expression was amazing to me, because he appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself.
What I actually saw was a pitiful, awful, monstrous man who had taken what should be a supreme act of love and tenderness between two people who care deeply for one another and had twisted and perverted it into an act of hatred and violence and death.
What kind of person needs to watch someone die to have fun? I thought.
I’ve always been a spiritual person and my faith has always had a powerful impact on my life. I believed that I was probably bound for heaven in the next few moments and I also believed that, when his own time came to die, this man was going straight to hell.
And something about that thought struck me as funny. Not that I could have laughed, if I’d wanted to, because his chokehold on me was tightening again, but I felt my body relax and I guess I laughed in my eyes because whatever he saw drove him into a rage. He grew more vicious. Still holding me by the neck, he began to shake me like a rag doll, my head snapping back and forth.
“Say you love me!” he growled, his voice angry, agitated and demanding.
How stupid, I thought. How the hell am I supposed to say anything when my throat is completely closed?
I guess my expression was defiant, because he yanked me back and forth by the throat again, my head flopping like a balloon.
“SAY ‘I LOVE YOU!’” he shouted, his voice almost inhuman in its fury.
Death was there, right there and it drove me to panic. Somehow, some way, I managed to squeeze out something that sounded like, “dgll LLODSOVE DGOO.”
My compliance seemed to calm him a little, but it wasn’t enough. A few moments later he started to choke me even more violently and I knew that this time, I would not wake up. In a raw terror, my instincts took over, pure animal fight-for-survival instincts that were telling me to act as if I was enjoying it.
So I moved my hips, trying to get him to climax so he would be done, so he would get off me, so he would go away, so I could live.
It worked. He ejaculated and immediately rolled off me, pulled up his pants and headed for the door. I got up too and tried to get there first so that I could run, but he anticipated that and hurried to block the way, walking backwards toward the door.
Suddenly, he put his hands up in front of him, almost in a pleading gesture and said, incredibly, impossibly, “We’ll have to date again.”
We’ll have to date again. The words resounded in my ears.
But he wasn’t finished. Reaching into his pants pocket, he withdrew a little silver and tiger’s eye jeweled, oval pillbox and handed it to me.
A gift, a present...from our “date.”
Still moving as if in a nightmare, I put my hand to my throat and realized that I was actually bleeding inside my throat. I stood there shaking in front of him, still naked from the waist down, bleeding inside, holding the pill box. In the next moment, he was gone.
It took one rapist less than half an hour to rip apart my life.
I remember looking at the clock because I was worried about how many minutes my brain had been deprived of oxygen. He knocked on my door at 6 P.M. and was gone by 6:25.
In that brief time frame, everything that had made me, me, had been crushed; I was consumed by fear and traumatized.
My family was a couple of thousand miles away and I was alone.
The first thing I did after he left my apartment was bolt for the bathroom, where I took a glance at my reflection in the mirror and almost fainted again.
The whites of my eyes were no longer white. They were blood red.
Gagging, I staggered backward. I no longer recognized myself. I was so shocked that I did not look into a mirror again for days.
Then I crawled into the shower and scrubbed my whole body with vinegar and then shampoo and then soap and other stuff. Scrubbed until my skin nearly bled.
I thought about calling the police, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What if they said that, by opening my door, I had willingly let the guy in? Plus, I’d modeled for Playboy and I’d danced on television in hot pants and go-go boots—what if they said I had somehow brought this on myself?
If any cop says anything like that to me, I caught myself thinking, I’ll kill the son of a bitch.
The state of mind I was in, I could easily picture myself lunging across the desk of some smart-ass cop and bodily attacking him.
Gone was the sweetly trusting, loving, naive little Lois from Kansas City. In her place was this raging, filled-with-frustration, devastated and distrustful…thing.
I just wasn’t me anymore and I wasn’t sure what the new me would be capable of.
I slept.
For twelve hours, I slept.
And then I realized I needed food. I was out of almost everything.
But I looked like a monster, bloody-eyed and fierce. And I didn’t even own a pair of sunglasses to help me hide.
So I hid in my apartment.
In the kitchen were one egg, one piece of bacon, one limp stalk of celery and half a bag of flour.
I lived on that. I cut the bacon into eight little slices. Once a day, I fried up one of the small pieces with a handful of flour and ate it.
Otherwise, I slept and waited for the blood to drain out of my eyeballs so that I could look human again before venturing forth into polite society. I lived like that for two weeks.
Starvation finally drove me out. I deliberately planned my visit to the grocery store less than a block away. I would go at 2 P.M., which I deemed to be the safest time of day and also the least crowded.
When I finally skulked into the market, I refused to get a cart and start down the aisles until I looked around and could be reasonably certain that there were no men in the store.
Once I had done this I rushed to grab a few modest but necessary purchases. Gratefully I found a female checker.
So far, so good.
I paused at the magazine rack in front of the store, bag of groceries in hand and was browsing the periodicals when a little boy—no more than six or seven—came over and stood beside me.
ATTACK HIM! screamed a voice inside my incredulous brain. KILL HIM STRIKE HIM SMASH HIM HURT HIM!!
Blinking in shock at the savagery of my own thoughts, I forced myself to breathe deeply, told myself, For heaven’s sake, he’s just a little boy! while I broke out in a sweat and began to back away.
From some dim distance I heard a man’s voice say, “Come on, son. It’s time to go,” and it was all I could do not to whirl around and scream, You idiot! He could have been hurt!
With
