Grif Stockley: Illegal Motion

I interrupt, “How was she dressed?” I need to see a picture of Robin, so I can get an image in my mind of what happened.

“Skirt and sweater,” he says.

“She always dressed up, even for class.”

I remember seeing Robin, but it was from Row 42 in War Memorial Stadium at Little Rock during the Memphis game two weeks ago. As bad as my eyes are getting, I could have been standing next to her and not have recognized her.

“Did you have anything to drink,” I ask, “or could you tell if she had been drinking?” A good answer would be helpful here. If she had been juicing herself up beforehand, it would at least be arguable she had more than studying on her mind.

“I smelled wine on her breath, but we didn’t have any thing at Eddie’s. It happened pretty fast.”

“Did Eddie just leave his place unlocked?” I ask, glad I didn’t have a friend like Eddie in college. I got in enough trouble.

“He gave me a key,” Dade says.

“A couple of guys had them.”

I think I’m getting the picture.

“So it wasn’t uncommon to take girls over there.” Robin shouldn’t have been there. No woman asks for rape, a logical impossibility if there ever was one, but perhaps someone on the jury will want to punish her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they had really wanted to find a place on campus to study, it would have been easy enough.

“Not really,” Dade says.

“You got to get off campus sometimes.”

“So you’ve slept with girls over there before?” I say 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 possible that he may let you stay on the team if you can convince him you’re innocent. Whatever you say can be used against you. The cops will talk to him, and if you contra dict yourself, it’ll be used against you.”

“I want to keep playing!” he says, his voice anguished.

“That’s what I want for you,” I say.

“But there’s a risk involved each time you talk.” I do not say that if he plays out the season and continues to do as well as he has done thus far, he will be worth a lot more money (assuming he is found innocent) to whoever negotiates his pro contract.

“What do you think I should do?” he asks, his brown green eyes searching mine as if I had been representing him all his life instead of just the last couple of hours.

Damn. Lawyers have too much power over other people.

“I think,” I say slowly, hoping I am not acting too much from greed, “that if you get the chance you should talk to your coach and tell him the same things you’ve told me.”

He nods affirmatively. I’ve told him what he wanted to hear, and I know it, too. In a year or two, I hope I can look back on this and not come to the conclusion that I exploited him. Shit, I may be so rich that I won’t even think about it.

“What is Coach Carter like?”

Dade grins.

“He’s pretty damn tough. I’m in shape though. I was dogging it in two-a-days in the beginning, and he chewed my ass out good till I got with the program. I didn’t think I was, but he was right. If you give it a hundred percent, he doesn’t get mad if you screw up.

He just comes over and shows you what you did wrong.

My grandmother died on Monday the week of the South Carolina game. He told me to go home and not worry about it that I’d start and have a good game. I did. If he doesn’t like you though, you might as well quit. He’ll run you off if he thinks you’re bullshitting him.”

Coaches. They are the closest things to dictators the United States has. Nazis, most of them. Probably the worse they are, the better their records. Frustrated drill sergeants and about the same level of intelligence. I hated my track coach at Subiaco. Hell, he wasn’t the one running 880 yards in ninety-degree heat. Still, I was the Class A state champion my senior year, the only thing I ever won in my life, outside a racquetball game at the Y. While we are talking, the phone rings. It is Carter, who tells me to bring Dade to his office at seven tonight.