The summer of 1981.

This was not the first time Gary had tried to rape Cary. Gary was 18 years and Cary was 17. Gary had lured Cary into the woods near his house with her two favorite things, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. After they got high, Gary started making his move. She was not interested in all that, then Gary got rough. After he wrestled her to the ground and got her in to position, face down in the leaves, he removed her panties and pulled his pants down only to find that he could not perform. The mushrooms had taken affect on him. He was forced to give up and apologized to her saying he only wanted to see her and laughing about his little problem. She forgave him, something she would soon come to regret for the rest of her life.

I had known Gary for years. He moved to McLean, Va. after his father had finished a tour of duty in Panama in the mid 60’s. He was about 6 years old and he had a problem. He had had an “accident” that left him with a slight speech impediment. I learned later that it was not an “accident”. When his dad was in Panama, they had a Panamanian housekeeper. As it turned out she was not fond of the American military presents there. One day when she was left alone with Gary she decided to take action and voice her discontent. She took little Gary, kicking and screaming, and stuck him in the oven, turned on the gas and left him there to die. When he was found he was comatose, just barely alive.

We used to play together. We would make fun of his voice. We called him “Scary” and “Scurvy” and “Luerp”. Kids can be so cruel. This would usually lead to a fight. He would wrestle me to the ground then threaten to punch me in the head but he never did, at least not very hard.

I was riding my bike around the block when Gary and Cary came out of the woods together. He was still apologizing. Her hair was a mess. She looked angry, apologetic and embarrassed at the same time. She said good-bye to us and left to go over to Caroline’s house just on top of the next hill. I didn’t know what had happened in the woods yet.

Cary had just arrived on the scene and she was beautiful. The new girl in town. I’d seen her before. She was a natural leader among the girls. She started a club called The Jelly Roll. They had a secret language called “operdopper” that Cary had learned in privet school. She had caught my eye from the first I saw her. I could see that she didn’t like Gary very much and I started asking Gary to fix me up with her. He said that she was weird and liked to pretend that she was asleep. And, that she fantasized about getting raped. I said that my first girl friend, Amy,liked that same fantasy, too, with the boy of her dreams, in the place of her chousing, in her dreams, alone. Gary just said, “No, I don’t know, whatever, maybe”.

We went to his house and he called Caroline. Cary was there already, Gary talked to her for a while, still apologizing franticly but, he never mentioned me. I begged him for her number. He said he didn’t have it. He gave me Caroline’s number instead. I went home and called. Caroline said it was a bad time but she would ask Cary if I could have her number. She never called back.

I had been dating a girl name Mary Z. for about a year and it just was not going anywhere. She was a troubled girl but I really liked her anyway. She got pregnant the first time she had sex with her boyfriend Todd at age thirteen. Her father made her have an abortion. She said that she probable would have had one anyway but she still hated him for making her do it. She was 17 now; she’d been in a motorcycle accident that screwed up her back. Her 30-year-old motorcycle-riding boyfriend called “Shank” had gotten her started on morphine and needles for the pain in her back. And, god was she pretty. Strawberry blonde, 5’3, 36-26-28. I all most got her in bed one night but she said she liked girls. I took that as a “no” and drove her home.

We still hung out a lot. She was really cool. And man, could she cuss. Instead of a simple “fuck you” she would say, “lick me” or “French my rectum”. It sounds vulgar know but then, for a teenager, that was too cool. She also liked to say, “fuck me, beat me, make me right bad checks” I don’t know why, she would just find a way to work it in to a conversation.

One time she called me up and said she wanted some beer but, we were both too young to buy beer. So, we went to 7-E and she asked people. This one lady asked if I had put her up to it then threatened to call the cops on us. Mary just got back in the car and said lets leave. As I’m backing out, she stands up through the window and yells, “ I hope your tampon gets stuck!” Then she says “stop right here and wait for me, don’t leave!” Before I knew what was happening, she took her shirt off, got out of the car, ran into the store, and ran out with a 12 pack in front of her face, jumped in the car and said “drive, mother fucker, drive, lets go! What the hell are you looking at?” Wow, what a woman! Later, when we were drinking her beer together, she said, “ I don’t think they got a good look at my face, hell, a tity shots worth 10 buck”. What could I say?

Her mother saw the needle tracks on her arm one day and started asking question. Mary picked up a fork and stabbed her self in the arm and said, “it’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it!” I went to visit her in the hospital. She was in the psych ward.

I went to visit her there many times. One time, when it was time to leave, a nurse asked me to wait until she asked the doctor if I was supposed to leave. This made me very nervous. Mary just looked at me and said under her breath, “Tell them you don’t have insurance”. Buy time the nurse got back we were giggling like a pair of loons.

Later that year, I got tickets for the Rolling Stones concert in Philadelphia, Pa.. Steel Wheels had just come out and this was their first stop in the US. Mary said she would go with me. A day before the show she cancelled.

I’d been trying to quit smoking cigarettes for about a week and this got me so upset that tried to I punch a hole in the wall. Bad idea. I picked a spot with a stud behind it. No hole in the wall but, I broke a bone on the left most side of my left hand. My hand was bent at a right angle to where it should normally be. I pulled it and put it back where it should be, got a bottle of rum from my sister’s room and called my friend Jeff.

We went to the hospital and they gave me some painkillers (Tylenol III’s), an ace bandage and the business card for an orthopedic surgeon and sent me on my way. It was late on a Friday and he gave me an appointment to see him on Monday. But the concert was tomorrow!

I was talking to my mom, trying to explain, she had quit smoking years ago, I thought she would understand. She said don’t go. I said but I have to. She said, “Why don’t you take Gary”.

She was always trying to get me to hang out with that poor guy. My father had been in the Army 94th Infantry in WWII; wounded and captured in Belgium, work for the CIA at Langley Headquarters until he died in 1964. I guess she thought it was my patriotic duty to be the friend of this poor kid who got his head stuck in an oven in Panama. I called him.

First, I asked if he had Cary’s number. He said, “No, I don’t, I told you that”. I said, “Well, do you want to go with me?” He said, “I’ll go but I’m not paying for the ticket, who can you sell it to anyway, the show is tomorrow you know… ah ya wa ya, ya ya”. I said, “OK, whatever lets go”.

I picked him up the next day. He was all decked out with a tie-dye shirt and a bandanna on his head like a hat and a bottle of jack that he stole from his dad. “What do you think of the bandanna? I think it makes me look like a pirate.” “Yeah it does”. I was kind of down. No date, a broken had in wrapped in an ace bandage and stuck with the “Gervmoster”.

Just before we got to exit 13, at Georgetown Pike and the Beltway, right across from Cooper Intermediate High school, where he and I had gone to school years before, two young girls ran across 4 lanes of traffic, to the shoulder and put their thumbs up. One of them was Cary and I forget the other girls name but she was just as cute, I stopped, they got in. They were headed to the stones show in Philly. What luck, what luck?

We stop for gas and to pee near Baltimore, Md. While the girls were in the bathroom, Gary grabs my painkillers and starts to crush them all up and before I could stop him, he put them in the bottle of jack. “Dude! I need those, what are you doing?” “Shut up, just watch, I want to get them fuck up” “Man, my hand is broken, I needed those pills, you idiot” “shut up!” The girls came back.

He handed the bottle to Cary and she took a sip. That was all she wanted. The other girl just shook her head. I was so pissed, he was pissed, they were pissed, things got worse.
It was a pretty quiet ride the rest of the way to Philly except for Gary’s feeble attempts at conversation. He kept trying to get them to drink and they refused. When we got to the show the girls got some tickets and we all went in. Gary suggested we all split up. So we did. It was general admission. I got down front. That was cool. I ran in to Cary at one point and we put our money together to get a t-shirt. She was looking up at me and I should have kissed her right there but I wasn’t sure so I thought I’d wait. Then it was over and it was time to go home.

When we got back to the car the bottle of jack was empty. Gary kept asking did someone drink it or did you poor it out, Cary? She said she drank it. Gary said, “no, I think you poured it out.” She just shook her head. He tried to hit on the girls on the ride back first one then the other. He was getting nowhere. Finally he quieted down and they all went to sleep.

The drive back was quiet. The three of them slept while I drove. We had to wake Cary up to get direction to her house. When we got there, she ran to the sidewalk and just flopped right down in the grass. I figured I’d better check, it looked like she might have fell. She looked like she was sleeping. I kissed her check and went back to the car. Gary decided that he should take a look, too. It looked strange so I went to check on the two of them.

She had been wearing a cotton dress and now Gary had it up over her head with her arm inside so she couldn’t move. Just like the playground days. But, this was different; this was a girl, maybe even my girl. He was rocking her back and forth, watching her breasts move. I could see her struggle. He said, “Look, she likes it”. I said, “Stop it”

I jumped on him. I dove right on him and knocked him off of her. In no time, he was on top of me. I knew that would happen. He always beat me that way. Now, he was holding me down, sitting on top of me. He said, “She’s my woman. Never interrupt a man when he’s with a woman.” Then he smacked me in the side of the face and said, “you don’t want me to hit you for real, do you” and he pulled his hand way back. Then he said, “hay, I don’t have to hit you, I can just squeeze you hand.” And he grabbed my hand, wrapped up in an ace bandage, right where the broken bone was. He squeezed and shook my broken bone until I just melted. The pain of that is hard to put in to words. There is no greater pain then that. Worse then breaking it the first time. The pain ran through my whole body. I could smell it and taste it. Bone, my bone. I felt pins and needles all through my body. And fear, unbelievable fear. What could he do next if he could twist my broken bone? Then she spoke, “what are you guys doing?”

I felt so stupid. Was he telling the truth? Was she really his girl? Why didn’t she get up and run? How could she be so calm? He got of me and went back to her. He sat down on top of her and asked her if she was all right.

It took me years to sort out what happened after that. 16 years went by before she and I spoke. All I could remember was I kissed her and she didn’t like me any more. When I saw her I gave her a big hug. We sat at the bar in the 9:30 club and she asked me what happened, what do you remember? I remembered the t-shirt. I remembered she lost her keys and we had to break in to her mom’s apartment so she could get in. Then she fixed us breakfast. I remembered that I still owed her money for the shirt. Four more years since then to go through the haunting memories as they come back like a slow motion movie. One frame at a time in random order. The lies he told me. The lies he told her. The lies he told everybody.

Back at Gary’s house, he was franticly apologizing on the phone again…Cary at my house asking me what happened. All I could do was ask her, “Oh my god, what happened, oh my god, what happened?”

The bruse on her face, he told me I kicked her when I jumped on him. He told her he might have kicked her when he knocked me off of her. Lies, and why not, he’d get life if the truth came out. He said I hit him with my cast. I didn’t have a cast yet!

He beat her unconscious so he could fuck her with out a struggle. She kept waking up so he kept beating her and fucking her and beating her. And I just sat in the car, re-wrapping my broken hand in that ace bandage that he got all screwed up when he was squeezing and shacking it. Thinking to my self, how come she likes him more then me? Look, he’s so rough. She must be just like Mary. I could see everything. They were right in front of my car. She is not going to like him much longer if he keeps hitting her like that. Serves her right if she likes him more then me. I would never treat a girl like that. The pain in my hand was pounding with my heartbeat. I turn on the headlights. I was made at both of them now. Nothing made senses!

Blinded by pain, I remember, after he got off me, I went and stud next to them where I was when I jumped him the first time. He was checking her eyes and shaking her head and asking if she was all right. I was ready to jump him again. He said, “Go site in the car or I’ll squeeze your hand again.” He covered her head again with the dress and said in soft and friendly voice, “Here comes Phil again”. Then he softly, and as gently as he could, hit her in the side of her head, pulled the dress back down and checked her eyes again and laughed. “You like that don’t you” He put the dress back over her head and held her arms in it and told me, “go sit in the car if your not going to help, go!” I went.