In what capacity? Stanley let out a huff of air in exasperation. He shook his head in exaggerated impatience, rolling his eyes. It came back to me early on, distinctly, that he had never wanted to be my boyfriend before this. My skepticism remained even as my memory wavered. Yet, he showed up each day, and I began to believe him when he said his feelings had changed. Other friends of mine who came to see me in the hospital were wary of Stanley, but his insistence on his right to be there and his role in my life stifled any objections that even my best friend, Sam, thought to make.
My mother and I had always communicated infrequently about my romantic endeavors. Later, she said I seemed like I wanted him there. With no memory of the original conversation, I believed him, but I felt overwhelmed. So he got a recruiting job and a room nearby. Instead of walking away or going inside, I just stood and watched him stutter as his face flushed until he finally formulated words.
And boy, what words they were. Incapable of speaking, I retreated through the sliding glass door into the kitchen. All of the words I wanted to say slithered through my mind, broken, disconnected.
But nothing came from me. As he spoke, he encroached on my space, stepping forward until his face was less than a few inches from mine. His hands still flapped in the air to either side; I think he may have wanted to grab me by the shoulders but refrained.
Stanley pulled his hands back, made a noise that sounded like a mixture of an exasperated moan and a frustrated yelp. All I heard next was the gate slamming behind him. All of the out-of-town transfer students over the age of 22 were corralled on the first floor of the transfer dorm. That dorm became a haven for all of us who had spent our post-high school years not attending college. But we had finally pulled together those community college units to gain admittance to a four-year school. And by God, we were celebrating.
Everyone except me. Stationed at the school-supplied prefab wooden desk underneath my bunk bed sans bottom bunk, I was drinking whiskey and playing music from a USB-connected speaker. Among the gyrating bodies, a short guy in a blue baseball cap, brim pushed up jauntily, slid forward with an elbow pointing at me. He looked too young to be drinking.
Later, Stanley would divulge his first impression of me: feet up on my desk, pugging whiskey straight from the bottle and ranting to him about Tom Waits. He thought I was a bitch. And I would tell him that I thought he was a disrespectful asshole. Before we slept together, Stanley spent all of his time with me and stopped seeing all of the other women he had been involved with. At the end of that year in the transfer dorm together, we all dispersed. But sure enough, he ended up in a sublet off of Laurel Street and would rap on my window from the front porch, softening his big brown eyes when I pulled back the blinds to see who it could be.
One day, Stanley, now sitting by that window at the computer chair and desk my sublet provided, broached a conversation we had never touched upon before, one I always avoided with everyone: acquaintances, bar patrons, friends — whatever Stanley was. I stopped listening after his initial question. A wood frame painted white housed a run-of-the-mill mattress, neither soft nor hard.
Stanley peered into my eyes incredulously, daring me to confirm what I could see him working out in his mind. So I did. And I said it for the first time in nearly 10 years. Maybe ask if I wanted a drink? Oh, God, I wanted a drink. Hmm, new to the area — no. I heard the words, I understood them, but none of them stuck with me. Your eyes water because everything feels overexposed and lacks detail. And then he kissed me gently and we had sex, on a mattress that could have been hard or soft or just fine.
And I understood because, I felt, who would want to be with me? In the months after I left the hospital, my memory slowly but surely came back to me. I remembered all of this, about how I met Stanley and what our relationship was like before the accident.
But I still had some questions. Some missing pieces — like how I could have let any of this happen. How could I tell you what Stanley had done? This conversation with Cassie took place before I fell out of the tree, and it came back to me as I gradually regained my memory. It happened on Memorial Day Weekend when we all still lived in the transfer dorms, she said.
They left before I returned from — where had I been? Drunk somewhere. Like always. Cassie described a beach bonfire. But then she and Stanley had run into the woods to find firewood.
She described Stanley slinging his arm around her neck, the same way he did to me. It was when she fell down that things changed.
She described them losing balance and toppling over a log. With him. And I hated myself. Because I had been awake, drunk but awake, when they returned. Everyone else clambered upstairs to continue the party, but Stanley pulled me into his room and into his bed. After what he had done. W hen Cassie told me all of this, Stanley had been studying abroad for months.
Neither of us had heard from him in that time. I heard from other mutual friends he had a girlfriend of sorts. I sighed and tried to keep an even tone. It sounded more like an accusation than a comment; it felt more like an accusation. You need to tell her. Call her right now and make sure you tell her. I n the months following my coma, these memories returned to me in sporadic waves.
I remembered, and then I convinced myself I must be misremembering, I must be wrong. Stanley would storm out whenever I brought up the past, only to return the following day like nothing had happened, which made things even more confusing. A foreboding sensation crept into my gut and my skin became cold and clammy. It was overcast, typical January weather in San Diego, but far from cold. Before we climbed the tree that night, you were telling me how much you hated him.
You had him buy a plane ticket back home in front of you to be sure he was really leaving. He had just moved all of his shit into your room after his lease ended, and you wanted him gone. Stanley and I had been involved, but it was long over, and — as usual — Stanley used me right when I thought I was rid of him.
When he came back from studying abroad, he stayed with me for about a week and insisted I mediate a conversation between him and Cassie. He found his own place, but then when the spring quarter ended and his sublease was up, he moved all his shit into my room; I protested but he insisted.
I still have no memory of the night I fell out of the tree, but Cassie told me I had made him buy a plane ticket in front of me to be sure that he would leave. After concluding our phone call, I remained seated on the ground outside.
I felt stupid; I was stupid. Stanley had been convincing me he was doing me a favor, that I needed him. When really, he needed me. Still paranoid about what had happened with Cassie and his reputation, he had been using me to convince everyone he was a good person.
A week after my call with Cassie, I was baking cookies. Remembering the recipe, the measurements, the order I needed to mix the ingredients, exercising my fine-motor skills to mix them — it was all good practice. It was all rehabilitating, my occupational therapist told me. Above the bowl of sugar and butter, my hands held a jar of peanut butter and an overlarge spoon, motionless. I stopped to look at her, closing one eye to combat the double vision the damage to my occipital lobe had caused.
Even knowing this, knowing my life had been disposable to him, I was too weak of a person to make him leave. You have a lot of competition. This obsession with outward aesthetics culminated in him taking me to Calaveras Mountain, a small mountain in east Carlsbad, and bidding me to run to the top.
Taking a knee, I put both hands onto the dirt-covered path and threw up. We were sitting at a Thai restaurant in a strip mall. Across the way, I had briefly worked as a hostess in a restaurant when I was newly 18; they tore it down and built a Red Lobster in its place.
Stanley reeled back as if he had just been slapped. His feminine lips parted and his bottom jaw hung open, aghast. Stanley, enraged, knocked over his tea. It had been almost empty. The outrage felt performative; the spill theatrical. I was beginning to get a headache; I just wished someone would be honest with me — my mom, Stanley, anyone who had been there.
Everyone wanted to protect themselves at my expense. But I chose to give it to my parents — the insurance had covered the majority of the medical costs, but my mother had racked up hotel bills staying in San Jose. He knew this — or should have. Did he ever listen to me? I took the train to work by myself. An eye surgery had corrected my double vision, and I no longer needed to close one eye or wear a patch to see. On paper, I appeared to be a legitimate, functioning adult, and no one asked about my abnormal gait or inability to write by hand.
It all matters. But what happened to me was real. Everything — my whole life — my whole life. You could barely string together a sentence before. You interrupted me. You yelled at me until I shook. I felt — all at once — I felt pain. You did something very wrong to Cassie. And me — you probably stunted the progress I could have made. Goodbye, Stanley. We were able to see each other in person in , then we talked on the phone in the summer of The hold rape culture has on us all makes it nearly impossible for genuine self-reflection to occur in these types of men.
I go to therapy to discern which parts of my skepticism are warranted and which are pure paranoia. Sign up for our Newsletter. When the Duffy Brothers were deported from the U. S, they hatched a plan to bring Bonnie-and-Clyde-style armed robbery across the pond.
Their plan had more holes than a bullet-riddled safe. T he American gangsters entered the British bank at three minutes to closing time on a Friday afternoon. Three men — two brothers and an accomplice — arrived outside, wearing black masks and gloves, horn-rimmed glasses, and narrow-brimmed trilby hats pulled low over their foreheads. They were armed with two revolvers and an automatic pistol.
It was p. Outside, at the Friday meat market, butchers and wholesalers closed up their stalls and rinsed blood from their cleavers. Inside, at the end of a busy week, bank clerks tallied up receipts and attended to the last straggle of customers, including apron-wearing market workers and a year-old girl. The brothers were Joe and Tommy Duffy, a pair of self-proclaimed American gangsters.
They claimed reputations as violent enforcers and armed robbers — and had the broken noses and gunshot wounds to prove it. Now they were bringing the bullet-spraying American bank robbery to sleepy England, where armed robberies were virtually unknown. But their gangster credentials were about to be severely tested. They had chosen the wrong bank, in the wrong city, at the wrong time, and there would be terrible consequences.
T he Duffy brothers were American gangsters who had been born to Irish parents in Edinburgh, Scotland, two of a family of nine sons. Joe immigrated in , ending up in Detroit, and Tommy followed across the Atlantic a few months later. Joe was then 20 years old and Tommy — the more rambunctious of the pair — was They may also have tried to become farmers.
This was the era of the gangster, the bootlegger, the racketeer. Prohibition and a thirst for illicit alcohol were allowing organized crime groups to flourish. Al Capone was waging war on the streets of Chicago. Arnold Rothstein was building a criminal empire in New York. Prominent gangsters, pictured on the covers of newspapers in chalk-striped suits and fedoras, became nationally infamous.
The hit movie Underworld , starring George Bancroft as gang boss Bull Weed, was the first of a series of gangster pictures that helped turn their protagonists into glamorous antiheroes. By their own account, it was the ease of obtaining guns that led the Duffys to become gangsters. The brothers became holdup artists, targeting stores and payroll trucks.
They also ran shipments of booze over the border from Canada for bootlegging gangs and became linked to some of the biggest names in American crime. Tommy claimed Capone offered him a job after spotting him during a boxing match.
By the summer of , the brothers were living in New York in a furnished room on the second floor of a red-brick rowhouse on West 11th Street. These were relatively small takes, but the brothers would later claim to have committed several more high-profile armed robberies, including at least one bank robbery.
Certainly, their activities brought them to the attention of law enforcement. Warren listed the Duffy Brothers on a lengthy wanted list of holdup gangs, alongside the likes of the Laughing Gang, the Harlem Terrors also known as the Sucker Gang , and the Headache and Aspirin Gang.
Commissioner Warren promised to rid the city of this scourge. One evening in March , the brothers were oiling their revolvers to prepare for a holdup when one of the guns went off and shot Joe in the left shoulder. There, doctors treated the wounds — and called the New York Police Department. Detectives arrested the Duffys and searched their room, where they found the revolvers.
The detectives believed they were guilty of several others. Both brothers were convicted of robbery in the first degree and sentenced to 20 to 25 years in jail. Joe was 24 and Tommy was They would not be eligible for parole until March , 20 years later. During their stays, both brothers experienced deadly riots in which several guards and prisoners were killed. Tommy was in the thick of the trouble and spent six months in solitary confinement.
More likely, Roosevelt just wanted the Duffy brothers out of the country. But whatever the truth, the brothers were placed into steerage on the SS Duchess of Richmond , and arrived back in Scotland on U. Independence Day, July 4, , determined to introduce American gangster methods to Britain. It was a hugely exaggerated and often ludicrous account of bullet-blazing shootouts and high-speed pursuits featuring an A-to-Z cast of infamous gangsters.
One character it did not feature was Joe Duffy. It was a more shocking and incriminatory story than the one the brothers had given to the Daily News following their arrest in In that modest account, there was no suggestion of any association with Al Capone or Legs Diamond, or of any criminal activity other than two stickups.
Perhaps the brothers were playing down their criminal connections in hopes of leniency. But their circumstances at that time — operating from a rented room with mail-order guns for low-value takes — did not seem particularly glamorous. The discrepancy between that Daily News story and the Weekly News account suggested that the Duffys wanted to inflate their reputations from small-time crooks to big-time gangsters.
With their sensationalist account, the brothers had an agenda. At least initially, they intended to become movie stars. Gangster movies were big business.
Hollywood released more than 30 crime pictures between and British studios also churned out crime movies, including the early pictures of Alfred Hitchcock. But the nearest Joe and Tommy got to silver screen stardom was a period working as movie extras at Elstree Studios near London. Then, according to their anonymous associate, they began to scheme up ways to raise enough money to bribe their way past immigration and back into the American crime game.
They tracked down some guns — probably decommissioned World War I weapons that had been reactivated on the black market — and planned an armed robbery. Instead, the Duffys recruited an Edinburgh tracklaying colleague named William Abbott to be the third member of their robbery gang. Abbott was a married man with a 6-year-old child and was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. He was known to local police but did not have a criminal record. He certainly had no experience of American gangster methods, nor apparently a full understanding of the implications of using them in Britain.
Strict firearms regulations and tough punishments meant armed robberies were extremely rare in Britain. Laws brought in to curb the circulation of military weapons following the war heavily restricted the purchase and possession of guns.
If a criminal killed someone while committing a gun crime, they could expect to be hanged. But, according to their anonymous associate, the Duffys were willing to do anything to get back to the United States, no matter the consequences. While these kinds of crime were virtually nonexistent in Britain, the public was familiar with them. British newspapers awed readers with tales of American armed robberies that seemed as distantly romantic as tales of the old Wild West.
Scotland Yard should be on its guard. For the Duffys, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, must have represented an even more appetizing target. It was more compact and less hectic than London, with fewer police officers — none of them armed with anything more than a truncheon. The Cattle Market branch of Lloyds Bank seemed particularly vulnerable. It was small but busy. The Duffys planned to march through the front door, terrify the occupants into submission with their guns, and walk out the back door with the cash.
But Newcastle, a medieval walled city, had a long history of fending off aggressors, from marauding Viking raiders to invading Scottish armies. Proud of its relentless production of coal, ships and Newcastle Brown Ale, neglected by the government and disregarded by the rest of the country, this was a tough-as-nails city that was used to looking after itself.
Its residents — known as Geordies — spoke in a dialect that was mostly impenetrable to outsiders. They were fiercely protective of their community. By , the global depression was biting the city hard.
Times were tough, and every penny was wrought from sweat and blood. The people of Newcastle would not give up their hard-earned money without a fight. Shoot him if he moves! Another of the masked robbers, probably Tommy, stepped forward with his revolver and ordered the teller and other employees to hand over their guns. This was an unnecessary request in England. Joe climbed over the counter and began to empty the cash drawer and fill his pockets with notes.
The third robber, Abbott, began to tie their hands behind their backs with green cord. One customer, a year-old girl, either refused or misunderstood and was pushed against a wall with a revolver pressed to her head. Meanwhile, bank clerk Joseph Robson rushed to a barred window at the rear of the building and yelled for help. Workers in the adjacent buildings heard the yells but assumed there was a fire and called the fire brigade rather than the police.
It was a calamitous error. Outside, although the meat market was closed, it was still busy with butchers and other workers, burly men with big, bloodied hands who were clearing out for the week. A crowd of them hurried to the bank, again assuming a fire. One of the butchers, Robert Angus, jumped up onto the window ledge to look inside. He saw the three masked men armed with guns, and the bank staff with their hands in the air. Some of the men began to barricade the entrance to keep the robbers inside.
Angus pushed through the double doors and strode into the bank, with a posse of other market workers behind him. The bank staff, realizing that help had arrived, began to fight back. Harrison, the teller, picked up a cash shovel and struck Joe behind the ear. By now, the fire brigade had arrived, and several firemen joined the fight. Abbott ran toward the door and pointed his revolver at the growing crowd outside. Ainsley, the bank manager, leaped onto Abbott and the two men began to wrestle on the floor.
The meat men then pulled fast the outer doors, trapping the robbers inside, where they were outnumbered and fighting for their lives. Tommy fled down to the basement and into the vault. Another bank clerk, Charles Robson, followed him down and locked him in. One of the customers, Kenneth Richardson, who was tied on the ground, recalled that one of the robbers — probably Joe — fell over him with blood streaming from his face. At some point, one of the robbers — again probably Joe — fired his gun.
John Ainsley disarmed Joe and stood over him with the revolver. Four men leaped onto Abbott and beat him into submission. By now, the police had been called. Workers peered out of windows and came out onto the pavements to watch the action. They lost their nerve then, because they realized the game was up. When Police Inspector Andrew Donohoe entered the bank, he found Joe and Abbott unmasked and bleeding on the floor, surrounded by butchers and bank workers. In the basement, Tommy had surrendered his pistol to a fireman.
Ainsley, the bank manager, had cuts to his face, and one of the clerks was slightly injured. Witnesses reported seeing a fourth man who might have been keeping watch hurrying away from the bank as the crowd gathered. But a fourth man was never identified, and the three bank robbers did not get away. They were dragged from the bank, thrown into a patrol wagon, and taken into police custody. All three gave false names.
But Constable David Nielsen of the Edinburgh Police said he knew all three accused men, and he properly identified them by their real names. Historians estimate that Queen Amanirenas was born between 60 and 50 B.
In response, the Kushites led by Queen Amanirenas successfully launched attacks against the Roman Cities in Southern Egypt, taking the head of the Statue of Augustus Caesar to be buried underneath the Palace Entrance at Kush as a symbol of the triumph over the Roman Empire.
After the Roman Empire had been defeated by Queen Amanirenas, the new Roman Governor, Petronius mastered a force of 10, Troops and began a campaign into the Nubian hinterland driving the Kushites Southwards and further inland for a period of about two years.
This is because Nubian hunters and warriors were known to excel as archers. Among the Nubian people, archery was not limited to men, as women too exhibited matching prowess. This gave rise to a number of women Nubian warriors and queens.
The most famous of whom was, Queen Amanirenas of Nubia, conqueror of the Romans. She was the second Queen of the Kush Kingdom, and was popularly known as Queen mother or Kandake, the title given to a ruling queen.
Her reign coincided with that of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony who ruled in Egypt. When Emperor Caesar Augustus of the Roman Empire defeated the Egyptians and made Egypt one of the provinces of the Roman Empire he decided to expand further south into the kingdom of Nubi.
When Queen Amanirenas received the news of the impending Roman attack, she had to think swiftly and strategically because Kush was much smaller than the Roman Empire, which meant that it had a smaller army. So, she decided to take the battle to the Romans by launching a surprise attack. Amanirenas led an army of about 30, Nubian soldiers, armed with swords, bows and arrows, to fight the Romans in Egypt. Simply click 'close' in the top right corner to continue reading! Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.
Like this: Like Loading About Brittani Barger 89 Articles. I have a B. I am also an avid reader who believes you can never stop learning! On any weekend in the fall, you can find me watching college football American football and cheering on my Tennessee Volunteers!
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