#for the gender and ptsd in SPN series Im working on

[chiisana-sukima]

The One Where I Escaped an Attempted Rape, Bought a Gun, and Managed Not to Shoot Anyone

Genre: Weird, True Life Anecdotes as Meta Commentary. Characters: Me (an incompetent victim), and Some Random Dude (an incompetent perpetrator). With side appearances by a Cop and my Roommate. Warnings: What it says on the label. Nothing too scary or at all graphic though. Summary: Also what it says on the label.

When I was in nursing school, twenty-five years or so ago, I lived in a dangerous, rundown area in Boston, and I had no car. I was walking home from the subway station one night, and a guy grabbed my breast, mugged me, and told me I needed to go down some tiny deserted street with him because he had a gun and he wanted me to “be his girlfriend”.

I had always thought, partly because of my history with sexual violence as a kid, and partly because I just don’t see myself as a physically brave person, that in a situation like that, I would be compliant in order to get out of the experience alive and with the least amount of damage possible. But it turns out what I actually did was not that at all.

I told the dude, in a voice that somehow ended up dripping with scorn (but not with a wealth of logic), that of course I wouldn’t be his girlfriend; he’d just stolen money from me.

He said he didn’t.

I said then give it back.

(He declined).

I swore at him extensively. And stalled for time, while I thought about whether I’d rather be raped or shot in the back. And then I ran into oncoming (sparse) traffic and escaped. When I got far enough down the opposite side of the street that I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to hit me anymore, even if shooting was still in the cards, I screamed back at him to fuck off, motherfucker, fuck you! and then I walked home.

He didn’t shoot me. Maybe he never had a gun. He never showed it to me; we were in semi-public. it was allegedly in the pocket of his baggy pants, where he kept his hand through the whole interaction. Not seeing the (alleged) actual weapon probably entered into my decision-making some, though I’m not sure how much.

When I got home, I felt elated- high on adrenaline, unharmed. He didn’t even get my wallet or my credit cards, just twenty bucks. My roommate- who later installed a steel core door and a reinforced frame for it, in place of my old bedroom door, because I was incapable of sleeping without a lock anymore and why have a lock if the cheap-ass door could just be broken in- said shouldn’t you call the cops?

The thought had not even entered my mind.

I called the police, and one of them came and took my statement. He had me come down to the station the next day and look at the mug book. I didn’t see the assailant there, but I did see a couple other guys from the awful slum of a neighborhood I lived in.

So here’s the thing. During the event itself, clearly, from my behavior, I was angry. I argued, and swore, and sounded like I thought the dude was less than a bug under my foot.

But I had no access to any of that. I felt terrified. Every time I opened my mouth, what came out was completely unplanned and I was shocked anew that I could be so stupid. I did consciously decide on running. But that was it; the only part the consciousness that narrates, that I call me, had any control over. All the rest of it came from somewhere else.

Later, I got a carry permit and a gun. I was- not surprisingly- frightened by the experience of almost being raped, and also by the presence of my neighbors in the mugbook. People got shot not infrequently where I lived. The dude across the street from me got shot and killed in a drug deal. A little schoolgirl on her bike got shot and killed in broad daylight about two blocks away. People got knifed. Houses burned down from arson. Strangers on the bus randomly told me I shouldn’t be in the area, while I was on my way to my job, to save their sorry friends’ and relatives’ asses.

The process to qualify for carrying a handgun legally in Massachusetts at the time was somewhat onerous. I had to take a class that lasted a couple of months, have a certain number of hours on a designated range, and take a practical exam given by the cops at the police range. 

I came to love shooting. It’s meditative and grounding both. I love guns. They’re gorgeous. They feel solid in your hands. The concentration required to shoot skillfully feels wonderful in that in the zone way that athletics does. Even the recoil feels good- out of your control for just a second and then back in it again, like catching air in a car.

But I never did end up carrying.

Because the better I got at shooting, the more I realized that if I’d had a gun the night I didn’t get raped, there’s very little chance I wouldn’t have killed that dude. I’m competence-driven, and he was slow and stupid (and probably high), and would have had no clue I was carrying and given me plenty of time to shoot him, and we were standing right next to each other, and I would have shot him in the center of his largest mass, because that’s how you shoot competently.

And the part of me that I call me did not want him dead. But I think probably the part where all that other stuff came from did.

There are several morals one could take from this story. “Don’t give guns to crazy people who have PTSD” is obviously one of them. “He would’ve deserved it” might be another. But those aren’t my point. My point is that *I*- the me who is what I choose- didn’t want him dead and still don’t. And given a slightly different set of circumstances, I almost certainly would have done this thing- this horrible, irrevocable, unfixable thing, that was not at all what I ever would have wanted. My lifetime weight of grief and his family’s lifetime weight of grief and his unfixable deadness would not have been any different for the fact that I have problems I can’t fix from someone else’s violence decades ago, or because, technically, it would’ve been his own fault.

Even though I don’t think of myself as particularly brave, I do think of myself as strong. I think of myself as morally strong, and emotionally strong; a person who has made hard choices and done hard things, and works hard to be a net good in the world. But people aren’t strong every minute or in every way. It’s impossible. We all have weak points where, given the right set of circumstances, we’ll make really, really, really shitty choices. That’s just how it is.

People (/characters) do terrible things, and sometimes mostly what I feel is angry. Because like everyone, some things just piss me off. But underneath the anger, there’s often not really any moral judgement. And then people rightly wonder, “but how could you think [Thing X] was the person’s action and yet still like them”? “[Thing X]- if it’s what really happened- is unforgivable”.

I don’t want to be over-dramatic about the handgun (ok maybe the evidence here suggests I kinda do, I dunno- guns are like that; they invite drama). I didn’t- thank christ- come into even the same galaxy where shooting someone lives. I *have* made bad decisions about other things, but I made the call I wanted to when I decided to keep on walking my sorry vulnerable ass outdoors, at night, in my terrible neighborhood, without protection, rather than risk shooting someone in a moment of anger and panic.

But that decision I made was the real moment of choice, and that I did live through, and it was no fucking fun. In the theoretical later moment down the other path, where I would’ve had the gun and been angry and panicked and not in control, it would’ve already been too late, like the crash after you don’t pick out a designated driver. And it wasn’t obvious at my decision point what I wanted or what I should do. I could easily have gone the other way. I did go the other way at multiple steps along in the process.

In the end, I made some choices that were probably good and some that were probably bad, and then I got lucky.

There are several answers for me to the question about calling actions bad, but then not judging the actor. One of the most central though, the most personally real, is the oldey but goody. It dates me, but: There But For Fortune Go You and I.