Same Old Sh*t, Different Century

In 1977 I lived in an apartment complex, Governour’s Square, north of downtown Columbus, Ohio. I guess the “u” in Governour” was supposed to make it classier. It didn’t work, but, hell, we were young and didn’t care about that stuff.

I was an administrative assistant for a state pension fund’s investment department downtown. My roommate had a car. I didn’t. I took the bus to work and hitched rides with her and other people for shopping and parties, basically the sum of our twenty-something lives besides our jobs.

It was handy that across the busy four-lane artery of Kenny Road was a small shopping center with a TGI Fridays in the front. We often walked there to meet friends or to grab dinner for ourselves.

One weekend night we were craving some of their loaded baked potato skins and fried zucchini and braved the scary intersection and walked into the restaurant, astonished to be able to get a table for two without any wait. I can tell you exactly where we sat. I don’t remember if I ordered a beer. I don’t remember if we got anything else to eat. What I do remember is how great it was to have time to catch up. My roommate was a newly-minted clinical social worker and I was hip-deep in sorting through bond trades and trying to catch up with Wall Street brokers. We both loved our jobs. We were learning lots of new and interesting things.

We were deeply engaged in conversation, our heads bent toward one another and sharing our appetizers when a guy approached our table, preppy looking with short hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a button-down shirt and a half-smile on his face, and leaned over and as I was mid-sentence butted in to tell us he and his buddies — gesture over the shoulder — had seen us and wondered…

Usually, it was my habit to hush up and accept the “compliment” of unwanted attention. I’d smile and nod and say “no thank you” and use body language to say “go away.” But something snapped for me that night.

I stopped him right there. “You’re interrupting us,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “What?”

“My friend and I are having a conversation, and you interrupted us.”

“But my buddies and I…”

“We’re not here to get picked up. We came to have dinner and enjoy each other’s company.”

I don’t remember specifically what he said next, but it had to do with not being convinced I really meant “no.” He tried to keep going, to impress on me the opportunity we were passing up, as if he was doing us a tremendous favor, and saying “C’mon” a lot.

“I’m asking you to please leave us alone,” I finally said. “We just want to have dinner together and be left in peace to have our conversation.”

And, of course, you know what came next. He stopped leaning in, his fake smile disappeared. He stood up and said, “Fucking bitch” and walked away.

Listen to me when I tell you, that was nearly fifty years ago, a different time and place, a different century, but sometimes I think all we’re doing is going in circles when it comes to what we accept with regard to women and entitled, angry men. My seven years working for our local domestic violence and rape crisis agency did absolutely nothing to dissuade me from this stark reality. By and large, society shrugs, and my argument for that is that all over this nation DV and rape crisis agencies that have been operating for decades still exist and are busy all the time. But, that’s tangential and a conversation for another day.

I have higher hopes for my three-year-old granddaughter’s future, but sometimes I fear hope has seduced me by giving me blinders. I worry as June grows she’ll have to be prepared in the same way I was, in the same way I had to prepare my daughter, with warnings that too many men expect compliance from women or we may suffer the consequences.

Lately, the rhetoric has gotten exponentially worse with faux Christianity loudly sanctioning male superiority along with whatever tactics are necessary to enforce it. Layered in there is a rogue administration that values power above all else with the twisted agenda to force unwarranted obedience on its citizens. Again, conversations for another day.

But the conversation for today is that this past week in Minneapolis, while the situation was clearly and vastly worlds-apart different from having to deal with an obnoxious preppy guy at TGI Fridays, there is a Venn diagram of overlap, or a continuum of sorts, dynamics that are familiar and in this instance with deadly consequences. A woman in her car utters the last words she’ll ever speak, saying, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” and the guy with the gun shoots her in the face three times and walks off, muttering, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

My dear friends, believe me when I tell you tens of thousands of women immediately recognized that man’s dismissive, angry tone, the one that says “your voice doesn’t matter and you don’t matter, only my power matters.”

RIP Renee Nicole Good and deepest condolences to her family and all who loved her. May this moment carry in it seeds of a turning point.