Anyway. Fuck it. The Trucker Story.

this is my worst story. my hardest story. only people either very close to me, people I want to scare into safer behavior, or potential sexual partners ever hear this one (you'll hear why).

So. I was sixteen, in my third semester at college. I was having a very hard time in general.

right before I started school, I had been in the mental ward for depression. Mental ward did very little for me other than (it turns out) give me a false sense of Accomplishing Things. False because it all fell apart. It wasn't real. It didn't come from me...it came from a twin desire to, first, get the FUCK out of the mental ward, and, second, get my ass out of the well that is depression. Both perfectly valid desires...i just didn't know how to go about it in a way that actually did anything for me.

the point to that mini-backgrounder is that it was somewhere during my second semester that my artificial non-depression started to wear off. over the summer after that semester it fell apart completely.

my third semester was a great big fucking mess.

(you'll all have to pardon my erratic capitalization for this entry, please)

I started out 3rd semester with your standard This Year is Gonna be The Year I'm GOOD! convictions. I signed up for 5 classes.

three weeks later, I'd dropped two. three was the minimum at my school you had to keep in order not to drop to part-time status, meaning, among other things, you had to live off-campus, which I couldn't afford.

missed a bunch of the 3 i had left anyway. spent each of the first four weekends (long weekends, I'd dropped friday classes, so from thurs. night to sunday night) in vermont with S. and D1. getting extremely extremely fucked up and doing very strange (not even sexually strange) things.

tried heroin that semester for the first time. thank fuck i at least had enough whatever in me to realize that I could never, never do it again, or I'd be completely lost. Stay away from the smack, kids.

also got my kitty, he, almost the only thing left from then, is still with me. my eldest child.

had roommates almost as crazy as me. not quite, but close.

that's a short little picture of me at 16 in third semester. a mess.

one night I went with a couple of friends to a truck stop we frequented.

There was a trucker there, making conversation with us. A big fat man, who, I later learned, was named Samuel Dwayne May. I use his full name because I don't care if that man gets strung up by his testes from a tree somewhere. Feel free, far as I'm concerned.

He offered all of us a ride. I was the only one who accepted.

I remember at the time thinking "Fuck it. I don't care what happens to me."

Guess what? I cared.

Anyway. I spent 24 hours in his truck with him. Chatting, dosing ephedrine. I learned that his birthday was also in May (May 5th), ha-ha, just like his last name.

I learned that he weighed 250 lbs, and I guessed correctly that his rig was doing 90 mph when it was.

I was wearing white tights, a black skirt, and a black leotard. I was pretty much at the maximum cute I would ever reach. My hair was bleached blonde, and I had a lot of holes in each ear, plus one in my right nipple.

We went to a truck stop, ate some. We went back in the truck. By this point we were aimed back at where I'd come from, having dropped off whatever the fuck it was we dropped off.

In the parking lot Mr. Samuel Dwayne May offered me $300 to give him a handjob. I refused.

So he forces me into the (tiny) sleeping cabin at the back of the cab. It was padded with red fake leather. It was about three feet by four feet by seven feet. He -- all 250 lbs of him -- was between me and the miniscule entrance.

He puts me in a headlock, at which point I briefly (couple seconds or so) lose consciousness, probably because of loss of blood to my brain. I remember coming to through this sort of complex cloudy thing, scrambling to get out of it, coming out, and realizing that this is very much worse than the fuzz I had just been trapped in.

It is worth mentioning at this point my general lack of sexual experience. I have been the recipient of oral sex by a man, but never the giver. I'd slept with a girl. I was a virgin in the technical sense.

He makes me strip naked. He forces me to go down on him. I tell him I've never done that before. He says it's just like a lollipop (it isn't). I tell him I bite lollipops, and he says, well, don't bite this one.

I consider it. Biting, I mean. But I decide that the risks involved (250-lb man, possibly not *entirely* incapacitated, obviously not much by way of ethics) are too weighty.

It's extremely horrible. He has a short, fat little penis, not unlike himself. I gag several times. Eventually he comes, makes me lay next to him.

While he tells me how lucky I am. That he didn't "pop my cherry". That he didn't kill me. I assure him I have no intention of telling anyone, that it's fine, that I'm okay. He lets me put my clothes back on.

And we drive back to massachusetts. Together. For an hour and a half.

I spent that hour and a half memorizing every single detail he had told me. I memorized his birthday. His license number. The color of his truck, make, and the address on the side. Everything.

At one point I had to make him let me out for a minute so I could try to vomit. Nothing came, just spittle and bile.

Finally returned to the same truck stop. Called the first person I knew who cared about me, was nearby, and had a car. He came immediately to get me, and took me back to his house. Called my parents. Had, while gone, been absent for the last time from one class. Didn't matter, I was dropping out anyway.

Got to tell my mom what had happened. I was also honestly afraid that my dad would try to hunt him down and kill him.

Lots of minor law-enforcement details after that, giving a statement, indictment, etc. Obviously, I lied about turning him in. I might have been a stupid fucking kid, but I wasn't about to let him get completely away with it.

The point to all of this. To me, anyway.

I learned. Motherfucker, did I learn. I learned to keep myself safe, as safe as I could. I learned that any man could be that trucker if I didn't know him. I realized that much, much, MUCH worse could have happened -- I could have been raped, or dead, or both.

And I was forced to recognize Samuel Dwayne May as a human being. If I hadn't made the stupid choices I had made, if it had been some guy leaping out of an alley, I might have been able to simplify the situation by just thinking of him as a Monster. This wasn't a Monster. It was a human fucking being. And I NEEDED to be scared. It's amazing to me often that I'm still alive after the shit I pulled. I put myself into situations I wouldn't even THINK of now.

And worse. I didn't realize that "I don't care what happens to me" is only true until it fucking happens. THEN you fucking care. Believe me, you care. A lot.

So kiddos, anyone who might be reading this...don't hitchhike, please. Don't take rides from strangers. Don't go out by yourself in the middle of the night. Don't tempt fate, because however shitty you might feel now, it gets a WHOLE lot worse. There are just plain bad people out there that you can never protect yourself against, and it's not worth taking any risks on top of that.

Seriously.

I wasn't even one of the "it'll never happen to ME" crowd. I honestly thought "I don't give a shit what happens to me."

So that's the Trucker Story. That's the worst one I've got, in terms of damage to my own bad self. Not nearly as bad as many, many people's stories get. But bad enough for me. Bad enough to keep me off the subway after 10pm. Bad enough to keep me as safe as possible.

- onehanded