Warning: Contains Scenes of a Disturbing Nature
Okay, you've been warned. This is going to be unpleasant to read. I sure as hell know it's unpleasant to write, but I need to externalize what's going on, and hopefully get it out of my system so I can sleep tonight.
Let me set the scene for you. I got a book in the mail (at my PO Box) tonight that I had requested through a book swap. The book is One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich. I wanted to read it before the movie came out in January. Well, because I'm me and I crave reading so much, I opened the book at the post office and started reading the first couple of pages. To be clear, this book is a mystery novel which is supposed to be quite funny, so it's not like I was cracking open Margaret Atwood or Stephen King. The main character, Stephanie Plum, starts the novel by telling us a bit about her childhood in New Jersey, and on page 2, we get the following passage:
Old Man Morelli used the garage to take his belt to his sons, his sons used the garage to take their hands to themselves, and Joseph Morelli took me, Stephanie Plum, to the garage to play train.
"What's the name of this game?" I'd asked Joseph Morelli
"Choo-choo," he'd said, down on his hands and knees, crawling between my legs, his head trapped under my short pink skirt. "You're the tunnel, and I'm the train."
Now, I know this is supposed to set up the character as someone who doesn't always make really good choices about men (considering that she's six and he's eight in this scene), and set up a slightly adversarial history between these two. Heck, it's probably supposed to be funny. I'm not laughing, as you can guess.
See, it just hits a little too close to home for me, in some really uncomfortable ways. When I was very young (about four years old), we lived with my grandparents in Elgin. Across the street lived my grandmother's friend Judy Lenz (last name changed because I can't bloody remember the actual last name), her husband Ted, and their son Warren. I'm sure Judy was a perfectly nice woman, seeing as she was friends with my grandmother. But she was also either incredibly stupid or willfully blind to what her husband and son were really like. Ted liked when I came over wearing a dress, because he'd sit me on the back of his car in the garage, lift my dress, and tickle my stomach. Warren... well, he did worse. I don't really want to get into details about him tonight. The thing is, I haven't thought about Ted in years. But after reading that little bit of text, I started feeling kind of shaky and kind of sick. And I feel kind of stupid about it; I mean, yeah, what he did was wrong, and not at all okay. But it could have been so much worse (was worse with his son). So he looked at my panties. That makes him a total creeper, but it shouldn't traumatize me. I don't even know why it's getting to me so badly tonight. I just want it gone, I really do.
I don't know how soon I'm going to be going to bed, no matter how tired I am. I'm hoping that this will help, get it out of my head and out into the electronic ether. We'll see. I think I'm going to go do something mindless now.
Let me set the scene for you. I got a book in the mail (at my PO Box) tonight that I had requested through a book swap. The book is One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich. I wanted to read it before the movie came out in January. Well, because I'm me and I crave reading so much, I opened the book at the post office and started reading the first couple of pages. To be clear, this book is a mystery novel which is supposed to be quite funny, so it's not like I was cracking open Margaret Atwood or Stephen King. The main character, Stephanie Plum, starts the novel by telling us a bit about her childhood in New Jersey, and on page 2, we get the following passage:
Old Man Morelli used the garage to take his belt to his sons, his sons used the garage to take their hands to themselves, and Joseph Morelli took me, Stephanie Plum, to the garage to play train.
"What's the name of this game?" I'd asked Joseph Morelli
"Choo-choo," he'd said, down on his hands and knees, crawling between my legs, his head trapped under my short pink skirt. "You're the tunnel, and I'm the train."
Now, I know this is supposed to set up the character as someone who doesn't always make really good choices about men (considering that she's six and he's eight in this scene), and set up a slightly adversarial history between these two. Heck, it's probably supposed to be funny. I'm not laughing, as you can guess.
See, it just hits a little too close to home for me, in some really uncomfortable ways. When I was very young (about four years old), we lived with my grandparents in Elgin. Across the street lived my grandmother's friend Judy Lenz (last name changed because I can't bloody remember the actual last name), her husband Ted, and their son Warren. I'm sure Judy was a perfectly nice woman, seeing as she was friends with my grandmother. But she was also either incredibly stupid or willfully blind to what her husband and son were really like. Ted liked when I came over wearing a dress, because he'd sit me on the back of his car in the garage, lift my dress, and tickle my stomach. Warren... well, he did worse. I don't really want to get into details about him tonight. The thing is, I haven't thought about Ted in years. But after reading that little bit of text, I started feeling kind of shaky and kind of sick. And I feel kind of stupid about it; I mean, yeah, what he did was wrong, and not at all okay. But it could have been so much worse (was worse with his son). So he looked at my panties. That makes him a total creeper, but it shouldn't traumatize me. I don't even know why it's getting to me so badly tonight. I just want it gone, I really do.
I don't know how soon I'm going to be going to bed, no matter how tired I am. I'm hoping that this will help, get it out of my head and out into the electronic ether. We'll see. I think I'm going to go do something mindless now.