Charlie Decker's failed sexual encounter with Dana Collette

During the summer before his junior year at Placerville High School, Charlie Decker traveled to Bangor with his friend Joe McKennedy to spend a weekend with Joe's older brother, Pete. The trip promised a rare escape from Charlie's mounting internal pressures. On Friday night, Charlie got drunk for the first time, and the next day, Pete took them to the University of Maine campus. There, they met Pete's acquaintance, Scragg Simpson, who told them about a party being thrown by a woman named Dana Collette at a camp her parents owned near Schoodic Point. The prospect of a party with "about forty million unattached ladies" and the promise of marijuana set the stage for what Charlie hoped would be a transformative weekend.

The Party and the Encounter

The party was a chaotic, crowded affair, packed with drunk and stoned college students. The air was thick with marijuana smoke and loud rock music, lit by a single red and a single blue bulb, giving the cabin the feel of a funhouse. Dana Collette, a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair and an extremely short fluorescent orange dress, greeted them. Charlie, still high from the marijuana they had smoked earlier with a dealer named Jerry Mueller, found himself intensely aroused by Dana, especially when she pressed her hip against his and he could see up her dress. After they smoked more marijuana through a water pipe, Dana whispered in Charlie's ear, telling him to go out the back door. He complied, his mind filled with the expectation of losing his virginity.

The Failure and Its Aftermath

Charlie went down a flight of weather-washed steps to a small, crescent-shaped beach below the cabin. The scene was beautiful and lonesome, with the moon and the sound of the waves, but as he waited, his arousal faded. When Dana joined him, he found himself unable to perform. Despite her attempts to help, his body would not respond. He felt a cold, depthless certainty that he was queer, a fear that had never occurred to him before. Dana, after a brief, manufactured smile, told him it was the dope and went back inside, leaving him alone on the beach. The failure was a profound humiliation, a confirmation of his deepest insecurities. That night, he dreamed of the Creaking Thing, the childhood nightmare of his father, but this time his father appeared holding his mother, her nose slit open, and threw her dead body onto Charlie's bed. He woke up screaming—with an erection.

Thematic Significance

This event is a critical turning point in Charlie's psychological narrative. It directly connects his sexual anxiety to his father's violent, misogynistic words about the "Cherokee Nose Job," which he overheard as a child on a hunting trip. The failure at Schoodic Point is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a deeper wound: the internalization of his father's brutal model of masculinity, which equates sex with violence, domination, and disgust. The dream that follows the encounter makes this link explicit, revealing that for Charlie, intimacy is inextricably tied to the threat of mutilation and death. This experience contributes to his growing sense of alienation and his feeling that he is fundamentally broken, a belief that fuels his rage and his eventual violent actions. The memory of this failure resurfaces during the hostage crisis, when he contrasts it with Sandra Cross's story of a successful, if emotionally empty, sexual encounter, highlighting his own perceived inadequacy and his desperate need to assert control.