Stalking the Bogeyman

I made sure he never got me alone again for more than a few minutes, which wasn't easy, because our parents socialized almost every weekend at either their house or ours, and he didn't move out or go to college after high school. He turned into one of those guys who still dates high school chicks and lives with his parents well into his twenties.

My memories of him in those years are scattershot. One Fourth of July he told me how much fun he'd just had sticking an M-80 up a cat's ass and lighting the fuse, how the cat had hopped around frantically trying to squeeze out the quarter-stick of dynamite before it blew in half. I remember that he was handy with tools, and when I was in Cub Scouts, my parents paid him a few bucks to help me build one of those miniature pinewood-derby cars. I made sure the door between his house and the garage workshop stayed open. He didn't help me build the car so much as just build it while I watched. He put a ball of lead in the front and painted it red and wrote "David's Delight" on the side in a handsome script. I won the whole derby, and I remember calling him right afterward, stupidly thinking for a couple of minutes that he and I were some sort of team, that we had something other than a predator-prey relationship. And I remember that for years after the rape, whenever he and I were in the same room and no one was looking, he would cup both his hands in a circle around his crotch and give me a Bogeyman smile, a smile that said, "I got some more of this for your punk little eight-, nine-, ten-year-old ass."

He stopped leering at me around the time I turned eleven, probably because I was getting to be a pretty big kid. Out of fear and shame and not wanting to make a fuss, I kept our little secret, but one night when I was almost twelve, I got my first sweet taste of payback.

It was New Year's Eve 1982. He was drinking heavily that night. His dad made a potent punch, and he guzzled one ornate crystal mug of it after another while his mom begged him to stop. The stroke of midnight found him passed out in a sleeping bag on the floor of the bathroom next to the bedroom where he'd raped me four years before. I snuck downstairs to where he lay and said his name a few times, louder and louder, to see if he'd wake up. When he didn't, I ran up and soccer-kicked him in the head, then turned and sprinted back upstairs, feeling quite satisfied with myself.

Until a few days ago, the last time I was face to face with him was twelve years ago, when I was 21. I was back home from college between my sophomore and junior years, and I needed a cheap suit for a job interview, so I went to Harry's of Hong Kong. And there he was, a 31-year-old cheap-suit salesman and rapist of children. I hadn't seen him in six or seven years, and I immediately realized two things. The first was that he was no longer bigger than me. I had six inches and at least fifty pounds on him. But in a street fight, what matters more than size is motivation, and the second thing I realized was that I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab a coatrack and bash in his head, carve out his heart with a shoehorn, snatch that metal ballpoint pen out of his cheap-suit jacket and stab him in the eye, over and over again, and everyone in the store would hear him screaming because he wouldn't have a pillow over his head.

But I did nothing. My mother was with me, and even more than I wanted revenge, I wanted to protect her and my father from the terrible knowing that he had raped me when I was seven years old, while they were upstairs with his parents, drinking wine and playing board games. I didn't want their memories of my childhood tarnished with his scum.

The memory of being raped when I was seven was never repressed. It was not recovered under hypnosis. It has always been with me, festering. When I was a teenager, I began researching how being raped as a child might affect the development of my personality, and I recoiled in horror. Every study I read supported the "vicious cycle" theory that victims of pedophilia are more likely to become pedophiles themselves. I felt like a werewolf had bitten me and it was only a matter of time before the full moon rose. Throughout my early adolescence, I was constantly, torturously checking myself for evil impulses. I made a blood oath with myself that if I started feeling the desire to rape children, I would kill myself and make it look like a mountaineering accident. I was already in the habit of solo climbing in Alaska -- no partners, no ropes -- despite my parents' repeated warnings against such a dangerous activity. Had I thrown myself down a mountain, they would have believed it, and better a son who died climbing than one who lived and raped kids.