Didn’t Mean Nothing By It

Matthew Evans Chelf

TW: SA

I went to my room. I shut the door. I sat on the floor.

            I didn’t play Final Fantasy or Zelda. I didn’t flip through Magic cards. I just stared into the gray nothingness of my carpet, feeling as though my face had been burned away.

            I tried to piece together what happened. Already, I couldn’t quite remember. My brain was undetailing the event. Unweaving it from my mind so I could go on being myself. But my body wouldn’t let go. I could feel his hand on the back of my head, driving my face downward.

            I didn’t cry, too shocked.

           

The house was silent. I didn’t know where anyone was. Surely my older brother, who had been there on the bus, in the back, cussing and trying to act cool, was around.

            But where?

            I’d never felt this alone—like if I opened my bedroom door, there’d be a drop into a dark void, not the hallway lined with light blue and purple wallpaper where our baby pictures hung in all of their innocence.

            Not that I could face my brother at this point. I was broken glass, shattered. I had to put the pieces back together, if I could, before I could face him.

            Or anyone.

 

 

For a while, for how long I don’t know, I sat on the floor, replaying the scene. The parts of it scattered like dry leaves, shuddered like scared fish. What is it about memory that blows away the unwanted? Is it so we can live? So we can maintain continuity?

            There was a hole in my brain where water rushed to fill in with darkness.

            But I believed, as I still believe, that if I searched the past, I could find clues. If I could find clues, I could give an account of myself that would explain what Curtis did to me.

            Why he did it.

            What it meant, if anything, and what I, in a practical sense, should do—like tell my mother or be a man and pretend it didn’t happen. The cultural script that I’d imbibed growing up in rural Kentucky, on a backroad named Ford Road, told me to keep my mouth shut. Forget, move on, get over it. A man would’ve hauled off and punched Curtis in the face. A real man wouldn’t have let it happen. That what happened was even possible spelled out an underlying weakness that was visible to everyone. Perhaps I’d had a mark on my back and it had only been a matter of time.

            Fight wasn’t an option for me. I was a small body and Curtis was a big body.

            My only hope was to name the thing that just happened to me. To not look away. To rebel against the silence. If I could name it, I could get back something: my self-respect, my dignity, my face.

            My body in the world.

            So I sat, and I thought, and the more I sat and thought the more I could feel Curtis’s fingers cupped to the back of my head. The hinges of my neck turning as my face slammed, the give at the bottom.

            I see his face.

            The O face.

            The wide eyes.

            The ecstasy.

            The joy.

            The satisfaction as he tilted his head back during his sick pantomime.

            His stop came right afterward. He shoved me aside. Stood, lifting his backpack to his shoulder, without ever looking at me or saying a word. He walked down the aisle, right by Mr. Tim, the bus driver, as if nothing happened. And Mr. Tim said what he said to everyone when they got off the bus, “Have you a good day.”

 

The only way I knew how to explain to myself what happened on the bus was going back to the fourth grade. When all the boys at school, including Curtis, got obsessed with wrestling. The boys spread their legs and crossed their arms above their heads. Jumped forward, chopped. “Suck it!” they said.

            It was supposed to be a joke, a silly, crude gesture that didn’t mean anything. We were just repeating TV, after all.

            But Curtis was one of those boys who scared me. He took it to the next level. Practiced moves in the hallways. Run, chest forward. Pick up and fall together backward. Jump and drop The People’s Elbow. Threaten to snap your neck with the Piledriver. Shouted, “Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?”

            My mother didn’t allow me to watch wrestling. When I asked why, she said, “It will rot your brain,” and explained no further. I felt angry and lonely, missing out. How was I supposed to fit in if I didn’t know the lingo, the moves?

            Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, I didn’t know anything about sex except it made babies and I wasn’t supposed to have it until I got married. Curtis was my first sexual encounter with another person. Of course I didn’t know that sex can be about domination. And that there are times sexual expression for a man reinforces their self image as a man, insofar as being a man means being a dominator, which it certainly did on the bus and everywhere else around me. I didn’t realize that what happened to me was a form of sex. Weapon sex. Strips the identity of the object. And what I was feeling was erasure, that I ceased to be me—and that was the point.

 

I needed someone to tell me it wasn’t my fault. That I hadn’t invited Curtis. That being hunched in the corner, limp with depression, wasn’t a welcome to violence. I’d been an energetic kid who played baseball, but puberty hollowed me out. I slipped into lifeless, doll-like fogs, eyes unblinking, unseeing, my whole body as sense deprived as plastic.

            I was in one of these phases when I felt an air bubble roll beneath me. I looked up. Curtis. He’d come from the back of the bus. He didn’t say anything. He stared straight ahead.

            I wonder what he must’ve saw in me, curled in a ball in a corner against the window. Did he come with intention of pulling me out of it? Was he bored?

            We were the last ones on the bus because we lived that deep in the country. Our older brothers sat in the very back. I could hear my brother’s goofy laugh through a cement wall. Had Curtis come to keep me company? To escape the big brothers?

            I knew Curtis but I didn’t know him well. For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, my mother didn’t want me playing with him, and so he was a familiar stranger to me. It didn’t occur to me that my mother and his mother went to high school together, and that maybe my mother knew things about Curtis’s family.

            His shaggy black hair was loaded with frizz and his face had broken out into a pizza of red bumps. He wore baggy blue JNCO shorts that hung loose around his ass because he didn’t wear a belt. His black Austin 3:16 shirt—like the professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin that he quoted all the time—was flecked with the same white snow that was in his hair. He lived in a derelict farm house. Paint peeling, couches on the porch, the frame tilted. The windows and doors always open, I could see that nothing was inside. His grandmother waited on the porch grasping a cane. The house sat alongside a dirt road that went way back in the country to where you couldn’t see. That’s where the landlord, a big time farmer in the county, had some trailers where the Mexicans he hired to cut tobacco lived.

            I waited for Curtis to say something. When he didn’t, I closed my eyes and went back to resting my head against the shaking glass.

            I didn’t resist him.

            That meant I let it happen?

            And if I let it happen, what right did I have to tell my mother? To tell would violate everything I knew about being a man.

 

“Matthew,” my mother called from the kitchen. “Dinner’s ready.”

            Finally I looked up. Purple-pink dusk glowed in my window. Out in the fields, the cows were marching in one big cloud past the pond, toward the barns.

            I stood, brushed my knees off as if I’d been in the dirt, told myself nothing happened, it’s not a big deal, it’s your fault anyway, don’t say anything, don’t act weird, just be normal. I opened the door and walked down the hall.

            That night my mother heated frozen turkey slices in gravy in the oven. Mashed potatoes. Carrots and peas from a can, a stick of butter between them. Something quick and easy she could make after getting home from E-Z Stop and still call herself a good mom. She’d had my older brother when she was sixteen. Then me four years later. My little sister four years later. My mother was tired. She collapsed on the couch in front of the TV to watch her soaps, her one escape.

            I am thankful my father wasn’t home that night. He was off patrolling the roads for the state of Kentucky. Seeing my father in his police uniform was an icon of terror and reverence. The way the light gleamed off the shiny black belt drew my eye to the gun, snug in its holster. The black fabric suctioned to my father’s frame, airtight, a cage fixing his body to a form of rigidity and authority. As much as I feared my father, everything I knew at the time about strength came from him and his boots that sounded like choking ducks when he walked on concrete. I’ve wondered how this night would’ve been different had father had been home. If his stoic, manly presence would have incited me to my usual silence.

            I ate quietly. Mixing the gravy with mashed potatoes. Normally I loved the thick warmness of my mother’s cooking, but as I ate I couldn’t stop seeing and hearing the yellow blur of hay fields, the bus engine burrowing into the earth.

            I looked to my right. Mom on the couch. I knew I could trust her to help. She’d always stuck up for me and my older brother when we got in trouble. Still, the shame. I feared if I told her everyone would know. Then what? And she would have to tell my father. How could I face my father after I’d been dominated by another boy?

            The rim of the plate blurred.

            I couldn’t fathom my father’s knowing. Still can’t.

            I wish I knew by what secret door I managed. Age, I suspect. Young enough so my impulse to share wasn’t yet entirely squashed. If I’d been a little older, perhaps I would’ve held it in. But I was old enough I couldn’t say what bothered me without prompting.

            When my mother went to put dishes in the dishwasher, I stood behind her, shaking, waiting for her to notice my destruction and for her to fix all that had gone wrong.

            “What?” she said, casually glancing.

            A square block jammed my throat. I opened my mouth to say what happened, but I choked on the block.

            “What happened?” she said. Alarm replaced exhaustion.

            What did happen? I wouldn’t know the words sexual assault until my twenties. Not having the language closed my throat.

            “What? What?”

            “Something happened on the bus,” I said, barely above a whisper. “He grabbed my head and did this.” I cupped my hand in an open flex and moved it up and down like I was dribbling a basketball.

            Crying, not because of what Curtis did, but because I told.

            She picked up the phone. Questions.

            “Did anyone else see this?”

            “Does your brother know?”

            “Did you tell the bus driver?”

            All of them, no.

 

Maybe it was that night or maybe it was the next night or maybe even a week later. The light turns on with my mother’s voice. So kind and high it was suspicious.

            “Matthew, there’s someone here who wants to see you.”

            It was like I opened my eyes and there was everyone.

            Him. His mom. Bus driver. Maybe my brother. Not my dad.

            On the threadbare, blue-and-white couches.

            The front door was open and on the glass screen wailed the darkness of night.

            Here was my mother’s vision of justice, because she loved me.

            She stood, smiling.

            Curtis’s mother said, “Hello,” and offered an embarrassed smile. She was a big woman with a raspy smoker’s voice. The way she sat on the couch reminded me of the way guilty people sit in pews at church, kind of perched forward with the jitters, hands clasped at the knees, and rocking away the seconds till it’s time to leave. Her smile hid whatever tense conversation that had transpired between her, my mother, and Mr. Tim.

            “Good evening,” said Mr. Tim. His voice was deep and heavy.

            Curtis’s mother said, “Curtis has something he wants to say to you.”

            All eyes to Curtis. He and his mother sat in the middle of the action.

            “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just joking.”

            His eyes rolled side to side as he tried to remember what he was supposed to say.

            “Yeah,” he resumed with a stammer. “I didn’t mean it. I was just playing around. I didn’t mean nothing by it.” By the end of those three sentences, his voice grew casual, confident. His mother never took her eyes off him. Even after he finished speaking, she continued to study her son.

            My face dropped to the floor. I wanted to feel seen and loved and saved, but I just felt stupid and embarrassed.

            What was I supposed to say? Good joke? Sorry I blew it out of proportion?

            “What do you think?” my mother said. The desperation at the edge of her fake smile made me sorry to put her through this. I regretted it.

            I had one option, the option that would make it all go away. I had to accept the apology. Even if that acceptance meant I accepted Curtis’s version of what happened. To reject would ruin the way back to normal my mother had paved. I could never betray my mother.

            I looked up and faced Curtis and his mother. What a strange pair. Sitting on the loveseat side-by-side, a mother shepherding her son to take responsibility while Curtis looked left, right, left, anywhere but straight ahead at me.

            “Are you okay?” my mother said.

            “Yes,” I said toward the brown-and-black grain in the wood paneling.

            “Do you accept his apology?”

            “Yes.”

            Mr. Tim, who had been calmly observing, cleared his voice. He sat forward and began to speak with his hearty baritone. Mr. Tim, in addition to driving the bus, was a preacher. The kind of man who spoke at funerals and weddings. Knew just what to say to bring closure. I’ve always respected him, even if it was under his watch that this happened. I didn’t blame him. He’d come to make peace. But I couldn’t hear him. I was too hard and raw to listen anymore.

 

Yes, I had to accept Curtis’s bullshit apology, and it was harrowing in the moment, but I’m glad I told and I’m thankful for my mother. Thanks to her, Curtis got kicked off the bus. I wouldn’t have to face my attacker everyday, unlike so many who go through this.

            Telling allowed me to move on. That was my mother’s orchestration. By playing it down, I was made to feel as though what Curtis did wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t have to change me.

            And, in a way, it wasn’t a big deal. When I think about the casual and rampant sexual violence that goes on in American culture, the constant threat to bodily integrity that is leveled against women and trans folk, what happened to me was small potatoes.

            Not long after that night, Curtis got evicted from that house. I never saw him again. Over time, I forgot about Curtis. Though, I’m not sure if forgot is the right word when his imprint resonates throughout my body and consciousness. My mother tried to spare me. But what happened on the bus did change me. Curtis welcomed me into the fear of the boys at school and the men in my landscape. He taught me the threat of a man’s body that’s always there. He fueled my rejection of the world around me and my longing for a home where I felt safe.

            That longing has been such a driving force in my life. It’s why I got into literature. Into writing. Why I went to graduate school to study literature and social justice. Things that gave me words to understand my life. Words to give me a way to transmute pain into meaning and transformation. Words I didn’t have back then.

            I’ve chased that longing to the other side of the country.

            It wasn’t until I left home for good that I could remember Curtis.

            It wasn’t until I had heard other people speak about their experiences, their fears, their traumas, that I could understand my own. That I could understand what happened to me. That I could talk about it and remain whole.

            It took me twenty years to remember Curtis.

            I was thirty-two. It took me by surprise. On a mundane drive home from work, I was telling my wife about the road I grew up on and how I’d get splitting headaches on the long bus ride home through the windy country roads battered by potholes. How there were no shocks on the bus, it was just shaking and thrashing and being thrown face first into cushionless pleather scarred by pocketknives. I recalled how the hot summer air tossed around the loose papers and gum wrappers on the floor. How Mr. Tim yelled at me with his preacher boom for listening to headphones. I smelled the rubber and field grass and fresh cow shit. I told her about Leo, a man who lived in a yellow bus on a hillock on the back end of Ford Road, where it was gravel, not paved. Everyday when our school bus rolled by, Leo waved at us kids, which I took as a reminder to never stop trying, always hold faith in life.

            She told me, “You were sexually assaulted.”

            That stunned me. I never thought of it like that. I had never thought of it at all after that night when Curtis and his mother came to visit.

            I refracted my adolescence through the memory. So many things began to make more sense. Why I walled myself off. Why I dove into Christianity and read the Bible by myself during lunch instead of hanging out with my friends. Why I never told my friends. Or anyone. Why my father wanted to take me hunting, so I could kill a deer and feel strong and manly.

            It’s hard to draw direct correlations. I’ll never know entirely how what Curtis did on the bus effected me. What I do know is I was talking to the only person I could’ve ever told. The shock of remembrance found me where I had found safety.