Months after a rough breakup, the x girlfriend, Courtney, contacted me and said I was the father of her baby and that I needed to talk to her. Stupidly, I did. She showed me the baby, which she kept in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator. It looked like a decomposing pork chop. I told her I thought it was only a piece of meat. She went ape shit.
She had grabbed me by the hair and used leverage to pull me down to the floor. She was on my back and tearing my hair from my scalp and smashing my head against her ceramic tile floor. I was bleeding and probably had a concussion by now. She wouldn’t stop. It seemed like it had gone on for minutes, and I heard my nose crunch. Blood was in my mouth. She had twisted my hair around her hands, and I could not just walk out and “leave the situation,” as a cop might say it. I had two choices: let her murder me or defend myself.
Stop her from murdering me and end up with a Domestic Violence conviction which would make me as good as dead. When it is girl against boy, self defense is no excuse in a court of law. A man should just take it on the chin and apologize to her for whatever he did to make her mad enough to do to him what she felt she had to do. Most judges would find me guilty and tell me that I should have walked away even though I couldn’t.
Right after the butcher knife incident, I had read many examples of what happens when the police are called in a conflict between a man and woman. Domestic Violence laws are often abused by the legal system. Everyone from judges to lawyers to police seem to side automatically with the woman. Her word is never questioned, and in some places whenever the police are called, the man is carted off to jail and treated as guilty until proven innocent. He is at a disadvantage and will often be found guilty in court. Prison and the jailhouse rape that sometimes goes hand in hand with a prison sentence, followed by a life of homelessness flashed through my mind.
Stories of domestic violence form the man’s perspective are all over the internet. Even when the woman starts it and commits all the violence, even when the woman has beaten the man nearly to death because he is too gentle to hit a woman and she knows it, even when the woman attacks the man with a deadly weapon, even when the man did not raise a finger to defend himself for fear of hurting the woman or fear of the legal system, if she has so much as one cut on her fist from breaking out the man’s teeth, the man will go to jail. All she has to do is say she feared for her safety and she will be believed. Many judges will rule that she was within her rights to use preemptive violence and the man should just take the beating and say he’s sorry. The only time the man doesn’t go to jail is when the woman tells the truth and admits she is the aggressor.
I don’t know anything about their past, but Lorena Bobbitt is celebrated as an American Hero. Popular women’s tv talk shows have her appear as a guest. They hold her up as a modern feminist role model and praise her for having the courage to cut off her husband’s penis. Her husband was sleeping like a baby when she attacked and dismembered him. I think the case against her was dropped as self-defence.
I hadn’t been in a helpless position since my father used to beat me when I was a kid. Tonight, it was the legal system that was holding me down and beating me to death.
It was like deciding whether to die now or die months later in prison. If I had to choose between prison for domestic violence and suicide, I would choose suicide. At least I would go out on my own terms. A domestic violence conviction would ruin all of my plans for improving my life. It would keep me from getting into medical school, grad school, or getting a good job.
Meanwhile, she was still smashing my face into her kitchen floor while swearing and howling with rage. I tried to think of something that wouldn’t leave an obvious mark. I reached back and grabbed the first place I could hold, the quadricep muscle of upper thigh. She was wearing thin pants, and I gripped her leg through the fabric. I squeezed. She shrieked even louder now. It was no longer a self-satisfied shriek but this time had a note of pain. Her little one-liners stopped. I squeezed harder, and she screamed and cursed louder. Spittle hit the back of my neck. She was foaming at the mouth.
I mentioned that I had been taking boxing lessons and working out. I was strong enough to lift a car, and I was strong enough to snap her neck in a split second. One of my exercises was to rip a phone book in half with my bare hands. It took a few minutes, but I performed this feat once every week so for my training. I had strong hands.
I wasn’t even squeezing with half my strength yet. I squeezed her leg even harder. She let out the craziest, ululating shriek I have ever heard, but she would not let go of my hair.
It was time to get serious. If I didn’t, I would be unconscious soon. I stiffened my fingertips into claws and dug into her leg. My fingers gouged into in the space between the thigh bone and the muscle. Her soft flesh was starting to give way, and my fingers sunk into her leg. It felt like the muscle was tearing under the skin. I twisted, trying to rip her thigh muscle off the bone.
Suddenly, she was silent and let me go. I got up and moved away from her. As I stood, she fell off me and flipped over on her back. Herr limbs were stiff. Then her eyes rolled backwards into her head. I got a paper towel from the rack next to the sink and wiped some of the blood off my face. Next, she started to shake in violent jerks and foam at the mouth. She vomited. Her arms and legs were flailing. Her head was stupidly smashing itself against the tile floor. She made weird moaning sounds. She peed.
I didn’t know what was happening to her, but she had never mentioned anything about being epileptic. Maybe I had discovered the Vulcan Paralysis grip. I quietly left and went home. I frantically got rid of all the marijuana in the house and started dismantelling the table bong. At the time, one of my roommates loved archery and had a crossbow he kept hidden, and I knew how to use it. I borrowed it, went up into my room, and barricaded the door.
Jail meant death to me. I didn’t know if I would just suicide or shoot anybody who tried to lock me up. I wrote in my journal what happened.Hours passed, but nobody came to get me.
I saw her one more time after that two weeks later. It was my last night in the city, and I was at the bar where I used to work celebrating with friends. Then she arrived. She was on crutches.
The second she spotted me, she dramatically winced with pain and hobbled past my table with her crutches. She was wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen her wear. They looked brand new, and I suspect she bought them just for the occasion. Her butt was almost hanging out. My handprint was painted onto the front of her thigh in a purple and yellow bruise. Healed abrasions marked my fingertips and thumb. Starting several inches below that, her whole leg was one huge purple bruise all the way down to her foot.
She sat at the table across from my table in my line of sight and directly facing me. Then her friends, the Foo Fighters clone band, arrived and sat with her. She never made eye contact with me, but they glared at me from time to time. I can imagine what she told them about me. I had qualms against hitting a girl, but these weren’t girls. I stared back and was ready to knock their heads together if they attacked me. In fact, I was looking forward to taking out my displaced aggression on all of them. They never tried anything. I changed tables so they were not in my line of sight.
I moved away the next day to take classes at another campus and start working on my PhD. I never saw her again, but friends said she shaved her head, put on black lipstick, and became a public item with a “goth” lesbian in that town.
Later, from time to time over the next three years, I got anonymous letters in her handwriting. They had San Bernardino, California postmarks. The first ones said I would soon read about her in the news. She had a Hollywood talent agent and would be in movies. In fact, she was lined up to play a role in something that would be filmed in Hawaii. She went on to brag that she was now a stripper (and I suspected prostitute from what I have heard about strip clubs). She was also fond of “brain candy,” her code word for methamphetamine, a drug PsychoTom and Billy introduced to her. Sometimes she proudly called it “Rose Chrystal Meth” on account of its pink hue and raved about how she liked to inject it. In the letters, she boasted that she had access to an unlimited supply, and the cook liked her. I never answered the letters. She sent dozens more, some to me, and three years later, she sent some to my new girlfriend. I lived in a different city by then, but she had found my address and the name of the new girl (Psycho Suzie, yet another distressed damsel I might write about later) I was living with. The last envelopes only contained newspaper clippings of advertisements for erectile dysfunction medications and penis enlargement surgery. I saved them all for my scrapbook. Once the new girlfriend sent an email to the address in the letter. The new girlfriend showed me what she sent: in it the new girl repeated a story about Courtney doing meth and sticking a wine bottle almost all the way inside herself.
It was now the year 2000, and I never heard from The Millennium Slut again, but a string of girls just like her would take her place. It took years until I learned to screen them.
Remembering and writing this made me so sick taht I could barely finish. I almost vomited near the ending. I spent the rest of the day in bed and made a couple of edits after I felt a little better.
She had grabbed me by the hair and used leverage to pull me down to the floor. She was on my back and tearing my hair from my scalp and smashing my head against her ceramic tile floor. I was bleeding and probably had a concussion by now. She wouldn’t stop. It seemed like it had gone on for minutes, and I heard my nose crunch. Blood was in my mouth. She had twisted my hair around her hands, and I could not just walk out and “leave the situation,” as a cop might say it. I had two choices: let her murder me or defend myself.
Stop her from murdering me and end up with a Domestic Violence conviction which would make me as good as dead. When it is girl against boy, self defense is no excuse in a court of law. A man should just take it on the chin and apologize to her for whatever he did to make her mad enough to do to him what she felt she had to do. Most judges would find me guilty and tell me that I should have walked away even though I couldn’t.
Right after the butcher knife incident, I had read many examples of what happens when the police are called in a conflict between a man and woman. Domestic Violence laws are often abused by the legal system. Everyone from judges to lawyers to police seem to side automatically with the woman. Her word is never questioned, and in some places whenever the police are called, the man is carted off to jail and treated as guilty until proven innocent. He is at a disadvantage and will often be found guilty in court. Prison and the jailhouse rape that sometimes goes hand in hand with a prison sentence, followed by a life of homelessness flashed through my mind.
Stories of domestic violence form the man’s perspective are all over the internet. Even when the woman starts it and commits all the violence, even when the woman has beaten the man nearly to death because he is too gentle to hit a woman and she knows it, even when the woman attacks the man with a deadly weapon, even when the man did not raise a finger to defend himself for fear of hurting the woman or fear of the legal system, if she has so much as one cut on her fist from breaking out the man’s teeth, the man will go to jail. All she has to do is say she feared for her safety and she will be believed. Many judges will rule that she was within her rights to use preemptive violence and the man should just take the beating and say he’s sorry. The only time the man doesn’t go to jail is when the woman tells the truth and admits she is the aggressor.
I don’t know anything about their past, but Lorena Bobbitt is celebrated as an American Hero. Popular women’s tv talk shows have her appear as a guest. They hold her up as a modern feminist role model and praise her for having the courage to cut off her husband’s penis. Her husband was sleeping like a baby when she attacked and dismembered him. I think the case against her was dropped as self-defence.
I hadn’t been in a helpless position since my father used to beat me when I was a kid. Tonight, it was the legal system that was holding me down and beating me to death.
It was like deciding whether to die now or die months later in prison. If I had to choose between prison for domestic violence and suicide, I would choose suicide. At least I would go out on my own terms. A domestic violence conviction would ruin all of my plans for improving my life. It would keep me from getting into medical school, grad school, or getting a good job.
Meanwhile, she was still smashing my face into her kitchen floor while swearing and howling with rage. I tried to think of something that wouldn’t leave an obvious mark. I reached back and grabbed the first place I could hold, the quadricep muscle of upper thigh. She was wearing thin pants, and I gripped her leg through the fabric. I squeezed. She shrieked even louder now. It was no longer a self-satisfied shriek but this time had a note of pain. Her little one-liners stopped. I squeezed harder, and she screamed and cursed louder. Spittle hit the back of my neck. She was foaming at the mouth.
I mentioned that I had been taking boxing lessons and working out. I was strong enough to lift a car, and I was strong enough to snap her neck in a split second. One of my exercises was to rip a phone book in half with my bare hands. It took a few minutes, but I performed this feat once every week so for my training. I had strong hands.
I wasn’t even squeezing with half my strength yet. I squeezed her leg even harder. She let out the craziest, ululating shriek I have ever heard, but she would not let go of my hair.
It was time to get serious. If I didn’t, I would be unconscious soon. I stiffened my fingertips into claws and dug into her leg. My fingers gouged into in the space between the thigh bone and the muscle. Her soft flesh was starting to give way, and my fingers sunk into her leg. It felt like the muscle was tearing under the skin. I twisted, trying to rip her thigh muscle off the bone.
Suddenly, she was silent and let me go. I got up and moved away from her. As I stood, she fell off me and flipped over on her back. Herr limbs were stiff. Then her eyes rolled backwards into her head. I got a paper towel from the rack next to the sink and wiped some of the blood off my face. Next, she started to shake in violent jerks and foam at the mouth. She vomited. Her arms and legs were flailing. Her head was stupidly smashing itself against the tile floor. She made weird moaning sounds. She peed.
I didn’t know what was happening to her, but she had never mentioned anything about being epileptic. Maybe I had discovered the Vulcan Paralysis grip. I quietly left and went home. I frantically got rid of all the marijuana in the house and started dismantelling the table bong. At the time, one of my roommates loved archery and had a crossbow he kept hidden, and I knew how to use it. I borrowed it, went up into my room, and barricaded the door.
Jail meant death to me. I didn’t know if I would just suicide or shoot anybody who tried to lock me up. I wrote in my journal what happened.Hours passed, but nobody came to get me.
I saw her one more time after that two weeks later. It was my last night in the city, and I was at the bar where I used to work celebrating with friends. Then she arrived. She was on crutches.
The second she spotted me, she dramatically winced with pain and hobbled past my table with her crutches. She was wearing the shortest shorts I have ever seen her wear. They looked brand new, and I suspect she bought them just for the occasion. Her butt was almost hanging out. My handprint was painted onto the front of her thigh in a purple and yellow bruise. Healed abrasions marked my fingertips and thumb. Starting several inches below that, her whole leg was one huge purple bruise all the way down to her foot.
She sat at the table across from my table in my line of sight and directly facing me. Then her friends, the Foo Fighters clone band, arrived and sat with her. She never made eye contact with me, but they glared at me from time to time. I can imagine what she told them about me. I had qualms against hitting a girl, but these weren’t girls. I stared back and was ready to knock their heads together if they attacked me. In fact, I was looking forward to taking out my displaced aggression on all of them. They never tried anything. I changed tables so they were not in my line of sight.
I moved away the next day to take classes at another campus and start working on my PhD. I never saw her again, but friends said she shaved her head, put on black lipstick, and became a public item with a “goth” lesbian in that town.
Later, from time to time over the next three years, I got anonymous letters in her handwriting. They had San Bernardino, California postmarks. The first ones said I would soon read about her in the news. She had a Hollywood talent agent and would be in movies. In fact, she was lined up to play a role in something that would be filmed in Hawaii. She went on to brag that she was now a stripper (and I suspected prostitute from what I have heard about strip clubs). She was also fond of “brain candy,” her code word for methamphetamine, a drug PsychoTom and Billy introduced to her. Sometimes she proudly called it “Rose Chrystal Meth” on account of its pink hue and raved about how she liked to inject it. In the letters, she boasted that she had access to an unlimited supply, and the cook liked her. I never answered the letters. She sent dozens more, some to me, and three years later, she sent some to my new girlfriend. I lived in a different city by then, but she had found my address and the name of the new girl (Psycho Suzie, yet another distressed damsel I might write about later) I was living with. The last envelopes only contained newspaper clippings of advertisements for erectile dysfunction medications and penis enlargement surgery. I saved them all for my scrapbook. Once the new girlfriend sent an email to the address in the letter. The new girlfriend showed me what she sent: in it the new girl repeated a story about Courtney doing meth and sticking a wine bottle almost all the way inside herself.
It was now the year 2000, and I never heard from The Millennium Slut again, but a string of girls just like her would take her place. It took years until I learned to screen them.
Remembering and writing this made me so sick taht I could barely finish. I almost vomited near the ending. I spent the rest of the day in bed and made a couple of edits after I felt a little better.
