Lucking Out

It was summertime. I remember floating in the pool, listening to the hair on my legs grow, staring up at the dull brown balconies of my apartment complex. I was mourning the loss of what had been a wonderfully numb vacation. I felt very lucky to have filled the last 70 days with nothing but beer and Coppertone. Only three more days until school started. I wanted to die. Or at least I thought I did.

I graduated from college early. Barely 20, not knowing what else to do, I had taken a job teaching English and drama. I loved both subjects, but I hated being a teacher. Where I come from, a young lady is not supposed to say that. Good girls should want to dedicate their lives to molding impressionable minds. I had always thought of myself as a good girl, but this would be my second year of extolling the virtues of subject/verb agreement and directing one-act plays in the coastal wilderness of South Texas, and I resented my students for stealing my youth.

The sun was slipping away, and as my hairy legs took me up the stairs to my apartment, I warned them of the atrocities ahead. There’d be more shaving, more struggles with pantyhose, and at the end of it all, high-heeled shoes. Enjoy your freedom, guys. You have three more days of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I had just gotten my first subscription to HBO a few days before, but I decided I had to start getting to bed a little earlier as those annoying school mornings would soon be creeping their way into my bedroom. I pinned up my hair, took a quick shower and walked into the kitchen stark naked. That usually wouldn’t have mattered, because my roommate, Sheryl, was never home, but for some reason, I felt uncomfortably nude that night, so I slipped on a tiny t-shirt and my favorite raggedy underwear for bed. I applied some Clearasil for a very striking Marcel Marceau effect. As I mimed wiping away the crocodile tears I shed for my fleeting youth, I heard a noise. I remained still for a moment, but when no other disturbance followed, I went to bed.

I had been lying there for half an hour when I heard heavy footsteps in the living room. In an instant I knew the steps were not my roommate’s and that I must act quickly to save myself from whatever it was that was getting closer and closer to my door. I reached for the phone but dropped the receiver when the young villain threw open my door so hard and fast he broke the mirror behind it.

“Mommy, Daddy, help me,” I heard my 20-year-old brain say. That was the last logical pairing of nouns with a verb my head was able to conjure up for awhile. A man I had seen walking by the pool a few hours earlier was now on top of me, pressing his knee into my crotch and sticking his dirty finger down my throat to keep me from screaming.

He told me repeatedly that he’d kill me if I screamed. Believe me, if you’re ever in this situation, you only need to hear it once. When he pulled his finger out of my mouth, to assure him that I meant to comply with his wishes, I let out a soft groan. A clever, witty remark, such as “please don’t kill me” was way beyond my immediate abilities. My vocabulary had disappeared as quickly as he had come in. My voice gurgled, cracked and sputtered. I simply could not form words. Still, I continued to make these creepy sounds in a futile attempt to talk my way out of this major catastrophe.

He wasn’t a big guy, but the knife handle peeking out of his jeans told me his size was really a moot point. I tried not to look at his face. I didn’t want to give him a reason to get rid of me, his only witness. When he demanded money, I reached for my purse that lay next to my chest of drawers and held it out to him. He tore through it only to discover my driver’s license and a credit card. He began ranting about the uselessness of a credit card with a girl’s name on it. He pushed me onto the edge of the bed and ransacked my jewelry box.

I remember staring out my window, at the lights of the courtyard, at the blue glow of the glassy pool I had enjoyed that afternoon, at the darting lights of car headlights on the highway. I started to form a phrase inside my head: “outside good, inside bad.” This became my mantra for what seemed like an eternity. Outside good, inside bad.

When the jewelry box came up empty, he ran one hand up my furry leg and with the other, undid his belt buckle. He pulled out his knife and tucked it into the front pocket of his jeans.

“Outside good, inside bad,” my brain told my body. If only I could get outside. Out there, where my students were pressing their back-to-school clothes. Out there, where I could wear twisted pantyhose and teach kids about prepositional phrases. All I had to do was survive the moment.

He tugged at his underwear and moved his other hand up to the back of my head, pulling at my hair. The thought of having this man on my skin and in my mouth was sickening. I didn’t think I could win, but I decided to pick a fight. Wouldn’t it be less painful if I went out in a struggle?

I lifted my right, hairy leg up to my chest and shoved my foot into his abdomen. I managed to throw him off balance for a second and took advantage of the move by running into the dining area and throwing down a chair between us. My attacker came bounding towards me, initially slowed by the chair, but making up for lost time by leaping over it and pushing me to the floor. His hands were small but strong. He squeezed at my throat with a vengeance, rocking me back and forth against the carpet.

Everything went white. I am gone, I decided. This is the end. I think he sensed it too, but at some point in his life, despite a fondness for knives, this criminal had already decided he was not a murderer. He dropped me to the floor, ran past me and out the door. At first, my vocal cords refused to cooperate, but eventually they warmed to the idea. My neighbor Jeff heard my scream for help and stepped onto his patio where he saw the man run away, brandishing what I would later describe as the world’s largest machete.

Much later that night, sedated and safely seated at my parents’ kitchen table, we all agreed I was lucky. Very lucky. At the time, I believed this meant that I was lucky to be alive. Now I believe I am lucky to have faced every woman’s worst fear and find that I will always go down fighting. I was lucky in other ways, too. Escaping with my life gave me the courage to quit my teaching job, pack up, and head for the big city to pursue endless aggravation and intermittent poverty in the world of show business. I figured that once you’ve had a guy come at you with a knife, nothing else could be so terrible.

The diligent cops in my hometown eventually caught my intruder and he was sent off to a Texas state prison in Huntsville. Huntsville is a pretty rotten place, doling out hard time, as they say on the cop shows. I sent him a postcard with a lovely picture of a Texas State Park dotted with bluebonnets. On the back I wrote:

Outside good, inside bad. Warmest regards, Brenda.

Brenda Pontiff toured the southern states for many years as a stand-up comic before moving to Los Angeles. She was a recent finalist in the Robert Benchley Society’s National Essay Competition.

~Brenda Pontiff