The Ishmael Gradsdovic papers continue, a journal entry from his Cal Poly years, making part 5
Last night, I stayed up late with B----- & some computer geeks & C----- & some of his friends listening to Jello Biafra at Chumash Auditorium. He talked from 8-midnight on a number of diverse topics in his usual far-out paranoid style. Good show, anyway, although he managed to alienate everyone at least once. He's a little on the shallow side, but then again he's an artist not a political philosopher.
So I got up this morning, a little tired, and went to my first class. Women's Studies 301. A hell of a class to have first thing in the morning. Usually keeps me drained for the rest of the day. They ought to have a critical thinking skills class as a mandatory prerequisite for the women's studies program.
Anyway, on Wednesday, one woman in the class had left us -- in the last 15 seconds of class -- with a bombshell. I suppose I'd better describe her. B----- says she used to come into the library when she worked there and had darling, well-behaved, children. She's old, for a student, and has long hair which she ties in two braids on either side of her head so that the hair lies flat on her scalp, with a part down the middle like an anti-mohawk.
Her physique reminds me very much of those Earth-mother icons made out of stone from the Cro-Magnon era -- chubby, if you're unfamiliar with that image. She smiles a lot and has an embarassed chuckle as a permanent warble in her voice.
The bombshell she dropped on Wednesday was this: We were discussing a recent rape at Cal Poly that had been covered in an article in the Mustang Doily. A prime example of idiot journalism, by the way. The victim, according to the article, was "otherwise unhurt," for instance. It happened at a Delta Tau party and most of the article consisted of interviews with frat folks trying to salvage their reputations and such...
But shall I get to the bombshell now finally? Okay. Well, we were on the subject of sexual assault, and in this last 15 seconds of class, the protagonist of my tale comes up with this story. She was walking through the park, minding her own business, when a man "ready for action" (which, to her is linguistically equivalent to "erect"), holding a knife, flashed her.
As she tells it, in the ensuing struggle for the weapon (no, the knife, dummy) she "accidentally cut his penis off."
Most of the class, of course, engaged in polite mental applause -- not wanting to seem barbaric in cheering on amputation, but on the other hand happy at the poetic justice of a sexual offender being disarmed. The story sounded a bit unlikely -- you know, a feminist's favorite fantasy -- but we took it at face value. Coincidentally, there was a letter-to-the-editor in either today's or yesterday's Doily about how rapists should be detesticled.
Anyway... today, she was asked to elaborate on her story. She told about how when she went to the police station, she was put in a room with glass walls and people looking in at her while she was being questioned and photographed and stripped to check for bruises. She was driven back to the crime scene to look for evidence. The man has never been found. "Didn't he have to go to the hospital?" someone asked. The man has never been found.
I don't remember any of this in the newspapers. Surprising, really, as the "courageous female victim chops off rapist's penis" story is absolute A-1 news-hound material. Definate TV docudrama material. Maybe even a book.
Soon afterward, we were told, another man, dirty and smelly, broke in to her house while she was bathing. She threatened him with castration and he ran off. Later, after the police had just left from showing her mug shots of potential dirty smelly rapists, she found her baby dead (she says with nary a vocal change) and called the police, who all of a sudden "treated me like a criminal." Eventually the verdict was crib death. One of those things.
It started dawning on me (and a number of others in the class, if I can judge from their facial expressions) that we're dealing here with a ten out of ten I think I'll go to Neptune on holiday I think I hear my dead mother calling me lunatic.
Okay. That only lasts an hour. I leave class in a hurry, being as I am just about the only betesticled person within arm's reach of you know who. Off to a thoroughly boring session of 421; a one-hour break; my final goddamned neural net lecture in 506 which went a whole lot better than my first goddamned neural net lecture in 506; and finally my Physics class which was much better than most of my Physics classes owing mostly, I would suppose, to my absence from it.
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