Full Disclosure Page 3

  The trailer park had concrete pads, and the spot next to his had no mobile home on it. We were sharpening sticks and using them to draw on the cement.

  “I’m gonna miss you,” I said.

  He looked down and absently started singing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.” It was still on the radio all the time.

  “Why are you singing that?” I asked.

  “’Cause it reminds me of you,” Damien said. “I’ll think of you every time I hear it.”

  His mom poked her head out of the door. “Your dad’s coming to get you in thirty minutes!” Sharon hollered. “Is all your stuff packed to go?”

  “Yeah!” he yelled.

  This horrible anxiety seized me, a feeling that I would never see him again. I dropped my stick, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him behind a tree to kiss him. My very first time. I think in my rush, I missed the target and kissed him more on the side of the lips, but it didn’t matter. It gave me the butterflies feeling of an orgasm. Like it was bad, and “What if our moms see us?”

  We smiled at each other, both of us still surprised by what I’d done. I heard the wheels of a car pull up. It was his dad. Damien got in the car and I never saw him again.

  I found out years later that he died—the rumor was that he was shot to death. He was bad. If you’re keeping score, yes, number one and number two are dead. Fucking black widow.

  Twenty years later, I was driving when “You Give Love a Bad Name” came on the radio. I’d never really listened to the lyrics, and as I did my mind wandered back to that day when I kissed Damien. I nearly drove off the road when it got to the line, “Your very first kiss was your first kiss good-bye.” Thanks for the memory, Damien.

  *

  When Damien moved away, I moved on to kissing my next great love, Patrick Swayze. I had a poster of him in my room because I loved him so much in Dirty Dancing. I kissed a hole in that poster. That movie is still my favorite, and I can still do every dance step. I was Baby for Halloween three years in a row as a kid. The real draw was Patrick, who I knew from an interview raised horses. I remember him saying he had two Straight Egyptian purebred Arabians, and four “fun horses” in California.

  I was in Cincinnati visiting my dad in his new house and was probably talking about Patrick Swayze having horses when Susan interrupted me.

  “You know,” she said, “I grew up with horses.”

  “What?” I said. It was like she told me she was part fairy. She got out her scrapbook from when she was a kid in Palos Verdes, California. The best part was that she had clippings from her horse’s mane in it. I touched it, thinking of Prissy Puddin’, the horse I rode with Miss Nicky when I was two. The hair was still silky, but so strong.

  “Her name was Tasine,” Susan said. “We had her mother, Taffy, and the dad’s name was Jacine.” She showed me pictures of her riding English, so formal in her flat saddle with both hands on the reins. She had the breeches and boots, and a huge smile under her equestrian helmet. Seeing the photos, I realized that not only did I love horses, I loved that type of riding.

  Susan was the first person sympathetic to that need to ride. Horse people can spot each other. The following year, when I was nine, she took me for my very first official English horseback riding lesson at Derbyshire Stables in Cincinnati. I rode a horse named Kiowa, and Susan bought me my first pair of riding boots. When I put them on, it was my Cinderella moment. I felt hot and powerful. They weren’t even nice ones and looked cheap, but I didn’t care. I was a horseback rider. After that, I pushed for more and more visits because I knew she would take me for lessons.

  *

  Back home, I rode my bike like I was on Kiowa, my territory extending around the horseshoe-shaped development of our neighborhood. One day I was out riding when I met a girl named Vanessa the way kids do, pausing to stare at each other until one says, “Do you wanna play?”

  I dropped my bike as an answer, and we pretended we were horses in the pasture. I became best friends with Vanessa, whom I am still so protective of that I want to be up front with you and say that’s not her real name. She was a year and a half younger than me, and sometimes the age difference showed enough that I felt like a big sister. Vanessa sometimes seemed even younger because she had a problem with wetting her pants. It happened every time she laughed, even when she had just gone to the bathroom. She was ashamed about it, and I would try to make it less of a big deal, pressing Pause on the playtime and helping her inside to change before her mom saw.

  “You’re okay,” I would say, partly because I often felt responsible for the problem because I had made her laugh. It was easy to slip by her mom, since she had a bunch of kids crammed into a tiny house the same size as mine. In the summer she watched older kids, too. My mother had me go over there for the day, and I’m not sure if she paid Vanessa’s mom anything or if she just figured I would be hanging out with Vanessa anyway.

  One day when I was nine I rode my bike over and I couldn’t find Vanessa. By then I could just walk into the house. Her mom was changing a diaper. “She’s next door watching a movie,” she said.

  It was weird, because I didn’t know a kid lived there. I’d only ever seen a guy in his forties, always home because he didn’t seem to have a job. I walked over and knocked on the door, anxious to see this new boy or girl who was stealing my friend. Then I heard a man’s voice yell, “Just a minute!”

  He was at the door, opening it just a crack, then more when he saw me. It was the guy I always saw there. “Come in!” he said, too much excitement in his voice. “We were just watching a movie.”

  Vanessa stood in the hall between the living room and the back bedroom, alternating between looking down and then at me, again and again. He was also looking back and forth at us, I guess trying to tell what we were saying to each other without words. Top Gun was on, Goose and Maverick turning and looping through the air. The movie just kept playing, none of us looking at the TV. I had interrupted something.

  “Do you want juice?” he asked, moving to the kitchen to get it before waiting for an answer. “Vanessa, sit and watch the movie,” he said, and then to me, “Have you seen Top Gun? I have a lot of movies to watch.” He pointed to the room that in our house was the junk room left to the rats. Here, the room was floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS tapes, the names of films taped off the TV scrawled on the side. Every eighties film you can imagine, he had.

  He was suddenly behind me. “Come sit,” he said. “Watch the movie.” Vanessa was on the couch, still not talking. I sat next to her, and he seemed flustered, as if he wanted to sit between us. Vanessa and I watched the movie, but he kept looking at us. Onscreen, Goose ejected during a firefight, hit the cockpit glass, and fell dead into the ocean. Maverick was cradling him in the water.

  “Vanessa,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”

  She ignored him, so I answered. “What?”

  “Come on, Vanessa,” he said. “Come in the back and talk to me.”

  I made a decision. Whatever was back there, I needed to know about. “No,” I said. “I wanna go in the back and talk to you.”

  He got up quickly and walked down the hall. “It’s a secret,” he said. When I entered, he closed the door behind me.

  I was wearing the hot pink cotton bicycle shorts that were so big in the eighties and a huge shirt my mom got at Kmart. It was white and had three girls on it holding surfboards with raised puffy paint designs. I looked down at my clear jelly sandals, the ones I loved so much even though they made everyone’s feet smell so bad. He took off my clothes, and the feeling I most remember is shock at what was happening.

  I was nine. I was a child, and then I wasn’t.

  It was the start of two years of this man sexually assaulting me. He was raping Vanessa, so I put myself between them, continually offering myself up so he would leave her alone. She was fragile and younger, I thought in my kid logic, and I was not. I would bike to her home, and when I realized she was inside his house, I
would bang on the door until he let me in. There would be the pretense of watching a movie, which would lead to him making a move on Vanessa and me demanding that he “talk” to me instead. Everything would be finished by four thirty, when his wife would come home from work.

  In summer, the assault was near daily. Vanessa’s mom watched a boy my age, Randy, who tried to get in to watch movies. “He’s a boy,” the man told us, “so he can’t come in.” You’re asking why Vanessa went over there so much. I know, I did, too. I can’t guess what hold he had on her. I don’t blame her, because she was a child doing what an adult told her she was supposed to do. I blame the adults in our lives. How did her mom let her be there every day for hours, feet from her house, and not know? Vanessa’s mom was deeply religious and very traditional, way more protective of her daughter than my disappearing-act mom. Why was this such a blind spot?

  A year into the abuse, when I was ten, I slept over at Vanessa’s house. We were up playing past lights-out, just these two normal kids feeling naughty for staying up. When I started to get tired, I figured I should go pee. The hallway was dark, but there was light in the living room. Her parents had people over, a man and a woman. As I crept to the bathroom, I noticed they were using the hushed whispers that grown-ups talk in when they’re trying not to be overheard. The voice that automatically lets you know they’re talking about something that you’re not supposed to hear. Which of course just makes you want to hear it. I crept just a little farther down.

  “I just don’t see why you let her play with Vanessa,” said the male friend.

  “I don’t know,” her dad said. “We try to do what’s right and not judge, but yeah, she’s white trash.”

  “The poor thing’s never gonna amount to nothing,” Vanessa’s mother said. “Not with that mama. Vanessa’s room will smell like cigarettes tomorrow. Watch.”

  “She smokes?” asked the female friend.

  “Naw, it’s that mom,” said Vanessa’s mother.

  “She will soon enough,” said Vanessa’s dad, “and probably try to get Vanessa into it.”

  They moved on to the weather, having decimated me. My face was burning hot, and I walked into the bathroom and quietly closed the door before I started sobbing. I looked in the mirror and for the first time I saw what they saw. The dirty clothes, the hair my mother never touched. I pulled up my T-shirt, first to wipe my eyes, then to try to huff in the smell of smoke that maybe I had grown used to. All this time, these people thought I was trash. My mother’s neglect, being sexually abused next door, just twenty feet away from where they were sitting discussing me—it was all to be expected for someone who wouldn’t amount to anything.

  And then I got angry. I washed my face, slapping cold water on it to stop my crying. I leaned in toward the mirror, and I said two little words that have made all the difference.

  “Fuck them,” I whispered. I was going to prove them wrong. It was the start of a coping mechanism that has gotten me through every traumatic event in my life: I keep moving. I’m not the kind of person to stay in one place. If I’m not going forward, I know I will go backward. So I just keep going.

  It’s part of why I never sought help from an adult to stop the abuse. I thought that would just affirm what people thought about me. I suppose that’s what a serial abuser counts on—the notion that kids blame themselves. If you didn’t tell the first time, it’s harder to tell the second time. Vanessa’s parents would probably think I liked it. Besides, in my world, adults were not people who helped you. I was on my own protecting Vanessa, and taking her place was the only way I knew how. And when adults did get involved, they let us down. I am sure there were other girls he raped, because when I was eleven years old, near the end of the summer of 1990, he got into trouble when he made some kind of move on the visiting family member of another neighbor girl. She told her parents, who called the cops.

  The police showed up at my house, two men at the door. My mom happened to be home, and she opened the door just a crack to talk to them. I stood in the living room as they talked quietly. I heard my name, and she told them, “Hold on,” and closed the door.

  She said the man’s name. “They wanna know if he’s ever done anything inappropriate,” she said. “If there’s something you need to tell me, you tell me privately. Because if I let them in they’ll take you away and I’ll never see you again.”

  My mom looked around the room quickly—there was a glimmer of shame I’d never seen from her about the state of the house. The bugs and the rats, the filth surrounding us. She was right—anyone in their right mind would take a child out of that house.

  “No,” I said. I am a terrible liar, and my mother knew it. She just didn’t want to let the police see how we were living. She opened the door again, still just an inch.

  “She said he’s never done anything to her,” my mom said flatly. “Okay? Bye.” My mom closed the door on them and any discussion about what had really been happening to me. She lit a cigarette and never brought it up again.

  As far as I know, he never did any jail time, but Vanessa stopped going over there. I don’t know if he was spooked or her parents told her to stop going. Vanessa and I drifted apart as friends when I started seventh grade at Istrouma Middle Magnet School around that time. When I saw her, she acted like I was just someone she knew vaguely. I accepted that, because I was already doing my own work of burying the abuse and moving on as if it had never happened. I started “dating” a boy at school, meaning we held hands and wrote each other notes. Michael lived down the block from me and had brown hair and the cutest nose. We dated for a few months and he was so great—until he dumped me on Valentine’s Day. He did it just as all the other girls were getting their valentines, and I have always suspected that he broke up with me to avoid the embarrassment of telling me he didn’t get me a card.

  Not long after, we were getting off the bus from the school, him behind me, and he grabbed my ass. He had done things like that before, but now we weren’t dating. I reacted with an insane fury, with all my pent-up anger focused on him. I pushed him, and when he pushed me back, I lunged at him, jumping him and throwing him to the ground. While other kids watched, we rolled around someone’s front yard, with me punctuating my slaps and blows with “That. Is. Not. Okay.”

  He got away from me, and we called it a draw. “You do not get to do that,” I yelled.

  “Okay,” he said, dusting himself off. “Okay.”

  Someone told on us, and since we were just coming off the bus we got suspended for a day. They called our parents in and my mom actually showed up. His mom, Terry, a bus driver, came in, and seemed relieved that Michael and I had already made up. But my mom made a scene, making the most of the attention on her. As Michael and I sat in little plastic chairs outside Principal Patim’s, we could hear my mother rant inside. When Mr. Patim refused to lift the suspension, my mother stood on his desk and yelled, “You just taught my daughter that it’s okay to be sexually assaulted.”

  Michael and I exchanged a wide-eyed look. For him, it was insane to see and hear a parent acting that crazy, saying those words. But as I waited for my mom’s performance to end, I played the words over in my head, “sexually assaulted.” That is what had happened to me for two years, and she knew. If anyone had tried to teach me that I needed to be “okay” with being raped, it was her. As an accomplice in silencing me, maybe this was the alibi she was telling herself: her daughter’s first brush with assault was a boy grabbing her butt, not the continual rape she chose to believe never happened because it would have exposed her negligence.

  The following year, Vanessa started at my middle school and was having crippling anxiety. There was an incident, I don’t know what, but it was enough of one that she had to see a guidance counselor. She told him what she had been through. I guess she said my name, because he called me in.

  “Is what Vanessa is saying happened to her true?” he said, looking across the desk at me.

  “Yes,” I said.
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br />   “Were you there?”

  “Yes,” I said, and finally I was able to say it. “He did it to me, too.”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “Saying what?” I asked. “He—”

  “Vanessa has real problems,” he said. “He didn’t touch you.”

  “He did, I swear.”

  “Then why are you fine?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Was I?

  “Because you’re making it up,” he said. “I don’t know why you would lie about this. Are you jealous of the attention she’s getting? Is that it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why would you lie?”

  I didn’t answer. I looked at my hands until he told me to leave. I’d finally outright asked for help from an adult, and I was called a liar. Vanessa stopped talking to me altogether, pretending I didn’t exist if we walked by each other in the hall. She seemed to hold her breath until I was gone, like kids do when they pass a cemetery. I respected that and didn’t push her. Maybe I reminded her of the room, or maybe she felt responsible for what that man had done to me.

  Vanessa and I still have mutual friends, so I know she has created a nice life doing the profession she dreamed about doing as a kid. I hesitated to even share this here because I know how quickly my truth will be used against me by people who want to prove that women involved in the adult entertainment business are all “damaged.” In a recent survey of two thousand people, 81 percent of the women alleged they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. Did they all become porn stars? By that logic, if you polled a hundred female surgeons—or politicians—would none of the women say that they got through growing up female scot-free? Vanessa and I endured assaults from the same man. Why isn’t she doing porn?

  After the guidance counselor, I never told a single person about the sexual abuse until this past June. I had been so successful blocking out what happened to me that it only came up when I recently went back to my old horseshoe neighborhood for a profile of my life. To show them my childhood home, we had to drive by the house where I was continually assaulted. Seeing it brought back a flood of feelings, and I broke down. I am still receiving flashes of memory, moments too graphic and sickening for me to share. Mainly it just hurts to remember being that vulnerable.