Squashed & #MeToo

On Facebook this morning I see the video footage of a twenty-one year old waitress who seized a random, roaming groper by the t-shirt, pulled him into a headlock and then threw him to the floor after he walked behind her and cheap-thrilled himself by grabbing her butt. She yelled at him as he lay on the floor and had her co-workers call the cops, who watched the footage and arrested him--he spending two days in a cement cell.

Once, in Evanston, at the Legal Tender bar, in my early twenties too, I was selling raffle tickets to patrons for an upcoming bar prize—all in the name of fundraising for one of my co-workers. Many men bought the one dollar tickets, or a long string of ten for a five spot. I too was snatched, this man suddenly wrapping his arm around me and pulling me onto his lap. Without even thinking, I washing machined my way up and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could! He spit out his whiskey and released me. His friends beating the bars with their hands, a group of orangutans laughing until they nearly cried. The bar tender assured me they were all assholes and my work night went on.

There is this man from Detroit, that came to Oregon, up from L.A. and I fell madly in love with him a handful of years ago. He moved back to Detroit in order to find more meaningful work and my heart broke in two. Our connection continued via Ma Bell and Hotmail and so he agreed after finding nothing better than the video-store gig to return here and live with me! I thought all of my best dreams were coming true, but we didn’t last three months in such close quarters, our disagreements about peanut-butter and water bills erupting volcanoes and so he found a room of his own at the house of ex-alcoholics.

Still, we were seeing one another, but he met a Mary and they’d had some kind of squash and tussle, what he later reported to authorities as friendly wrestling, something he’d done with other lovers? Over the past year, she has written letters to officials, his work, uploaded videos of city council meetings in which old, white men accuse her of having an axe to grind, but it was he who sharpened his zucchini on her levi-ed thigh as he pinned her down on a long, red couch.

Photo Credit: Flickr/no name