The print version of Monsters in Our Heavens #1 also includes  an introduction and some advice about what do if you are being harassed at work. MIH #1 was published in May 2008 and is available from www.arcadedistro.com for one dollar plus shipping.

I spent the last school year working with 30 kids and my co- worker Matt at an afterschool program in an elementary school for five hours a day. Since our supervisor, Alan, was in charge of several afterschool programs in the area, he only visited the school every other week. Matt was left officially in charge because he had been working for the program six months longer than I had. So while Matt wasn’t technically my boss, he took that bit of authority to heart and abused it as often as he could.

Though he was active and the kids had fun with him, I couldn’t really stand Matt as a person and it wasn’t because he was a football- playing, computer- gaming, red meat- eating college student from some small town an hour away. He talked nonstop while at work, so I felt like I knew him pretty well after the first week we spent working together and it became plainly obvious to me that he was usually full of shit.

He was the kind of person who believed that he couldn’t be racist because he had a few black friends. But one day, he made a big deal out of the fact that all the black kids in our program liked grape juice. Never mind the fact that almost all of the kids liked grape juice; Matt wouldn’t accept it as coincidence. He said that he didn’t see the harm in stereotyping black kids based on grape juice, but I think that by pointing that out, Matt proved that he considered other people’s personality traits to be based on the color of their skin (or whether they are gay or straight; male or female). I wondered if he saw anybody as an individual; or if he had decided that everybody was just a conglomeration of personality traits based on their race, gender, etc.

Every time a womyn under the age of forty waved to him before walking out the door, he would immediately come strutting over to me to obsess over her physical features and try to convince me that she was totally flirting with him. His comments really annoyed me: partly because it’s just not an appropriate thing to talk about at work- we’re supposed to be the adults in charge of a roomful of kids, and also because it made me worry that Matt was misinterpreting my own friendliness as an invitation to treat me like a potential object of interest. 

True story: Matt programmed his cell phone to remind him not to cross me during the weeks that he predicted that I would be on the rag. For a week each month, a few minutes after he came to work, the phone would beep and Matt would show me the screen that said “LT- PMS Alert,” with a big, shit- eating grin on his face. He could never seem to understand why I didn’t find that hilarious. (And just for the record, his calculations of my menstrual cycle were way off. Every time I got angry with him, which was practically every few days, he would ask if I had gotten my period early.)

I constantly tried to point out when he was being sexist, when his jokes were inappropriate for work, when I needed him to leave me alone, but I was never able to get through to Matt. He would get defensive and either (a) insisted that he was joking or (b) called me a hypocrite or (c) said that I’m mean and stormed off. Still, I never repeated any of the fucked- up stuff he said or did to Alan. That was partly because I chalked up his behavior to immaturity rather than flat- out sexism. Plus, running to my supervisor for help would have gone against my belief that hierarchy and authority figures are unnecessary.

In order to explain how things finally changed at my workplace, I guess I’ll start with the first incident that got me thinking that I needed to find a new way to deal with Matt. One night, he asked me to leave work early to go turn in his timesheet (the form that we used to keep track of our hours) to the office. Then, five minutes after I left work, Matt called me on my cell phone and the conversation went like this:

“Hey LT, Alan just showed up.”

“Oh shit, did he ask where I was?”

“Yeah. I told him you left to visit your friends in Houston.”

“What the fuck? Why?”

“Well, what was I supposed to do, get myself in trouble? He’s not mad at you anyway.”

I happened to run into my supervisor at the office a few minutes later, and of course I had to tell him the truth. I thought Matt would be pissed that I ratted on him, but he actually apologized.

I started thinking that maybe Matt had learned his lesson until a couple of weeks later, when he crept up behind me while I was playing checkers with a kid, and he jabbed his fingers hard into my sides in the way where it kind of tickles but also really kind of hurts. I have always hated being tickled. People think that’s weird, but it makes me feel like I’m not in control and I start to panic a whole lot. Naturally, I whipped around to face Matt and spoke as calmly as I could, but with more than a trace of malice in my tone. I said that I hate being tickled and would appreciate it if he could please not touch me again. He reacted in his usual fashion; rolling his eyes and saying that I need to lighten up under his breath.

We did a great job of avoiding each other until the second half of the day. I don’t remember how I pissed him off, but just hours after I told him not to, he started tickling me under my arms and on my sides. I guess that was his way to establish control without hitting or yelling at me, but in my eyes, being tickled in infinitely worse than being physically assaulted. When he let up, I shot up from my defensive cower and punched him hard in the arm. My hands were shaking from how upset I was. What happened next was pretty shocking and frightening: He grabbed both of my wrists and slammed me against the wall. There were kids around, but neither Matt nor I said a word out loud during this incident, so I don’t think any of the kids were aware of what was going on. Matt was still breathing heavily after he let go of my wrists and I could tell that he was furious. He warned me not to ever hit him again.

Now you’re probably wondering what I did about it immediately afterward, and I’ll tell you upfront that I didn’t really know what to do. After that encounter, Matt and I avoided each other until the end of the work day, when I demanded an explanation from him. At first, he gave me a lot of bullshit excuses: He was just messing around, I hit him first, he wasn’t trying to hurt me. But when he saw that I wasn’t having any of it, he came up with a very sincere- sounding apology, and I decided to just let it go. That must sound so stupid and pathetic, but listen: People like Matt are very coercive and manipulative. They know how to play on your insecurities to et what they want. I walked away thinking that maybe it was my fault, maybe he just forgot, maybe the next time that he does something fucked up, then I will tell Alan about it.

A couple weeks later, I finally decided that I was done putting up with Matt’s shit. It was on a Thursday afternoon after he walked up to where I was sitting on a bench with a few of the older kids and sort of lunged at me like he was going to attack me. Here’s the exchange that followed:

“Ohh, I’m real scared, Matt.”

“You should be. You know I could easily kick your ass.”

“And you know that I could just as easily tell Alan about it.”

“Oh yeah? I’d just tell him that you’re lying because you’re mad at me about something else.”

Yeah Matt was joking, still I couldn’t help but think, “Well, he was violent with me that one time, and he has lied to our supervisor to keep himself out of trouble.” I knew that I would be putting myself in a stupid position if I didn’t tell Alan what Matt had said. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t try like hell to convince myself that I could still deal with this on my own.

My boyfriend at the time was in jail, so I didn’t feel like I had anybody who would take the situation seriously to talk about it with. Making matters worse was the fact that I was seriously doubting that the supervisor would believe me. According to Matt, he and Alan were good friends.

With seemingly nowhere to turn for advice, I looked inward. I thought about what I would do if my younger sister had come to me and told me that she was in this same position with a boy at school. If you have a younger sibling, then I don’t need to tell you that I would, at all costs, make sure that somebody told that boy what’s what and that my sister felt safe and comfortable at school from then on. I figured that I should treat myself with the same respect that I show my sister, so I vowed to go to the supervisor’s office in the morning and tell him about what had been going on.

I woke up in the morning with my stomach in knots and drove to the office; fully expecting not to be believed or told that I was making a big deal out of nothing. I figured that the very best I could hope for was that Alan would give him a slap on the wrist; then Matt would be mad at me and make my days miserable for as long as we worked together. Regardless of the consequences, I just had to get this off my chest and find out for sure if anything could be done to help me.

I worked up all of my nerve and marched inside, only to learn from the ladies at the front desk that Alan had taken the day off from work. I stood alone there in the hall for a few minutes; not sure what to do, but unwilling to face another day of work with Matt while this issue went unresolved. I paced around the building until I found myself standing at the door of Janet’s office; the womyn who supervises my supervisor. Totally scared and overwhelmed, I had to consciously ignore the doubt running through me, the sweat that was starting to pour out of my skin, and my heartbeat pounding in my ears as I knocked on the door. 

To my relief, Janet let me into her office and told me to take a seat. I introduced myself shakily, but she already knew who I was. As I started to relate the problems that I was having with Matt, a genuine look of concern spread across her face and I relaxed a bit. Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. In my head, I tried to tell myself that I need to keep my shit together and that this was sounding too much like a therapy session, but I needed Janet to understand the full scope of how fucked up Matt had been to me this year.

After I related the same story that I just told you to her, Janet paused for a minute to turn to her desk and took a deep breath. Then, she told me that there was a label for Matt’s actions, like tickling me after I told him not to: “Sexual harassment.” Once she said that, the weight that I had been carrying around finally lifted from my shoulders, and I was so relieved that I could have cried.

After all these months of being scared, I had at last told somebody about Matt and she believed me. I was never going to have to worry about Matt getting me fired in retaliation for not playing along with him. I would no longer be afraid of the day when Matt finally snapped and physically or sexually assaulted me in a way that had lasting effects because now I had Janet to back me up.

Now, what should have happened next? Well, ideally, Matt should have been stripped of his supervisory role, Janet and I would have set up a meeting to confront Matt and tell him that his actions were not okay, and his future behavior should have been monitored by the wimmin he worked with to make sure that he wasn’t bullying anybody.

To this day, I’m not sure if Janet handled this situation the right way, but I do think that her intentions were good; I definitely feel like I can trust her as an ally. Here’s how it went down: Janet asked me if I felt comfortable going to work that day, and I told her truthfully that I did. I also said that Matt is just immature and that I think he needs to be talked to, (by a supervisor, since he won’t listen to me) but not fired.

After my meeting with Janet, I went to work that day feeling guilty and awkward around Matt. Over the weekend, Alan had a talk with Matt and told him that his behavior toward me is unacceptable. Out of spite, he ignored me until Thursday morning- when he apologized before work. Our relationship afterward was tenuous, so at the end of the year, I felt disappointed that I was never able to get through to Matt and teach him how to be respectful toward wimmin, but I did succeed in standing up for myself and making my work environment a safer place.