Too Close

I was 18 years old during the summer of 2009. My family and I were off to Disneyland for a week-long vacation. I had a lot of fun throughout the week until the very last night. I was on my way to the hotel room after having a smoke. I had just come out of the elevator when someone approached me. He was wearing a solid white cook uniform and he rushed up to me to ask if I wanted to drink that night. I figured I might as well get drunk since it is the last night.

I don’t recall the entire walk out of the hotel or to his car. The next moment I remember I was in his car and he was walking out of a gas station in Los Angeles with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He didn’t get any chaser so it was hard to down the shots. He pressured me to drink more and more, but he only took a couple of small drinks off the bottle.

He drove us to some random park and we got out of the car to walk out in the grass. I was pretty drunk by that time. He tried to be suggestive and I told him I have a boyfriend, but it did not stop. I told him I was going to beat his ass if he didn’t stop trying to touch me. He did not believe me and now I can’t believe myself either. He wrestled me down, but he did not hurt me. I gave up when I realized how strong he was and he let me up off the ground.

Thoughts started to run through my head. Things have happened before. Things like this. Being drunk… alone… with some stranger. Most people would have learned their lesson by now, right? Not me. Here I am at some park a few hundred miles away from home, in the middle of the night. Here I am once again in another dangerous situation too drunk to protect myself if anything happens.

Eventually, we went back to the hotel, but he still wouldn’t leave me alone. He brought me to a storage room and attempted to put me up against a wall, trying to kiss me, but I pushed away. I kept telling him no… I kept telling him to stop, but he just kept trying to pressure me. He never raped me, thank god, but he could have, easily. He had the opportunity to have done whatever he wanted at any point that night and no one would have ever known.

This is what scares me the most, what he could have done…

I got lucky. I mean I got really really lucky that night. To think about that situation today makes me feel the kind of anxiety I should have felt in the first moment that guys approached me at the hotel. I should have anticipated the possible outcomes and denied going in the first place. What if I didn’t get as lucky. He could have raped me, beat me, even killed me, and left me out there in that park.

The incident still affects me because of how dangerous it really was. It didn’t feel dangerous at the moment, but years later I have come to see the reality of it… and even what could have happened, yet didn’t… is still part of the bigger picture of reality.

I use this memory to remind myself of how people choose what they do. If they want to take advantage of you, they will. If they don’t, they probably won’t, but could they change their mind? Yes, that guy could have changed his mind at any point. He didn’t have to take me back or let me go. I just got really, really lucky.