LY #107 My Other Trauma

Buckskin Road, Pocatello, today

A year after my sister killed her child I was raped.  This post contains my memory of that event. 

Pocatello, Idaho.   A snowy night in February, 1972.   I'd walked in the early dark from Frazier Hall on the campus down 6th street to the Albertsons between Center and Clark.  There I purchased a helium balloon and attached a note to it.  The note was for Will Huck, a teacher with whom I was involved.  Then I started to walk back to my Aunt Huldah Bell's house on 9th street where I was living.   I would drop off the note at Will's apartment on 7th and then continue home.  Will wasn't home when I knocked (he was at the movies).

When I started to cross 8th I saw a couple of men coming toward me on the sidewalk.  I began to dig in my purse for a small knife I carried there.  I stopped paying attention.  This was my mistake.  I should have gone in a different direction or kept my eyes on them and crossed back to the other side or run or something other than what I did.  While my head was down they grabbed me as I walked past the alley between 8th and 9th just off E. Bonneville, 1/2 block from my aunt's house.  I tried to scream but a hand was over my mouth and on my throat.  I was crying hysterically.  I saw a knife and I was told that if I stopped struggling I wouldn't get hurt.  The strongest memory of that moment is the sound of a dog who coughed.  It was trying to bark but it's old throat couldn't make enough noise.

And then I was in a car being taken into the hills up Buckskin Road.  Something in me clicked into some kind of autopilot.  I stopped crying and started making conversation with them.  I looked out at the lights of the city below.   There was a moment when they let me out of the car when I might have tried to escape by running into the night, into the scrub brush.  I look back and think, "These men were fat and out of shape.  I might have escaped."  And they were fat -- one of the two was obese.  But some part of me chose not to run.  I don't know why.  I stayed and let them do what they did for a couple of hours, including kiss me on the mouth.  In some ways that was the worst thing.

When they were done we drove back down the mountain.   My mind was clear and bright like a diamond.  I asked them why they were rapists.  One of them, the one who talked to me (the other was silent) said that it was like hunting, that it was a thrill, but that they didn't like to hunt animals because killing animals was cruel.  I remember telling them, "It's a good thing you captured me and not some poor virgin Mormon girl.  She might have been really damaged."  Did I think I had sustained no damage just because they didn't cut or beat me?

They dropped me off around the same place they'd picked me up, warning me not to go to the police or they would track me down and kill me.  I walked to my aunt's house.

When I walked in the door I said something like, "I've just experienced what Robin Morgan called a political crime."  This was a reference to the speech made in the Idaho State University Student Union Ballroom four weeks earlier by the feminist author of Sisterhood is Powerful.  Then I started crying.   I knew I shouldn't go to the police because Morgan, in her speech, had talked about what the police did with rape victims, calling it a second rape.  I was not a virgin.  I was a pot-smoking college student with an older man for a lover and a history of promiscuity.  I didn't want to be brutalized by more men.

I don't remember what my Huldah said to me. I do remember that my other older sister, then living with her, told me not to call my parents because "it would kill them."

So I took a bath and then I called Will and said I needed to come over to his house.  I don't remember how I got there.  Did he walk to Huldah's to get me?  Did Huldah drive me over?  I don't know.  I remember that when I got there we got stoned on some hashish I'd been given and had sex.  I wanted to drive the experience of the rapists from my body.

For a week after that I was someplace else.  I would find myself walking somewhere in town without realizing how I got there.  I didn't go to classes.  I stayed at Will's apartment.  The following week was midterms and I flunked all of my tests.  I didn't drop out, however, and I did wind up passing all my courses that semester.

Later, at ISU, I gave short speeches on being raped and I would have to explain that I was not "asking for it," that with my short hair, hat, and the heavy winter coat and pants I was wearing at the time I was kidnapped, I was barely distinguishable as female.  I've written poems about this event and even wrote an essay in a college writing class, an essay the professor later said that he assumed was about someone else, not me.  That was a far less confessional time than our present era, when everyone tells their story, as I am doing here.

In my first post of next week I'll talk a bit about the impact of both The Rape and The Family Tragedy on my way of being in the world, including my life in the classroom.  Then I'll be able to put both back in their their respective boxes.