I Don't Like Soda
The following is an essay regarding the incident and its affect on me in the aftermath. I Don’t Like Soda I don’t like soda (or pop as we called it in my childhood hometown). Especially the dark colored sodas like Coke or Pepsi. Don’t know why. I just never have. That is what I have always told people and that is what I have believed. That is until yesterday. I am just a couple of months shy of my 49th birthday and new memories came floating in yesterday that reminded me that I did like soda. I liked it a whole bunch until I was thirteen. I will get back to this but for now, what is important is that I am a survivor. A survivor of many things. But, for this moment, and for the purposes of this essay, I am a rape survivor. It is Sunday morning, February 2, 2014. I live in a small college town in Southern Ohio. On Friday night I had friends over for dinner and then we went uptown to a local bar to support our friend’s new band. The crowd was a mix of students and Professors, young and not so young. The band was fantastic and my friend, the lead singer, never misses a note. It was uptempo and fun and the music covered a broad range of mostly pop music through many decades. We gathered, we laughed, we talked, but mostly, we danced. As the night went on the dance floor became more crowded as did the bar. I am in my own little world, groovin’ to the music, right up front when it happens. It happens so fast I am stunned into submission. I feel someone pushing me from behind with their groin. Aggressively. He pushes until I am up against the stage. I can hear him laughing but don’t catch a glimpse of him until he pulls back and I am able to step free. I move to the side of the dance floor using my friends as a barrier and get a better look. He makes eye contact with me and laughs. I decide to shake it off and get back to enjoying the music and dancing in the safety net of my friends. This doesn’t last long. All of a sudden. One bump. Two bumps. I turn around. Again, this same guy, thrusting his unwelcome pelvis into my backside. This same, short, young twenty-something jerk. I leave the dance floor. My husband, who danced his few dances earlier in the evening is at our table engrossed in a conversation. When I approach he can see I am upset and asks what is wrong. “Did you see that?” He did not. So, I relay the unpleasant story to him and his eyes start scanning the dance floor. “Which one is he?” I point him out. “The little one in the striped shirt?” my husband asks? “Do you want me to say something to him?” I tell him no, not wanting to make a scene at my friend’s debut event. The set is almost over. It is getting late and close to time for us to go anyway. I suggest we just leave. I tell him I will get my coat and purse and say some goodbyes and I will be right back. I take four or five steps. And, then, it happens. I feel an open hand grab and squeeze my butt. I turn my head and there he is again. He just keeps walking. I am blown away. I haven’t had to deal with anything like this in years. I turn back to my husband and tell him what just happened. He begins to get up. I place my hand on his chest and tell him, “No. I’ve got this.” I walk over to the table where this little pervert is standing and I confront him. “What is wrong with you? You cannot just molest women on the dance floor and put your hands and body parts on them at will.” He looks me dead in the eye and says, “like I would touch you.” I shouted back, “fifteen people on the dance floor saw you!” At this point his friend steps between us and starts to plead with me to let him handle his friend. “I’m a student here. He isn’t. I am sorry for his behavior. Please don’t get us kicked out.” It was too late. My husband and a close personal (and somewhat imposing) friend of ours were looking down on the little pervert explaining that it was time for him to go. He was protesting and claiming innocence, of course. In comes the bouncer. He comes up to me and asks what has happened. I tell him. He cuts his eyes at the table of young men and mentions he has been keeping an eye on them all night. He turns to my assaulter and informs him that it is time for him to leave. He then turns to the whole table of young men and informs him that the entire group needs to leave displaying zero tolerance. Kudos to this new local establishment! I catch my breath, let my adrenalin regulate and begin to say my thank you’s, my apologies (yep, I actually apologized to people), and my goodbyes. My husband and two of our friends walk out the door. And their he is, being pushed back from the door by two guys. He looks up at me and glares. I no longer have time for this attacker of women, this little boy who does not know his place, this person who walks through life leading with his penis. Saturday morning comes early. I wake from a dream-like fog. They are back. The flashbacks. Triggered by last nights events like clockwork. I am in a PTSD episode. And it is 4:13 am. I can hear my husband snoring to the right and my big male mutt snoring on the left. I am safe and warm in my own bed but I feel anything but safe and warm. It is going to be a long day full of memory games that come in strange and unexpected waves. Some familiar. Others will turn out to be revealing, exposing new pieces to the nearly thirty-six year old puzzle. It was 1976. I was eleven years old, I began taking martial arts classes. Kong Soo Do, a Korean martial art similar to Karate, to be specific. The owner of the gym (“dojo”) and my instructor (my “Kwan”) was a tall, charasmatic man with blond hair and a soft manner. He was kind and genuinely interested in his students. He was a patient teacher who was very devoted to our mastery of not just the physical skills but the spiritual disciplines of martial arts. I took lessons two nights a week and loved every moment. I had found my sport. I was tiny but I was pretty good at this thing. I progressed quickly through the promotions and did well at competitions. When I was thirteen I had achieved the rank of purple belt with one stripe. I had a few stripes to go for the brown belt level, then came black. These two goals were a long way off, however, because they were extremely difficult to achieve and took mastery. I would never achieve them. One evening my teacher approached me about doing some self defense exhibitions. I was flattered but surprised he picked me. I was the smallest person in the gym. I wasn’t the youngest but I was certainly the tiniest. I was thirteen, 4 feet 9 inches tall and I weighed in at 56 pounds. He explained that I was the perfect candidate for the job because of my size. If someone like me could take down a 6 foot plus man like himself then that would really empower girls of all sizes. I’m in! I was honored. With my parents permission, I was going to my first demonstration at a local high school clear across town just a few weekends later. My instructor was going to pick me up and we would be gone most of the day. This was not unusual as he often gave many of us kids rides to the various competitions all over the tri-state area. The only difference this time? I was the only kid going. But I trusted him. My parents trusted him. He had been my instructor for over two years, I babysat for he and his wife, and I even worked summers for his father. No one gave it a second thought. The demonstration at the high school took only 30 minutes. The drive to the school took longer than the demonstration. I remember being surprised it was so short and being a little disappointed that it was over already. We packed up, climbed in the car and started down the road. He suggested lunch at Wendy’s. I was hungry. “Sure, why not.” In 1992, I began counseling when my brother died. Initially, I was going for grief counseling, but in rather quick time, it was clear that I was in for something much more intensive and scary. Within 3 months, I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Dissociative tendencies. The trauma of my brother’s death had acted as a trigger and the flashbacks came in trickles at first and over the years they have come more like waves. It is like a puzzle where you are only given a few pieces at a time and you wait, sometimes for decades, for new pieces to reveal themselves. I was thirteen years old, 4 feet 9 inches tall, 56 pounds and I was raped by a towering 6 foot plus thirty-six year old predator with a black belt in martial arts who had trained me in self defense. Only he did not train me in how to defend myself against his attack. 1979. Self defense demonstration behind us. A thirteen year old girl sitting at a table in a Wendy’s in Northern Ohio eating lunch with a thirty-six year old man she trusts. 2014. A forty-eight year old woman waking up after being accosted by a young man in a local establishment the night before. The memory floods this time. I am thirteen sitting in Wendy’s across from my martial arts teacher. I have ordered a chili, a salad, and a pepsi. He asks me if I found anything on my porch the week before. I think back. Valentine’s Day. The necklace. A small heart pendant with a little diamond in the middle. A valentine card attached, signed by my secret admirer. How could he know about that?. The necklace was sitting in my mom’s jewelry box. I had refused to wear it not knowing who it had come from. I spent a week looking around my class room. Which boy could it have been? Mike lives just behind me. No, we have been friends since we were toddlers. Not Mike. Roger? No, not Roger. He has a crush on my friend Anita and has been using me as the go between. Joe? My paperboy? He would have had no problem slipping it on to my porch. Could be Joe. But, who knows? And, who cares? I am not interested in any of these boys. I have known most of them since first grade or longer. Nope. No way I am ever wearing that necklace. I snap out of it when I hear my own voice saying “How do you know about the necklace?” I sip my pepsi. I move salad around the plate with my fork, scared of the answer. “I left it for you. I am in love with you.” These words come out of his mouth in slow motion. The room is spinning. I can feel my heart racing. I am confused. I excuse myself to the bathroom. I compose myself. I am scared. These are pre-cell phone days. I have no money for the pay phone. I am not equipped to deal with this adult situation. I have to get through lunch and safely home. I can do this. I return to the table. I tell him the necklace was pretty but my mom won’t let me wear it because we don’t know who it came from. I tell him she has it in her jewelry box and is determined to find out who left it for me on our porch. I sip my pepsi. I move more salad around. I black out. The rest of that day is mostly lost in my mind. It comes back to me in pieces. In drips, in drops, in waves, and, sometimes, but rarely, in a flood. I made it home alive. No outward signs of attack. I keep it to myself. I lock it away. I never go back to the gym. I quit martial arts forever. My parents are baffled and eventually quit asking why. It is 1992. I am sitting in my therapist’s office and the first memory comes. It comes in smells, and snippets of phrases, and heavy breathing and I freak out and have to be medicated. It smells like cleaning supplies. He is breathy, excited. I am breathing heavy, fear. I can hear him saying, as he pushes me down, “you have to stay on your stomach, only my wife gets to look into my face.” I can hear him saying, “it has to be this way, only my wife gets it the other way.” I am sodomized. Thus, begins my journey with the diagnosis of PTSD. I am 27 years old. I have lived with PTSD most of my life and now I finally have a diagnosis. I have learned to live with and manage PTSD quite well with years of intensive therapy. But I am not cured. There is no cure. And I am reminded of this from time to time. I was reminded of this on Friday night, when a drunk and stupid young twenty-something assaulted me on a dance floor and triggered the memory gates. I don’t like Soda. I never have. Especially the dark colored ones. That is what I have told people for years. And until yesterday I believed that to be true. But it is not true. Until I was thirteen years old I loved Pepsi. Until one day, at a Wendy’s, a thirty-six year old man, a man that I trusted, a man who taught me self defense, slipped something into my Pepsi and raped me.
Happened on February 2, 2014
Incident reported by target
Bystander Action? No
Harassment Types: Sexual
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