I Saw Him Get Raped

What We See. What We Can't Unsee.

You own a dog? You have to walk a dog. It's that simple. No one with a backyard wants a dog using it as a toilet and so out on the streets we went. Me. The dog. The walk spreading out in front of us.

This was in New York City. Brooklyn to be exact. A Brooklyn well before Giuliani and the 1978 Canine Waste Law that required the city's half a million dog owners to actually clean up after their pets. So just me and my malamute. We'd walk down the street on the driver's side of the cars parked from one end of the block to the other. She sniffed tires, and would on occasion disappear between cars to poop.

The walk was about way more than bowel/bladder maintenance and much more about the contemplative stroll. And the nighttime walks often gave you glimpses into the lives and houses of your neighbors. Through closed windows in the winter and open windows in the summer, it was the smells of dinner cooking or arguments or just domestic noises. Human noises.

I never thought about rape, or consent, or that I was witnessing a crime. There wasn't the language for it back then.

But this was the Fall and there were still kids rushing in to eat, and adults rushing out to get the kids that needed to eat. The dog and I had already eaten and so in sort of a post-prandial pause we poked down and around the block which, given that I was 11, had become a map of desire, and I lingered longer by the houses of girls on the block that I liked. Hoping for a glimpse.

It was a nice middle class neighborhood. Nothing too outrageous or dangerous happened there. Just human stuff.

But mid-block I catch a glimpse of something. It wasn't so much what I was seeing that had grabbed me. It was the way that what I had only glimpsed was moving. It was undulating and at the age of 11 I made it out for what it was: someone was fucking someone.

The house housed a slightly older kid named Travis. He lived there with his family but when you're 11 your world is populated by your peers and his parents were mysteries to me. But they seemed nice, and were always nice to me. The adults in his house.

Travis, three years older than me, was another story. At 14 he had a lot of adult appeal. He was polite, always well dressed, bright and handsome. He fooled all of the adults. But Travis was mean, so he didn't fool very many of us kids and when someone was scampering over the rooftops and breaking into people's houses through their stained glass skylights, we were pretty sure it was Travis.

Just to be clear: his family also had money. Travis just broke bad. And now as I wove my way back to his house I could see in the darkened corner where one brownstone met the one next to it, Travis’ partially naked ass, very definitely rising and falling as he thrust into someone below him.

I couldn't see who and I couldn't hear who. They were being very quiet. But when a car pulled down the street and its lights partially illuminated the corner I could see it was his developmentally disabled younger relative. The six-year-old kid —nephew? brother? — gentle and harmless and well liked in the neighborhood, was now splayed below Travis.

Travis was a teenager and I expected he'd have been there with a teenager. I hadn't expected what I should have expected from Travis. Confused, I hustled home, the dog in tow.

Was this something they did all of the time? Why would they do it? Why outside? Were they having fun? I knew enough to know that his parents didn't know but given all of the attention girls had paid to Travis did Travis like boys? Only?

I never thought about rape, or consent, or that I was witnessing a crime. There wasn't the language for it back then. Leastways not language that was accessible to an 11 year old. And while I was not ignorant about sex and sexual activity, I knew it happened usually between people who were not blood related, but you…well, you never really knew what other people did, least of all your neighbors. In a weird co-related crime confession my friend Mike had told me that his father was having sex with his sister.

He said he had witnessed, on multiple occasions, his father going into his daughter's bedroom to do so. When he was asked if his mother knew and what she thought about it, he shrugged. Very much like it was no big deal.

But also, with a trace of nerves playing around the edge of his mouth. He was the only Filipino guy we knew so at 11 we just assumed the adult world was stranger than we had imagined. But we didn't repeat it. To anyone. Or even to each other again.

Not because we knew it was a crime but because it was sexual and what? You were going to ask adults about this? Not likely.

"How was your walk?" My mother asked from the kitchen while I took the dog's leash off and let her run free.

"Ok."

I didn't go to high school in the neighborhood so a few years later I wasn't around much and when I left to college there was soon no more neighborhood to go back to. Everyone had moved away, and into their adult lives. I figured though with the miracle of the tendrils of social media I might find Travis again. To what end? To whatever end I could find.