When a Body Meets a Body That Set a Rapist Free
Out of all of the gin joints in the world why'd he have to walk into mine?
He’s looking at you, but not at you at the same time. It’s more like he’s looking at the SIGN of you versus you. Asian cats get this a lot: “I could tell they were trying to figure out if I spoke English…even while I was speaking English to him,” said my friend Jay.
It’s such a weird kind of othering that it makes you wonder what country they think they’re in.
But the answer to this is always simple, and then again not very: America.
“Have you seen Spearchucker?” asked almost everyone in my freshmen dorm who thought I might know where Craig Spearman was. Spearman, a fan of M.A.S.H., the movie and the TV show, thought to call himself Spearchucker. In homage to an African American character of the same name. In homage to that AND a sort of ritual humiliation.
“You mean CRAIG?” And a look from me. I don’t recall anyone asking me if I had seen him using his chosen nickname more than once. Because I looked AT them, and not the sign of them.
Nowadays I guess they would call these micro-aggressions but given the hospital visits I had from macro-aggressions I could easily tell you which I preferred.
[W]hen Stanford water polo player Brock Turner got busted for felony sexual assault, the first thing out of my mouth was “fuck that guy.”
And still: it grew wearisome. Piled upon a Stanford University student body steeped on the upswell of Reagan’s America, and a large percentage of which hailed from California, a state with supposedly lots of racial diversity but, by my lights, very little class diversity, there were plenty of reasons to look at the SIGN of me and forget that I was just a middle class kid who danced to the tune of a different drummer: the mohawk, Whipping Boy, the motorcycle, tattoos, and fist fighting lunacy. All of the things that make for a good college experience at a good college in my mind but were too much of a stretch for the ‘80s, pre-Internet.
“Can I help you?”
People were wonderfully helpful at least. I got asked this question a lot. Usually when I was walking through a dorm trying to find a friend’s room.
“No.”
“Well, who are you looking for?”
“A friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Was there something about my use of the word ‘no’ that was unclear?”
“Well, we just don’t you wandering around…”
“My campus?”
“You go to school here?
“No. I just wander around here hoping to have conversations like this.”
I find who I am looking for, my docent, who I later find out was named Andy Chen, finally gave up the Columbo ghost when he sees me disappear into Peter’s room after a hearty greeting. For the sake of intersectionality here let’s note that Andy was Asian.
Now I’m not listing this as a casus belli, but I mention it by way of explaining how when Stanford water polo player Brock Turner got busted for felony sexual assault, the first thing out of my mouth was “fuck that guy.”
I played rugby for two of my years at Stanford. Worked out at the varsity weight room. One of my first friends was a water polo player. I knew the lay of the land.
Druggings and fuckings at the Betas. Gangbangs at the largely football player Delt house…High school girls in over their heads…
I also heard the talk. Druggings and fuckings at the Betas. Gangbangs at the largely football player Delt house. A house that mysteriously got burned to the ground years later. High school girls in over their heads, fueled by too much alcohol, coming face to face with men who, in an effort to impress other men, chose rape to do so.
If you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be, doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, does it make sense to even attempt redress? Even in the face of a sex crime? Easier to leave school. Easier yet to say nothing.
But then Turner gets caught and an opportunity for accountability was upon us.
“You know, I know people who know her and she was wasted.” A friend knit her brow and nodded her head toward me thinking I would get it. I got that she, the mother of three sons, felt exposed.
“And?” She got that that I, the father of four daughters, did too.
Then the semi-reliable narrative where bad man goes to prison gets upended and Turner gets a three-month jail sentence, getting locked up and getting out before friends of mine serving time for speeding tickets. For the sake of intersectionality here let’s note that the sexually assaulted, Chanel Miller, was later revealed to be Asian.
The judge in this case? Former Stanford athlete Aaron Persky.
Then all hell broke loose and all of it congealed around Persky who was summarily recalled in 2018, the first judge in 80 years to get rolled like this. He was also ordered to pay $161,825 to the recall campaign, and according to small Silicon Valley rumors his social life was upended, friendships dashed. Persky had tried to coach girls’ tennis at a local high school and had to move on from here when it was discovered that he was “the” Persky.
I felt some certain amount of satisfaction. To the tune of Minor Threat’s “Sometimes good guys don’t wear white.”
Then one day while training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. This face spends the whole training session there and then when I’m in the middle of making a joke post-training about the size of my penis it hits me: PERSKY.
“Hey…I’m class of ‘84. You too right?”
He knows and then again he doesn’t know. And because he’s not sure he just assumes and says, “I’m using my real first name now: Michael.”
But I wasn’t going to ask. And as we unroll the names of possible friends in common I’m watching him. Without rancor. Without judgment. But fully aware of the fact that if I had been Brock Turner at any point in my life I wouldn’t have been there, free and unencumbered, and having an easy chat with Judge Aaron Persky.
He leaves and I pull the head coach aside and tell him what happened.
“You were so fucking friendly to him. I didn’t know,” the coach said. “But you’re not that friendly to anybody. So I was confused. You think he’ll come back?”
“I hope so.”
“Why? So you can fuck him up?”
“No, man. I think he’s had enough of that.”
“You feel sorry for him?!?”
“Not that either,” and I pause. I mean had Persky actually sexually assaulted Miller himself, given our sentencing laws and the execrable way we treat victims of sexual assault he, in all likelihood, would probably be out of jail already. This sucks. But this is the law.
And this is the same calculus that got him roasted. But, for the sake of intersectionality here, let’s note finally that Michael Aaron Persky is some version of white. Which, weirdly, seems to make all the difference in the world.
So did he ever come back?