My Big Break
Jennifer Dines reviews—and redefines—an assault she experienced in her twenties.
From 2002 to 2004, as the lead singer of the band Anti-Love Project, I dared audiences of post-punk twenty-somethings to break me.
“You wanna hurt me? Go ‘head and try! I’ll roll it off my back and make you see it through my eyes,” I crooned, piercing my gaze into the spotlight.
On beer-stained stages of rock clubs across Boston, I intoned my song to Justyn, even though he never came to our shows: “And then you tell me you’re not impressed. Well, you look good on paper, dear, but I look fabulous undressed…And if I had just one wish come true, it’s to never be like you!”
Justyn had given off the appearance of having it all together with his group of connected-to-the-music scene friends, his dark denim wardrobe, his girlfriend in New York, and his advertising gig as a creative director. But that was all a front.
Justyn was a predator who drugged me and raped me. Back then, I never considered myself raped, but something inside my twenty-one-year old brain, the one who wrote the lyrics to ”One Wish,” knew he had done something violent and shameful. But at the time, I couldn’t admit how much it hurt. I never told anyone the story of what had happened that night. I tried not to take it too seriously. It was just one drunken night with a sexual encounter.
From 2002 to 2004, as the lead singer of the band Anti-Love Project, I dared audiences of post-punk twenty-somethings to break me…“You wanna hurt me? Go ‘head and try! I’ll roll it off my back and make you see it through my eyes,” I crooned, piercing my gaze into the spotlight.
But I had known enough to protect myself by writing ”One Wish,” letting Anti-Love Project’s listeners know I’d seen this act before and wouldn’t fall for it again: “You wanna play me? Your plastic games. Well, I’ve seen them a million times and it always feels the same. And then you find out you’re all alone and picking up the pieces from the shadows of your broken home.”
That brings me back to Justyn’s disgusting house in Allston, where I awoke on a January morning with every cell in my body twitching, pins and needles in my arms and legs. Someone breathed heavily next to me. I spotted a pack of Parliament Lights on the nightstand, next to a bottle of CK One. Justyn’s brands. The alarm clock’s numbers glowed 5:15.
I slid out of the bed, careful not to make a noise. My clothes lay in a pile in the corner of the room. I put them on one by one, naming each in my head fondly as if greeting old friends. Black underwear. Cheetah-print bra. Gray jeans. Wool socks. These clothes covered the shame of awakening naked in the bed of someone I’d never intended to sleep with.
It happened on a Sunday night after a session at The Green House, an Allston recording studio named for the crumbling mint green Victorian it occupied. I had joined Justyn’s band, The Destination, as keyboardist a few weeks earlier.
On beer-stained stages of rock clubs across Boston, I intoned my song to Justyn, even though he never came to our shows…Justyn was a predator who drugged me and raped me.
I’d met Justyn through the internet. He’d contacted me on AOL Instant Messenger after seeing the profile I’d created on makeoutclub.com, a now-defunct website for “indierockers, hardcore kids, record collectors, artists, bloggers, and hopeless romantics.” I’d wanted to be all of those things, but the truth was I’d just graduated college and felt lost without the structure that school had provided.
My makeoutclub profile consisted of a black and white photo of myself in a sheer camisole, Diesel jeans, Urban Decay lipstick, a list of the bands I loved, and my desire to sing and play keyboards in a rock band. I had thought of it as an ad for myself as a musician, but I think Justyn saw it as an ad for my vulnerability.
That Sunday night, Justyn and I remained at the studio with the sound engineer after the other members of the band had left for the evening. Justyn had me stick around to sing some back up vocals for a song he had written called “Control.”. I thought I could get them done in a few takes, but no.
“Do it like you’re Kim Deal in the Pixies,” Justyn ordered as I resang “I lose control” again and again. He kept wanting someone else on each and every take: Kim Gordon, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Karen O. Looking back, I see repeating “I lose control” over and over as Justyn’s attempt to hypnotize me.
When it finally ended, he suggested a drink at the Model Cafe, the notorious Allston music scene after-hours hang out just a block from the Green House. The night felt like just any other at the Model with Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” and the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” thumping through the sound system. Just like any other night when I ashed Marlboros into a plastic ashtray and drank room-temperature PBR. Justyn spotted some of his scenester friends and waved them over to our booth. I couldn’t hear a thing they said, but I nodded along anyway, pretending to follow the conversation.
Back then, I never considered myself raped, but something inside my twenty-one-year old brain, the one who wrote the lyrics to ”One Wish,” knew he had done something violent and shameful. But at the time, I couldn’t admit how much it hurt.
At some point, I got up to go to the bathroom, even though I always hated having to push my way through all the bodies in that room to make my way back there. And that night someone was on my trail. When I finally arrived at the women’s room, someone grabbed my shoulders and pushed me through the door. I heard the click of the lock, though this now seems impossible, given the volume of the music in that place. Perhaps I had only heard that click in my head, but it was the turning point, the moment I knew I had been trapped.
Justyn’s specific combination of wet leather, citrusy aftershave, and Parliament Lights consumed the normal bleach and piss smell of that bathroom. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and cupped his hand, filled with white shimmering powder, under my nose. I couldn’t understand why Justyn had followed me into the bathroom. In my dozens of times in the Model bathroom, I had never been in there with anyone else.
“Sniff!”, Justyn demanded, shoving his fingers towards my nostrils. I obeyed. My head filled with coldness, like an icicle had been shoved up my nose.
“Ohhhhh, shiiiiitttt.”
Justyn’s voice stretched and lowered like a tape being played at half-speed. Crimson dots dripped on the floor and the sink like red raindrops. He shoved a wad of toilet paper at my nose, and I pinched it into place.
He issued another edict before he exited the bathroom.
“Wipe the blood off your face, clean up, and meet me outside.”
I now wonder if the instant I snorted served as a green light to Justyn. I’d done what he suggested. I hadn’t said no. So perhaps Justyn took this to mean I’d consented to his command. Now drugged, he could do what he wanted with me. But I find it surprising that the gore all over my face hadn’t slowed him down.
I now wonder if the instant I snorted served as a green light to Justyn. I’d done what he suggested. I hadn’t said no. So perhaps Justyn took this to mean I’d consented to his command.
He slipped out. I waited for the bleeding to stop, but it didn’t let up. I scrubbed my face with the cheap pink soap from the crusty dispenser, which left my skin raw and red. I rolled up some toilet paper and stuck it deep inside my nostrils before slinking out of the bathroom.
Justyn stood right outside the bathroom door, arms crossed like a bouncer. He put his arm around my shoulder and hustled me through the crowd, out the door, and over to the cab stand.
Justyn lived a third of a mile from the Model. We could’ve walked, but maybe Justyn worried that fresh air might bring me to my senses, making me alert enough to realize his plan.
The following morning, I headed out into the cold January weather with my coat unzipped for a walk of shame down Brighton Avenue. My hands had trembled too badly to grasp the talon.
When I arrived home, I flopped down on the futon in my bedroom. I lay there, brain buzzing, twitchy and morose. I thought I might die, but instead I fell asleep.
I woke up with a throbbing head, fuzzy tongue, and cavernous stomach. I switched on the television for company and headed to the kitchen to fry up some eggs.
I never named the events of that Sunday night as sexual assault until twenty years later, after watching the film Promising Young Woman.
The television announcer’s voice said something about it being Tuesday morning. I bolted to the living room to check the date on my phone. I’d lost a full day to sleeping. The Destination rehearsed on Tuesdays, and we had our first show coming up. I had to get myself together for practice.
The eggs reawakened my sense of smell. My body and clothes exuded a disgusting odor, a combination of cigarette smoke, sweat, rust, and cologne. Justyn’s cologne. Yes, I had walked home from Justyn’s the other morning, but what the hell had happened?
I grabbed some fresh towels and headed into the bathroom. Glimpsing myself in the mirror, I did a double take. Blood crusted the rims of my nostrils. My bleach blonde hair had matted crimson patches. Sour gray skin. My blue eyes had turned dark.
I rubbed gobs of body wash into my skin under the hot water. Removing the filth called up what had happened to me and to my body. But swatches of time had disintegrated, like a film with missing frames, one in which I stood behind the camera, lens trained on two bodies, neither of them mine. No matter how many times I rewound the story, patches of blackness remained.
Justyn tossing me a black bathrobe. Justyn’s oily black hair. Justyn’s teeth gnawing on a torso. Hips grinding together. Chests thwacking against one another.
The most lucid memories? Justyn punching the pillow. Justyn’s limp dick against my leg. His utterance: “Fuck. It must be the drugs.”
Now, with over a year of sobriety under my belt, and having abandoned the blinders of alcohol, my vision has become crystal-clear. It is so painfully obvious that Justyn sexually assaulted me.
In the shower, I let out a dismissive giggle. Justyn. What an idiot. “It must be the drugs.”
Still, it never seemed like he had spoken to me. More like he’d been talking to himself. Justyn’s monologue. Had I ceased to exist for him in that moment? Was I just another object in the room?
Considering how I looked in the mirror that morning, like a dead girl, I wonder if Justyn got off on dead girls. He could do whatever he wanted with the bodies. He had turned me into a corpse for his pleasure, his power trip, both.
I never named the events of that Sunday night as sexual assault until twenty years later, after watching the film Promising Young Woman. In a scene at the beginning of the film, Neil finds Cassie plastered at a nightclub. He puts her into a cab to take her home, only they wind up at his home. Still, Neil seems like a nice guy, the kind of nice guy like Justyn, who listens to the Cure and writes romantic songs. But once Neil sees that Cassie is passed out, he starts to kiss her, to touch her.
It all seemed so familiar. I had never seen what happened to me as so poignantly wrong until the visual mirror played out onscreen. Neil saw Cassie fucked up, and he saw a doorway to her body.
Cassie’s story doesn’t end like mine. Cassie only feigned drunkenness. She snaps out of her disoriented state and confronts Neil. She toys with these men like they toy with women, her M.O. ever since her best friend passed away, since Cassie dropped out of medical school and into a deep depression.
Neil freaks out when Cassie reveals herself as stone-cold sober.
I quit drinking shortly after seeing that film. I had binged on red wine and off for two decades after that Sunday night. Now I wanted to be Cassie, with the courage and ability to confront the situation, and, like Cassie, I needed to be sober to do so.
Now, with over a year of sobriety under my belt, and having abandoned the blinders of alcohol, my vision has become crystal-clear. It is so painfully obvious that Justyn sexually assaulted me. A man following a woman into a bathroom and locking the door behind him seems like the beginning of a murder mystery, not a normal have-a-few-drinks-after-band-practice hang out. The blood-matted hair of the dead girl in the mirror turns that mystery into a horror movie.
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