Читать книгу I Will Find You: In Search of the Man Who Raped Me - Joanna Connors, Joanna Connors - Страница 9

Monday, July 9, 1984. Cleveland.

On the last day of the first part of my life, I’m running late. As usual.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I’m driving up Euclid Avenue in my Toyota hatchback, fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, pushing it to twenty, headed east out of downtown Cleveland for a 5:00 p.m. interview at Case Western Reserve University.

It’s already 5:00. Rush hour starts at 4:30 here, and I’m trapped in the daily exodus of workers leaving their offices in the city for the suburbs, all of them stepping on the gas through the bad parts of town, speeding past the brick housing projects and the weedy vacant lots that mark the spots where riots burned through in the ‘60s.

At East 55th Street, the borderline between downtown and the inner city, you can almost hear the steady beat of car locks clicking down, the percussive sound track to Cleveland’s deep racial divide.

I slalom from the left lane to the right lane and back, swearing and scolding myself the way I always do.

Why don’t you leave more time? Jesus. What’s wrong with you?

It’s high summer, and I’m worked up and jittery, hitting the steering wheel as I talk. The car has no air-conditioning. My open window lets in the heavy, hot fumes of summer, melting tar and truck diesel. All I want to do is get to Case, do a quick interview, and then head to my neighborhood pool for an evening swim before it closes. I’m thinking more about the pool than the interview, which I’m doing only because the guy who runs the little summer theater on the Case campus bugged me so much about it. I’ve agreed to watch a rehearsal of their next show, and then talk to the playwright, someone I’ve never heard of, who’s in from Peru. I’ve been so busy I haven’t read the play or anything about the playwright. I’ll wing it.

At this point, I’ve lived in Cleveland only ten months. I still get lost, still don’t know all the shortcuts. I keep up the yelling at myself and other drivers as I head into the rush-hour snarl of University Circle, a hub of culture, education, and verdant parks at the eastern edge of the city. The Circle is the rose on the lapel of Cleveland’s threadbare jacket, financed by the likes of John D. Rockefeller and the city’s other titans of the Gilded Age as the home to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, two history museums, a botanical garden, art and music schools, and Case Western Reserve University.

On the many occasions when our civic dignity is wounded, Clevelanders always invoke University Circle to restore our pride. It’s no easy task. Magazines continually put us on soul-crushing lists, naming us the fattest city in America, or the poorest, or the least sexy, or—the latest—the most miserable city in America. I like to imagine teams of statisticians with clipboards going door to door, measuring the misery of an entire city, offering tissues and hugs as they listen.

I forget how this one determined misery. The choices are many, topped by dreary winter weather, high unemployment, and the sorry history of our teams. Cleveland still has three major-league teams, but they all lose so often, and so spectacularly, that my newspaper calls it a “streak” if any of them win two games in a row. The nickname for the stadium where the Cleveland Browns play is “The Factory of Sadness.” After LeBron James took his talents to South Beach, ESPN found few reasons to even mention Cleveland, and resumed paying attention only when he came back in 2014. Before the first home game after LeBron returned, Clevelanders filled the streets downtown, the mass celebration reaching a level of joy and mayhem that other cities might reserve for a World Series or Super Bowl win.

The Cavaliers lost the game.

After delivering that familiar disappointment, the team then astonished everyone in Cleveland by starting to win, making it to the playoffs, winning again, and continuing to the NBA Championship Finals. Which they lost.

Clevelanders, their hopes crushed yet again, immediately started talking about next year.

On one border of University Circle you have the massive Cleveland Clinic, a Legoland where new buildings appear almost overnight, usually followed by squat bodyguards outfitted with Secret Service–style earpieces, there to protect the Middle Eastern shahs and princesses who jet into Cleveland for luxe treatment on private hospital floors. A few years back, a rumor circulated that one shah arrived with his own “volunteer” kidney donor in tow. Some said it was because he did not want to wait on an official donor list; others said it was simply a matter of not trusting the quality of our kidneys.

A couple of blocks from the clinic is Hough, the poor, predominantly black neighborhood where a six-day riot, sparked by racial tensions between black residents and the police and white business owners, broke out in 1966, the middle of the decade of urban riots in America. Four people died. Two years later, in Glenville, another neighborhood that borders University Circle, a shoot-out between black nationalists and Cleveland police sparked a three-day riot that left seven people dead.

When we moved to Cleveland from Minneapolis in the summer of 1983, we knew little of this. Most of what my husband and I knew of the city fit on the invitation to our going-away party, which featured a picture of that burning Cuyahoga River and a woman from a ‘50s horror movie running away in terror. “Cleveland, City of Light, City of Magic,” it said, adopting Randy Newman’s ironic ode to our new home.

None of our friends could imagine why we would move to a city that was a punch line for late-night comedians: First prize: A week in Cleveland! Second prize: Two weeks in Cleveland! Ba-da-bum. The city offered so much material for mockery. The burning river. The stinky steel mills. The mayor who set his hair on fire with a blowtorch when he cut a ceremonial metal ribbon to open a convention. The wife of that same mayor, who declined an invitation to the Nixon White House because it was her bowling night. (It was, in her defense, the league championship.)

Our reason was simple and embarrassing: We moved to Cleveland because we had quit our jobs at the Minneapolis Star on impulse, in a buyout, and The Plain Dealer was the first paper to offer us both employment. We were twenty-nine. We decided we would stay five years, then move on.

That summer of 1983 was the summer of Return of the Jedi, which supposedly completed the Star Wars trilogy but did not. Madonna released her first album. Michael Jackson introduced the Moonwalk. WMMS was the hot radio station in Cleveland, playing “Every Breath You Take” and “Beat It” in constant rotation. That summer, Scientific American reported that crack cocaine, which in 1983 was just beginning to creep onto the streets of big cities like Cleveland, was “as addictive as potato chips.”

In Cleveland, it was also the summer of the smash-and-grab. That was the first thing everyone warned me about when they discovered I was new to town. “Don’t leave your windows open or your purse on the passenger seat,” they said, over and over again, those first months. “At stoplights, they smash the window and grab it before you even know what’s happening.”

“They,” while never overtly identified, implied the black men and boys in the designated danger zones of the city—Hough, Central, Fairfax, Glenville: neighborhoods that still showed the scars of the riots in 1966 and 1968. Block after block was pocked with weedy vacant lots and houses with windows covered in plywood and graffiti, where people slipped in and out of the back doors like shadows. Many of them came from the suburbs. In 1990, the celebrated, and winning, and white, coach of the Cleveland State University basketball team was one of those shadows, caught leaving a crack house with a prostitute on his arm.

Hough, once a fashionable neighborhood of three-story houses with wide front porches, changed in the space of a single decade, going from 95 percent white in 1950 to 74 percent black in 1960. Urban renewal and the last gasp of the great migration from the South pushed black people out of the central city and into Hough. Realtors lit the flame of panic selling and white flight to the suburbs up the hill, Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.

By the summer of 1983, Hough was a place I was told you did not go if you were white. Of course, black people had danger zones, too. They were warned not to go to Little Italy, where the aging vestiges of the Cleveland Mafia passed the day drinking espresso at sidewalk cafés and young white men attacked black people who dared cross into their territory.

You drove through Hough, along Chester or Superior Avenue, to get from the suburbs to downtown. But you didn’t turn onto the side streets. Or so I was told. My husband, working the police beat that first year, told me not to stop at red lights if I ever came home late at night.

Sometimes that first year I felt like a child listening to fairy tales about the dangers lurking in the woods. Go straight to work, Little Red Riding Hood, and don’t stop or the wolf might get you.

What did I know? I had lived in Minneapolis–St. Paul for a decade, where the black population appeared to consist of Prince and about a dozen other people. A black reporter who had recently arrived from Texas came into the newsroom one day and said she’d spotted some black people on the street and followed them in her car, hoping to find out where all the black folks lived. She left after a year. “This place is just too white,” she said as she departed.

In Cleveland, smash-and-grabs turned out to be the least of the dire warnings. When I went to look at an apartment in Cleveland Heights, the landlord warned me of an epidemic of carjackings. As we stood in the living room, the sun slanting on the polished wood floors, he told me that one of the women in the building had just bought a BMW, and I should think about it, too.

“She used to have a Mercedes,” he said, “but that’s one of the cars they like to take. A little dangerous for a woman to drive. BMWs are just as good a car, but they’re not as flashy.”

He clearly had no idea where newspaper reporters lined up on the pay scale.

Monday, July 9, 1984.

It’s 5:15 p.m. when I pull into the parking lot at Case. I run to Eldred Theater, stumbling a little in the heels and linen skirt I put on that morning to look professional. The doors into the building are open when I get there. Maybe they’re still rehearsing and haven’t even noticed I’m late. I run up the stairs to the small lobby area on the second floor and look into the theater.

Empty. The whole place is empty.

Damn it! They’re gone.

I must have said it out loud, because a voice comes out of the shadows across the landing. “They said to wait a few minutes. They’ll be back.”

The guy who said it is leaning against the wall, smoking. He’s wiry, not much bigger than me, with an Afro and plastic-framed glasses the size of salad plates, just like mine. It’s the ‘80s, the decade of the Giant Glasses.

“They did?” I say. “Oh.”

I wait, sticking to my side of the little lobby. I feel awkward, like I should say something else, but he’s not saying anything, either. I think about asking him for a cigarette, even though I don’t really smoke. I used to, starting when I was a freshman in high school, and hid my cigarettes in a metal Band-Aid box, right up until I was twenty-two and my chain-smoking father died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The day after his funeral I quit, though I still bummed cigarettes when I was in a bar or around other people smoking.

I’m about to ask the guy for one when I smell menthol in the smoke curling across the lobby. Forget it. I hate menthol.

A couple of minutes pass. He stubs out his cigarette on the floor, shakes another from his pack. Kools.

As he lights it, I decide I’m done waiting and turn to go back down the stairs.

“I’m working on the lights,” he says to my back, his voice mild. “Do you want to see what I’ve been doing?”

A yellow light flashes briefly in my head: Caution. You don’t know this guy.

I ignore it. It’s just a flash, and I speed through it the same way I’d sped through every yellow light on Euclid Avenue driving here.

“OK,” I say.

The door to the theater is closed.

I open it and walk through, into the dark theater and the second part of my life.

I make my way down the narrow right aisle and climb the two steps to the stage, the guy right behind me.

I turn and look up at the stage lights. They’re off. Only the house lights are on. He says, “I should turn them on.” He doesn’t move.

Animal alarm flashes through my body, followed by a flood of adrenaline. The surge makes me dizzy.

This is not right, I think. In fact, this is bad. Really bad. Get out of here. Now.

“I think I’ll wait outside,” I say. Still polite. Still the good girl.

I know it’s too late in the second before he grabs me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides.

I try to scream. I want to scream. It should be natural: Danger leads to fear leads to scream.

But my body has other ideas. Panic overtakes me and closes my throat into a tight, burning knot, muting me. All I can manage is a strangled, small, “No,” just above a whisper.

“Be quiet,” he says.

I feel metal on my neck, moving slowly under my jawline. A sharp point presses into the skin.

I stop moving, stop trying to scream. My attention focuses on that one small point of cool metal against my throbbing vein.

He has a knife. He has a knife. The thought pulses with my blood, a hundred beats a second.

“Please don’t do this,” I say. “Do you want money? Do you want my purse? Take anything you want, but please don’t hurt me.”

“Now, just be quiet,” he says, his voice calm, soothing, as though I’m a child who just woke up from a nightmare.

He pushes me behind the scrim, a translucent screen at the very back of the stage, then backs me hard against the concrete wall, his hand to my mouth. He shows me the knife. It isn’t a knife, though: It’s half a pair of long utility scissors, the kind with black handles and a sharp point. A makeshift dagger.

“Now, I can kill you,” he says, still calm, like he’s saying he can get me a cup of coffee. “But I won’t kill you if you do what I say.”

My breath stops. Wait. Kill me?

The world shrinks into the small, still space behind the scrim. Nothing else exists.

How did this happen? One minute I was running toward a college theater, thinking about how I would fake my way through the interview, get to the pool, and then figure out something for dinner. The ordinary middle of an ordinary day of my ordinary life.

I catch a flash of steel when he moves his hand. An image appears, unbidden: my mother cutting fabric on our dining room table, pins held between her lips, her long, black-handled utility scissors crinkling the tissue-paper patterns of dresses.

His hand still covers my mouth. I nod: Yes. I will do what he tells me.

He takes his hand from my mouth. I do not say anything as he starts fumbling with the buttons on my blouse.

I shake. I try to stop it, but I can’t.

This is it. My rape. I knew it was coming. Every woman knows it, anticipates it, fears it, yet also doesn’t believe it will happen to her. And now here it is. My turn.

My stomach drops, but I do not let myself cry. The effort burns my throat.

I think of something that might stop him. “I’m having my period,” I say. I try to sound apologetic.

“Be quiet.”

He tears at the last button on my blouse, and as he pulls it off I see drops of blood dotting the front.

My mind takes a few seconds to catch up to this new piece of information.

My blood?

I put my hand to my neck, where the dagger was. Sticky.

I look at my hand. A bright red smear.

Yes. My blood.

I look down and see more blood on my skirt. My new linen skirt, bought to celebrate the new job. Bought to look professional.

As though it recognizes itself, the blood in my veins springs to action. I feel it pounding upward, squeezing through my carotid artery, pushing into my head. My body is electrical wire, the current switched on.

Then, just as suddenly, it turns off.

I slip away from my body, like Peter Pan’s shadow, into the fly space above the stage. My fear has vanished. I look down at the stage. I see myself. I look small, standing there in my bra. I look scared.

From the moment we humans are shocked with the terrible knowledge of our own mortality, we wonder and fear: How will I die? When will I die?

A guy smoking a Kool just delivered my answer.

Now.

Now is when it happens to me.

I don’t find it strange that there are two of me. On the stage, I feel his hands on my body. I feel the blade next to my neck, then next to my chest. I feel the rough concrete wall scrape at the skin on my back.

From up above, I watch all of this with a soothing detachment. I know it’s me down there, but I feel like I’m watching someone else. A girl in a play. For her, I feel … I guess the word is “concern.” And pity.

Down on the stage, my blouse is on the ground. My skirt lies in a puddle at my feet. He fumbles with his zipper, still trying to hold the scissors at my neck. He tells me to take off my shoes and everything else.

It occurs to me—probably not then, probably later—that rape is a clumsy business. It’s nothing like the movie versions. The clothes come right off in the movies, usually ripped dramatically. Nothing gets stuck. The rapist knows what he’s doing and works with efficiency. He never has trouble maintaining an erection. As for the victim, she either fights back and escapes—after kneeing the rapist in the groin, of course—or she dies in horrifying violence that will be avenged by the hero.

I, on the other hand, almost topple over while I unbuckle my shoes. My underwear binds my ankles. The rapist still can’t get his zipper down.

Up above, I decide he really is not the right person for the role of rapist. Not at all. He’s too young, too skinny, barely taller than me. His mesh tank top is the kind favored by men who spend a lot of time in the gym, but he has no muscles to show off, no pecs rippling under the shiny mesh. No, he isn’t right for the role. Not scary enough. He will be something of a disappointment to the audience.

The rapist finally gets his zipper to work and sheds his pants, revealing gray boxers. I wonder idly from above: Are they gray because he never washes them, or is that their original color? I hope, for the girl’s sake, it’s the latter.

He shoves me against the concrete wall and tries to push his penis into me, standing up. But he’s not tall enough, and his penis isn’t hard enough. He turns me around and tries again from the back. The concrete feels cold on my cheek.

When standing doesn’t work, he pushes me down to my hands and knees, kneels behind me. He forces a finger into my vagina, as if trying to locate it, and then presses his semisoft penis into me and starts thrusting. Fast. Faster. He’s pumping away so fast I think it will end quickly, but after a couple of minutes he gets tired, or bored, turns me over onto my back on the stage floor, and pushes his penis into me again, from the front.

He moves with mechanical disinterest, not speaking, not looking down at me. Above, watching, I wonder if he even feels excited. As he continues to thrust, grunting, a small cross hanging from his neck dangles in my face. Lying under him, I fix my eyes on it as it swings, back and forth, a hypnotist’s charm.

He stops, abruptly, and looks me in the eye.

“Are you married?”

I hesitate.

Is this a test? What answer does he want?

Then I realize he must have seen my wedding ring.

“Yes,” I say. Nothing more.

“Have you ever had a black man before?”

Now what should I say? Does he care?

“No.” A lie. I had two black boyfriends in college.

“I bet you’ve always wanted to,” he says. He leans close, his breath hot with the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. This time, I know what he wants me to answer.

“Yes,” I say.

He stands and pulls me up by my hair, then pushes me to my knees.

“I got to get off,” he says, and presses my face to his groin, still holding my hair.

“Suck on it,” he says.

His penis has gone soft again. I look at it, nestled like a small bird in the coarse black hair. I close my eyes and take it in my mouth. Smell and taste hit me at once. Urine. Sweat. Something musky and rank. I gag and try to cover the gag.

Up above, watching, I wait for the girl on the stage to bite the penis. That’s what they do in movies. They bite it. They hit the guy in the balls. They scream. They scratch. They escape.

The girl onstage does not bite. She sucks. He stays soft.

“Harder,” he says.

She sucks harder. She can’t breathe. She keeps going.

Up above, I observe: This is pathetic. Pathetic rapist. Pathetic blow job. If the girl were better at it, this would be over. She can’t even make a rapist come.

He grabs me by the hair and pulls me away from his penis. “Lie down,” he says. I do, lying on a strip of red carpet embedded with the grime of years of entrances and exits.

Time passes and stops at the same time. I do everything the rapist tells me to do. I suck. I lie down. I turn over. He directs me in an automated, perfunctory Kama Sutra.

I understand that the only way this will end is for him to come, so I try to excite him. I move my hips, I thrust back, I kneel in submission. I make noises of pleasure. Oooohh. Mmmmm. I kiss him back.

“Do you like this?” he asks. Three, four times he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

Nothing I do matters. Even as he moves me around, muttering, “I got to get off,” he seems oddly bored by what he is doing.

He loses his soft erection and turns me over yet again, pulls my bottom up and jabs a finger in.

“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he asks.

He doesn’t wait for an answer. This excites him. His penis hard, he sodomizes me, pushing in fast and without warning.

The pain stuns me. It burns. I fight for air. My face, rubbing into the dirty backstage carpet, is wet and raw. I have held back my tears, but now I choke on them.

“Does your husband do this?” he asks.

I close my eyes and try to breathe.

“Does it feel good?”

He coos the words into my ear. He’s hurting me; he has to know he’s hurting me. Dirt and carpet fibers catch in my throat. I hold my breath and try to give in to the pain, to make it go away.

“Does it feel good?” he asks again.

“Yes.”

“Does your husband do this to you?”

Then it hits me.

This is a prison rape.

Of course. He’s been in prison, and now he’s doing to me what someone did to him. He’s claiming me as his property.

Then: A noise from downstairs. A bang, like a door closing.

Bang: Someone is here. Bang: I will be rescued. Bang: No. He’ll panic and stab me.

He stops, puts his hand over my mouth, and grabs the weapon, pulling out but still hovering over me.

“Be quiet, now. Be quiet.” I nod and he takes his hand away. We freeze in place.

Silence.

Silence.

Nothing.

No one is coming. I won’t be rescued. He will kill me.

He pushes me to the floor again, and keeps going, posing me like a doll: on my back, on my hands and knees, on my stomach. Then he put his penis in my mouth again, hovering above my face as I lie there. I gag, bile rising in a bitter gush into my throat. I can’t breathe. The penis falls away from my mouth.

He slaps my face. “Bitch.”

Then he caresses the spot where he slapped. Gentle.

“You’re my bitch,” he says. “You do what I tell you.”

He moves down my body and burrows his face between my legs. He licks.

Above, I observe: This is weird. Rapists don’t do this. Do they?

He licks more.

Up above, I decide he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. I want to shout down at him: God! Have you ever done this before?

He stops. “I know you liked that,” he says, pride in his voice, as he climbs on top of me again.

How long has it been? I have no idea. The theater feels like a sealed tomb, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, soundproof and windowless, with a trapped heart beating inside. I am alone. Utterly alone.

I watch from above. How will it end?

I try something: “I think the people I was supposed to meet will come back,” I say. “They might catch us. We should get out of here.”

He looks at me, thinking about it. Then he nods and reaches for his pants. I crawl across the dirty carpet for my skirt. We dress in a hurry.

“Get your purse,” he says.

I give him all my money: a couple of twenties and some singles. He grabs the wallet from my hands and shakes the coins out, pocketing the quarters and dimes and pennies.

When he has everything, he puts the dagger-scissors up to my back and pushes the point in just enough so I can feel it.

“OK,” he says. “We’re going to go outside now. I told you I wouldn’t kill you, but if you do anything stupid when we get out, I will kill you.”

He leads me out a backstage door and down a staircase, holding my arm, the point of the scissors pressing into my back.

Then he opens a door and we are outside. My brain registers the change in one-word thoughts: Bright. Sun. Air.

Then: DAVE.

In the sun, I see a tattoo on his right arm: “DAVE,” carved into his dark skin in crude capital letters. It looks like someone etched it with a sharpened ballpoint pen. Or scissors, I think, feeling the point in my back.

I glance at him and look away. Now I know his face and his name, or maybe his prison boyfriend’s name. Did he notice that I saw it?

“Where’s your car?” he asks.

My tiny flame of hope sputters and dies. I’m outside, but I’m not free. And now I know too much for him to let me go. Now he’ll take me somewhere in my car and kill me. I hesitate.

“It’s in the lot over there,” I say. Then I add: “Right next to the attendant’s booth.”

This is not true, but I continue the lie. “We can’t go there. We don’t want to get caught.”

He thinks for a second, then turns me so I’m facing him. He licks his finger and rubs at the blood on my neck. He smooths my hair.

“Now, don’t you go to the cops,” he says. “If you go to the cops, I’ll have to go to prison.”

“I won’t go to the cops. I promise.”

“If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you,” he says, almost cooing. “And when I get out, I will find you.”

He kisses me on the lips and walks away.