over all the other girls, but at a high school kegger? I was the only girl there dressed as if I was working the ho stroll. I immediately started drinking antiseptic-tasting Bacardi 151, which is apparently all they had. It took me precisely five minutes to be incredibly drunk.
I remember when it hit me I could barely stand. I felt embarrassed because I knew I had to throw up. I crept away and locked myself in the bathroom. As I was throwing up, everything started spinning. I think I passed out shortly thereafter. I don’t know how long I was in there, but a girl finally broke in. I remember people helping me down the stairs so my date could take me home. I was like rubber- I couldn’t even hold myself up. I heard one person saying that they should put me in a shopping cart. I remember thinking …Wow…people are making fun of me, I am a fool. I blacked out shortly thereafter. I don’t remember getting into his car, I don’t remember us driving. I just remember waking up in the backseat. It was dark and I was looking up at a streetlight. There was someone on top of me and my dress was up around my waist. The guy was having sex with me. I was being date raped.
Losing my virginity had not been my idea but I was too afraid to say no. This time I literally woke up to find this person on top of me. I was asleep! The guy stopped when he realized I was awake. He seemed to feel guilty. He tried talking with me until I sobered up. He was not arrogant like Jamie, but he had just raped me while I was passed out. He certainly didn’t think my father would hunt him down and shoot him, that’s for sure.
I didn’t get home that night until four in the morning and I was in huge trouble. I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened. I could only cry. It was a crying like no crying I had ever experienced. It was a deep, thick, hard sort of crying, coming from way inside my guts.
The next few weeks were suicidal for me. I wanted to kill myself. It hit me what I had done. I had purposely created this sexy image and I now had a reputation of being a person that was not me. I looked like a girl who wanted to have sex! And I didn’t want to have sex! I had a closet full of sexy clothes and high heels and bins full of makeup. I wanted out. I wanted to say “Cut!” to the director and walk off the set. I had just started the tenth grade only a month and a half prior and I still had three more years of this? I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. I truly wanted to die. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. I smoked cigarettes and hid in the bathroom stalls, crying in my leather jacket. I started ditching all of my classes and failing everything. I walked around in a daze, my hair a mess, tears at the edges of my eyes.
A few weeks passed and I didn’t get a period. I thought, No way. I can’t be pregnant by this Matt guy… I am fifteen. What have I done? I waited another week. I still didn’t get my period. When I was two weeks late on my period, I started to look for Matt to tell him. He tried to dodge me; I couldn’t get him to talk to me. He had avoided me, just as Jamie had quickly done. He probably heard from Jamie that I was easy, for all I know. Anyway, when I finally got him to talk to me, the first thing I noticed was that he looked hideous. He had short, feathered bangs; yellowed skin, and super hesher brown hair. After getting a good look at him I thought, Why did I go out with this ugly bastard? He was very short with me and said he had to be somewhere. I felt like I was starring in an After School Special. I told him that I was late on my period. I can’t remember what he said- I think he said he would pay for half of an abortion or something. I went home and cried my eyes out. Things were not going as planned. I was supposed to be flipping my hair in slow motion somewhere.
I was reeling into a deep depression. I knew I couldn’t turn back time and take my virginity back. I did a lot of walking around by myself during that time- I walked around my neighborhood, crying and smoking. I was usually barefoot- I couldn’t tell you why. I think it was the beginning of a mental illness. My mind was splitting open and I just stopped caring.
I remember pouring a big mug of orange soda and walking down the hallway to my room. In the middle of walking, I threw the mug against the wall and kept walking. The soda splattered all over the wall and the mug and ice cubes fell to the carpet. I didn’t even look back or miss a beat. It was that feeling of just truly not caring. Nothing mattered- why was I even alive? I went in my room, shut the door, and started writing. My dad opened the door not too much later and asked me if the mug was mine. I lifelessly said yes. He threw each ice cube at me with force. It hurt, and I knew I shouldn’t have dropped my drink on purpose, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I just sat there, letting him pelt me with ice cubes, watching the look of anger on his face.
I ended up getting my period. I wasn’t pregnant. God gave me a pass. Did I learn my lesson? No. I put on a Guns N’ Roses shirt that Todd Lewis had given me (because he was now into Public Enemy), and went out to find more trouble. I did do one smart thing though: I put myself on birth control pills. If I was going to have sex or even just be too drunk to know what was going on, then I needed a safety net. I didn’t want to add an unwanted pregnancy to the mix.
In mid-November, I was walking down the street yet again. A big red truck rolled by with a Sunset Strip Tattoo bumper sticker on the back. It was a sign of Hollywood, where I wanted to be. I thought, This is my chance. I won’t mess up this time. A cute guy and his friend leaned out the window to talk to me and I felt adrenaline. I didn’t think, Walk away. Now. You are in enough trouble. I thought, This will be exciting. Older guys! From Hollywood! I chatted with them for a few minutes, asking about the bumper sticker and trying to feel out if they actually hung on the Sunset Strip. They did. I gave them my number. Soon thereafter, the main guy, Casey, was picking me up from school and from my house more times than I cared for.
It was cool the first day. I went to one of his friend’s houses and it was amusing. We drove to a hip record store in Sherman Oaks called Moby Disc, and Casey shoved a cassette tape down my pants and made me steal it. I had stolen plenty before, so I wasn’t scared. I was excited to hang out with him and his friends, who were nineteen, twenty. One the guys had been in the Metal Years movie. I felt like I was getting somewhere.
After hanging out a few times, I started to realize two things: One was that Casey was not planning on bringing me to hang on the Sunset Strip with him. He wanted to scam on girls. Two, I didn’t much like Casey. He was rude, he was disgusting, and he was fatter than I had remembered. He had a gut, a double chin, and frightful hair extensions. His head must’ve looked okay out of his truck window, because the rest of him looked like he had fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. To make matters worse, he didn’t seem to have a conscience. I knew I needed to end the relationship or whatever it was, but I didn’t know how to do it.
I was so intensely nervous around Casey and his friends
that I never spoke. I decided I needed alcohol to calm my nerves. I meekly asked him for Southern Comfort, remembering the initial buzz I felt when riding in the car with Jamie. Casey all too gladly provided my fifteen-year-old ass with hard liquor. As soon as that occurred, things started sliding downhill faster than a fucking bobsled. I drank enough to pass out and Casey often locked me in a room full of bottles of his piss (he was too lazy to go to the bathroom), and went about his business. I recall his room having trails of ants in it as well. Sometimes he brought me to other people’s houses and left me there. Once he brought over a young bisexual girl and tried to get me to have sex with her. Another time his father was chasing his friends around the house with an ax, trying to kill them. Then there was the day he took me to the house of some old, rich guy who had a teeth fetish, and offered me up like a sacrificial lamb. The guy examined my teeth and said he wanted Casey to bring me back to ‘party.’ I was like, What is this all about? Casey said that he and his friends often came to the guy’s house for parties and they bit his hand and he paid them. Good Lord, I thought. When things like that happened, I drank up.
I often feared I wouldn’t get home at night and I was scared of missing school the next day. But I was so full of self-hatred and misery, that I wanted to be anywhere but where my parents were. I just remember wanting to be away from them. Casey scared me, but I was determined to deal with it. I told myself to toughen up and handle it.
One evening, we were at some guy’s house and I saw Casey go into a bathroom. He was so antsy and excited, he didn’t close the door all of the way. I saw him first tearing a piece of a cotton ball…then fumbling with a spoon, and something else…what was it? A lighter? I squinted my eyes in my alcohol-induced haze and saw him tie some sort of rubber tubing around his arm and inject something into one of his tattoos, like a shot…I don’t remember how long he was in there, but when he came out, he immediately laid down next to me, wrapped his limbs around me in a grip and fell straight asleep. He didn’t wake up for a few hours.
I was not prepared to deal with any man, let alone a heroin addict. I was a kid. A kid from the suburbs, at that. It appeared to me that heroin was the ‘in’ thing to do because of Guns N’ Roses, who were well-known addicts. Casey bragged of seeing Guns guitarist Izzy Stradlin buying drugs at the “shooting gallery” where he bought his heroin. He probably deliberately bought heroin just to run into him, as he loved Guns N’ Roses.
Casey also bragged about being bisexual. I guess it was another ‘in’ thing to do. He told me some of the guys in Ratt were bi and so was this person and that person- it was like he was trying to be cool. It was the same thing I was doing, but on a higher level. It was as if he was identifying the “cool” variables in these rock stars, and trying to emulate the ones he could.
One night he said we were going to a party. Party? I had never been to a party, besides the one where I got so drunk I locked myself in the bathroom and woke up when the party was over. I was ready to try again. I got all dressed up in a tiny outfit that even Kelly Bundy would have thought was too skimpy. I put on some four-inch high, purple snakeskin pumps; a tiny, tight tube skirt, and a shirt that barely covered my bra on all sides. I had a huge silver heart charm resting in my visible cleavage. My midriff was on display to show that I had a six-pack from doing so many v-sits in my room throughout the past two years. I thought the party would be like something I had seen on MTV or in the movies: People would be dancing on tables. The trees out front would have toilet paper in them. Long Duck Dong would be on an exercise bike and Jake Ryan would be clearing beer cans stacked into pyramids. The Beastie Boys would be there, throwing pies at each other. A couple of the guys from Mötley Crüe would be arm wrestling at the coffee table and there would be a game of strip poker going on. Once again, I had this fantasy that I would walk into the party in slow motion and all heads would turn. Guys would turn to mush and similarly dressed women with less fortunate bods would sneer with jealousy…
(small voice) But that was not what happened.
I got out of the car and realized that we were at a house party in Studio City. It was still light out. The sun was almost down and people were standing around outside …in jeans. Lots of jeans. Jeans on guys, jeans on girls. The girls were wearing shirts that covered their whole bodies and they wore barely any makeup. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were playing on a stereo, singing “What I Am.” People turned and stared all right, but they started laughing right afterward. Not what I was going for, once again. I really just did not get it. I honestly thought Kelly Bundy looked cool and I always tried as hard as I could to look just like her. Anyway, once I saw the crowd I didn’t want to walk up to the party, but I had no choice. I could barely walk in my spiked heels down the driveway. I was wobbling like an old woman with Parkinson’s. Twenty people were outside squinting at me and whispering to each other. I heard someone ask if I were the entertainment. Just then, I reached the end of the driveway. I had one foot on the gravel and another in the grass when my heel sank. The grass was soft, so my heel poked through to the dirt underneath. My other foot caught on the gravel. The next thing I knew, I was going down. That is where the real slow motion started- Down, down, down, down …into the splits. I had one leg out in front of me and one behind me. I couldn’t get up. My skirt had ridden up around my waist. Casey grabbed my hand, yanked me up, and pretended it didn’t happen, which was my preferred method of handling embarrassment.
Despite that debacle, Casey continued to drag me around with him on his errands. I thought if I waited long enough, he would take me to The Strip, but it never happened. It seemed we were always driving around. He drove really fast around canyons at night, drunk and high. I was sure we would drive straight off a cliff. Other times, he brought friends with him in the cab of his truck and made me sit in the back. Not the back seat, the back of the truck, like, where you would carry a dirt bike or something. I remember he and his friends stole a big hard plastic Santa Claus from someone’s lawn and threw it in the back with me. I was freezing back there, rolling around with the Santa Claus while he whipped through traffic on the freeway. They were laughing at me, treating me like an animal.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care what happened to me. Just kill me, let me die here, who gives a shit. I didn’t even care if I was alive, why I would give a shit about that? I was kind of just waiting to die. I tried to stand up to Casey once by slapping him in the face, but he slapped me back even harder. He said, “You think you’re hot? You aren’t shit.”
Shortly thereafter, he thought it would be funny to hold a gun to my head to scare me. This was the worst possible person I could have chosen as company.
One night when I had passed out, Casey and his friend took off all of my clothes and did horrible, humiliating things to me. I would have not even known this happened, but they decided to videotape it and show everyone they knew. This event is what brought me from depressed to truly suicidal. When I think back to the way that night was going before I passed out, I remember being flirtatious with them while I was drinking. I was wearing high heels, tight pants and a tiny shirt. I know that it is a total debate among people- is there such thing as ‘asking for it’? I can tell you what was going through my mind: I wasn’t wearing skimpy clothing because I wanted sex. It was because I thought I looked cool, pretty, and sexy. I thought it gave me some power. I was also flirting. But when I was flirting, I wasn’t thinking that I wanted sex. I just felt attractive and liked the attention I was receiving in return. I don’t think these guys raped me, I think that they thought I was initially consenting. The fact that I passed out straight away and they went on doing who knows what- I can’t come up with anything to play devil’s advocate for that. They were totally vile and corrupted and I was the perfect target.
Casey tried to show me the tape one day. I was so incredibly disturbed, I couldn’t even speak. There were close ups of my private parts, which were still unmanicured, due to my being so young and not knowing how to g
room. It was humiliating, embarrassing, and just crushing. I hid my face. I wanted to be pretty and flirtatious. I didn’t want this. Why did guys have to make everything so ugly and dirty? I didn’t even know something like that could even occur- it wasn’t in my realm of imagination.
Casey started blackmailing me with the videotape, telling me he was going to show my parents if I didn’t do whatever he said. I was devastated. I had only lost my virginity a month prior and had only kissed a boy for the first time a few months earlier. How it spiraled into being blackmailed with a videotape is beyond me. But it did. And it wasn’t a very good videotape, because I was asleep for chrissakes. But I didn’t learn my lesson after my first date. Or my second date. God was knocking on my forehead and I was ignoring the warning signs. I made the decision to hang with these people. I thought it would be exciting and fun and grown up.
