TRIGGER WARNING- True Story of my Jail Rape

I remember thinking, even as the 14 year-old boy on my left kept kicking me in the temple, how strange it was that I should notice at that moment how different a black cock tastes.

After all, I was at that moment, truly in fear for my life. That I could or would be killed, or at the very least, seriously injured, was being made graphically clear by my fellow inmates with the punctuated emphasis of their fists and feet.

These 35 or so others and I were the temporary guests of the District of Columbia Youth Detention Facility and I was seriously out of my depth.

I had been charged with simultaneously with being a runaway and with harboring a runaway. Despite my numerous requests to have this apparent contradiction explained, I never did learn how this could be. I can only say that it would provide great insight when later I would study Kafka in college.

In February 1970, aged 17 years and 3 months, I had moved to attend The Hawthorne School, a progressive, non live-in, private high school. It was a last-ditch attempt to find an academic environment I could adapt to long enough to finish high school.

I had already traveled extensively on my own, (to Eire & Britain, across Canada to Alaska, to the West Indies) but this was my first time truly living on my own. And none of it, particularly growing up in the semi-rural Pine Barrens of New Jersey, had in any way prepared me for my first experience with the D.C. police.

It began a few weeks earlier at a benefit concert for the Quicksilver Times, one of the ‘60’s best underground papers. Mixing politics, music, youth culture, and graphic art with deliciously biting satire, its articles and illustrations were frequently plagiarized by other magazines across the country. In those free-wheeling, anti-custodial days, this was seen as ultimate compliment.

As an aficionado, admirer, and creator of psychedelic art whose works adorned many clothes an bedroom walls amongst my friends back in New Jersey, it seemed to be just the outlet I was looking for.

Especially when I met the awesome Dawn.

A year older, with shimmering, golden, waist-length, she wore a long, diaphanous, Indian print skirt and a denim vest she had elaborately embroidered into a floral garden filled with all manner of mystical beasties.

She was a volunteer typist and seemed genuinely enthusiastic about showing my sketches to the art director.

` Of course the art director was more than happy to take on even an inexperienced hand with layout and I was invited to come by the following week.

I still remember my first assignment, a test of my skills. I was asked to enlarge a single panel of a cartoon strip. The kind of thing the most primitive xerox machine can do in seconds, but back then, any photo work, enlargements, half-tones, reductions, photo copying, had to be done in the darkroom at the printer and cost at least $10 each.

On the tiny operating budget of an underground paper, where rub-on lettering was a luxury, photo work was a major expense, an artist who could turn photos into drawings and alter graphics to fit a particular space was a valuable commodity. At the end of the four-day-straight layout and paste-up I was offered a paying job as a contributor.

Contributors were paid, as was everyone, in papers. 100 copies per issue with the full-time staff receiving 400 copies. We could sell them out of the office for wholesale at 10 cents per copy or sell them on street corners for 25 cents.

It was during my second layout session that I got busted.

In those open days, by their very nature, underground papers were the de facto community switchboards and were frequently the first contact newcomers had in a new city.

Street people, as they were then known in a non-pejorative sense, were common hangers-out. Freaks and politicos, hippies and vets, used our offices as a meeting area during daylight hours.

One such person, a young woman about my age, was, innocently, to be my undoing.

She had appeared in the afternoon and just spent the day hanging around. Our lobby had several well worn couches and was a virtual reading room for all the other papers in the US (we all exchanged papers). It was common for people to be there for hours, though this woman’s youth and beauty did make her stand out.

As night fell it became apparent that she had nowhere to go.

Now to those who were not there, it is impossible to describe the intense level of paranoia which existed amongst the counter culture of those times. We were more than a little of afraid of being shut down over even the pettiest of crimes.

Even though we had no idea as to what extent, we assumed correctly that we were under close surveillance.

The person working the front desk called the few shelters but it was late and they were either not answering or had no beds available.

I was asked if I had any friends who might put her up for the night but my friends and classmates all lived at home and it was far too late to start calling around.

I was looking forward to spending the next three days straight doing layout so I suggested, with only slightly impure thoughts, “Why doesn’t she crash at my place?’

More fateful words, before or since, I have probably not ever spoken.

The young runaway was astounded, especially when I made it clear that she would be there alone, that I would make such an offer to a total stranger.

Even if my meager possessions had consisted of more than a few clothes, school books, and a beat up alarm clock, I’d have had no qualms. Such were those idealistic times.

I had to walk her over and let her in, it being a sort of rooming house. Once there, I’d leave her my extra keys and go back to work. We never made it. We had to cross Du Pont Circle, an always busy intersection of 3 broad Avenues and 2 major Streets. It was, and is, a major pick-up point for transvestite and young, gay male prostitutes. It is never empty.

And even at 3 a.m., a 16 year-old girl and a 17 year-old boy should not have normally attracted any attention.

But as we were leaving the circle to head south on New Hampshire Ave., a blue and white patrol car squealed to a stop in front of us, blocking our path.

It was followed by another and another, until, dangerous desperadoes that we were, we were hemmed in by five cars including 3 marked and 2 unmarked units.

Never being one to keep my mouth shut when I have an opportunity to put my foot in it, I laughed out loud and asked if these 11 or 12 guys thought they would be enough.

It was the last time I had to learn that cops really hate wise guys.

Even at that youthful age I was a seasoned traveler with no little experience in dealing with the police. In the past I’d had to explain to Mounties how a 14 year-old came to be hitchhiking across Canada, to East German Staats Polizei why a 13 year-old was taking pictures of a military convoy (though I lost the film), and to some very stern-faced Dutchmen in white uniforms why I was camped on the beach in St Maarten with no money at age 15.

So foolishly I assumed that in my own country, tact, a calm demeanor, logic, and the truth, would soon set things aright.

If we’d just been runaways, and they’d just been police, that might have worked. But they had an agenda and were not interested in anything as trivial as facts.

It wasn’t until much later and had become more informed of the ways of the police “Red Squads” and FBI (not to mention, NSA, CID, DIA, et al.) that I realized the elaborate trap which had been laid for me to blunder into.

Through the Freedom of Information Act I would later learn that the entire building, down to the bathrooms, that the Quicksilver Times occupied, was infested with recording and camera equipment.

Other staff members have since shown me transcribed conversations and copies of files filled with references to photos of people engaging in all sorts of activities which pose an obvious threat to National Security such as having sex (a very popular subject), smoking hashish, or taking a crap (second only to sex in its fascination).