I realized he was erotically excited by the attack. My friend who was almost murdered had faced the same kind of response from the men around her afterward.
I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?
I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I went to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of gay friends in suburban Marin County, the county of the Trailside Killer and that homicidal banker. My boyfriend at the time was running the lights for a concert, but was supposed to come and join me at midnight. He was delayed by his diligence, and I was sad that we were not celebrating the New Year together. I didn’t have a car in those days, I didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride, so I set out well after midnight to walk to my mother’s house about a mile away, where I could slip in and sleep on the couch without disturbing anyone. Perhaps she was away; that part I don’t remember, but what came before was indelible.
While I was on the main thoroughfare between the two houses, I realized that someone was behind me. I turned around: it was a big man with a shaggy beard and long hair. I walked faster. He was only a couple of feet behind me, not at a normal distance, and we were the only two people out on foot at that hour. It was dark, and the shrubs dividing the dark homes from each other loomed and streamed shadows, and his shadow and mine swelled and shrank from streetlight to streetlight, and cars passed by and their headlights made all the shadows swirl and lurch.
Once I had spotted him he began to speak, a low, steady stream telling me that he wasn’t following me, that I should not trust my own judgment, an accelerated course of gaslighting designed to undermine my ability to assess the situation and make decisions. He was very good at what he did, and his insinuating sentences were disorienting to the very young woman I was. Clearly, he had a lot of practice. I wondered later what harm he had done to other women before and after.
So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement. Now I would flag down cars, stand in the middle of the road, make noise, bang on doors, respect my own assessment of the threat, and take any action that seemed likely to get me out of it. I would bother someone, anyone. But I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real. It was many years later that I stopped letting men tell me what had and had not happened.
On that dark boulevard, I behaved as though it wasn’t happening, though I crossed the street to see if he was following me. He stuck to me like a curse. The walk seemed endless, though I was hoping to get to my destination before he attacked, thinking that if I didn’t disrupt the stalemate perhaps neither would he. Cars passed. Shadows swirled. I crossed the street again. He followed. Again. Again. Finally a few blocks before my destination, a man in a sedan pulled up and leaned over to open the passenger door and offered me a ride.
The stalker murmured from very close behind, “Don’t you know that getting into a stranger’s car is the most dangerous thing you can do?” Of course I had been told that over and over, and I hesitated.
Then I got in.