The Ties that Bind: Rape as a Job Hazard

In the aftermath of a horrible attack, I couldn’t change my whole life, but I could change a small part of it

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In the beginning I collected ties. Men’s ties.

Like notches on a belt, each one a token of a battle won, a new land conquered. I favored fancy places like Lutèce or Laurent. Places frequented by overfed men in expensive suits accompanied by velvet- and pearl-wearing ladies with perfectly coiffed hair and pancake to hide their wrinkles. Where conversations were held in whispers, and you heard the delicate ring of silver on silver as expensive cuts of meat were sliced into dainty pieces.

I liked those places because when I walked in, wearing something like my dark purple spandex, cut up to the hip on one leg, down to the waist on the other shoulder; when I walked in with my fire engine red Ziggy Stardust haircut and five-inch black spike platforms; when I walked in on the arm of a man in an expensive suit and tie, all eyes turned to me. I liked the shush of velvet as the ladies turned, then turned away, cutting their eyes at each other; the silence as the men turned, stopped eating, stopped talking, then turned away, avoiding the eyes of their wives.

It was power; I was on stage, center ring, and I loved that feeling.

It was a fight to the death. I was taking one of their own, but instead of a scalp or an ear, I took a tie. And the money as well, of course, but that I never could hang on to. The ties, I collected, and hung from the ladder of my loft bed, the way a hunter fills the walls of his study with the mounted trophy heads of his kills.

Men’s ties. I mean, I don’t blame him, they were there. They were handy and designed to be knotted, and there was a seemingly endless supply of them. In hindsight, I think it should have been enough to make me stop, those six hours. Six hours that have spanned thirty years. You’d think it would have been enough at that moment, to wake me up, make me stop drinking. Stop dating pimps. You’d think.

You’d be wrong. I just stopped fucking guys who wore ties.

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I wrote a book about the ten years I spent working the hoochy cooch bars in Times Square. I peddled that book around and while most found it too brutal, even the people who liked it wanted to know how I got there.

You can’t just drop yourself into the middle of Times Square and start the story there, they said. People want to hear about what came before.

If I’d been able to talk about what came before, maybe I wouldn’t have found it necessary to find my way to the middle of Times Square to begin with.

When I arrived there, it was the end of the 70s, the beginning of the 80s. New York City was different than the city you know today. Times Square was someplace you could disappear, hide in plain sight—not a tourist destination. Neighborhoods were dangerous in ways they haven’t been for years. Pre-Disney, before NYU took over downtown, before silicone or lap dances, before even crack or AIDS, when pimps looked like Huggy Bear, taxi cabs wouldn’t go further east than First Avenue, and if you had breasts, of any size or shape, home grown or bought and paid for, you could get paid well to show them off.

If I could have talked about the things that happened before, the things that happened after might not have had to happen at all.

So, I wrote a book no one wanted to publish about my Times Square years. Well, wait a second. A book is something that’s been published. It has a front cover and back cover. There’s a binding, a spine, lots of pages.

I wrote a story. Some of which has been published, but not enough to warrant a front and back cover all its own. I’ve tried rewriting the story, in an attempt to fit into the shape it needed to fit between the two covers, what editors had asked for.

I only got as far as the rape.

I was raped. Burned. Beaten. Sodomized. Fisted both vaginally and anally. I was terrorized and tortured and bound both around my wrists and my ankles with ties that had been hanging all over my bedroom.

Men’s ties. I mean, I don’t blame him, they were there. They were handy. And there was a seemingly endless supply of them.

I wrote about that. Then I wrote about that again. And again. And again.

Then I stopped writing. I kept trying to go back and finish the story. I’d written about the years that followed, but suddenly, I couldn’t even do that.

You know, when I started writing this story it was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be what they’d asked for, it was going to be about how I got to that place in my life.

Not about how my life got stuck there.

And it is stuck. Like an LP with a scratch, the needle gets so far and then it just keeps repeating the same snippet over and over again. You get to hear a brief interlude that came before, but the symphony that follows? That remains unheard.

I backed away from the story.

I tried to look at it from a civilian’s point of view. Someone who couldn’t even imagine rape to be a “job hazard.”

It should have been enough, I thought in hindsight, enough to make me stop what I was doing. It was six hours in 1980something, six hours that’ve lasted more than thirty years. So, you’d think it would’ve been enough at that moment, to make me stop drinking. Stop shooting dope. Stop dating pimps. Groupie-ing for gangsters. Enough to make me find a job where the dress code involved more than G-strings, fishnets, and platforms.

Instead, I just stopped fucking guys who wore ties.

Jodi Sh. Doff is a NYC based writer and caregiver. Her work appears in print and online, in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, and frequently includes autobiographical elements of addiction, alcoholism, and caregiving. Follow her on Substack at The Dirtygirl Diaries and The Long Goodbye.