400 Days of Oppression (21 page)

C
HAPTER
XIV

“Fuck that bitch! My lawyers will eat her alive. That fucking slut won’t get a dime from me!”

“She’s not after money, Michael. She’s pressing criminal charges. You’re going to be tried for attempted rape.”

“That’s bullshit! We were in a sex club! On a goddamn S&M farm for Christsakes! She wouldn’t have been there if she didn’t want to get fucked!”

Michael’s father shook his head, placing his palm against his forehead and closing his eyes.

“Something is not right with you, Michael.”

Michael smirked.

“I’m just fine, Dad.”

“No, you’re not. You need to see a therapist, a psychiatrist. I’m not going to have my son turn into some kind of rapist or serial sex murderer or something!”

“You’re overreacting, Dad. Me and Farrad just went to a fetish farm to check it out and see what it was like. Chicks go there to live out their fantasies of being overpowered and dominated. I was just giving that bitch what she wanted. Who knew she was going to freak out like that? It doesn’t matter anyway. I told you, I’ve already got a lawyer on this. Nothing is going to happen. You’ll see. I might even sue that bitch for what she did to my sack. They had to sew it back on!”

Michael Evans Sr. looked his son in his eyes, placed his palm against the boy’s cheek, then ran a hand through his own thinning hair, before dropping his head into his palms and letting out a sigh that appeared to empty his body of all vitality. He wilted into the brown leather recliner he was sitting in, looking as if he’d aged thirty years in a matter of seconds.

“Maybe something should happen. Maybe you should go to jail.”

“Dad!”

Michael looked at his father.

“You don’t mean that.”

Michael Sr. seemed to diminish even further, folding into the plush brown leather recliner, collapsing in on himself.

“Maybe I don’t.”

Michael nodded. He patted his weary father on his stooped shoulders.

“It’ll be okay, Dad. You’ll see.”

Michael bent and kissed the bald spot on his father’s bowed head, turned and left the room. He snatched a thin windbreaker from the coat rack, protection against the chill breeze and late night fog. It still amazed him that it could be seventy degrees during the day and drop into the forties at night when the fog rolled in. To Michael, the weather in San Francisco was every bit as fickle as its citizens. He grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose vodka off the bar, took a swig, and carried it out with him to his car.

Michael’s cell phone rang as he stepped from the apartment and hurried to the black Porsche parked at the curb.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Farrad.”

His voice sounded hoarse, weak. Farrad trembled, choking back sobs. Michael had never heard his friend sound so…weak, so defeated. Pussy. Some guys just couldn’t take the heat. Threaten them with prison and they fell the fuck apart.

“What’s up, bro? You all freaked out about getting arrested? I told you, my lawyers are the best in the business. They are handling it.”

There was a pause. A strangled sob. Then a whisper.

“Someone…a big black guy…he attacked me. He…he…did things to me.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“I’m in the hospital. Watch out, man. Be careful. I-I think he might be coming for you too. I think it has something to do with that whore from the fetish farm. I gotta go. The cops are here.”

The phone died and Michael immediately turned, expecting someone to be creeping up behind him. The street was empty. He climbed into the car, slammed the door shut, locked it, and shifted the Porsche into drive. Only then did he feel the chill breeze on the back of his neck. His hairs stood on end and icy tendrils of fear clawed his spine.

Michael turned and noticed two things simultaneously. His rear passenger window had been busted out and there was someone in the back seat...someone very large with a knife. Michael jerked forward, startled, terrified. He pulled the door handle and stepped one leg out onto the pavement. That was as far as he got. The man grabbed him by his hair and jerked him back into the seat. Michael yelled. His cry choked off suddenly when he felt the cold steel against his Adam’s apple.

“Shut up and drive.”

“Don’t kill me!”

The blade cut into his skin and Michael yelped. A warm wet trickle dribbled down his neck.

“If you don’t shut that fucking door and put your foot on the gas, I’m going to give you a second smile. You got that shit?” The voice was deep, gravely, angry. It didn’t have a hint of bluff in it. If anything, it sounded like the man was doing everything he could to restrain himself from slitting Michael’s throat.

Michael obeyed, closing the door and driving farther into the park. The man frisked him quickly, roughly. Michael wept like a child.

“No gun? You’re a cocky son of a bitch ain’t you? You rape a woman and it never even occurs to you that someone might want to retaliate?”

“D-d-don’t h-h-h-h-hurt me, duuuude. This was...this was just a misunderstanding. I didn’t mean to hurt her. We were all just having fun. She wanted it. I’m telling you, she wanted it.”

There was silence from the back seat. Michael looked into the rearview mirror and could only see a dark silhouette, a shadow that was darker and more solid than the other shadows.

“You hear me, dude? I didn’t do shit!”

“Don’t call me dude. Turn left right here, motherfucker.”

The man guided him through a series of turns down familiar streets, finally leading him into Golden Gate Park.

“No way, man. I’m not going in there!”

“I’m going to make this real simple, Michael. If you do as I say, I won’t kill you. I’m going to hurt you. I’m going to hurt you a lot. But I won’t kill you. But if you fuck with me. If you don’t do exactly what I say, I’m going to gut you like a fish. You’ve only got a few seconds to decide how this is going to go. Then I start making you bleed. I didn’t kill your little sidekick and I could have.  But I promise you, if you don’t do exactly as I say, I will cut your fucking head off, slice open your belly, and decorate this nice eighty-thousand dollar sports car with your internal organs. Now, drive!”

Michael stepped on the accelerator and piloted the Porsche into the park.

“Turn off your headlights.”

“But...I won’t be able to see the road.”

“There’s a full moon. You can see just fine. Turn off your fucking headlights.”

Michael began to tremble. He felt some mild relief knowing the man hadn’t killed Farrad. Whatever this man had done to him, Farrad was still alive. It had been less than an hour since Michael had spoken to him. But Farrad said the man had done “things” to him. That’s how Farrad had put it. “Things.” As if whatever was done to him had been too terrible to verbalize.

Sobs escaped Michael’s quivering lips. He began to snivel and weep as his imagination conjured up visions of castration and other, more terrible forms of genital torture. He’d once seen a picture in a body modification magazine of a man who’d had his penis split in half, a row of rings pierced through each side. Michael’s testicles shriveled up tight against him, a whimper escaped from his lips.

“Stop the car.”

They were in an area of the park that wasn’t visible from the main road. The dense trees and other foliage formed a thick canopy that blocked out the stars and moon. The streetlights didn’t reach this far, so the darkness was absolute. No one would see them and no one would hear them. Michael could hear the sound of crashing waves from the San Francisco Bay. It was an isolated, lonely sound. A hopeless sound.

“Please don’t do this. Don’t do this!”

The back door opened and Michael began to cry as the huge black man with a very large knife wrenched up his door and dragged him out of the car by his hair, punching him in the face repeatedly as he pulled him down into the dirt. Michael’s face cut, bled, bruised, and swelled.

“Please. Please. Please. No. No. No. Noooooo!”

The punches weren’t the worst of it. Once out of the car, the man began cutting off Michael’s clothes. Michael tried to resist, but each attempt to protect himself was met with punches that made the world spin. Michael blacked out several times. The last time, he awoke to find himself naked, face down, duct tape around his wrists and ankles, the huge black man violating his anus with the hilt of the huge buck knife. Michael screamed as the man rammed the leather-coated knife handle deep in his bowels without any lubricant but his own brute force. It felt like his anus was being cored out like an apple. Blood squished from his rectum and ran down the sides of his buttocks as the man continued to rape him with the knife. The duct tape around Michael’s mouth muffled the sound of his agonized screams, not that anyone would have heard him this deep in Golden Gate Park.

The man dragged a large duffel bag out of the car and withdrew a baseball bat, then he reached back in and took out the bottle of Grey Goose Michael had brought with him from his father’s bar. He withdrew the knife from Michael’s anus and replaced it with bottle of Grey Goose, easing it in deeper and deeper, using Michael’s own blood and feces as lubricant. Michael’s guts cramped as he felt the cool, glass, bottle fill his vandalized rectum. Then the man rose, placed a foot on the small of Michael’s back for leverage and to hold Michael in place, then lifted the bat. Michael screamed and tried to squirm away, knowing what was about to happen next. The man swung the bat down hard, hammering the bottle into his colon and shattering it.

What felt like a hundred shards of glass embedded themselves deep in Michael’s hemorrhoidal tissue. Then the man used the business end of the bat to grind the glass in deeper, putting his shoulders into it and grunting audibly with the effort. He shoved the bat in as deep as he could, managing to get nearly six inches of it into Michael’s anus, rupturing blood vessels as jagged shards were embedded deep into his rectum. Before climbing back in the car, the man urinated all over Michael, taking care to aim the warm stream at Michael’s face.

Michael was still conscious, screaming in a hell of indescribable pain, when the man leaned down and whispered in his ear. The man’s face was all shadow. Eyes and a mouth surrounded by darkness that bled into the surrounding night. It took a moment for Michael to realize what he was looking at. A ski mask. His attacker was wearing some sort of black Lycra ski mask. 

“I could have castrated you permanently. I should have castrated you. You will not fight this in court. Even if you tell the police what I did to you. Even if they catch me, one of my dear friends will come to visit you, and they will take from you, whatever I want them to take. Cut it off and bring it to me. Do you understand?”

Michael nodded, still sobbing and sniveling.

“If you fight the charges in court. If you try to make Natasha out to be some kind of slut who asked to be raped. I will be angry. I will come for you again. Do you understand?”

Again, Michael nodded.

 “Now, when you get to a phone, I want you to call the hospital, ask for Natasha, and I want you to apologize to her. I want you to beg her to forgive you. If you don’t, I will come for you again. You understand, you piece of shit?”

“Yes! Yes, I understand! Don’t hurt me again! Don’t kill me!”

The man in the black mask climbed into Michael’s car and drove away, leaving Michael naked in the park with the baseball bat still protruding from his bleeding asshole.

C
HAPTER
XV

The phone rang and every nerve vibrated in sync with the chime. I wanted to scream. My head was cloudy from the pain meds, but the pain was still there, pounding like thunder between my ears. A migraine the magnitude of Mount St. Helens.

I remembered where I was. Why I was there. Attempted rape. It was an old story, but one I thought I’d put behind me. Meeting Kenyatta was supposed to mean the end of drunken date rapes. He was supposed to keep me safe, but he hadn’t been there to protect me.

Hours passed. Nurses came and went, checking my vitals, asking me how I felt and whether I needed something for my nerves. I watched soap operas and game shows. A psychiatrist came in, looked at my chart, then asked me if I was having nightmares, trouble sleeping, if I would be afraid to leave the hospital and go home, and then, finally, the big question: “Have you had any suicidal thoughts?”

I laughed. I don’t know why. I just thought it was funny. Almost every day of my life, the idea of suicide had been there. I even found it comforting to know there was always a way out of this madness if it got too rough. But not now. As crazy as it might seem, Kenyatta had given me something to live for. I had a goal. The idea of checking out before achieving that goal was the furthest thing from my mind.