“Procurement.”
The word hangs over the table between us. I gasp. The sharp inhale causes the word to slide down my core. It stings. I hold my breath.
There’s a feeling of visceral realigning as my gut makes sense of a final puzzle piece plopping into place. The picture pops - clear of the fog that’s been there for over fifty years.
The back of my head clenches. My brain feels the squeeze as if I’ve just registered the ingestion of way too much caffeine, but my belly unclenches. So weird. So physical - this process of the body making sense of new information.
“‘Pro-cur-ed,” I roll the word around my mouth, “That is what my high school buddy and I were, in 1967! Procured for six members of the UCLA basketball team. That’s what happened to us!” I exhale. "And, Oh, my God, Kelly, my boyfriend's friend got paid for our gang-rape!"
“Wow. Sorry that happened,” she says, “Yeah. It’s a regular practice. Learned about it when I was in the WNBA.”
How could an event fifty years ago come to table with us here in Oakland? What miracle was wrought for this new friend, who understands what happened to me as a teenager in Los Angeles, to be here now? She knows all about arrangements made for young women to be bought from a procurer and brought to male members of sports teams for pre-sport sport - mice for cool cats to play with. It’s a regular practice.
Shame morphs. Rage rises. Red hot. I burn and yearn to fight them off, NOW, those five bastards who pinned me down on the wall-to-wall mattresses in some apartment living room in Westwood Village where they killed off a part of me.
Fifty years ago, I was inert. Frozen. Prepped with hash and pimp sticks and copious amounts of vodka. My friend fared much better taking only one of them to another room. For neither of us was escape an option. Kelly had driven us to the "party" and he wasn't there now. But she had no previous history of early childhood sexual abuse. She fought back as best she could. Fifty years ago, I was not aware of my own history of boundary violations at the hands of our father who ain’t in heaven, Howard was his name. In his drunkenness, he used me, my older brother, who began drinking at age nine, and my older male cousin as well - the one who’s schizophrenic in back woods Oregon.
Dad had perverse appetites. What can have happened to him to allow him to think that using children for his sexual gratification was a good idea? He spent time in jail for molesting my step sister. I didn’t know this when it happened. I didn’t know why he was jailed when I was ten. I only learned years later that it wasn’t for “disturbing the peace and resisting arrest,” which is the only part of the story that our adults told us kids. He was arrested for molest. Step-sister Heidi’s mom called the cops on him. Sentenced to a year in jail, he got out after six months for "good behavior." My Auntie Nora knew the story. She told me when I was forty-five, three years after my memories began to surface.
It’s taken me a long time, a lot of energy and a lot of money for therapy, bodywork and survivor support groups, twelve-step programs, self-defense courses and lots of hair-pulling from thinking I was crazy, in order to heal - or make sense of - my adolescent acting out, drinking, drug use, promiscuity and feeling like I was made of black Jello at my core. Throughout my school years, I feared people getting too close to me and finding out about the slime that lived within me. Yet, I had no conscious memory of what happened to me from a time before I had teeth to when my father left - just before I turned ten. My memories didn't surface until I was forty-two.
How lucky I am to have had wonderful support from my husband and daughters, therapists and healers. Lucky and thankful.
There is a statistical link between early boundary breaches and subsequent rape, molest and harassment. It’s as if we’re trying to assemble the raw materials to recreate that initial wound and heal it at last. We keep trying, thinking this time we’ll get to the core and heal what needs to be healed. Usually, we only end up being hurt again. I'm here to testify: Once healed, we won't stand for being victims again.
Here’s the thing about very early trauma: It feels like a life sentence. Before age two or so, we haven’t developed the mastoid processes of the temporal skull bones behind our ears. We have no sense of temporality; of time being bound to moments. To infants, it feels as if what’s happening in this moment will happen forever. This causes huge overwhelm for the immature nervous system. Catecholamines and other stress hormones flood our bodies, creating extreme fight/flight/freeze responses. When unresolved, the accumulation of stress hormones leads to hyper-vigilance, nervousness, premature aging and inability to focus. Often times we only have one of the Three Graces, with which we are all born - Fight, Flight, or Freeze, as our default setting. How many people do you know who are always itchin’ for a fight? Or always on the move? (stuck in flight) Those of us who cannot respond to situations, go numb or become totally withdrawn or depressed are stuck with Freeze as our default setting.
Fortunately, we’re hard wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal.
My hope is that this moment in history when the Post-Weinstien flood of women (and men) disclosing what has happened to them at the hands of perpetrators, will be a teaching moment for young women (and young men) everywhere to TRUST THEIR GUT. If something doesn’t feel right about any situation in which they find themselves, they have a right and duty to avail themselves of all three in-born defensive responses: Fight, Flight AND Freeze (if necessary). Freedom to use the best option is key. If you’ve a history of trauma, whether male or female, please, see a practitioner who specializes in helping folks heal and reclaim their resilience.
You’re worth it. Healing what happened to us is the only game in town worth playing. The time of passing down inter-generational trauma must end.
Bringing to light what has been in the shadow of our human psyche for millennia may help all of us to heal enough so that we may be able to turn to the healing of our home: Planet Earth!
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