It'll never happen to me

I had finished a management training course with a fast food chain, a job I didn't want to have in a new home city. I thought I had left that job behind in Ohio, when I moved east with my boyfriend. For our purposes, his name is Al, and my name is Mark.\nWe initially loved the city. It was only a matter of time, we both thought, before we'd have the town by the tail.\nWhen he left his business and his wife, the life before us held all the newness of a cherry blossom day in April. It seemed we laughed all the way across Pennsylvania, arriving with perfect timing just a few minutes in advance of the moving truck. It wasn't as cold there. Everything would be fine.\nThe last night of the training course was a get-together dinner, and it broke up late. I had my first friend in this new city, the franchiser's training manager. I had told Al about him, a truly nice fellow, because he too was gay. I knew it the moment I walked into the class at the corporate headquarters. It's what we call gaydar.\nThe class was in a different state, and the half-hour drive home that night was pleasant and quick; the highway loop around 10 p.m. is a vastly different experience than it is at 5 p.m. I walked in the door of the apartment, and walked into a scenario I thought happened only to other people. \nAl was agitated and pacing the floor, and when he saw me, his muscles tensed him into a totem pole; he leapt at me in the most cat-like way I've ever seen a man move.\nIt started with fists, but he tired of that, then it was just a see-saw of slaps. Then slaps punctuated by questions that were never answered correctly. After some minutes of this he paced, and when I moved, the slap and question routine started again.\nI thought I had never seen this side of him, but I had -- I merely excused it, explained it or blamed myself. The prior Christmas, I stopped for a beer with friends after shopping. That time, he used a hammer on the TV set. The next day, with a big bow, was a newer and better one. It was an apology, an explanation. \nOr there was the fact that when we began seeing each other, it was never in public. It was at home, no friends over, no acquaintances, no plans to go anywhere. No one had ever wanted me so much, I said to myself, no one had ever wanted me all to himself.\nI think he thought someone was looking at me, I was looking at someone, I was sleeping with everyone, they were torridly giving me sign language phone numbers and he just couldn't see it happening. He had changed his entire life, he couldn't find the job he wanted, he had left a good situation, and it was entirely my fault.\nI was sleeping with someone, someone had seduced me, the next-door neighbor was too friendly, so he couldn't be straight. I must be sleeping with him, too.\nFrom a decade's safe distance, I'm still frightened of this man. He left me on the floor that night, and when I could get up, I bolted and chained the door, moved furniture and sat in the bedroom on the floor facing the door in case it opened.\nI had to work the next day, and oddly, I made no excuses for why I looked so bad. I went home that night to find my bank account empty, all portables gone and messages on the answering machine. Threats to kill me poured into that machine for a week, and I never knew when, so I wouldn't answer the phone. I had no one to talk to, no one I wanted to talk to, and for a while, I thought I would be killed. It would happen quietly, in the middle of sleep I couldn't put off anymore, in a town where I knew so few people, and couldn't quite explain this turn of events even if I had friends.\nI began to keep the tapes of the messages, and finally one night I answered the phone, played one of the messages back on the recorder and threatened to go to the police. I had nothing else I could threaten. I knew and he knew it was 50-50, his story against mine, but I had his voice telling me I was better off dead. I knew and he knew the police treated domestic violence between men so often as a good fag joke. He finally left me alone.\nI never saw him again, never heard from him, don't know if he is alive or dead. \nToo often I hear people say they will not be abused, wouldn't stand for it, would defend themselves, would kick the abuser's ass. It's Barbie's world where the Corvette works all the time, the house is on the beach in Malibu and Ken is a constantly happy cipher.\nSome of you will go home tonight to a jealous partner, or one who tells you constantly that you are fat and you need to lose weight. You'll find yourself going to places they like, movies they want to see, wearing clothes they approve of on your body. They will say things that astound you, call you names you don't appreciate and laugh at your discomfort. \nYou will think that your education protects you, that your morals ennoble you, that your emotions are firm and steady; that your credit cards will free you, your checkbook will open and you will leave and find a better life without them.\nIf your Al comes, I pray it's that easy.