But he got off. To me, the biggest issue at stake was a season's damnation of watching Bryant-to-Divac pick-and-rolls every night on SportsCenter. But to the men in that room, it meant something else entirely.
"I knew she was lying," says Tyson. Tyson hadn't won a hand all night, so his demeanor was shorter than it was as we were setting up the game. He usually gets this way about an hour into every game. He is what we call dead money.
"We don't know that she was," says Kennedy Smith. He's a lawyer, so his perception is often a bit more skewed. "Just because she dropped the case doesn't mean he's not guilty. I think you have to pay attention to the fact that the public servants that were in charge of prosecuting a rape case in a little town like Eagle, Colorado had to go up against the best defense that Kobe could buy. That cased was doomed from the start. The sad thing is that we may never know and this could have terrible repercussions for women in the future that are raped by athletes and too scared to come forward."
"It's your bet, Kennedy," says Tyson impatiently. He's folded already and dying for the hand to finish so he can see if the next deal gives him the fingers to go all-in.
"She stood to make a lot of cash if she won," I say. I had folded too and the hand, which had temporarily been disrupted by the breaking news, had already gone on too long. "Imagine the money she would have taken from Kobe if she would have gone through with it and won."
"It makes you almost wish you were a woman," says Jackson Michaels. "I'd get raped for a couple million dollars. If I had to sit through bad sex for three minutes just knowing that at the end of it, I'd be a millionaire, I'd find a way to enjoy it."
"I'd let Lisa Leslie rape me for free," says Tyson. "I would give her carte blanche in violating me however she wants."
"Men can't be raped," I say. "It's impossible. Physically, it's impossible."
"Like hell it is," says Kennedy, the lawyer. "The same endorphins that activate a hard-on are produced when fear is induced. That, compounded by the blatant insinuation of sex from a dominating woman in a position of complete control, would activate you expediently."
I'd known this guy for years. Just because he went to law school gave him the right to be a pain in the ass while Jeopardy! was on or a crossword puzzle was in sight.
"So a man can be raped?" I ask.
"Sure," says Tyson. "Haven't you ever seen Oz? Or the Shawshank Redemption?"
"I mean, by a woman?"
"Certainly," says Kennedy. "It's entirely possible. In fact, I fantasize about it all the time."
I'm aghast. "You what?" I look around the room to see if anyone is as affected as I am. These guys wouldn't lose their poker faces if a porno starring their parents was slipped onto the JumboTron at halftime.
"Fantasize about getting raped," says Kennedy. "I do it all the time."
I stop waiting for the next hand. I'm the dealer this round, so the game is paused while I try to get my head around this.
"You have a rape fantasy?" I ask. I turn to Tyson. "Do you have a rape fantasy?"
"I had a dream one night," he says. "I felt weird for three days after."
I look to Jackson. "You?" I ask.
He sheepishly turns and says, "Every once in a while I get really smashed and when I wake up in the morning, I find my handcuffs are broken and my lover isn't speaking to me. Does that count?"
"What kind of rape fantasy do you have?" I ask the other guy in the room. He hasn't said much all night, but he keeps winning. I'd never remember his name if it weren't for all the business cards he hands us after every game that read, "Joseph R. Kelly, Managing Editor."
"The only fantasy I have involving rape," he says, "is that my wife believes I'm sleeping and gives up. That woman's insatiable."
"It's natural," argues Kennedy. "Me, I like to think about traveling through the jungle and getting captured by some Amazon tribe and they tie me to an altar. To appease the tribal gods, they each have to have their way with me or else their harvest won't bear fruit that season."
"Remind me never to pick up any Kleenexes as your house," I tell him. "You're a sick bastard."
"Not me," says Tyson. "I get off on my boss. Every time she's bawling me out on some account she thinks I've messed up or some 'i' I forgot to dot or something, I picture her saying 'fuck it' and slamming me against the wall and ripping off my shirt. She's fussing with my belt buckle and can't get it open fast enough. She throws me over her desk and knocks her little name plate and all her pictures of her dork husband and her Stepford children on the floor and loses her shit all over my naked body. The ultimate moment comes when her eyes roll back in her head. Those same eyes were beady and shit, hitting me like lasers only moments before. But once she lets it all out, those laser beams are rolled back in her head and she's digging on old Tyson here."
He offers a high-five to Jackson, but Jackson misses it and an awkward moment passes and forces him to put his hand away.
So the game ends and I walk home. All night I'm thinking about this. I had planned on getting drunk, so I'd hidden the phone cord (drunk-dialing is bad). With no one to talk to, I sat on the couch and played it out in my head. How could I be the only one without rape fantasies? All of the other guys have them, so what does that say about me? Am I weird because I've never gotten off to the thought of being raped? Is something the matter with me?
There's a movie on HBO with Halle Berry in it. She's crying on a couch and drinking with Billy Bob Thornton. The volume is too low and I can't find the remote, so I'm left to my imagination. God only knows what a woman like Halle Berry could be crying about. Uh-oh, they're making out. Clothes are coming off... Jesus Christ, Halle Berry's naked. She's... she's getting on top of Billy Bob and...
I spend the next ten minutes utterly freaked out. In my lifetime, I've seen two major comets, the home run record broken twice, and New Orleans, but this has truly paled in comparison. I light a cigarette.
A certain level of inspiration strikes me. I concentrate:
My imagination takes me to Hollywood, where I'm waiting tables. It's been a long shift. I'm in the back parking lot, taking out the trash. Halle Berry comes out of the shadows. She's got on this gear like she has in that movie with Billy Bob where she's wearing a wife-beater and a do-rag on her head... She looks serious. She ain't taking no shit.
She catches me off-guard. I'm midway through the motions of lifting the trash barrel over the top of the dumpster with just the proper amount of force to get it over, but not so much as to send the whole damn thing into the pen so I'd have to go in after it when she takes me from the right and pins me against the wall. She's got a knife. "Don't move, white boy," she says. I don't lose my grip on the barrel because I wouldn't dream of having to go in after it, so it follows me and clips her over the head as I'm thrown to the wall. She drops to the floor and it's not long before blood puddles from under her. I've just killed Halle Berry.
It's a hate crime because a racial epithet was spoken during the attack, but Halle's estate procured a prosecutor good enough to expunge the evidence that I was the victim of said epithet. I'm sentence to a hefty term in prison. It's an election year and hate crimes are not en vogue. I go to prison. The rape fantasies have taken a turn for the worse.
That's not right, I say to myself. I have to try harder If I was going to have a decent rape fantasy by the next poker game, I would have to be a bit more committed.
So I close my eyes and try again:
But if she was on my left side, that would mean she'd have to be coming from the dumpster. How could that happen?
Okay, if she's hiding behind the dumpster. That's right. That makes more sense. Halle Berry is hiding behind a dumpster waiting for the waiter to take out the trash, and at the right moment, she jumps me and puts a knife to my throat and tells me she's going to rape me. She's got that fire in her eyes like she did in B.A.P.S. and I know she means business.
She digs the blade deep into my neck and says, "You're going to give it up, white boy."
No... it's more like: "Drop your pants, white boy. I'm going to rape your ass."
She would never say that in that situation. Maybe it's better if she just says, "Drop 'em, or I'll stick you in the neck."
I'm too freaked out to respond quick enough. "Drop what?" I ask her.
"Your pants," she hisses. Her jaw is tight and there's an intensity to her I haven't seen since before she won the Oscar. She pushes the blade tighter into me. She's shoving me behind the dumpster so that no one will see. She's in complete control.
I fumble at my belt. I get my pants off -- Jesus, why did I wear the boxers with the penguins on them tonight? If I'd only done my laundry last night like I promised myself I'd do, I'd have on the boxer briefs that I'm told look pretty good on me -- and she pushes me to the asphalt.
"If you scream," she whispers, "I'll slit you like a pig." To prove her point, she licks my face like she's Catwoman.
She goes to work. She rips off the boxers with the penguins on them in one movement, much like the way Hulk Hogan used to take off his shirt. The sound of pumas fighting somehow gets in my head. I close my eyes, trying to block out the images of both my boxers being shredded and Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. I mean, here I am getting raped by Halle Berry and I've got half-naked Hulk Hogan on the brain.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" she demands.
I open my eyes. She's straddling me, staring at my action figure. Her mouth is agape, as if she's face-to-face with the Pythagorean Theorem.
"What do you mean, 'what's wrong with me?'" I ask. I know what she means, but the best defense is always to get defensive in this situation.
She's looking at me with suspicion. "You ain't gay, are you?"
"Hell no, I ain't gay," I say to her. "I'm just really stressed out right now. I've got a lot on my mind, with work and all."
"You're a waiter," she reminds me. She knows it's no use. She falls off me and onto the asphalt between me and the dumpster. She's angry. I can feel it.
"Are you mad at me?" I ask her.
"No," she says, but I don't believe her. Her mind is elsewhere. She sighs heavily. Typical, she's thinking. She doesn't have to say it out loud. It's in her sigh.
I catch myself. This isn't happening. I have to think realistically. Halle Berry just wouldn't give up on me. She'd keep trying. She wouldn't wait behind a dumpster all night just to give up at the first sign of opposition. This is the woman who rebounded after The Flintstones movie. No, in the real world, Halle Berry would try again!
Halle jumps back on top of me. She's drawn blood now on my neck as she burrows the knife in further. Any minute she could take out my jugular and it would be curtains.
"What's wrong with you?" she snaps. "I told you, I ain't taking no for an answer." She slaps me across the face. "Get it together, boy!"
Nothing happens. She slaps me again, harder. And again. Still nothing happens. There I am, sitting on the couch and I'm feeling rather ashamed so, to get in the act of things, I slap myself. I'm shocked by my own blow, but I do it again. I slap the other side of my face, picturing all the while that Halle's getting madder and madder, more and more impatient. I twist my nipple then slap myself again.
My roommate pokes his head in the door. This commotion has woke him up. He looks at me and shakes his head.
"I'm moving out," he tells me.
"Chill out," I say. "This is research."
"What kind of research involves you sitting up at three in the morning, watching HBO, slapping yourself and twisting your own nipple?"
"I'm trying to develop a rape fantasy."
"And what is this? Method masturbation?"
"Go back to bed," I say. "I'm busy."
He leaves me to it. He's a good guy, never asks too many questions. He's a writer, so I can only imagine that I root for him if only for the prospect of being immortalized forever in his material, because I no doubt will make the cut.
Where were we? That's right: behind the dumpster, getting raped by Halle Berry...
She's more persistent than I thought. She gets away with it. I can't possibly bring myself to imagine the event, so I fast-forward to the after-party. She finishes and falls off me. She rolls over and faces the dumpster, her back to me. I reach out to caress her perfect mocha shoulder, but she recoils from my touch. Sharply, she recoils.
"Are you... Was it...?" I can't find the words. I don't want to ask, but I'm dying to know.
"Shhhh," she goes. "Just hush."
I sit there in silence for a moment, feeling dirty. I wasn't good enough. Here she was, Halle Berry and hiding behind a dumpster for hours lying in wait for me to come out and this is all she got? Granted, it was the best forty-five seconds of my life, but how will this play out? If I went for the cash and sued her, the trial could get nasty. I would probably end up with somebody like Kennedy defending me and he wouldn't be able to quash all the damaging evidence. I could only picture the defense attorney cross-examining me and asking me stuff like:
"Is it true that when Ms. Berry raped you, it took you less than a minute to climax?"
"Do you really expect the jury to believe that it took you thirty whole minutes to achieve an erection after Ms. Berry put the knife to your throat?"
"Come on, Mr. Pruitt... you can't possibly expect any self-respecting, God-fearing jury of your peers to buy the fact that Ms. Berry, on the night in question, was lying in wait behind a dumpster in the seedy side of Los Angeles waiting to rape you."
Yes, I say from the vantage of my hide-a-bed, I too would drop the charges.
But it wouldn't happen like that, would it? The prosecutor is right, isn't he? If I were to be raped, it would never be like that, with Halle Berry stalking me and waiting for me to take out the trash. It would be somewhere else, when I least expected it. And she wouldn't look like Halle Berry either.
I picture the lunchlady from high school. Without the hairnet I think she could have passed for Danny DeVito in drag. I want to say her name was "Phyllis," but I'm not sure. (I feel guilty pursuing a rape fantasy without knowing my attacker's name, but I digress.) I'm walking home from the bar. I've stopped at Taco Cabana to pick up a burrito before I venture home. It's dark out. I'm drunk and vulnerable. I'm a sitting duck.
Phyllis emerges from the shadows. I've got her by a couple feet, but she owns me with the extra fifty pounds. Plus, I'm drunk. In no time, she has me to the ground. She's got a knife too, and she's got it to my throat. This time, it's frighteningly sexier. I'm her only outlet. No hay un escape, say the Spaniards.
She has no trouble with it. It goes down like an oyster. When she's done, she stands up and kicks me. I curl into the fetal position and feel dirty.
"Nacogdoches High School rules, bitch," she says as she spits on me. She snatches my burrito and walks away. I can almost imagine a stadium full of people cheering. That gives way to bar patrons passing by and looking at me. Phyllis stuffed me behind a dumpster before she took off, so all they see is a naked crying man behind a dumpster and they throw coins at me.
I make my way home and shower. Brush
my teeth. I'll never find the phone
cord, so I don't call the police. I
don't call Tyson or Kennedy. I don't
call anyone. I retire to the couch and want
to cry.But I can't.
The next day I spend alone. I can't see anyone. I'm a well, waiting to gush. I drink a lot and smoke two packs of cigarettes. Oprah is on and I even switch it to the Oxygen Network to catch "After the Show." It all makes sense now.
I miss a poker game and two Happy Hours, so people come looking. Kennedy offers to cheer me up so we go to CD World to get some music. "You're just down," he says. "You need to get laid. Either that or buy some new CDs." I'm beginning to put it out of my mind - it didn't happen. It was just a drunken hallucination, a flashback.
"That's not the problem," I tell him. "Besides, I got laid the other night."
"By who?"
"Somebody," I tell him. "You wouldn't know her." And in a perfect world, I tell myself, he never would.
But the world is far from perfect.
You see, she's at CD World too, that dwarfish woman who violated me. I recognize her as soon as we enter the store and make an attempt to run for it.
"Come on buddy," Kennedy consoles. "Let's just check out a few albums and we're out of here." He leads me by the arm further into the store and my best hope is not to be seen.
But she sees me and I'm done for. A moment passes where she recognizes me and she's not sure exactly from where. I can't turn away; it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I watch it all come together for her. A smile cracks across her face.
"I never got a chance to thank you for giving me your burrito," she says.
"Don't mention it," I say.
"Sorry about the other night," she says. "I was PMSing pretty hard. I shouldn't have left you like that."
A strange look crosses Kennedy's face. He went to law school, so I don't imagine it's taking too long for him to put it all together.
"Really," I tell her, "don't mention it."
"Hi," she says, offering her hand to Kennedy. "I'm Phyllis."
Kennedy introduces himself and says, "So where do you know Eryk from?"
"You haven't told him?" she asks, shocked.
I feel the teeth of this bear trap closing in on me. There's nowhere to run. I'm fucked.
She invites herself to the bar with us. She has a great time. She agrees to meet us all again tomorrow. I don't know how it happens, but Phyllis begins to regularly appear at the bar with me and the guys. Sometimes she gets too drunk and too loud and I have to apologize for her. Other times she gets sauced and waits for me to walk home alone and has her sick, twisted fun with me then shows up a few nights later with an apology. On those nights, she pays my tab. The guys start calling her my "girlfriend."
Things get out of hand. One night,
while standing over me behind the dumpster, she tells me she does it because
she's tired of me staying out all night playing cards. Another night, she says she does it because
she thinks I spend too much time at the bar.
I start staying in more because she would rather rent movies. We hold hands while we watch them and then
one night, she tells me she loves me. I
tell her I love her back because I am frightened. That night, she does it out of love and tells
me that I've made her happier than she's ever been in her entire life. That night, she promises, she won't use the
knife.I come to. I have to. The prospects are harrowing. After all, it's only a fantasy. By definition, it's not real. Halle Berry's not waiting for me behind the dumpster and I'm not in the alley with Phyllis. No, it's only a fantasy and I'm sitting on the hide-a-bed with the HBO on and old Billy Bob is eating ice cream with Halle Berry. I realize that a man's shortcomings are exactly that and they're personal. I am no less normal because I don't have a rape fantasy and I can show my face with pride to the next game. Besides, those assholes are nothing but a bunch of deviants and who wants to be like them anyway, with everybody having to keep an eye on them and all?
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