Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (67 page)

29
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

Mick's scarves, his own personal trademark, become the Strangler's garrote.

A magazine reporter described the frantic audience reaction to "Midnight Rambler": "Keith Richard sways through a long, threateningly erotic guitar introduction as Mick slowiy removes a bright gold sash. On the first line, 'You've heard about The Boston Strangler,' the lights suddenly dim and Jagger is outlined in a deep red floodlight. He slinks around the stage, a slim-hipped, multi sexual reincarnation of Jack the Ripper [sic]. Grasping the sash like a whip he brings it down with a crack. . . . 'Me, me,' they shout. 'Hit me, Mick.' "

"Midnight Rambler" is Mick Jagger's orgasmic, heightened re creation on stage of the rape-murder of twenty-three-year-old Beverly ·Samans, the most viciously mutilated of the Strangler's victims, taken from the words of Albert DeSalvo' s confession as it appears in Gerold Frank's authenticated book. ( Musicologists might want to check Mick's lyrics against pages 354-356 of
The
Boston
Strangler,
paperback edition. ) Af ter Keith Richard's musi cal bridge, punctuated by a faint "Oh, don't you do that, oh, don't do that" ( Beverly's cry ) , Mick chants,

Well,
you heard about
The
Boston-aghhhh

It's
not one
of
those.

Well,
ta1kin' 'bout
the
midnight-shhhhh The one who closed the bedroom door . . .

Oh God, hit her head . . . rape her . . . hang her . . .

The knif e
sharpened . . . tiptoe . . . uhhhh

Oh
just that . . .
She
was dead-Uhhh,
the
brain
bell
jangled, Hullo, have you ever seen so dead?

"Midnight Rambler" ends with Jagger's crescendo, "I'm gonna
smash
down on your
plate-glass
window/ Put
a fist,
put
a fist through
your
steel-plated
door/ I'll . . . stick . . . my . . . knife right down your throat." The transformation is complete. Mick has become the mythic Strangler, and with more tensile grace and style than the original model ever possessed.

In the summer of 1965 a strangely compelling bit of graffiti appeared on the wall of a subway station in Greenwich Village. With great economy of word and thought it read
"MICK IS
sEx."

Those were the days of "Satisfaction," the Stones' first great hit
("I
can't get
no satisfaction,
well
I
try, well
I
try . . .") . By the early seventies, at least according to "Midnight Rambler," "Sym-
.
pathy for the Devil" and "Let
It
Bleed," the search for sexual satisfaction had led to the dark enactment of simulated violence for autoerotic pleasure. A Stones tour in i969 culminated in the tragedy at Altamont, where the playacting on stage touched off an uncontrollable frenzy of real violence among members of the audi ence to Jagger's genuine bewilderment, or so it appears from the film documentary Gimme Shelter.11i1i<
1
inan..was knifed and beaten to!''death· a:t Altamont by the Stones' myrmidon guara of Hell's
·.
Angels, who needed but a small romantic push to release their anti s9cial behavfor; less· publicized but reported in a West Coast women's liberation newspaper was an eyewitness account of several
·

-rapes du
.
ring the fi-ee-forall O'ncei-t:
·
·

• Jagger and the· Stones were not an isolated example of violent
  

.
sexuality during the heyday of hard rock. Jim Morrison of Th Doors and· Jimi Hendrix, both dead, had meteoric careers built on simulated onstage abuse of women for autoerotic kicks.
'It
is inl\',;r esting to note the emergence during this period of a group that actually named itself The Amboy Dukes, from the title of a late forties novel of gang life in Brooklyn by Irving Shulman in which the climactic scene is the rape of a neighborhood girl who wouldn't "put out" for the Dukes-as up-front a case of romantic conjuring as we are wont to find. But the Stones were/are the champions and their brief, unhappy association with the Hell's Angels of Cali fornia illuminated the danger of glorifying violence.

We have the self-styled hero-outlaw of journalism, Hunter Thompson, to thank for foisting upon a susceptible American public in the mid-nineteen sixties the mythologized exploits of a gang of scruffy, two-bit, overaged hoodlums and motorcycle freaks known as the Hell's Angels. Had it not been for Thompson and his souped-up prose covered with a chrome shine of social significance, the bike-riding thugs in their swastika-studded black-leather jackets might have gunned off into yet another California sunset and oblivion. Instead, the Hell's Angels came to symbolize the bandit outlaw fighting an oppressive system to a generation of young people newly politicized by the Southern civil-rights movement and soon to be galvanized into opposition to the Vietnam war.

Thompson and the Angels jointly shared their first real pub-

29E
I
AGAINST OUR Wll.L

licity break when he wrote a spirited defense of their "outlaw tradition" for
The
Nation in 1965, a piece that was intended to give the lie to what Thompson called the "supercharged hokum" in accounts of Angel gang rape that had appeared in Time and
Newsweek.
"The Hell's Angels mean only to defy the world's machinery," he explained, comparing their working-class group loyalty to Joe Hill and the IWW. Thompson knew his audience well enough to tailor his piece to his readers' predilections. The heady combination of Joe Hill, the Wobblies, a swipe at
Time
and not one but two "phony" charges of rape was enough to launch the Angels as the new cultural darlings of the liberal lef t. "They speak to and about each other with an honesty that more civilized people couldn't bear," Thompson wrote with a sob. As for those nasty Luf twaffe insignia and Iron Crosses that the Angels used to adorn their jackets- "Purely for decorative and shock effect," he soothed .. "The Angels are apolitical and no more racist than other ignorant young thugs."

In his full-length book
Hell' s Angels,
Thompson continued his odd mythologizing of the bike gang's habits, endowing their sadistic sexual antics and swaggering confessions with the imprima tur of Everyman's fantasy but stopping just short of actual en dorsement. Or does he stop short? Thompson's high-horsepower writing style managed to neatly straddle the question. He professed to see in the Angels a larger-than-life symbol of society's "rape mania, the old bugaboo." Rape mania, according to Thompson, was composed of several related aspects. "Women," he announced, "are terrified of being raped, but somewhere in the back of every womb there is one rebellious nerve
_
end that tingles with curiosity whenever the word is mentioned." The Angels, he believed, were merely taking advantage of this female curiosity. "Sure, we'll take whatever we can get," he quotes an Angel as saying. "But I've never yet heard a girl yell rape until it was all over and she got to thinking about it." Non-Angel men shared a slightly different per spective: "Men speak of rapists with loathing, and talk about their victims as if they carried some tragic brand. They are sympathetic, but always aware. l}aped women ·ha:ve been divorced by their hus l?ands-who couldn't bear . to live with the awful knowledge, th visions, the possibility that it wasn't really rape. There is the bone of it, the unspeakable mystery
/
'

There was little unspeakable mystery but remarkable correlation with disciplinary procedures practiced by the Mundurucu and Tapirape Indians when_ Thompson described gang rape by the Hell's Angels "as a form of punishment" inflicted on "a girl who squeals on one of the outlaws or who deserts him." "Pulling the Angel train," Thompson wrote, was "a definite ceremony, like the purging of a witch," and he recorded the punishment with the neutral eye of a trained anthropological observer. An errant woman would be apprehended by some of the boys, taken to a safe house, "stripped, held down on the floor and mounted by whoever has seniority." Angel wives and girlfriends ("mamas" and "old ladies") were invited to watch the group disciplinary procedure but few took advantage of the opportunity. The author grandly concluded, "So the Hell's Angels, by several working definitions, including their own, are working rapists-and in this downhill half of the twentieth century they are not so different from the rest of us as they sometimes seem."

Not so different from whom? There is no doubt that Hunter Thompson himself had a case of acute identification with his subject matter and that fact and fiction tend to get confused in his own well-developed fantasy life. Years later, when he had quit mythologizing the Angels and had embarked on a more satisfying career of mythologizing himself through semifictional political campaign reportage, the Prince of Gonzo told a fellow reporter, "You know I was a real juvenile delinquent . . . got picked up on a phony rape charge, all that." Out of this sort of stuff the image of the heroic male is formed.

The appeal of the sexual outlaw has always been profound. I am certain that part of the mystique attached to Caryl Chessman, and why he became an international rallying point for the fight against capital punishment in
1959-1960,
had to do with his legend as the Red Light Bandit, who preyed on women in lovers' lanes. Not that guilty or innocent Chessman should have been executed for crimes that did not include murder, but as a figure around whom a cause was formed, the sex attacks he may or may not have committed added to his image and made him the ideal personification of society's favorite victim: the arrogant, unloved desperado who never had a decent break or a faithful woman.

Legends of rape have helped to mythify a score of bandits, from the notorious eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin, celebrated in story and ballad, who "raped an occasional servant