Free Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion by Grif Stockley

bluntly.
    Dade makes an angry face for the first time.
    “I didn’t rape nobody though. If you’re an athlete on this campus, you can get girls. That’s no shit.”
    “Were you attracted to her?” I ask again, knowing this is a sore point with him, given the lectures he must have received from his parents.
    I hear Dade’s stomach growl. Jail is a great place to be gin a diet. Patting his stomach through his wrinkled shirt, he says, “She wasn’t my type. A little thin, you know what I mean? No titties, no butt. I like girls with meat on ‘em.”
    I scribble as fast as I can.
    “So what did she do?” I ask, knowing there are a hundred details to fill in. But Dade seems in no mood at this first meeting to write a book on the subject.
    He looks at a spot on the ceiling and says emphatically, “She wanted it. She came over to the sofa and took this paper out of my hand and sat down by me. She started writing on it, and talking, kind of bumping against me on the sofa. Hell, I knew what she wanted and I kissed her.
    And before I knew it we were in the shower and damn she was hot! Shit! What else could I do? I only fucked her once, and then she got out of bed and took off like a bat out of hell. It was like she got what she came for, and that was all she wanted. While we were doin’ it, she didn’t complain or tell me to stop or nothin’.”
    I look at Dade carefully, knowing he has had almost forty-eight hours to come up with this story. It could have easily been a form of “study rape.”
    “When you say she was ‘hot,”
    ” I ask, neutrally, “try to remember exactly what she did or said.”
    He shrugs, “She was all over me. Kissing me, rubbing my dick, hugging me. She even washed me. All the time talking ‘bout how she liked me and what a good body I got.”
    I wish I had remembered to bring a tape recorder. Obviously her statement, which I should get tomorrow, is going to be quite a bit different.
    “Is she going to be able to testify you hurt her in any way?”
    Dade scratches his left armpit. He hasn’t had access to a shower in over forty-eight hours. I’ve had clients who contracted lice in jail.
    “She didn’t holler or anything.”
    “Did you use a rubber or any kind of birth control de vice?”
    Dade admits candidly, “I never even thought about it.
    It wudn’t like we stopped to talk about it.”
    I write, “no rubber” relieved at least his story seems consistent. I can see developing an argument that Robin was simply curious and decided to scratch an itch and felt overwhelming guilt afterward. Why shouldn’t she be attracted to him? They were friends; he’s a hunk. As routine a part of the culture as casual sex has remained, despite the threat of AIDS, it is not out of the realm of possibility that though Robin felt extremely ambivalent about what she was doing, curiosity and youthful desire got the better of her. Hormones and alcohol have been used to explain the behavior of young males since some body first slipped on a fermenting grape. If women expect to be treated like men, why doesn’t the same rationalization apply to them? A decent argument may be that it now does, but the difference is that they haven’t learned to stop feeling bad about behavior men take for granted. In concrete terms, ladies and gentlemen, my brain preaches, Robin Perry had a few glasses of wine beforehand, and wanted to see what it was like to sleep with an African-American who was a star football player.
    He accommodated her, but by the next day she was feeling so terrible about it she claimed it was rape.
    I go over his story again and realize I am convinced he didn’t rape her. There is something I find myself responding to in this boy. I might change a few things about him, but I would change a few things about myself as well.
    “Assuming Coach Carter is willing to talk to you,” I say, putting down my notebook, “we need to decide if you should talk to him and tell him your story. It’s