The Time I Got Roofied and Why I am Pro-Choice

In Fall / Spring 1998-1999, I was living in North Austin with my friend Rebecca. We had met on my first day of college a few years before. She had just finished her degrees in mathematics and economics a few months prior and had just started working for the state.¹ I was in my junior 4^th year pursuing my degrees.

Rebecca was bright and funny. It must be noted as well (it figures into the story) that she was beautiful too. She had a certain…aura that always seemed to me to be standard-issue to beautiful girls from the Dallas area that suggests that “you probably aren’t good enough to talk to me.”

In private contexts, I would describe her as thoughtful, quiet, and tender. But in public contexts, she really knew how to get a party going. She could schedule your evening plans with a quick, “You’re coming to the bar with us later on, right?” Caught in her magnetism and charisma, you knew you’d go. And you did. At any rate, she made just such an invitation in the icy Winter of 1998 that we and another dozen or so friends meet up to do New Year’s Eve on 4^th street.²

We took cabs down and went into one of the bars down there. I don’t quite recall which, and mentioning the name now might cast an aspersion on an establishment that might not deserve it. Let’s just say somewhere near the landmark gay bar “Oilcan Harry’s.” In short order, our party filled in. Rebecca commandeered a low coffee table for drinks and a couch for the party. She was always able to get a seat or a table wherever we went.

Now I will readily admit I had a drink or two, probably whiskey sours as that was my drink of choice back then. But I’ll also emphasize that I was in my early 20’s at that point and drank regularly: after finals, when tubing, when hiking at the Springs. This isn’t a point of bragging, but it is an attempt to say that what happened next was not simply “Oh he had more than his limit.”

As you might expect of a beautiful, vivacious girl who always got the good seat at bars, Rebecca decided that what our party needed was a round on her. As I recall, and this is the last thing I very vaguely recall, I think the drink was called a goldfish? I think it had powdered sugar in it? When she reappeared, she had a serving tray laden with glasses full of a pinkish drinks.

I drank mine and thought it was formidable, but not unusual. It was sweet and sugary and it didn’t feel any stronger than a shot of quality tequila. My lady also had one. The night went on a bit longer and then Rebecca offered me the rest of hers. She said she didn’t like it and, being a he-man thanks to dominance-based masculinity (“Real Texas men always outdrink the women-folk”), I downed it.

And then, I remember nothing.

I woke up the next day with a pissed-off lady and an apartment full of strangers. “What…happened,” I asked, baffled.

My lady turned from irritation, to her credit, to curiosity and care and said:

“You don’t remember being in the street?”

“No.”

“You jumped out of a cab [As in, it had stopped in traffic, I opened the door and climbed out].”

“I what?”

Now anyone who’s known me for a while knows that I can certainly, and especially in my 20’s did, get up to some antics. But these feel so weird to me. I look back now and think: “I did what?”

When I push my memory as hard as I can, I can remember the busy traffic on 4^th street. I can remember shining headlights. I can remember horns honking, I gather, now, at me. I remember getting out of a cab for some reason, but I don’t know why. I remember thinking I was being entirely reasonable, but it, apparently, wasn’t reasonable in the eyes of a rational person nearby. The thought processes around motivation and why, I simply do not have.

Being 20 and invincible, not much else came of that story. I had made a righteous ass of myself (some more of that was yet to be done in my 20’s…) and slept through LOUD, BLARING music that had gone til the literal break of day thumping through the walls of the apartment.

I did my best to smooth feelings and laugh it off, but something never sat right with me about that night.

Shortly After

A year or so later, I told a friend this story. She’d worked some in and around bars, and I watched an ever-growing look of horror cross her face as I told the story.

“Uh, you sound like you were roofied.”

I’m pretty sure I said “What,” but I could hear the lightbulb lighting up.

“Do you remember how the second drink tasted?”

“Yeah, kinda bitter and metallic.”

She went ashen gray.

“Oh, Steven. And what ingredients were in the drink?”

“Well, I remember a lot of powdered sugar and lemons.”

“Neither of those taste metallic-bitter. And did the first drink taste like that?”

“Come to think of it, no…”

But I started to think more about what had happened and it shook me.

A Reckoning

At the time of the incident, I was a six-foot, 180 pound, 20 year-old young fella. I’d never had a blackout drunk before, and I have never had one since. But that night is a gaping hole in my memory. I think someone had tampered with Rebecca’s drink, and when I drank most of it, I took her place.

Weighing some additional scores of pounds more than a slight, thin young woman, I can only imagine how the same dosage would have affected someone of Rebecca’s frame and size. It would have been immobilizing and memory-obliterating.

And that’s when I turned ashen, I suddenly came to viscerally feel the true horror of this type of sexual predation. Had I been a woman under the influence of that drug, my memory would have been far too gap-filled to identify my assailant. My narrative would have been too murky to make for compelling testimony in an assault charge. I would have been hopeless to even put together a plausible he-said/she-said version of the events. And in a final wave of nausea I felt the sickening revulsion, I could have been made pregnant by that monster’s plan.

And in one sickening moment it became clear:

This is why we have to protect abortion access. Because men are sick fucking monsters.

Implications

On that day, I became pro-choice. First, I don’t bear children. I don’t know what it’s like, so I need to defer to the wisdom who do bear the young and the brunt of economic and care impact for doing so.

And secondly for men who think they need to have an opinion on this, I think we need to guarantee that, in the case of rape or incest, a woman’s access to this remedy be preserved, full-stop. Can you imagine bearing a more humiliating and sickening fate than being compelled by the state to nurture the fruit of your sexual assault? Is such a baby going to get the loving, care, and nurturing that is required for its flourishing? It’s indecently callous to expect the assaulted to transcend such a horror.

As I have grown out of my bubble of ignorance (I hope), I have come to understand there are also tragic cases where the health of the mother is in jeopardy in her pregnancy. In that case as well, a woman’s access must be guaranteed. Can you imaging being forced by the state to risk your life for a being that might take your life in the process?

In both cases, to force a woman to bear the child is to assert that her actual life and the dignity of it is worth a less than a hypothetical. In the post Roe v. Wade world, we’ve readily recognized these cases. Texas' recent heartless passage of SB8 denies even this. This law is cruel and tells Texas women their own bodies are not their own.

From this point, I am been willing to see that there are many other cases less clear than assault or medical jeopardy where abortion access is a remedy that benefits society and the living parent(s): spousal rape, lack of financial stability, debilitating post-partum, etc. These are all tragic situations that fill me with sadness to consider. But in every one of them, I trust those women to know what’s best for themselves and their prospects. If the state were really pro life it’d figure out how to give free day care, quality health care, safe housing, and ensure public schools for the poorest had similar success outcomes to the wealthiest. That’s a real “culture of life.” It’s a lot harder and it doesn’t triangulate and whip-up the base and accordingly, there’s nary a peep about bringing it to pass.

In closing, fuck you, aye-voters in Texas legislature on SB8. You are cruel and you know that your donor class will not get caught in this. No, they’ll always be able to “plan a roots trip to Europe” or “catch a show in New York” where such a procedure can be done discretely and out of conflict with profitable political myths, you cynical and craven assholes. No, you are making the lives of poor people — too poor to complain and all-too useful as a wedges to boost your political fortunes — hellacious in a heartless squeeze-play. Fuck you.

And as for the guy(s) who ruined my night (but who might have ruined my friend’s or some other poor girl’s life for the sake of their sexual gratification): Double fuck you; burn in hell.

Update: 2021-09-08

As if to double down on stupid even harder, when asked about the obvious case of: “You were raped and didn’t find out you were pregnant until 6 weeks after,” Governor Greg Abbot had this patently stupid response (video):

Speaker 12: (16:02) Governor, regarding the heartbeat bill, why force a rape or incest victim to carry a pregnancy to term?

Governor Greg Abbott: (16:08) It doesn’t require that at all, because obviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion. And so, for one, it doesn’t provide that. That said, however, let’s make something very clear. Rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets. So goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape so that no woman, no person, will be a victim of rape. But in addition to that, we do want to make sure that we provide support for those who are victims of rape. And we have organizations that we as a state support, that others support, to make sure that anybody who’s victimized that will get the support they need.

Speaker 12: (17:04) Are you planning to increase support for those moms once those babies are delivered?

Governor Greg Abbott: (17:07) Absolutely.

What possible “support” could someone provide to make “Oh, look there’s the baby I made with that guy who drugged me, raped me, and saddled me with economic burden and trauma for the rest of my life.”

Footnotes

There’s a lot to tell about our friendship and those years that I’ve never written about because it has a tragic end. Maybe someday I can write about those, but for the time being, I want to write about an event along the way.
I miss my friend. As I write this, my fingers want to record more about her. I can still hear her voice. There was a saccharine element to it like Los Angeles, I don’t hear any Texas twang or drawl. I remember her wet-haired and laughing while hanging out by the pool. I remember sharing pizza or creamed spinach on spaghetti and laughing at “South Park.” I remember raiding the local HEB for beer before the blue laws kicked in on Saturday night.