Let's call this a second story about the girl in my last entry, the girl at the Electra Palace in Thessaloniki. I have a few stories acquired from her back long ago, and I do want to archive them here. In the end, we're only the stories we tell. I've believed that for a lifetime.
This story isn't from very long after the summer she had the fling with the Greek boy with the vintage MG. If my memory holds, it happened during spring break the following year, when she was back in the city from Colorado School of Mines. I only heard it later, and I was never quite clear on the details. Marsha was never like the girl from New Zealand whose stories I've recounted here--- she wasn't someone who wrote everything into a journal, someone who thought her life was something to structure into a narrative. The story itself is a scary one, and very much a #MeToo tale, if not something a bit worse. I offer that as a warning.
From what I was able to gather, she was back home on spring break. She'd driven out of the city to visit a friend at a college maybe an hour's drive west over the river, and was coming back that evening. She took the older state highway and not the interstate highway. That led over a bridge and through the edge of a small town that had two points of notoriety. There was a restaurant-bar on the highway that had once been the center of a scandal involving illegal gambling, bribery, and half a dozen state legislators. And the town was a major speed trap. You'd come down from a bridge over a small local river and the speed limit suddenly went down to 30 mph. The town made a fortune in traffic fines.
In short, Marsha was stopped and ticketed for speeding coming off the bridge. The local fines were painfully high, and all the more so if you were doing 20 mph or more over the limit. Marsha was terrified of having to tell her parents she'd been ticketed...and at having to ask for a couple of hundred dollars for the enhanced fine. She told no one about the ticket and then drove back over a couple of days later to see if there was anything that could be done to reduce the fine or take driving courses or whatever. That strikes me as painfully naive now, but she was only eighteen, and as a posh girl she might've been sexually experienced since fifteen or sixteen, but nonetheless sheltered from a great many things.
The arc of the story is crushingly obvious. She went to the police station in the small town late one afternoon and talked to one of the deputies about her ticket. He assured her that while the town court was very, very serious about speeders, she had no previous tickets and maybe something could be done. He then invited her for coffee at the little diner down the street so they could talk about what she could tell the court. She got into the police car, and the deputy drove up onto the nearby levee and tried exactly the obvious thing--- grabbing her, kissing her, and getting a hand up under her shirt. She was braless, as she usually was, and that encouraged him to grope her more. She did tell me that her nipples hurt for the next couple of days, and that he'd left bruises on one breast.
I always obsess about details, but she didn't give me many. I'm still not clear on what she was wearing--- a long-sleeved tee or a polo shirt? Jeans or shorts? I knew her tastes enough to know that she loved polo shirts and had a thing for long-sleeved tees with college logos. When I've played the story in my head, I do imagine her in either a Colorado School of Mines tee or a band tee from whatever she was listening to that spring. Yes, I do understand that worrying about the details of wardrobe isn't a good thing on my part.
In any event, he groped her breasts and tried to kiss her...and tried to go further, to pull open the shorts or jeans she had on and get them down. I'm not sure what happened next. Marsha always said that she'd panicked and begun to cry and hyperventilate and the deputy panicked, drove her back to her car, and more or less shoved her out of the patrol car. She never said anything about what happened with the ticket itself, and for all I know the panicked deputy made it vanish. I certainly don't know what else happened in the patrol car. Did she kiss him? Did he make her give him head? Did any of it go further? Did her jeans or shorts come off? Had she offered him a blowjob to get the ticket fixed? I only had hints from her, and a couple of very brief mentions from the one local friend she told about it all. My own reading of the hints is that something happened, but after all these years, I'll never know what.
Now it probably says a lot about me (and says nothing good) that when I first heard about what happened, what went through my mind was that it was a scary-yet-hot story and that I wanted the story fleshed out. That might be understandable at eighteen, but...now? It is almost a porn video plot, though I'm sure that things like this do happen to young, terrified, vulnerable girls and that it's all a gross abuse of power and, yes, a crime. Nonetheless, even decades later, I do want the details and want to craft it all into a story. Needless to say, while I might've asked her about the details when we were both twenty or so and having a drunken reunion while home from our schools, I'd never be able to ask her now, even if I knew where she was. But the events are still there in my head, and I still see what happened as a film-in-the-head.
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