"Weird" Is Not Even the Word

Aaaaaaand it gets weirder.

I'm having a difficult time wrapping my brain around this situation, so I'm going to relate the facts as I understand them.

At 6 this morning, I awoke to a tap on the leg from Tim. We'd both stayed up late last night, drinking beer and just generally relaxing; I'd finally fallen asleep around 4, so I was apparently pretty difficult to wake.

"Um, can you give me a ride? Squeaky's in the hospital again," he said.

We drove to the hospital--not the same one we'd taken her to the other night, but one a fair bit closer to home--and I dropped him off. We were both assuming it was Squeaky's stomach again.

I stopped at McDonalds and picked up some breakfast and came home. There were a couple of messages from Squeaky's dad, asking if she was here; just as I finished eating, he called again, and I told him what I knew--that she was in the E.R, probably with her stomach complaint again. He said she'd gone out last night with his upstairs neighbor--a woman he's apparently known for about a year--and that she hadn't come back. I assured him that I knew where she was, and that she'd probably call him soon. I sent a text message to Tim for him to call Squeaky's dad, and then about 8 AM, I went to bed. I set my alarm for 10:40, since I had a noon appointment with Dr. J on the north side of the city.

At a couple minutes after 9, the phone rang. "Hey, um..." said Tim. "Listen, I don't have my bus card, and anyway they wouldn't let Squeaky on the bus because she doesn't have any shoes, and they're gonna discharge her in a few minutes....she's really fucked up..."

"What, did they give her pain meds or something?"

"Nah," he said. "She got raped by them Kings over in Humboldt Park. They drugged her up, too. Drugged her up and raped her."

"Holy shit," I said. "Damn. Yeah, I'll be there in a little bit."

I pulled up to the hospital and Tim and Squeaky walked out. Or rather, Tim walked; Squeaky leaned on him. She was moving very slowly, obviously in pain. While we drove home, she made a couple of phone calls; from what I overheard, I gathered a little of what had happened. She told someone "Yeah, I relapsed last night," and made arrangements for her dad to pick up some of her belongings from a friend's house, which Tim was supposedly going to get later. I dropped them off--Squeaky needed substantial help from Tim to get out of the car and up the steps--and went to my appointment.

I came home, fixed a sandwich, and went straight to bed. I slept like a stone for quite a while, and came downstairs around 8 PM. Around 9, as I heated up some leftovers, Squeaky emerged from Tim's room, on her way to the bathroom.

"How you doin', lady?" I asked.
Her voice was hoarse. "I have bruises all over my body and I feel like shit," she said. She showed me her arms; they were covered with bruises, like big finger-marks, all the way from the upper arm to her hands. "And I can't use this hand because it hurts so much. Do you have some ice I could use?"

I fixed her an icepack, and she went back into Tim's room for a while. When she came out, she started telling me what had happened.

The story she told was so crazy-sounding, so fantastical, that she said she knew nobody would believe her. It started out normally enough--she had left her dad's place with his upstairs neighbor. "My dad trusted her, so I figured I could trust her too, right? He was okay for me to go out with her..."

At one point last night, around 10 or 11 PM, Squeaky had called and said she was on her way over--that this woman was going to give her a ride over here. Then that plan changed, and Tim said she wasn't coming after all because "the girl who's driving wants to go see her baby-daddy," Tim said.

What neither Tim nor Squeaky knew was that the baby-daddy in question lived in Humboldt Park. *note below When they arrived, Squeaky protested, repeating that she really, really wanted to come over here and see Tim instead. "No, no," the girl apparently told her. "These guys are cool."

This is the last point at which the story makes perfect sense. From here, it gets dodgy. Not that I disbelieve her--I want to make that clear. I don't doubt that she THINKS some of these things happened, but...

I'm ahead of myself.

There were apparently several people in this place the neighbor took her, and at one point one (possibly more) of the guys wanted Squeaky to come for a ride with him. She didn't want to go but the neighbor said he was okay, that she should go with him and just relax, and that nothing would happen because if anything happened, Squeaky's dad was going to blame HER (the neighbor). Squeaky resisted, saying she still would rather go to see Tim, but the neighbor was adamant and said that if she didn't go, it would mess up her (the neighbor's) relationship with the baby-daddy, and blah blah blah. So against her better judgement, Squeaky went with the guy.

ALSO against her better judgement (she claims), she was persuaded to have a couple of drinks. She says she really, really didn't want to drink--she's been sober for a couple of months now--but that the guy pressured her. She said that after the drinks, she started feeling really strange--like her limbs were going numb, and her brain was fogged, and all sorts of other uncomfortable sensations. (I'm thinking the guy slipped her something in her drink.)

THEN, she says, he started trying to make a move on her, and she told him not to touch her--that if her "man"--meaning Tim--found out that he'd done anything to her, Tim would kill him. She fought him off, she said. Later, she says, he stopped to get some weed, and she took two hits.

This was where things got really, REALLY weird.

She claims she jumped out of the car at a stop sign, because she had called the neighbor to tell her to come rescue her, and when she asked the guy where they were, his answer didn't match the street signs she could see, so she got out of the car to check for herself. She claims she passed a cop car, but when she told them she was in trouble they said "I don't give a shit" and "Don't make me shoot you" and such; that they were in marked police cars but wouldn't show her a badge and wouldn't help her....

The story went on like this for a long time. At one point she was in a church that wasn't a church, because there was one white person speaking English and a lot of black people speaking in tongues, and they tied her down and put some sort of liquid on her which made her skin numb, and some guy made her repeat something after him...and there was an ambulance, except the people driving it weren't paramedics, and she said they were going to set it on fire...and on and on.

My suspicion here is that either her drink, or the weed, or both, contained some sort of hallucinogens--PCP, maybe, is Tim's guess. I'm pretty sure that all sorts of seriously-disturbing things happened to her, but that the cult/church and the fake cops and fake paramedics and being chained to the rails inside the ambulance...that all of that was the result of her seriously-altered perceptions. (Even when she was staying here before, I'd commented to Tim on her seeming inability to tell fact from fiction and reality from unreality; I'm sure THAT little quirk of personality is involved here as well.) She swears up and down that all of these things happened, and I'm sure, in her mind, that they did.

What is NOT called into dispute, though: the girl is COVERED in bruises. She was clearly hurt, and she clearly gave a good fight. She said she was combative in the hospital when she finally woke up, even to the point of yelling at Tim, when he arrived, that HE was part of this big conspiracy too. (She had convinced herself, at some point, that there was a small group of people who were in on this plan to hurt her; she says that the people she saw at the house when she arrived were the same people who were supposedly paramedics and police; that this same group was in the "church" and on the streets in the area. I don't know WHAT to make of that.) I'm sure some of the bruises were from the medical personnel trying to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. She also says it took them a couple of hours to get her name and contact info out of her, because she was convinced that the people in the hospital were part of the plot as well. She says she thought they were going to kill her, and that she also thought they were going kill Tim, and she begged them not to kill Tim, to kill her instead.

She's absolutely devastated, to say the least. She's scared to be alone, and claims she's never going anywhere alone again, ever. She's very obviously been traumatized--there's not the slightest sense that she's faking. I don't know how much of what she says is true; the bulk of the story, as far as I can see, is the result of horribly-distorted perceptions caused by whatever these assholes spiked her drink or her weed with. She swears they're not--she is absolutely SURE that everything happened exactly as she remembers--which, to me, would be enough reason to be traumatized all on its own! But it's very obvious that she was victimized in some manner. I didn't press for info about the rape--whether the hospital had done a rape kit or anything--but I did ask if the police were called, and she said no. She has no recollection of how she even got to the hospital; my guess is that the "fake" ambulance, supposedly part of the plot, was actually real.

The hell of this? According to Squeaky, her father is still defending the upstairs neighbor--the one who brought her into this situation. Tim, of course, is livid. I'm hoping HE doesn't do something stupid as "revenge".

I told her I'd give her a ride up to her dad's tomorrow, so she can collect her stuff; before this happened, Tim had approached me with a request: that Squeaky be allowed to stay here til we move, to make it easier for her to get to the job that's waiting for her (downtown) and so that she can give a Chicago address to the social-services agencies; apparently some programs are only available to city residents, and her dad's address is in the suburbs. I told him yes, but SOLELY ON THE CONDITION THAT her residency with us ends the moment we move, and that any attempt to extend it beyond that point will be considered a dealbreaker as regards the continuation of our roommate-ship. He agreed to that condition--and several others, such as "she has to bring her own toiletries, because I'm tired of her using all my shampoo".

This new development, as I told Dr. J today, will not shake my resolve. (I was proceeding on very sketchy reports of what had happened, but I'd seen enough to know, even before I got the story, that something bad had clearly taken place.) She can stay til we move--which will be happening by the end of October at the VERY latest--but once we move, if Tim wants to live with her he'll have to get them an apartment together, because I'm not going down that road. That's what I told him in the first place, and that doesn't change because of what happened to her.

But oh, my god, do I feel bad for that poor girl. All my animosity towards her has gone; I just feel really, really bad for her. Nobody should have to live the life she's had; no matter what percentage of the bad decisions have been hers, that doesn't excuse the bastards who have taken advantage of her. Like everyone else, when she said "No" that should have been respected; like everyone else, no matter if she'd made a bad decision, she's still a human being and should have been treated as such. I can't begin to describe how sad her story makes me, or how angry--or how lucky I feel, to have had the life I've had, because no matter what has happened in my life, it's mostly stuff I've brought on myself--not stuff that other people have inflicted on me.

And again: she's only nineteen years old. I know some EIGHTY-year-olds, and not ONE of them has had HALF the bad things happen to them that have happened to Squeaky in those nineteen years. No matter what part she's played by making bad decisions--nobody, NOBODY, deserves the things that have happened to her.


*Non-Chicagoans--Humboldt Park is a neighborhood in Chicago, about a mile to three miles north and two to four miles east of where we live. It's predominantly Hispanic; though it's been in the process of gentrifying for about fifteen years now, there are still very rough patches here and there. JP lived in Humboldt Park when he and I first started seeing each other, back in 1994, and when my ex found out where I'd been going every night, he referred to it as "a demilitarized zone". Tim has an instinctive fear of H.P., because it's predominantly Latin Kings territory and Tim affiliates himself with a rival organization.