wrong place, wrong time

[the_siobhan]

This isn't one of my funny stories. It's an incident I've been thinking a lot about for the last couple of days, and it makes me go WTF? so I decided to write it down.

When my sister and I were both teenagers (or so - I might have been 20) she was dating a guy who grew up in Uxbridge, a town about an hour north of Toronto. One weekend my sister, the boyfriend, her best friend and I went up there for a party.

The trip there was just one of our typical stupid roadtrip stories. We went up in the best friend's parents' station wagon, and she managed to lock the keys in the car while we were stopped in town for lunch. We spent 30 minutes trying to get a coat-hanger through the window so we could get the door open, during which time she revealed that she had no licence, insurance or ownership with her. While the boyfriend hid out in the restaurant because he had a warrent out for him. While we were parked across the street from the local police station.

But I digress.

So the point of all this is something that happened at the party itself. I had met the host once before, but everybody else was new to me. It was a typical party, everything seemed to be going pretty cool and I was having a good time. At one point I was playing some table-top game that involved knocking your opponent's discs off a polished surface - buggered if I can remember what it was called - and as well as the other players there were a bunch of people hanging around just shooting the shit.

During the game there was one guy there who was a part of the crowd but who never really spoke to me directly. He was just there, making loud jokes and drinking along with everybody else.

That was -- what, 22, 23 years ago? I still remember his name like it was yesterday. Ian MacDonald.

So the sister's boyfriend was somebody I got along with fairly well most of the time, but he was one of those guys who liked to poke at things that he knew would bug you. Stupid stuff usually, like jabbing you in the ribs until you yelled at him. We were always getting into these stupid sparring matches that usually end up with the two of us punching each other in the arm. It was never serious, just goofing around. Kid stuff.

I'm not sure how we got into it this particular time, but I remember we were on the carpet of the basement rec room. We might have been kneeling or something. We were definitely pushing each other. And we quit, and we both laughed and he got up and walked away, and I started to get up as well.

And something hit me from behind, and the next thing I knew I was upside down and being dumped onto my head.

I have no idea how long it lasted, but for some time that felt like forever, I was wrestling with this MacDonald guy. And he was hurting me, and I wanted him off. At one point he had me pinned to the ground on my back and I had managed to get a good grip on his ears and I was pounding the top of his head repeatedly into the television set just behind us - and that's when the guy who lived there came downstairs and pulled him off of me.

I don't remember what he did to me. I remember that was stiff and sore all over the next day. I remember that the waistband of my jeans were torn and I had to borrow safety pins from somebody.

And I remember that the party just went on like nothing had happened.

Later I asked the sister's boyfriend why he hadn't stepped in. And he said, "Well, I was going to. But then you were winning, so I sat down. And then you started losing, so I stood up. And then you started winning again, so I sat down."

When I talked to the host about it later, he told me he had come downstairs to find what he thought had been two guys beating the crap out of each other, and he had broken it up to protect his parents' house. He was shocked to see it was me.

He also told me the guy had been previously accused of rape by two separate women. This was common knowledge in town.

I wonder how much of peoples' normal reaction to a guy jumping a woman in public was short-curcuited by the pushing match I just had and how much by the fact I had fought back. I wonder if I had cried and yelled for help if people would have stepped in.

How much was just because the whole thing was just so fucking weird nobody knew what to do.

I heard later that he had gone around telling everybody that we had snuck off during the party and made with the wild monkey sex. For some reason that was the part of the whole incident that pissed me off the most.

Comments

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

*shudder* EW

That guy was SERIOUSLY fucked up. Seems he had been turned on by seeing you being "hurt" in the playfight thing, and just lost control.

I wonder if you looked now, how long he's been in a security hospital?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I've never thought of looking him up. Might be interesting to find out at that.

[amon-zero.livejournal.com]

Very creepy indeed. The only thing that calms me when thinking of this scenario is perhaps similar to that which stopped anyone else intervening.. I seem to have picked up quite serious faith in your ability to put a hurtin' on the deservin'.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The bf's response does kind of bear that out.

One of the things that I find a bit bizarre in hindsight, is that when I say the party went on like nothing happened, I'm including myself in that. I borrowed a couple of safety pins, bitched about the guy being an asshole, and went and got myself another beer. It didn't occur to me that the situation was more than a little fucked up until I told the story to somebody and saw how they reacted.

Nowadays, I'd probably press charges. Or eat his liver. One or the other.

[amon-zero.livejournal.com]

Or eat his liver

And I wonder how I got these impressions of you.. ;)


I know how it is with continuing on "normally" after weird shit has broken out. Been there a few times myself, although normally I look the worse for wear.

[notmostppl.livejournal.com]

Of course you went on like nothing happened. Makes perfect sense to me. It's normal to say and do whatever you have to until you're out of the situation. And normalizing the situation in your own mind after the fact is a matter of survival. Even nowadays, there's a high personal price associated with pressing charges... and there's no guarantee for a fair result. It's good that you can write about it now. It's never too late to acknowledge that something bad happened.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

I read this several times. I still can't find anything that explains, even a little bit, why this Ian guy jumped you. Did he think it was a free-for-all?

It's pretty obvious that you and the bf was wrestling in a playful way, but it seemed like Ian deadly serious.

[2ndaryairplane.livejournal.com]

the lack of crying out and yelling on your part would definitely be something to stop people from interfering when you put up a good fight. having witnessed a precident shortly before, did not help any either.

situatio IS fucked up, though, from our point of view.
i can't say for people that were at the party, drunken brawls may very well be a normal thing.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

From what little I knew of that crowd, I would be very surprised if drunken brawls weren't a normal thing.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

And people wonder why I refused to party in small towns as a teenager.

[montieth.livejournal.com]

I can see how the other people would have not quite known how to respond. Your perspective was the only one (aside from Ian MacDonald) that wasn't clouded too much by confusion as to what was going on. From an outside view, it could have just looked like you and him got into a playful tussle. The fact that the direct witness thought you were winning at several points does bear that out to a degree.

Personally, if I saw you and some bloke slugging it out on the floor a hotel room at Convergence, I'd probably get Macross or someone else big, but I'd probably eschew sticking my arm in there to stop you unless I had a very very very clear opening.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

As you say, the difference was very clear to me - going from laughing and pushing, to silent and deady serious. But anybody else would have had to have been actually watching us to know that, and I imagine in a room full of people drinking and talking that wasn't happening.

It probably also happened a lot faster than I remember.

[individuation.livejournal.com]

Really, some people just need to be euthanized.
It's for their own good.

[algernon33.livejournal.com]

Geez!...
The Guy is a complete Asshole..
He's lucky it was only his Ears, I would of told you to go for his Eyes..

-A33

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "WTF?" sums that up. That's seriously bizarre. Also, I can totally understand that bit at the end being the most irritating part of it.

I don't know what I would have done in that situation. Like, as you say, it might have fallen into the whole, "What the hell?" kind of don't-know-how-to-react realm.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

If I had been thinking clearly I might have yelled for somebody to get the guy off of me. But it happened too fast to think out my response.

I've definitely had the "don't-know-how-to-react" experience. I was once sexually assualted by a woman, my own disbelief that it was actually happening meant I reacted almost too late to get myself out of there.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

There's a strong cultural idea that women don't do that -- that sexual assault is a crime committed by men against women, and there's a vague acknowledgement that it sometimes also happens to young boys at the hands of men. That it can happen to both men and women at the hands of women and that it can happen to grown men at the hands of both men and women are big blind spots in how people visualize sexual assault. I think for a lot of people it would be hard to get their brain around that in time to do something about it.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Odds that it's the same guy are tiny, but I'm a little squicked 'cause I had some guy named Ian (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sontaran) (dunno the last name), who lives up in your general neck of the woods and is about the right age, go just a little stalky on me in my LJ/AIM a couple of months ago.

I've wrestled with BFs for fun, but thank the gods I've never had to do it in earnest. I'm fairly big and strong for a girl (though not nearly your caliber, of course), but I honestly don't know how I'd do, and fear that it wouldn't be well.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

That is pretty creepy.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

That is very weird.

Anyway, the game you were playing - was it kinda like snooker, with pockets that you had to shoot the discs into? If so, it was probably karoms - there's a variety of spellings for it. It originates somewhere in the Indian subcontinent - my dad used to play it as a kid.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

From what I remember, the table had numbers at each end, and then a gutter. The object was to get your own disc onto a high number while knocking off the other teams'.

I think vaguely like shuffleboard, if I'm remembering that game right.

[frogmistress.livejournal.com]

My motto had always been "don't date anyone who's ass you can't kick" and all the males I dated were smallish (about my size, in fact.) frogmaster on the other hand, is not smallish or about my size at all. The first time we play-wrestled, he pinned me and there was nothing I could do to get out of it.

I completely freaked on him, screaming "Don't ever do that again!" and crying and stuff. He had no idea what he had done. We've gotten over that, but, it was a very scary concept for me, then.

I can definitely understand that his lying bit was the most annoying thing to you. There isn't much to be done about that. Once said, it's out there. Even if you don't care what people think, it completely sucks to have you associated with an asshole like that.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The Evil Ex was a small guy, but thanks to a lifetime of martial arts training he could pin me really effectively. The one and only time he did it I went completely nuts. After it was all over I told him very seriously that if he ever did it again he was never going to be allowed within 50 miles of me, ever.

He's the only guy who's ever been able to get me down so I couldn't do anything and it was utterly terrifying.

[caspervonb.livejournal.com]

I always thought that was one of your stories that was the strangest and made me the most uncomfortable.

When said in the proper tone around a few drinks, it can actually be pretty funny. I remember the first time you told me. "That's pretty fucked up" and we both laughed.

But, really, I never could understand why jerkoff didn't get his head kicked in. Or, at the very least, why it wasn't stopped.

Like many things, I like to chalk this up to people being a strange and fucked up breed.

That's very little comfort however. It doesn't explain anything and sweeps too much under the rug.

The truth is I don't know why people would be so broken, so completely messed up and inhuman, that they would let something like this happen.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Somebody published a study not too long ago that said that if you are in some kind of trouble, and a stranger comes by they will help you. If two strangers come by, they will team up and help you.

But if a whole crowd of strangers comes by, they won't do anything. They will all wait for somebody else to take the lead.

I think that explains how somebody can be assaulted or killed in public and whole crowd of people can do nothing.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

The whole "bystander effect" thing is pretty common, apparently. I've heard lots of different reasons why people do nothing in a situation like that, but it mainly seems to boil down to nobody actually believing their eyes or being sure they understand what's going on, and waiting to see what other people do before acting themselves.

I guess it's the downside of the "if in doubt, do nothing" idea, that no-one wants to make a dick of themselves jumping in like a hero only to find they've totally misread it. I know i've done it more than once, and kicked myself later for not doing anything because i wasn't sure.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

One of the things they teach you in emergency first aid is to pick out people and give them direct orders if you want anybody to be of any use. "You in the red tie, go call 911. You in the glasses, go get X." It's the only way to get past that bystander effect.

I wonder if things would have gone differently if I'd be able to keep it together enough to yell at people.