with tears I could barely find my car.
It was then that I realized just how messed up I really was.
In the blur that passed for the next few weeks, I spiraled downward and downward into a depression so severe I began to question my own sanity.
When I had to go back to work, I chose to work for a temp agency, because it allowed me to be basically anonymous, as the jobs afforded little time to make friends. Somehow I managed to function, more or less, in a way that didn’t arouse any suspicions from anyone around me, but inside, I was screaming.
“Justice” isn’t a word that we normally think about in our day to day lives, but it preoccupied me to the point of obsession. More than anything in the world, I wanted that awful pervert to be caught and made to pay for what he had done to me, but how could that possibly happen if I wouldn’t go to the police?
So then I obsessed about making a police report, but my thoughts kept swirling round and round themselves and always came out the same: They’ll take one look at me, find out I’m a model and a dancer and blame me.
And I still had all this rage inside me, this wild animal clawing against the cage and howling at the moon. I was truly afraid of what I might do if I did talk to the police and they did doubt my story in any way. I actually worried that I would attack somebody at the police department and they would arrest me and put me in jail.
I was terrified and filled with fury and I wanted to die.
In all fairness to the Los Angeles police, I have to say that since I didn’t make a report, I really have no way of knowing what they would have said or how they would have reacted—these were fears, among the many terrors that roamed around the black desperate corners of my mind—and nobody ever said there was anything logical about fear. So I never did go to the police, but that didn’t stop my own unreasonable obsession that the guy who had raped me somehow, some way had to be punished for his crime.
Six weeks or so after the rape I left work early one day so that I could beat the traffic. I got in my car and was traveling down a busy boulevard, not thinking anything in particular, when suddenly, as if driving itself, my car turned into a parking lot. I sat, somewhat befuddled and stared at the shop in front of me. It was a high-priced clothing boutique where I never shopped because it was far too expensive for me, but there I was, for some reason.
I got out of the car and, like a zombie or some extra from the movie Night of the Living Dead, walked into the store. There, hanging on a rack in front of me, was a splendid full-length purple velvet skirt that had been marked down to less than twenty dollars.
Maybe I’m supposed to buy this, I thought, but I was still confused. Why had I driven here? What weird thing was happening? I paid for the skirt and got back into my car, determined to drive home this time.
But my car seemed to have a mind of its own and without my consciously doing so, I found myself turning the car up a steep, winding, two-lane street next to the parking lot.
I couldn’t turn around, I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where I was going and my eyes welled up with tears because I was beginning to think I’d entered the Twilight Zone.
It was one of those times when I was truly afraid that I might be losing my mind.
After all, I was terribly scared of everything after my traumatic attack. The last thing I ever wanted to do was find myself in unfamiliar territory. All I’d done for two months was go to work, buy groceries and stay cloistered in my apartment. Why was I doing this? I didn’t want to be here!
I just wanted to go home. Yet I couldn’t.
Finally, the road leveled off and I spotted a graveled area where I would be able to turn my car around and get the hell out of this place. I pulled into the small area and glanced up—
Right into the face of my attacker.
He was just emerging from the second-floor doorway of a shabby, rundown apartment complex and seemed to be heading straight for my car.
A soul-chilling scream gathered at the back of my throat, but before I could open my mouth, two other men appeared in the doorway, one on each side of the man who had tried to kill me.
Police officers.
The man who had forced his way into my apartment, tortured and raped me was being led out of the building in handcuffs!
His thin, pale face was twisted, enraged and desperate. He was fighting and struggling against the cops the same way I had fought with him.
I stared in profound shock as the police dragged him down the stairs and slammed him face-down onto the hood of the police cruiser. My mind was so stupefied at the sight that I don’t think I even breathed.
Something about this strange, horrified woman sitting staring from her car at the scene must have caught the attention of one of the officers, because I was startled from my stunned disbelief by a cop banging his hand down on the hood of my car.
I fumbled to roll down the window.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
Now, I’m a very honest person normally and I felt like every thought I had in my mind at that very moment was plastered all over my face, so I tried to tell myself that, actually, I didn’t know the man since, obviously, we had never been formally introduced.
“N-no,” I stammered.
Of course the cop knew I was lying, because they get lied to all day long and they know a liar when they see one, so he asked me to get out of my car and requested permission to search the vehicle. Naturally I said yes and when he had satisfied himself that I didn’t even have a pack of cigarettes, much less contraband, he relaxed a little.
“Why has this man been arrested?” I asked breathlessly, my heart hammering in my chest so hard I thought it would jump out of my mouth. My knees were so weak I had to lean against the car for support.
He said, “Six keys of cocaine.”
I didn’t know what a “key” of cocaine was. In many ways, I was still an innocent little girl from Kansas City and I struggled to get my mind around a picture that flashed into my head of a piece of cocaine, shaped like a key.
With a little smile, he added, “That’s six kilos of coke.”
Timidly, I said, “Is that a lot?”
“Yes,” he said and to his credit, he didn’t laugh at the question. I guess he’d figured out by then that I wasn’t one of this guy’s drug customers or something.
“He’ll get a lot of jail time,” he added kindly.
Numbly, I crawled back into my car, turned on the ignition, stepped lightly on the gas pedal and somehow managed to steer to the bottom of the hill, where I pulled into the first parking lot I could find, stopped and burst into jagged, tearing sobs. For a while I wept and then suddenly, I broke out laughing. Then I cried some more. And laughed some more.
It was so incredible. So unbelievable. My bruised and battered heart had cried out for justice, just simple, sweet justice and it had all seemed so impossible. I had never reported the crime and I didn’t see how this guy
