Denial (19 page)

Then I tell him. “I think Brian Beat raped me.” I tell him this apologetically, tentatively. I am worried about how he will react. This is an experiment for me, to tell someone who knew Brian in his youth that I knew him, too, but in a very different way.

“I didn't know that!” he says, covering his mouth, as if wishing he could take back everything he said until now. I see that he feels responsible for not knowing, that he might have tried to alter the way he talked about Beat or himself had he known that I, too, was a victim, even though I write books and teach at a famous university.

“How could you possibly know?” I ask, in what I hope is a sympathetic tone. But in truth, I am happy he feels ashamed. This is the first of Brian Beat's friends who hasn't insisted that Beat was innocent, and I am relieved. But not totally relieved. I want him to suffer, at least a little bit, for the denial of his childhood friends and for that spiritual mumbo-jumbo, too.

The room is now permeated with shame—his story of drugs and homelessness, my thoughts about running away, my unbecoming desire to hurt John. Even the dog is ashamed of her paltry bark. And now that I've divulged my rape, there is the presence here, too, of my violated vagina. As I type this word, I cross my legs. I cover my vagina with a thick metal shield. Titanium with spikes. I surround myself with armed guards.

Now that my rape is in the air between us, I want to leave immediately. I want to stand up and walk out that door. I will myself to remain seated. I justify my claim by telling John about the police reopening the case, about the gun, the unusual modus operandi.

“Are you sure you want to talk about this?” he asks.

“I'm sure. Don't worry,” I lie, trying to make light of all this.
But there is something new here. I cannot pretend that I'm so strong that the rape means little to me, the way I used to.

“Tell me more,” I insist. “More about his mean streak.”

“One time on the Cape, I was walking down the street. He was walking toward me, eating an ice cream cone. I noticed he didn't look like himself. When he reached me, he bit me, hard, on the cheek. He hopped on my back and put the ice cream cone on my head. All the while he had a grin on his face. But he looked demonic. I was scared. He was a lot bigger than me. He wasn't thuggish or churlish, but he could be crazy looking. It came on suddenly. Some of his behaviors were crazy.”

“Did it hurt when he bit you?” I ask, shocked by the bizarreness of this story.

“A lot.”

“What did you say to him?” I ask.

“I was scared. I didn't know what was going on,” John tells me. “Sometimes he was strange. Scary. He was thin, but he was always a little bit taller and strong. Not big, but strong. And taller.

“One time we were driving. We had just drank cough syrup to get high. We hit a dog. We yelled at Brian to pull the car over to help the dog. He didn't want to pull over, but we insisted, and he did. The dog was dying. I felt sick. But there was nothing we could do for the dog. Brian didn't seem to care at all. He wasn't upset like the rest of us.”

“Tell me about what happened when you were living together on the Cape.”

“He was always coming and going. Some of these jobs were late-night commercial work. So he was always coming home late. I never knew where he was. That's why when he tried to get me to be his alibi, I wasn't really sure if he was home when he said he was. He told me that some girls had been raped, that the
police might be coming to ask some questions. He told me that I should tell them that I remember him being home, that I was watching the news on the couch in the living room. I think it was the eleven o'clock news. The rape must have occurred during the newscast. It may have been half an hour before or after. He wanted me to say that he was there. Truthfully, I really didn't know. I had dozed off.

“I went to Hyannis, to the courthouse, to testify. He had this really inept lawyer.”

“In what way was he inept?” I ask.

“He was really unimpressive. He wanted me to testify, but I sat in the court all day. They never called me.”

“How did you come to believe he might be guilty?” I ask.

“Just reflecting on the whole thing…. It just felt right that he could be a rapist. I can't say it was any one thing. There was a wildness to Brian. He was not a fighter or a bully in my experience. But he had this wild spurt of sadism…. The time he bit me. The time he punched me in the stomach, still smiling. The time he missed the vein on purpose. Always smiling. You add it up. There was a bizarre element to him. And one of the girls who had been raped, afterward I talked to her. I was defending Brian. And she said, ‘That man raped me.' Somehow, I understood then that it was true.”

He is thinking now. “I wonder if he had any paraphernalia in the house,” by which I assume he must mean the mask and the gun that Beat used. He used a wig, too, for the rapes on the Cape.

“I am not a nosy, meddlesome person. I never went in his room. But he had a truck—a panel truck. It was the kind they used to use as a bread truck. It was sinister looking,” he recalls. “They didn't have the windows like the vans do now. There might have been a little side window. He might have hidden things in there.”

The truck seems to make him think of something else.

“One thing I thought was strange—Brian used to like to go out
late at night in these real short shorts. Jeans with the legs cut off to make shorts but cut real short. Like a woman would wear. I thought it was strange. Too short for a straight man to wear in Provincetown.”

“Do you think he might have been homosexual?” I ask.

“I wouldn't say he was gay in general. Girls were attracted to him…a lot. He had no trouble getting dates, wherever he went. He seemed so smooth with girls. I was kind of jealous. I wasn't smooth at all.

“But he liked to go to this gay bar with his short shorts. He would make an excuse that he was going there to swim. It was a gay bar at a hotel. They had a pool. The pool had lights, and it was open at night. I think it was called the Crown and Anchor. It was the last bar on the left if you were going down the strip toward the water.

“It was fine to be straight in P-town back then because you knew where to go. You wouldn't go to the gay clubs because you knew they were gay clubs. I always felt like he went there in his tight shorts not just because he liked to swim.”

“Did you know that Brian got out of the military by saying that he had been homosexual?” I ask.

“No, I wasn't aware of that,” he says. He looks surprised.

But then he thinks of something else.

“Years later, after I hadn't seen Brian or Simon for a long time, I started getting more into the folk music scene. I was pretending I knew a lot about it. Brian and Simon used to go to this club in Boston all the time—I think it was called the Loft. They said that they went to hear folk music. I never went with them. But a few years later I was trying to impress some people, trying to make them think I knew about folk music. I told them I used to go to the Loft to hear folk music. They all laughed and said that the Loft wasn't a folk club but a gay bar. I was embarrassed, but I said, No, no, it's a folk bar. It wouldn't surprise me if it was a gay
bar and Simon and Brian went there trolling, looking for older men to buy them drugs or whatever.” The Loft was in fact a gay bar back then.

“Did you ever hear about abusive priests at your elementary school?” I ask, changing the subject.

“I was naive about that. At that time families went to priests for help. You wouldn't suspect them of anything. But one time my mother and stepfather sat me down and asked me pointedly if this one priest ever did anything to me. There must have been rumors going around about him because my parents asked me in a funny way. Pointedly, like there was a good reason for their question.”

“Did you ever hear that any other boys might have been abused?”

“No,” he says. “I never heard anyone talk about that.” But then he tells me about a boy at St. Louis School who was openly gay. “It was unusual back then,” he says. “His family was involved with the church. He had a few brothers. One brother hung himself. In Webster. The brother who hung himself, he was gay, too.”

I wonder why the brother hung himself. Could he, too, have been abused by a priest?

John urges me again to talk to his sister. He gives me her number. As we are leaving, he says to me, “I have never told anyone that story about the hook. I'm glad I told you. I feel much better now.”

We have exchanged gifts, this recluse and I.

One of the gifts he gave me was the recommendation to call his sister Cathy. When I did, I discovered that Brian Beat had tried to rape her, too. He was in high school at the time. She managed to fight him off. At that time, he hadn't yet thought of threatening his victims with a gun, at least not with her. At last, I have found someone able to confirm that the sadistic rapist that I think I recall was real. At last, I have found someone who doesn't feel the need to protect herself—and punish me—with denial.

R
esearch is unpredictable. You can chase some subjects seemingly forever and hit a brick wall; but sometimes serendipity strikes. I wanted to interview Hamas, for example, so I went to Amman. I left Amman without a single interview. But when I got to Gaza, two important leaders were willing to talk to me. I've learned to accept, even to expect, that luck will play a big role in my work. Even so, Jack's coming to work for me and what he has been able to help me see have been a surprise.

I was away when Jack began to search for John in earnest. First he drove out to Worcester, John's last known address.

“I went to his mailbox,” Jack told me. “The mailbox at the address I found for him. I thought about opening it. But then I realized it might be illegal, so I called my friend Julian. He's a lawyer. Julian told me it's illegal to go through someone's
mail. You can look, but you can't touch. So I looked. I saw that John's roommate owned a cleaning company. I ended up looking up the company. I found another lead by looking into another mailbox without touching. It was one of those mailboxes in an apartment building, so the top was stuck up. I went to the other address and there was nothing there. I came back and told you we had some leads. I went to the third address, and there was a car there. It was a truck, a pickup truck. I sort of staked out the scene. I drove by his house a few times. To get the license plate number. I didn't want to stop and be seen. But I'm not sure if it's his house. So I called my friend who works for an insurance company. She has access to the RMV system. I said to her, I need a favor. I need you to look up this license plate. And it was John Henry's. I wondered, should I knock on the door. Then I saw him.”

Jack kept searching for John, long past the point where I have given up on finding him. Why was he so determined?

First I better tell you how I found Jack, and how he came to work on this project as my research assistant. A friend of mine, Jen Lockwood, who is an artist, bought a share in a storied Irish pub in Cambridge called the Plough and Stars. The bar was famous for offering Guinness on tap, long before it was available anywhere else in America. It is a rowdy bar that attracts a mix of locals—housepainter poets, construction worker artists, drifter intellectuals, academics from Harvard and MIT, and politicians. Jarrett Barrios, who had once worked as a bartender, launched his campaign for state senate at the bar. It was the birthplace of
Ploughshares
, a leading American literary journal, in 1971, but had recently fallen on hard times. Jen put a lot of energy into reenlivening the bar. She remodeled. She painted the walls a velvety red and hung silvery stars from the ceiling. She brought in her husband as the new chef. And she hired Jack as her bartender.

Jack is particularly well suited for the job at the Plough and Stars. To begin with, he's Irish American. He has “good court vision,” one of the bar's owners told me. He might be joking with several customers at once, while simultaneously twinkling a lupine eye toward a regular just pulling up a chair. Jack is a graduate student during the day and a bartender by night. Jen suggested that I hire him as my research assistant. He's smart and a good worker, she told me, and he's involved in terrorism studies. Could I have him e-mail you? she wanted to know. I said yes.

When I told Jen the subject of this book, she told me that she and Jack had just had a conversation about Jack's father, who was in the marines, and had come back from Vietnam with what Jack suspected was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His father had died at age forty-eight, when Jack was twenty.

“Jen and I had this conversation about my father,” Jack told me later. “I don't normally present myself as the son of a PTSD case. My father's been dead for so long. It's not something that I think about that much,” he said. “And anyway, it never occurred to me it would be relevant. I thought I was taking a job to help you with your work on terrorism.”

Of course I would have to check out why Jack would think his father had PTSD just because he had been in Vietnam.

“What makes you think your dad had PTSD?” I ask him.

“My dad was stationed in Da Nang when he wasn't out on patrol. Da Nang was constantly being attacked. The U.S. forces would shut down their outgoing artillery when the base came under attack, so that the attackers wouldn't find the rocket launchers. When the constant noise of the outgoing artillery stopped, it meant you were under attack. When my father returned from Vietnam, he would sometimes bolt if he heard silence. If he woke up to silence in the middle of the night, he would scatter for his gun. The only way he could sleep is if he put the radio on static. He would tune the radio to static and crank it all the way
up. If my mom tried to turn the static down, he would wake up in a panic. My mom tried to wean him off the static sound. She turned the radio down little by little.”

Jack's father had PTSD.

His father would fall asleep on the couch on Saturday afternoons, Jack tells me. Sometimes he would wake up confused and in a rage. “We never knew when, but when it happened, it was really alarming,” Jack explains. “It was years before we were old enough to understand what was happening with him.

“It's not representative of his behavior—much of the time he was a fun, wonderful father, but you never knew when he'd come into the room and demand ridiculous things of us. He would shout at us. We were afraid of him. Really afraid. He would have random checks. We got hit hard when we had it coming. He threw me through the closet door once. After that I made sure I didn't misbehave again,” Jack says.

Jack was reluctant to tell me that his father beat him. But once he got going, it was hard for him to stop.

“He was scary. All my friends were afraid of him. All my cousins. But the upside is that he trusted us. When we lived on Staten Island, we could do whatever we wanted. We were encouraged to go wander around in Manhattan. We did all this crazy stuff. He would say, you better learn how to survive in the Bronx. Take your skateboard over there! We could go over to Alphabet City [a part of the East Village in Manhattan that was dangerous in the 1980s, when Jack was growing up]. I always remember feeling more street-smart than all my friends. All the other kids had to be home by ten. We could stay out as late as we wanted to. But the next morning, we had better be ready and in shape to do whatever he wanted us to do that day. He would come in our room at five thirty in the morning, shout ‘Reveille! Reveille! Reveille! Feet on the floor!' Sometimes he would run us. My brother and me. Sometimes he'd have us
help him fix our latest broken-down car. ‘Shine the goddamn flashlight where I'm working!' he would scream. And we had better jump to do what we were told.”

Was Jack's father training him to survive some kind of war? I need to know. It all sounds eerily familiar.

“Run us? What do you mean by ‘run us'?” I ask.

“Make us run. He would run right behind us. I was strong and sort of submissive. But my older brother was a little bit less athletic, and he didn't want to run. He would be crying. My father would run right behind my brother. He would be behind him and kick him if he slacked off. We didn't run very far, a three-mile loop. But my dad would try to run us fast. He was a marathoner. He ran the NYC marathon when he was forty-six. He ran a lot of 10-mile road races.”

“Then my father had a problem at work. He got demoted. Right after that he got sick. It was clear he was suffering psychologically. He had all this fear. He got cancer. When I'd stay with him in the hospital, he would wake up in the middle of the night and start mumbling incoherently. He would be very afraid, and I wasn't sure why. ‘I've told you too much,' he'd repeat several times, and then fall back into his morphine-induced sleep. But he didn't really tell me anything. A month later he was dead.”

I see that Jack is reflecting.

“But I think the bigger part of his trauma is that my father was beaten by his father. My father would talk about it sometimes, as if to say, ‘You got it easy compared with what I went through with my old man.' My cousins told us that my grandfather beat my uncle so bad he got brain damage. And my grandfather's father beat his kids. The family myth is that our great-grandfather beat his son to death. That's a secret scandal, a family secret. No one was ever prosecuted. That was what you did. You discipline your kids. It's an Irish thing. My uncles that are still alive have started talking to me about it.”

An Irish thing? I think to myself. By now, I am surprised that it took so long before Jack came to understand the truth of why he was so driven in this work. He finally got it, he tells me. “It was about my dad. Plus, my girlfriend in college. She was gang-raped,” he tells me.

“What do you mean, gang-raped?” I gasp. I am not sure I want to hear this. A sleepiness washes over me. I consider leaving this part of Jack's story out. It's too much for me and too much for the reader. But it's an important part of Jack's life so I've left it here.

I notice a flutter of pain on Jack's right cheek. But he continues his story and I don't stop him.

“We were in college. She was at a party. She drank too much. She was really drunk. Some boys took her into a room and took turns with her. After that we had a really hard time. I was only eighteen. I hadn't had a lot of sexual experience. After that I was scared for her to go to parties. Scared for her to drink. Scared to tell her not to drink because I didn't want to be paternalistic. And so on. Later she told me she'd been abused as a child. Her stepfather used to walk around at night naked with a gun in his hand.”

“Where was her mother?” I want to know.

“She says her mother didn't know. Her mother was in denial,” he says. I see from the look on his face that Jack is suddenly aware of what he's been telling me.

“I didn't want to tell you any of this,” he adds, apologetically. “Sometimes the job became traumatizing for me, but I was afraid to tell you.” He sighs.

I feel my shoulders tensing. I was afraid of this. I want to know, but also don't want to know.

“What do you mean? Why didn't you tell me?” I ask.

“I didn't want to express any vulnerability to you. If I told you the work was traumatizing, I knew you wouldn't let me do it. You might push me away. I felt I had to do the work without flinch
ing. I figured I just had to tough it out. Interesting jobs are going to be tough,” he concludes.

“I'm so sorry,” I say. “You should have told me.”

Jack has a girlfriend from Turkey that he's been living with for five years. He is planning to marry her.

“I didn't want to tell my girlfriend about what I've been doing for you,” he says. “It seemed to me it was unprofessional to talk about it. And I didn't want to bring it home. She comes from a world where rape is still the victim's fault. It would annoy me if she blamed you. When I finally told her about this project, she reacted strongly. She started crying. It made me worry that she would tell me that she was raped, too. I didn't want to hear that. This is awful, but I didn't want to know. It would just wear me out. I was fully prepared to let her act as though she had gotten over it. Women who say they got raped can get killed in Turkey. Honor killing. Or forced into marriage to their rapist. So no one talks about sexual violence there. She had never heard about rape or sexual violence, except in an abstract way.”

A grandiose thought comes to me: This is why I have to write this book, to speak out for those who cannot speak. I push the thought away.

“So I had these experiences that made me understand what you had been through. And also, I knew how to interpret the way you might be acting.”

I'm stunned.

“What do you mean, the way I might be acting?” I ask. This is not where I expected this conversation to go.

“I understood when you were in the zone. I had seen it happen to my father a lot.”

“‘In the zone?' What do you mean by ‘in the zone'?” I ask.

“You just get different. You seem cold, officious. I've seen it happen lots of times,” he says.

I feel my toes curl up in my shoes.

“I first noticed when we went to see Stevie at Global Gas in Milbridge. I had wanted to drive you, but you went with Chet. When you called, you were all business. Normally you're very friendly. We talk. And then it's like a different Jessica shows up. You're all business, like you have tunnel vision. You look different. Your brow goes down a little bit.”

He's smiling. A semi-smile. He's embarrassed.

“You were in the zone that time with Stevie,” he repeats. “You were a little impatient. You didn't even notice that I was there, and I was feeling you didn't notice Chet was there. So you were functional at one thing. Just one thing.”

“Did I ever hurt your feelings when I was like that?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

Of course I want to hear whatever it is he has to say. But I also want to float out of the room, away from the intimacy of this embarrassing moment. I touch my clothes, making sure they are straight, making sure they are still there.

“No,” he says again.

“Why not?” I ask, bluntly as usual.

“Because my dad was like that. I knew you were in the zone. I saw my dad in the zone so many times. You never knew who would come home from work. It could be the tough marine. Or was it the sweet guy who would read Robert Frost poems to you. When you have a dad like that, you learn how to read people's moods really quickly. You read their body language.”

Again, I straighten my clothes, hoping he won't notice.

He continues. “I understand what you're doing when you interview terrorists, when you interviewed the people in this book,” he continues. “You were reading these people. You are good at reading people. You know how to sense danger quickly.”