The Time is Right for Predators in the Street
“It doesn’t matter what you wear,
Just as long as you are there
So come on, every guy, grab a girl,
Everywhere, around the world…”
Popularized by Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancin’ in the Street,” was a joyous tune back in 1964. Despite the fact that we had just suffered the angst of the Kennedy assassination — still another fall from grace — Americans were genuinely happy, or at least pop culture had us believe so.
Marvin Gaye co-wrote this Motown hit, and he would suffer his own horrible fate a couple of decades later, a violent end to a domestic dispute with his own father. I wonder what Marvin would make now of these seemingly innocent lyrics, for we are not living in the 60’s pop age — neither the Motown generation nor the psychedelic lovefest.
No. We are living in an age where gropers and harassers, rapists and pedophiles don’t exist merely on sordid cable channels or on the front page of the New York Post. They make the films we watch; they set policy in our Congress. They run for the U.S. Senate holding their self-autographed bibles. They support and endorse the pedophile in their soon-to-be midst. They say they’d rather have a multiply-accused sexual predator by their side than a Democrat.
The witch hunt is on, and neither Roy Moore nor the president is the one being hunted. Giddy with a tax victory, it’s every Republican for the party, damn the torpedoes, the poor, and the victims of every guy seeking to and succeeding in grabbing all the girls he can.
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In 2015, before these scandals became explicit, Louisiana author MO Walsh published his first novel, My Sunshine Away (Putnam). In the novel, a neighborhood girl, Lindy Simpson, barely fifteen, is horribly assaulted and raped one summer evening as she rides her bike home from track practice. She walks into her house afterward, not noticing or caring that one of her track shoes had been left on the street where she was raped. There are many suspects in the story, not least of whom is the narrator, the boy who lives a few houses down from Lindy, and who absolutely adores her. He is a year younger, and while he’s known Lindy all his life, he falls in love on the day of the space shuttle Challenger catastrophe. Lindy throws up at the news of the explosion, and the narrator notices her innocence, her undisguised terror and confusion, and he is lost in her, seemingly forever.
Would he stalk and want to rape her, though?
Well, he does sort of stalk her, in that way that of an adolescent boy fixated on the girl/goddess of his dreams. Through another neighborhood boy — an older guy who is failing his foster home life miserably — the narrator learns how and where to spy on Lindy. Though ashamed of his behavior, his hormonal desire controls his better instincts. He does worse things, too, but we are never really in doubt about his love for Lindy and that he could not possibly hurt her.
Though, of course, he does.
While the novel certainly keeps the mystery of Lindy’s rapist a secret almost until the very end, that mystery is not the only one, or upon a second reading, even the main one. More mysterious, perhaps, is why the narrator wants Lindy to understand and appreciate him. And even greater than that is the mystery of why no one ever suspects the true rapist, why Lindy’s parents allow her the latitude they do before and after her rape, and most importantly, what the effect of her rape is on Lindy herself.
She turns dark; she is betrayed by her peers again and again. She is never forgotten, but in her high school life, she becomes a thing — someone to avoid, to talk about, to give up on. Someone, perhaps, not to be believed.
Her rape, even though it doesn’t kill her or cause her not to have sex again, does transfigure her. On a certain level, she doesn’t recover, and it is arguable even at the end if she ever will.
Though at the end, one of the novel’s other great mysteries is solved: why is the narrator telling this story? Why does he accuse himself and allow his most sordid actions to be chronicled, by his own pen, page after page?
That answer is revealed when we discover the audience that the narrator has been writing for — the one he’s been addressing all along:
“The doctors tell us you will be a boy. And they say that you are healthy. Your mother and your sister are ecstatic about this, as am I, but with my excitement comes the fear that I will not be able to raise you from this boy to the man I know you can be: a better man than I have been, surely, but one like I am trying to become…I want the two of us, together in this world, to be good men. And when I tell you that I love you I want, so badly, for you to understand what I mean.”
I don’t know if the fathers of Al Franken, John Conyers, Garrison Keillor, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Donald Trump, and too many others to name, ever told their sons such heartfelt truths: if they ever admitted their own sins against women. If so, they didn’t say so enough or as ardently as they should have. Or maybe they did, and these sons are simply beyond morality.
Sometimes, fiction tells us more about ourselves, our truths, than any reality show, or bible verse, or any so-called self-confessional ever can. I started reading Franken’s book this summer. I won’t continue. I can’t.
MO Walsh wrote a novel that couldn’t be more timely, though the author couldn’t have seen, either, the ironic timing of its release. But then, the truth and reality he is writing about, sadly, know no limits to time, place, theology, or political reality.
What is important, what Walsh has depicted here and doubtlessly knows, is that even though the victims of sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape might “recover,” their lives are horribly changed, forever.
Even when they’re “believed.”
You see, Lindy never came forward either.
