Sexual Harassment Saga (Part 1), continued…
It was Christmas Eve. The office was nearly deserted. Jeff (my boss), Mike (the Safety Director) and five of the six owners had disappeared for the holidays. With an absence of male leadership (note: all leadership was male) and only a fraction of the “girls” working, it felt like a ghost town.
On this quiet afternoon, I was contently working in my office when he entered. I’d tell you his name, but I forgot it. Funny how something so significant as the name of the man who triggered an 8 year ordeal has slipped through the cracks of my memory 13 years later. What I do remember is that he was old, and I was young. I was in my 20’s; he was in his 70’s. He was a retired California Highway Patrolman, working part-time inspecting fleet vehicles and signing fix-it tickets. His job required him only to interact with the guys in the shop (a separate building from mine, across the parking lot outside my window). I worked exclusively inside, in the executive/administration building. He had no reason to come into my building, much less my office. And yet, he did.
We had met months earlier. Our paths crossed by chance when we were in the dispatcher’s office at the same time. I knew from that first encounter that something wasn’t right. I could sense it. Not just the violating feeling of a man undressing you with his eyes – something more. The sprouting of an obsession. I tried to reject the feeling. Discount it. Dismiss it. Chalk it up to my oversensitivity. The problem is, you can’t shake what you know in your gut. You just try to “act” like you don’t know it.
Not long after that first interaction in the dispatcher’s office, he began stopping by my office to chat every so often. The visits soon increased in frequency and length. Before long, he was showing up at my office like clockwork every day he was working, no longer standing around making casual conversation but confidently and authoritatively pulling up a chair and imposing his will upon me. He wanted to see me…to look at me…to watch me. I wanted him to leave me 
alone. He knew it, but he didn’t care. There were several occasions during these uninvited visits when he would just stare at me. No conversation. Just silence. He seemed to like the tension and discomfort that created for me. He’d run out of things to say, but he didn’t feel awkward about remaining there, in the chair across from my desk, just gazing. His eyes spoke, and what they said was not good. I had grown more than uncomfortable with him. I was afraid of him. What I saw in his eyes scared me. My gut from that first encounter in the dispatcher’s office was dead on.
But he was old. He could have been my great-grandfather. I was taught to be respectful and polite to my elders. My sense of duty, combined with my feminine inclination to be accommodating kept me from saying to him what I so longed to say: “Leave me alone!” It was that same sense of duty and imputed respect that served me up on a platter for him on that fateful Christmas Eve.
December 24, 1996. I was at my desk, working. The air in the office was light as a handful of us girls were wrapping things up before Christmas. I was loving my job, looking forward to Christmas with my family. All was well with the world…until he appeared in my doorway. As always, his appearance triggered a tensing in the pit of my stomach. As always, I greeted him with an artificial smile and cordial discourse while my insides cringed. As always, he perched himself in the chair across from my desk, looking at me, leaning back with the poise of a predator.
He began with his usual rambling – insignificant chit chat to which I politely offered an occasional response. My reticence was only peppered with one word or one sentence acknowledgements of his monologue. My focus was on my work, with my head down and my hands busy typing, writing, going through papers. He knew the message I was sending, but he didn’t care. He willfully ignored it, as he had been doing for weeks through my escalating hints to leave me alone. After what seemed like an eternity of his fixated stare with little conversation, he finally stood up talking about how he had better get going. Just when I thought my anxiety was nearing relief, he started to approach my desk, asking me if he could have a “Christmas hug.” That’s what he called it – a “Christmas hug.” I was dumbfounded. Fight or flight. Do or die. Confrontation or accommodation. As etiquette seemed to dictate, I reacted with the latter. It was do or die, and I did.
The lady in me – the one my mother raised to be well-mannered, respectful and kind to people – she stood with the poise of a princess that would make my mom proud. As I got out of my chair to walk out of my U-shaped desk, he navigated his tall, large frame around the desk, reaching me before I had stepped two feet from my chair. He went in for the hug. I raised my arms to touch his arms in a semi-defensive position of a faux hug – a “this will technically count as a hug but I’m keeping my arms here to make sure you can’t fully hug me” sort of way. As I did, his little “Christmas hug” turned into his large, long arms reaching around my body and pulling me into him as his face came crashing into mine. With reflexes the speed of light, I turned my head to the side just in time for my cheek to receive an open mouth of saliva and tongue landing on it. He had attempted a kiss…an open mouthed kiss, while holding me firmly in his arms. That was the moment time stood still. That was the day that everything changed in my world, though I had no idea at that time how much of an impact that moment in time was going to have on my future. Like the day my mom died, this day was a historical marker on the timeline of my life.
Photo credits: Will Foster, Matt Hampel
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