It was late in the night when I heard about the rapist that prowled around Berkeley in the 1970's. I could've read about him, I might have at some point, but the reality of the terror in College Terrace was more impacting from a contemporary witness. "He would tie up husbands and rape their wives," a friend told me as we talked in her living room. The television had recently been shut off. I sat leaning against a glass door, while she and her husband addressed me from a love seat. They never mentioned his name: Melvin Alfred "Mac" Carter Jr. She said during that period they were living in a cottage that cost only $125 a month, and the other homes in their neighborhood were selling off for two hundred thousand apiece.
"He attacked eighty times," her husband interjected. She nodded because it was a fearful year. It led to a story about their opening of the door with a pistol, ready to fire. Not Carter but a student in need of advice stood on their porch. I remembered my father coming to the window with a shotgun a month ago, prepared to shoot me—the stranger rattling his door. I mentioned this as if to acknowledge that fear is an endless trend.
My friend said she never grew up among guns, though her husband lived on a ranch and killed animals at a young age and remembers holding the heart and intestines of a deer after his father cut open its chest. "How could you not cry?" she asked him. He had kept the pistol slung over their bedpost in Berkeley to protect her. They have been married for just over thirty years.
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