I am a Man & I am a Rape Survivor.
I was 13 years old when they kicked in the door of the ghetto motel room I was staying in. This is My Story…
My rapists were not strangers, at least one of them wasn’t. He/She was a trans prostitute off of Lumbard Ave. in South Philly. When I had a good week or weekend of hustling ready rock, that’s Crack for all you uninitiated, I would pay the $90 weekly rate. I had found this place when I was first getting into heroin at 12 years old.
Wait, WTF!?!?!? Did he just say “getting into heroin at 12”????
That’s right readers, you see, I come from a very traumatic beginning. When I was 6 years old my parents divorced and my dad moved in with his new lover. Well, about 2 weeks in she began beating me. I was threatened effectively enough to keep my mouth shut. She would use rubber bands to snap my testicles or jam kitchen utensil handles up my ass.
Let’s take a tick…
My story is graphic and violent. It is not meant to glorify, justify or encourage any behaviors. It is also not my intent to cause any adverse memory responses. Having said that this story only gets worse.
Back to the Story
She would do this to me in front of her older teenage kids. Well her 2 oldest sons used these opportunities as an encouragement to make visits to my room for late-night blow jobs, which they would always have to beat me up first. Those late-night visits continued about once a week until one night when I had just turned 9. They came in as usual and I pulled out a knife and threatened to cut it off if I saw either one again. Fortunately, that was enough to end that chapter. The beatings, however, continued for another 3 years.
When I was 12 years old, I fought back and nearly beat her to death. My Dad, who allegedly had no knowledge of the previous 6 years, saw me beating his wife and he knocked me out with 1 punch and when I awoke, he had packed all of my clothes into an Army duffel bag and told me to leave and never come back. So I left.
Sadly these events were not the aforementioned rape. For the first few months of being a homeless 12 year old, my best friend Miles snuck me in on the nights I wasn’t supposed to be there. I discovered IV drugs shortly after being kicked out and I would spend the next year learning how to hustle Crack to support my burgeoning Heroin addiction. During the summer of 1987, I would find a $90 a week roach motel in South Philly.
I was the only person staying there that wasn’t a transvestite prostitute. There were always propositions from a couple of the more creepy ones and some of their “John’s”, but we never took them up. Well on this particular Friday night no was an unacceptable answer. The last thing I remember was being hit with the door.
I woke up in a hospital in Philadelphia. I had over a dozen stitches and my jaw was broken and my left eye was swollen shut. The Dr’s and nurses kept trying to get me to make a statement. I lied to the police and told them that I was a runaway from Foster Care in N. Jersey, but I also wouldn’t give them my name. On the 3rd night in the hospital Miles brought me clothes. The day they un-wired my jaw I snuck out of the hospital and went back to S.Jersey.
For the next 26 years, I would shoot dope at these experiences. I would use them as fuel to try and commit suicide on the installment plan until the wee hours of October 28, 2013, when I made the final installment.
That night I would successfully kill myself with an intentional overdose. God, the Universe, the Collective Consciousness whatever you wish to call it had other plans for me, and with the forethought of a very good friend, I was revived. You cannot imagine how demoralizing it is to fail at suicide. It is the lowest I had ever felt in my life, but I knew with 100% certainty that I would never touch Heroin again.
8 years this has held true.
As always my Spiritual Warriors, be well…
~Namaste
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