If Now Was Then

A long time ago, I decided to leave the hotel room in Des Moines where I was staying with my boyfriend and drive back home to Milwaukee. He was drunk and insisting that we go out on the town and I was terrified of getting killed in a car accident.

He didn’t like my decision. My going stranded him in another state. It would end up being difficult for him to get home. He would have to take a Greyhound but that was okay, I decided, because that’s what people did then. They waited in bus stations to go places they couldn’t get to on their own.

Because he disagreed with my decision, he pinned me on the bed. He was heavy, a very big man, so being pinned was no small situation. He also had his hands around my throat but, fortunately, for me at least, one of his hands had been damaged in an industrial accident, a press had pressed his hand into a shortened version of a man’s hand, one that couldn’t reach the circumference of a woman’s neck. It was my saving grace. That and the fact that he was drunk.

Somehow, I got out from under him and made it to the door, ran into the hotel hallway, and started screaming. People opened their doors and looked at me and then hotel security came and asked me what I wanted to do. Leave, I said. I want to leave.  So I did. All the people closed their doors. It was that fast, like they saw screaming women in the hallway every day.

I look back at that now. I remember how terrified I was and I remember how, layered on the terror, there was a thick, heavy blanket of shame that I’d let myself be in such a situation. I wasn’t the kind of woman who would let a man abuse her. What kind of woman is that? I don’t know. I thought I wasn’t her.

I fought off a man who wanted to hurt me, a drunk man but still a man. So part of me felt bolstered by feeling that I could defend myself. Not much bolstered since the disgust with myself at being in such a situation was like an acid bath, steam and froth up to my neck. I wanted to vomit.

Now I wonder what would have happened if he had had a gun. Would he have pulled out the gun and killed me? He was drunk enough to do that, to not care. And he was crazy enough to do that. Not wanting me to leave as if it was the end of the world if I did. As if the ride on the Greyhound bus would be his own death.

But he didn’t have a gun and so I’ll never know if he would have used it. Although he had a gun later in his life and he did use it. I know because his sister told me at his funeral that he’d sat on the curb in front of his house and shot himself in the head. So he was capable of pulling the trigger.