In the fifth grade, the one shining light in the whole change of schools/culture shock scenario was meeting Tim. He would become my best friend all during the school year. In fact, we became more than just friends - we became preteen lovers. This was a time when I explored my sexuality uninhibited. The sex we had was thrilling because it seemed so "naughty" to a couple of ten year olds, yet there wasn't any guilt attached to it. I can remember having orgasms without the accompanying fluids, and then wanting to stop immediately thereafter. Tim and I had a strange relationship. It was a friendship, but it went deeper than that. I can honestly say I fell in love with him, even though the concept was still a bit foreign to me. I can say this with confidence because, to this day, I still love him, and now I know what that really does mean.
I remember in particular one night we spent together at his house. We did a sleepover and his parents put us in his sister's room because it had a bigger bed in it. We couldn't wait to get to bed and begin exploring our bodies. We laughed and giggled and took turns performing oral sex on one another. Unfortunately, we made too much noise and in the middle of the night his father came in and made Tim move to the sofa in the living room. It was frustrating and disappointing because it left me all alone, yearning to smell the scent of fabric softener on his pajamas and to feel his warm body. I wished he had sneaked back in to be with me, but eventually I fell asleep, alone. To this day I can still imagine that I smell his scent, and it gives me warm flutters in my chest.
I also remember us playing "strip poker." Of course, neither of us really knew how to play poker. It was more of a ruse to get to take our clothes off and have sex. The rule was that the winner would suck the loser's dick. I seemed to win more than I lost, LOL.
When we hit sixth grade, we drifted apart. I guess it was because we were both moving toward puberty and because I was a bit of a quiet child, sort of on the fringe of the class since I came so late to the school. Tim was very extroverted and he made friends easily. I think it was kind of embarrassing for him to hang out with me in this crucial year and we stopped seeing each other.
Sixth and seventh grades would pass without any close contact between us. However, I did manage to find another sex partner with a kid named Shawn who was from my neighborhood and with another kid from school and his 18 year old brother. Nowadays the brother would be arrested and marked as a sex offender, but I can assure you that I was as willing as he was. People have hard time believing that a kid can want sex as much as an adult. Some of us are born whores I guess, LOL.
In eighth grade I was really missing Tim. I would see him every day and the longing was still as strong inside me as it had ever been. Finally, mustering courage, I wrote him a note. I know, how gay is that, right? I felt like a school girl but I didn't care. I had to take the chance. I wrote asking him if we could be friends again, carefully adding "but not like before" at the end, since I didn't want him to think I would be expecting sex. Later, he would tell me that I didn't need to say "not like before," which made me think he might have wanted to resume our intimacy. I just wanted to reestablish contact again. During my science class I got a pass to the restroom and went to Tim's locker. The lockers had vents at the top and I slid the note into the vents and listened as it dropped inside to the bottom of his locker. Now I would have to wait and hope that he didn't scorn me.
To my surprise, Tim was just as eager to be friends again as I was, and he and I began our friendship anew. This time there was no sex - at least no blatant sex. We had a strange ritual. He would come to my house when we were all alone and we would wrestle. I would let him pin me down and he would straddle my neck, his crotch pushing near my face, and he would say "do you want a pearl necklace?" I would later learn that this was a euphemism for cumming on someone's neck. Of course, it never came to pass.
This behavior between us continued until one night in ninth grade Tim slept over. It was the weekend and he and I stayed up watching that stupid 70's show "Solid Gold." We were sitting on the loveseat in the living room of my parents house and I kept wanting so much to attack Tim and rip his clothes off. By now we had both reached puberty and the longings turned to lusty passion. As we watched the show I made a joke, saying "those male dancers are so gay!" And, in one of those moments we all have when one hears the words one most wants to hear from someone else, Tim said "I think I'm gay." OMG. He did not just say that. And, tragically, hearing what I had been waiting to hear, yet disbelieving my ears, I said "what?" Not "really? me too!" but "what?" and he said "nothing." There it was. It was the fateful moment when I could have grabbed passion by the horns and instead my hesitation cost me everything. I couldn't get him to repeat what he said and finally we went off to bed.
That night we shared my waterbed. I had a stereo next to the bed and, after we stripped down to underwear and t-shirts, Tim asked if he could listen to the stereo through my headphones. I assented and we got into bed. A while passed and Tim appeared to be sleeping, although he would confirm to me 25 years later that he was actually awake. I was incredibly horny and I could see that Tim had an erection, which I assumed was just a sleep induced erection. I softly touched it through his underwear, my breathing getting heavier and my heart pounding. It was all I could to to keep myself from jumping him. The head of his cock began to peek out of the waistband of his underwear and I was thrilled by the changes puberty had brought about. I began to stroke the head of his penis with my finger until I could bear it no more. I gently laid down on top of him while he lay there, motionless. I dry humped him through my underwear until I came with convulsive force. I lay there briefly after I had finished, panting, and then slowly rolled off of him and went to sleep.
The next morning I awoke to find Tim sitting indian-style on the floor next to the bed, chin resting on one hand while he flipped through a magazine. We chatted briefly and then he said he felt unwell and asked me to call his dad to come pick him up. After he left, I wondered if he had been awake the previous night during my sexual advances. 25 years later Tim would confirm that he was, indeed, awake and that the reason he didn't feel well the next morning was because "I had blue balls." What a waste. If only he had reacted, we could have made wild love together that night.
After that night, things changed between us. Tim became distant and he stopped wanting to get together. I was obessed with him and I was crushed. I was deeply in love at this point and wanted to be with him, but nothing was ever discussed between us, and we drifted apart once again. At one point, in a failed attempt to win him over, I filled his locker with gifts for his birthday (I had the combination), but it backfired. He became embarrassed and angry and told me to take it all back. That was really the last time we spoke in high school. Tim eventually "dated" some girls and the only time I saw him was in gym. I can remember doodling in science class while I daydreamed about being with Tim. I would write, over and over, IWTSTSC. This was shorthand for "I want to suck Tim's cock." I just couldn't shake him.
I remember one last time we were naked together. It was in gym class after swimming. We had gang showers in our locker room and everyone tended to shower after swimming. Tim was in the shower with me and we both lingered until no one else was left but just the two of us. We stood there silently glancing sideways at each other, partially aroused, but too nervous to say a word. And that would be the end.
25 years later, having thought about Tim many, many, many times over the years and wishing so much that we were in contact, I located him on Classmates.com. It took me awhile to screw up the courage to send him an email via their website. Finally, I sent a short note inquiring about his well-being. Then I waited. To my surprise, I received a response and learned that Tim was living in my area. He was still single but living with a woman. I had entered law school and we chatted on the phone one night about our lives for a bit. Tim had recently bought a house as had I, and his girlfriend was a graduate of my law school. It was some common ground. Tim told me his younger brother had come out of the closet as a young man, but had tragically killed himself. Tim shared with me his active support for gay marriage, and told me that he did so in memory of his brother. I was disappointed that he wasn't gay, but I did find it odd that he was the one who broached our past relations. It was during this conversation that Tim revealed to me that he had been awake the night I humped him, and I wondered inside if maybe part of him still longed for what we had. Maybe someday I will work up the courage to find out.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.
After my parents split, we went through a dark time. My mom cried a lot. In those days it was safe to walk to school, and we did. It was about a twenty minute walk each way and I used to pass by a bunch of stores on the main drag. One was a florist. One day I stopped in on the way home and bought a single white rose for my mom because I wanted to cheer her up. When I got home, I gave it to her and she started to cry. I was bewildered. I said, "mommy, I bought the rose to cheer you up, not to make you sad." She said, "I'm not crying because I'm sad, I'm crying because I'm happy." I guess it was one bright spot in a very bad space.
There came a time not too much later when my mother's friend Barbara set her up with a blind date with a man Barbara and her ex-husband were friends with. I remember how nervouse my mother was. Apparently the date went well, because they began to see each other and, eventually, she introduced us to this man, Bob. Bob seemed like a nice guy, especially to a kid whose dad had up and disappeared. He would always treat us kindly when he came by the house, and would sometimes bring us stuff. My mother must have thought God was smiling down on her to bring her this person in a time of great sadness. I was happy for her, because she seemed to be her normal self again.
Bob was divorced with two daughters and he lived alone in a skanky apartment complex in our town. He was out of work and seemed not to have the ambition to get back in a hurry. Once he met my mother, though, things changed and he went back to work and began to put on the appearance of propriety.
Eventually, Bob moved in with us. It seemed like the natural progression of things. I couldn't believe how easily we had transitioned from one father to the next. It was like when they changed Darrins on Bewitched. One day my dad was there, the next day it was Bob. Things continued along this cheery path and eventually Bob proposed to my mother. Like a bad B movie, this facade of joy was to fall apart once the marriage occurred.
As soon as my stepfather was entrenched in his position as "head of household," he began to change. He began to assert his "authority" and it became all too clear that the four little children he had just added to his family were going to learn to bow to his will. My stepfather is a first generation American of a German father, and we soon learned why the Nazis were both feared and hated. Bob apparently had an inferiority complex and low self esteem. Nothing pleased him more than to impose rules just for the sake of causing friction in the household, and when he came home from work at night the supper had to be on the table or he had a fit. He would also find any excuse to start an argument either with my mother or with my brother and I. My sisters were still too young to be the object of his venom.
At first, we continued at Catholic school, probably for the sake of continuity. But the following year, we transferred to public school and moved to a new house. My mother had equity in the house my parents had bought, but Bob had not money, so my mother used her funds to put a sizeable downpayment on the new house. This also meant that we now had a new neighborhood and had to make new friends. It was all a big culture shock, both at home and outside. My first experiences at public school were horrific. Because I had been groomed with manners and showed respect to the teachers - even holding the door for them - I immediately became the object of scorn and ridicule. My first day in the lunch line I chastised another student for cutting in line and told him that we never cut the line in Catholic school to which he replied that I should go back there then. It was awful and I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.
The only bright side was that they taught languages in public school and I was able to enter the French division. The kids in the French division didn't seem to be as rough as the general populace and, as it turned out, we would remain together through grade school, junior high, and high school, since French was taught for the remainder of our schooling.
I remember at the end of my first day of fifth grade in this new, hostile place. We all reassembled in "home room" at the very end of the day for dismissal. The bell rang and kids swarmed out of the classroom doors like bees bent on a target. As I avoided elbows and book bags, I felt a tug on my arm. A red-cheeked, smiling face appeared from behind and he introduced himself as Tim. Even at this age I was readily attracted to boys, and his warm brown wavy hair, blue eyes, and pleasant visage immediately tugged at something deep inside me. This was the beginning of what would become my first love. More on that later.
As the years passed, Bob became increasingly more verbally and physically abusive. Every day was like a mini hell, with the acid in my stomach churning as the hour approached when he would come home. His abuse took the form of belittling attacks on my brother and I and eventually turned from the vocal to the physical. He would poke us in the chest with his finger, backing us into corners, pushing us, hitting us. I remember one night my brother became embroiled in a particularly bitter argument with Bob. My stepfather became so engraged that he threw my brother down into a wood framed chair which had belonged to my great grandparents. It had a very heavy frame with vinyl cushions. The violent force caused the chair to crack into pieces, and represented an escalation of the tension that had grown steadily over the past couple of years. It was, unfortunately, a representation of the status quo which would taint the remainder of my childhood.
There came a time not too much later when my mother's friend Barbara set her up with a blind date with a man Barbara and her ex-husband were friends with. I remember how nervouse my mother was. Apparently the date went well, because they began to see each other and, eventually, she introduced us to this man, Bob. Bob seemed like a nice guy, especially to a kid whose dad had up and disappeared. He would always treat us kindly when he came by the house, and would sometimes bring us stuff. My mother must have thought God was smiling down on her to bring her this person in a time of great sadness. I was happy for her, because she seemed to be her normal self again.
Bob was divorced with two daughters and he lived alone in a skanky apartment complex in our town. He was out of work and seemed not to have the ambition to get back in a hurry. Once he met my mother, though, things changed and he went back to work and began to put on the appearance of propriety.
Eventually, Bob moved in with us. It seemed like the natural progression of things. I couldn't believe how easily we had transitioned from one father to the next. It was like when they changed Darrins on Bewitched. One day my dad was there, the next day it was Bob. Things continued along this cheery path and eventually Bob proposed to my mother. Like a bad B movie, this facade of joy was to fall apart once the marriage occurred.
As soon as my stepfather was entrenched in his position as "head of household," he began to change. He began to assert his "authority" and it became all too clear that the four little children he had just added to his family were going to learn to bow to his will. My stepfather is a first generation American of a German father, and we soon learned why the Nazis were both feared and hated. Bob apparently had an inferiority complex and low self esteem. Nothing pleased him more than to impose rules just for the sake of causing friction in the household, and when he came home from work at night the supper had to be on the table or he had a fit. He would also find any excuse to start an argument either with my mother or with my brother and I. My sisters were still too young to be the object of his venom.
At first, we continued at Catholic school, probably for the sake of continuity. But the following year, we transferred to public school and moved to a new house. My mother had equity in the house my parents had bought, but Bob had not money, so my mother used her funds to put a sizeable downpayment on the new house. This also meant that we now had a new neighborhood and had to make new friends. It was all a big culture shock, both at home and outside. My first experiences at public school were horrific. Because I had been groomed with manners and showed respect to the teachers - even holding the door for them - I immediately became the object of scorn and ridicule. My first day in the lunch line I chastised another student for cutting in line and told him that we never cut the line in Catholic school to which he replied that I should go back there then. It was awful and I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.
The only bright side was that they taught languages in public school and I was able to enter the French division. The kids in the French division didn't seem to be as rough as the general populace and, as it turned out, we would remain together through grade school, junior high, and high school, since French was taught for the remainder of our schooling.
I remember at the end of my first day of fifth grade in this new, hostile place. We all reassembled in "home room" at the very end of the day for dismissal. The bell rang and kids swarmed out of the classroom doors like bees bent on a target. As I avoided elbows and book bags, I felt a tug on my arm. A red-cheeked, smiling face appeared from behind and he introduced himself as Tim. Even at this age I was readily attracted to boys, and his warm brown wavy hair, blue eyes, and pleasant visage immediately tugged at something deep inside me. This was the beginning of what would become my first love. More on that later.
As the years passed, Bob became increasingly more verbally and physically abusive. Every day was like a mini hell, with the acid in my stomach churning as the hour approached when he would come home. His abuse took the form of belittling attacks on my brother and I and eventually turned from the vocal to the physical. He would poke us in the chest with his finger, backing us into corners, pushing us, hitting us. I remember one night my brother became embroiled in a particularly bitter argument with Bob. My stepfather became so engraged that he threw my brother down into a wood framed chair which had belonged to my great grandparents. It had a very heavy frame with vinyl cushions. The violent force caused the chair to crack into pieces, and represented an escalation of the tension that had grown steadily over the past couple of years. It was, unfortunately, a representation of the status quo which would taint the remainder of my childhood.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The World Comes Crashing Down...
When I was eight years old, my parents split up. My Dad owned his own business and was not home alot, but Sunday was always family day and I can remember him reading Ragedy Ann and Andy to me. There was a character in the particular book that he read called "Little Weaky" and he used to tickle me and call me by that name. That's about the only time I remember my Dad being affectionate to me. His parents were fairly cold people. My grandmother came from a WASP family that was very typically New England. You didn't hug or kiss or say "I love you." My grandfather was French Canadian but he was an alcoholic. Generally French Canadians tend to be warm people, but he was a beast. He hated kids. Whenever we would visit my grandparents he would already be drinking and he'd keep his distance. I always thought he was mad at me, but it turns out he was just an asshole.
When we would arrive at my grandparents house, my grandmother would be sitting in the TV lounge, drink in one hand, remote control in the other. She wouldn't even get up. Her obnoxious French Poodles would come yapping to the door, their claws tearing at the screen and scraping against the metal like nails on a chalk board. They weren't big dogs of course, but they were intimidating to a kid whose only pet was a kitten, and who was fairly introverted and shy. There was never any warm, fuzzy anticipation when we went to their house.
This was the early 1970s, so the remote control was a fairly new contraption. I remember it was a big, rectangular brown box with tan buttons that clicked when you pushed them down. Each one was for a different channel. It had a cord, since infrared remotes were still some years off in the future, so a wire ran from the television to the sofa and you had to be careful not to trip and break your neck. The room would be billowing with smoke, since both my grandparents smoked like chimneys. Looking back at how they interracted, I am reminded of the film "Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf." They carped at each other, nagged each other. Never would anyone mistake their interraction as love. Two cold, lonely people, masking their unhappiness with alcohol, yet unable to free themselves from this marital bondage because of the generational attitudes about divorce in those times. Better to honor "til death do us part" then to have even a year of peaceful solitude. My grandfather would later become a sad, eccentric person. When he died, my aunt told me that they found a garage full of unopened items he bought from home shopping channels on TV. They also discovered that he'd been supporting a mistress forty years his junior. Yet my grandparents did stay together for the rest of their lives, both dying of natural causes. Miraculously, neither suffered liver damage or lung cancer. Good, hardy, 17th century genetics at work, I guess.
My father. Well, he requires a lot more analysis, but for now I will just relate what happened to completely destroy my childhood world. Apparently, my dad had been seeing hookers in the city next to our town. His company was located not far from the "red light" district and, apparently, he had managed to squeeze in some leisure time during his 14 hour workdays. Funny, he couldn't seem to drag himself home for some time with his kids. Therein lies the power of the penis, the one true master of all men. Well, naturally, my mom - a woman with good instincts - sensed something was up. She found phone numbers in my dad's wallet and I distinctly remember the night all hell broke loose. I was in my parents' room and my dad was in the shower. He had just come in and was always covered in grease and grunge from his job. My mom was upset and she picked his wallet up off the dresser and began rumaging through it. She found a slip of paper which apparently had a name and number scrawled on it and she began to cry while simultaneously flying into a rage. I had never seen so much anger and vitriol spew forth in our house before. She barged into the bathroom, steam wafting out into the hallway, and confronted my dad in the shower. They had it out and I remember him getting dressed, grabbing some clothes, and storming out some time later on his way to my grandparent's house. All the while my mother was convulsed with anger and grief, the betrayal shattering any sense of normalcy that reigned in our house. What made it worse was that she was pregnant with her fourth child.
My parents would never reconcile. I remember the day my mom decided it was time to pack my father's things up. My brother and I helped her to put his clothes into brown paper bags. I was rummaging through my father's top drawer and i found a clear plastic box with some kind of steel contraption in it. I was a very curious kid, which can be a dangerous thing. I took the item out of the box and began fiddling with what looked like a kind of lever. The lever slid forward and in a split second the room filled with a green cloud. My brother, who was on the receiving end of the explosion, began to exclaim that his eyes hurt. Apparently I had accidentally fired off a tear gas gun that my dad kept in case of a burglary. My mom grabbed the gun out of my hand and rushed to the phone. I heard her address my grandfather on the other end. Apparently it had come from my grandfather's fire control business and my mom was asking him what to do. She hung up the phone and dragged my whimpering brother into the bathroom and began rinsing his eyes out with water. That incident has been emblazoned on my mind since. As an adult I look back and think how much worse this could have been. You see, my dad also kept a number of guns in the house in the closet. They had no locks whatsoever, and I even remember red shot gun shells being kept in the house as well. How different the times were. I keep thinking how awful it would have been if my curiosity had extended to those guns.
My dad's things sat by the front door of our house for what seemed like an eternity when he finally came to collect them. He was living at my grandparents' house and we hadn't seen him in some time. I remember thinking that this was all temporary and that my parents would find their way past this and that the status quo would soon be restored. It was not to be. Never again would my dad read books to me, nor would we spend those Sundays going for a drive and stopping for dinner at Vallee's restaurant. In fact, I couldn't forsee what hell my life would become in just a few short years.
Oh, and then there was the One True Church. My brother and I were enrolled at a parochial school that was run by our parish. I was in the third second grade at the time. I had a reputation as a model citizen in the school. A model student, a model christian. I had learned to read at the age of four and was a voracious reader. I was already reading at the high school level by that time and the nuns at school thought I was God's own angel here on earth. Each afternoon as I left the school I would pause before each nun's open classroom door and say, "good afternoon, sister, God bless you sister." This was my daily ritual and it endeared me to the entire convent. I can remember one Saturday afternoon riding my bike up to the convent and knocking on the door. I had come to visit the nuns and they invited me in for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we chatted for a bit. I do remember some confusion on their faces since apparently it was either not proper or it was unheard of that a student would pay a visit to the convent, especially a boy. After a short time, the sisters politely sent me on my way.
This Catholic bliss would all come to a screaching halt when wind of my parent's divorce finally made its way through the parish. Nothing is more evil then a bunch of Catholic women gathered together in one room. My mother was part of the lay women's club, and her plight was ripe fodder for the group. Once the divorce was final, she was asked to leave the women's club. Worse still, one Sunday at mass the old, shriveled head priest, Father O'Day, refused to give communion to my mother when she went up. I watched in horror as my mother stood there, mouth open, hands folded in prayer, as father shook his head "no" and my mother, embarrassed in front of the entire congregation, had to step aside. She took my brother and I and we left the church that moment, never to return. We remained in school for the remainder of the school year, but further indignities followed. The worst was a nun telling my brother, just age nine, that my mother was "going to hell" for getting divorced. Of course, it mattered not that my father was the one to blame for the breakdown of the marriage. The ignominy befell my mother, while my father somehow escaped public blame.
My mother gave birth to my youngest sister in November that year, and my father was nowhere to be found. Worse still, my mother's father had died of lung cancer that previous Spring before all hell broke loose, so my poor mother was left with only her mother to support her. My dad was a selfish bastard and was refusing to pay proper support to my mom. And, obviously, with four small children, she was unable to work. We were forced to go on welfare and medicaid because we suddenly found ourselves without an income. My mother was humiliated having to use food stamps at the local market. Our friends and neighbors witnessed the whole shameful proceeding, but no support came from outside. It was a dark time.
When we would arrive at my grandparents house, my grandmother would be sitting in the TV lounge, drink in one hand, remote control in the other. She wouldn't even get up. Her obnoxious French Poodles would come yapping to the door, their claws tearing at the screen and scraping against the metal like nails on a chalk board. They weren't big dogs of course, but they were intimidating to a kid whose only pet was a kitten, and who was fairly introverted and shy. There was never any warm, fuzzy anticipation when we went to their house.
This was the early 1970s, so the remote control was a fairly new contraption. I remember it was a big, rectangular brown box with tan buttons that clicked when you pushed them down. Each one was for a different channel. It had a cord, since infrared remotes were still some years off in the future, so a wire ran from the television to the sofa and you had to be careful not to trip and break your neck. The room would be billowing with smoke, since both my grandparents smoked like chimneys. Looking back at how they interracted, I am reminded of the film "Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf." They carped at each other, nagged each other. Never would anyone mistake their interraction as love. Two cold, lonely people, masking their unhappiness with alcohol, yet unable to free themselves from this marital bondage because of the generational attitudes about divorce in those times. Better to honor "til death do us part" then to have even a year of peaceful solitude. My grandfather would later become a sad, eccentric person. When he died, my aunt told me that they found a garage full of unopened items he bought from home shopping channels on TV. They also discovered that he'd been supporting a mistress forty years his junior. Yet my grandparents did stay together for the rest of their lives, both dying of natural causes. Miraculously, neither suffered liver damage or lung cancer. Good, hardy, 17th century genetics at work, I guess.
My father. Well, he requires a lot more analysis, but for now I will just relate what happened to completely destroy my childhood world. Apparently, my dad had been seeing hookers in the city next to our town. His company was located not far from the "red light" district and, apparently, he had managed to squeeze in some leisure time during his 14 hour workdays. Funny, he couldn't seem to drag himself home for some time with his kids. Therein lies the power of the penis, the one true master of all men. Well, naturally, my mom - a woman with good instincts - sensed something was up. She found phone numbers in my dad's wallet and I distinctly remember the night all hell broke loose. I was in my parents' room and my dad was in the shower. He had just come in and was always covered in grease and grunge from his job. My mom was upset and she picked his wallet up off the dresser and began rumaging through it. She found a slip of paper which apparently had a name and number scrawled on it and she began to cry while simultaneously flying into a rage. I had never seen so much anger and vitriol spew forth in our house before. She barged into the bathroom, steam wafting out into the hallway, and confronted my dad in the shower. They had it out and I remember him getting dressed, grabbing some clothes, and storming out some time later on his way to my grandparent's house. All the while my mother was convulsed with anger and grief, the betrayal shattering any sense of normalcy that reigned in our house. What made it worse was that she was pregnant with her fourth child.
My parents would never reconcile. I remember the day my mom decided it was time to pack my father's things up. My brother and I helped her to put his clothes into brown paper bags. I was rummaging through my father's top drawer and i found a clear plastic box with some kind of steel contraption in it. I was a very curious kid, which can be a dangerous thing. I took the item out of the box and began fiddling with what looked like a kind of lever. The lever slid forward and in a split second the room filled with a green cloud. My brother, who was on the receiving end of the explosion, began to exclaim that his eyes hurt. Apparently I had accidentally fired off a tear gas gun that my dad kept in case of a burglary. My mom grabbed the gun out of my hand and rushed to the phone. I heard her address my grandfather on the other end. Apparently it had come from my grandfather's fire control business and my mom was asking him what to do. She hung up the phone and dragged my whimpering brother into the bathroom and began rinsing his eyes out with water. That incident has been emblazoned on my mind since. As an adult I look back and think how much worse this could have been. You see, my dad also kept a number of guns in the house in the closet. They had no locks whatsoever, and I even remember red shot gun shells being kept in the house as well. How different the times were. I keep thinking how awful it would have been if my curiosity had extended to those guns.
My dad's things sat by the front door of our house for what seemed like an eternity when he finally came to collect them. He was living at my grandparents' house and we hadn't seen him in some time. I remember thinking that this was all temporary and that my parents would find their way past this and that the status quo would soon be restored. It was not to be. Never again would my dad read books to me, nor would we spend those Sundays going for a drive and stopping for dinner at Vallee's restaurant. In fact, I couldn't forsee what hell my life would become in just a few short years.
Oh, and then there was the One True Church. My brother and I were enrolled at a parochial school that was run by our parish. I was in the third second grade at the time. I had a reputation as a model citizen in the school. A model student, a model christian. I had learned to read at the age of four and was a voracious reader. I was already reading at the high school level by that time and the nuns at school thought I was God's own angel here on earth. Each afternoon as I left the school I would pause before each nun's open classroom door and say, "good afternoon, sister, God bless you sister." This was my daily ritual and it endeared me to the entire convent. I can remember one Saturday afternoon riding my bike up to the convent and knocking on the door. I had come to visit the nuns and they invited me in for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we chatted for a bit. I do remember some confusion on their faces since apparently it was either not proper or it was unheard of that a student would pay a visit to the convent, especially a boy. After a short time, the sisters politely sent me on my way.
This Catholic bliss would all come to a screaching halt when wind of my parent's divorce finally made its way through the parish. Nothing is more evil then a bunch of Catholic women gathered together in one room. My mother was part of the lay women's club, and her plight was ripe fodder for the group. Once the divorce was final, she was asked to leave the women's club. Worse still, one Sunday at mass the old, shriveled head priest, Father O'Day, refused to give communion to my mother when she went up. I watched in horror as my mother stood there, mouth open, hands folded in prayer, as father shook his head "no" and my mother, embarrassed in front of the entire congregation, had to step aside. She took my brother and I and we left the church that moment, never to return. We remained in school for the remainder of the school year, but further indignities followed. The worst was a nun telling my brother, just age nine, that my mother was "going to hell" for getting divorced. Of course, it mattered not that my father was the one to blame for the breakdown of the marriage. The ignominy befell my mother, while my father somehow escaped public blame.
My mother gave birth to my youngest sister in November that year, and my father was nowhere to be found. Worse still, my mother's father had died of lung cancer that previous Spring before all hell broke loose, so my poor mother was left with only her mother to support her. My dad was a selfish bastard and was refusing to pay proper support to my mom. And, obviously, with four small children, she was unable to work. We were forced to go on welfare and medicaid because we suddenly found ourselves without an income. My mother was humiliated having to use food stamps at the local market. Our friends and neighbors witnessed the whole shameful proceeding, but no support came from outside. It was a dark time.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Respect the Cock...
At the tender age of seven, I became fixated on the penis. I don't know why. I did everything in my power to manipulate the neighborhood boys into showing me their dicks and playing doctor. I remember that we had a jungle gym in our backyard at that time. My brother and i put blankets over it and made it into a makeshift fort. There I would bring boys to hang out - literally. We would take turns pulling down our pants and swinging from the trapeeze-style bar that hung in the center of the jungle gym. I got a thrill from the exhibitionist abandon of showing off my pre-pubescent body. I've often wondered how, at that age, my curiosity was coupled with a sexual longing for these boys that I ogled and touched, our bodies far from the hormonal ravages of puberty, yet still able to get an erection. I was so entirely gay from that early age, yet i had no idea what it was to be "gay." For me, it was as natural as picking up worms after a rainfall and putting them in a bucket to bring home to show my mom. Or, going hunting for salamanders under old logs down in the gulley by the stream. It was part of my boyhood, not some "evil" or "depraved" thing that society would later introduce to me as "unnatural." Left alone to develop in a bubble, or on an island cum Lord of the Flies, I think my attraction to men would have developed free of any psychological torture or shame that the Catholic Church - of which I was an unconsenting member - or the Government would foist on me. Free of societal constraints I could see myself blissfully ignorant that the natural lust and love I felt at that early age was something other than the intention of God that some of us be "different."
In the beginning...
When I was six years old, I remember watching TV in the basement at my grandmother's house. The news was on and - though I didn't know it at the time - Anita Bryant was on ranting about sick gay men while images of guys holding hands and kissing were intercut with the story. Even at that age I felt a twinge of recognition with these fellas and I turned to my mother and asked her why this woman hated these people? My mother said "because they're sick." At that moment, I think my innocence was destroyed like when you walk through the most beautiful, intricate spider web in the garden. In a split second, a thing of beauty becomes detritus in the wind.
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