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wrong place, wrong time
Jul. 20th, 2005 06:34 amThis 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.
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.