The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes From a Life

by Robert Goolrick

  I tell it for this reason. I tell it to you now because I’d like to think that somewhere, sometime, one thirty-five-year-old father will look at his four-year-old son and not touch him and not whisper in his ear and not put his hand down his son’s throat and not invade his son’s body with his own and they will both turn away and sleep in innocence.

  Even one single father. One single child. That would be enough of a reason.

  I tell it for the fathers. The priests. The football coaches. The Boy Scout counselors. The lonely men in secret basements. Murderers.

  I tell it because that one child, that one son, will have a childhood, will grow up with hope in his heart. He will take joy in his first love, the kind of sweetness and hunger country singers like Tim McGraw sing about, in beautiful, sad voices aching with longing. Lying in the back seat of a car with rain falling on the rear window, the wipers going. The hand on skin. The taste of a tongue on a tongue. Making love wearing your watch, with the television on.

  I tell it for the first time the sheets are drawn back and that boy lies down with the person he loves and he is alone with his lover and happy to be there. He will stand in the shower with his lover and every idea he ever had will vanish from his mind and every cell of his skin will thoughtlessly come into being, and never again will that skin be just the membrane that holds his body together, and those hungers will never leave him.

  Because everything, every single thing is sensual, every gesture, every idea, every moment of every life. A white T-shirt. The taste of food. Holding hands. Being seen. Being famous. The young women in their summer dresses. The young men who speak longingly in low voices on their cell phones on rainy street corners late at night. The men who move through the gloomy hallways of the homosexual baths, insatiable want moving their blood through their veins, quickening their pulses. Everything that makes us desire, and makes us feel desirable. It is not a life I know, but that is how I imagine the world. Perhaps I’m wrong.

  When I see, on television or in the movies, people winning things or people kissing, I cry. My heart breaks, every time, for all that they know, for all that they will ever know and be. I cherish them for winning and kissing.

  I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I cannot accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I cannot accommodate myself to it.

  AND NOW I WILL have to be that person forever.

  I KNOW THAT I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their e-mail, doing the crossword.

  I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware.

  THIS IS WHAT it takes to get me through the day: 450 milligrams of Eskalith, 1,000 milligrams of Neurontin, 2 milligrams of Klonopin, 6 milligrams of Xanax, 80 milligrams of Geodon, 200 milligrams of Lamictal. They do not begin to touch the anguish and shame of being what I have been, of becoming what I have become. I take Ambien to sleep. Sometimes I take it in the afternoon, just to shut off the noise. I still sleep badly at night.

  I TELL THESE STORIES because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of the lying.

  I tell it because I don’t want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over and over just because I was in a bad mood.

  I tell it because I have been pulling myself up by my own bootstraps since I was four years old and the effort has left me sickened and exhausted and angrier than you could imagine.

  I tell it because there is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven’t had, from which I have been locked out, and it never goes away.

  I tell it because I did wish in the graveyard, because I do wish, that everybody could be the way we were at our best: funny children, a marvelous house, the mother everybody wanted to have, the mother sitting by the creek in her red flat shoes, the adorable Dickensian father who believed in Christmas. I am not the hero of my own life, I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; I am peripheral to the whole of my family, to the whole of my small circle of friends, and I always was.

  I tell it for the sorrow of lying in Frette sheets in hotel rooms in foreign countries with a razor blade on the bedside table, a talisman of my own death beside the full ashtray and the clear cold glass of water, knowing that not one other soul I love knows where I am.

  And I apologize. I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because, while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible. A tableau vivant of the death inevitably to follow.

  I tell it because I try to believe, because I do believe with all my heart, that there is a persistence of song.

  I TELL IT for all the boys, for the life they never had.

  A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  This has to have been a difficult story to tell. Why did you decide to write it?

  That’s what most people ask me. Why dredge up the past again, why redig the graves long grown over? Why go through the pain of telling this story? Why not just get over it and get on with your life?

  Some asked in sorrow, some in horror, some in anger, but everybody wanted to know the same thing. Why did you write it?

  Here’s one reason.

  I was raped as a child of four by my drunken father while my mother watched. It is the seminal moment of a damaged life and I at last had to speak out.

  Here’s another.

  There are approximately 90,000 reported cases of child sexual abuse in this country every year. Estimates are that 80 percent of the actual cases go unreported. That means approximately 500,000 children, boys and girls, are violated every year, and nobody is doing anything about it. It is epidemic in this country, and it has got to be stopped.

  There are tens of thousands of boys who have been molested by Catholic priests. They grow up, they try to live the best lives they can, but they are forever shattered.

  Many grew up straight, some gay, some relatively unscathed, many damaged and drugged and alcoholic and lonely and forever broken. I wrote the book for them. For us. Every story is different, and my story is unique to me. But I wanted somehow to speak for them, for the 500,000 every year, for the Catholic boys whose lives and faiths were forever altered, for the little boys and the little girls, in most cases with no one to tell. No one to believe them. No parents. No friends. No police. Nobody.

  The cruel silence has got to end.

  Did you write this initially for yourself, or did you plan from the outset to have it published?

  I wrote it for myself. I didn’t think about publication. I thought about expiation.

  One day, I was sitting in my psychiatrist’s office, and the subject of my father’s bizarre funeral came up.

  It was a story I had told many, many times over the years. Always with a kind of darkly comic Southern Gothic bent, saying, don’t we Southerners do peculiar things in peculiar ways. The story never failed to bring laughter to the dinner table.

  Yet, here I found myself telling it again, and it didn’t seem so funny anymore. It seemed horrible, lonely and tragic and the final episode in a long and hateful relationship, and I found myself bawling like a baby.

  I was shocked. I went home that afternoon and started to write, to try to understand, to put finally to rest the old demons. It was like shoveling the dirt into the open grave all over again.

  And behind every door there was another door, and I opened each one, without trying, as I had always done, to pretend that everything was OK. It was, in fact, a mess, and it has been a mess from the beginning, and I knew why.

  You seem to have had a very close relationship with both your parents, taking care of them until the end, yet they come under very critical scrutiny in your memoir. How did you feel about that? />
  I loved my mother, even as she grew more pathetic. We were affectionate and intellectually in tune. She had behaved like a monster at times, but you have to understand that, from the age of four, I had this desperate need for my parents to love and forgive me. And, of course, I had a secret and cruel bond with my father, and he was so sad after my mother died, and he grew to be such a wreck, that I felt it my duty to do what I could. I used to have this fantasy that on her deathbed my mother would have a moment of clarity and tell me it wasn’t my fault. I waited for that moment for years and of course it never came. And I wanted my father as he died to ask for my forgiveness, to admit some kind of guilt. He never did.

  People used to ask me after my parents died, What happened? What happened to turn such a graceful, charming, and beautiful young couple into what they became, and although I had an idea, I never said anything. But, one day, I offered to tell my uncle my version of what happened. He listened to the long story in silence, and then he said, “Well, that explains a lot.” That was his only comment.

  I said to my uncle on that hot August morning, “I’m telling you this, not to cause you grief and distress, not even because you asked. I’m telling you this because, if I die tomorrow, I want you to tell people that I didn’t live the way I’ve lived just because I was in a bad mood.”

  You say that you had anticipated a feeling of relief if not joy at your father’s death, yet you were overcome with grief. Was this a surprise to you?

  It was a shock. I had wanted some kind of resolution, and now it was never to come. I had thought I would be free of the memories, free at last to live my own life with the secrets laid to rest, but I found I was locked forever alone with them. There was to be no emancipation.

  At the time I couldn’t have explained it all. I was just grief-stricken, I would cry at unexpected moments, and of course I was drunk most of the time, which made it worse. I just felt so alone, as sons do when their fathers die, but in my case it was a much more complicated situation than merely putting good old Dad in the ground and realizing that you have moved to the front of the line. You aren’t a son anymore.

  You paint a vivid picture of the fifties and sixties social life in which heavy drinking—especially at frequent cocktail parties—was the norm. How much do you think drinking affected your parents’ lives, and yours in turn?

  When I was little, it all looked very glamorous to me. Everybody dressed up. Everybody laughing and telling anecdotes, especially my father, who was the anecdote king. They were grownups, and I wanted to be one, to tell anecdotes, to stand on the back terrace drinking old-fashioneds as the sun went down.

  It was a life that revolved around having fun. And, for some, the fun turned bitter and caustic. As their youth failed, and their inadequacies were revealed, it got out of control, and then life was not about parties and fun, it was about alcohol. It was about blocking out regret. Regret at careers that went nowhere, at novels that didn’t get published, at lives that turned sour as sheets that haven’t been changed in too long.

  My parents were desperate for me to learn to drink, but I wouldn’t do it. I would fix their drinks for them, I would sit and watch as they continued drinking long after the guests had gone home. They drank from five o’clock until their last nightcap, which was usually drunk in bed, but I wouldn’t drink.

  But when I did start to drink, at around thirty, I was an alcoholic in two weeks. And I repeated the pattern. At first I did it for fun, to fit in with my crowd of friends, and then I just did it to block out everything I didn’t want to think about, mainly the pain of my childhood and the endless nowhere of my adult life.

  I drank to die.

  Very self-destructive behavior became a pattern in your life. When did that begin, and how aware were you at the time of the underlying causes?

  When I was about fifteen, I used to imagine that there was a button on my thigh, a button I could push and cease to exist. Not die, vanish as though I had never been there at all, leaving no grief, no memory, no mess to clean up. I would simply never have been. That pattern continued throughout my adult life.

  And about the same time, I developed a notion that I was toxic, that my touch alone could bring infection and death to whoever touched me, that whatever my father had injected into me was in my blood, and it could kill.

  It made my first romances very difficult. I loved them, but I was scared for them at the same time. I didn’t want my beloved to die, or watch me die.

  These notions persist to this day. Years of psychiatry, of medication and hospitalization, the death of my parents, the fact that none of my lovers have in fact died, nothing changes this idea.

  I didn’t know what caused it, at first, just a deep and rabid self-loathing; I didn’t connect what had happened to me as a child with what I was feeling as a young adult, although I never for one second forgot it, and, again, there was no one to tell. Because I knew every question would lead inevitably back to the original question: What happened to you? And that was the one question I couldn’t answer, couldn’t even phrase to myself.

  You write about the failed relationships you had with both women and men. Was there ever a time when you thought you might be able to sustain a romantic connection with someone and make a commitment to a long-term involvement?

  It was all I ever wanted, all I continue to want, the coziness and spaciousness of a love that lasts. I still love every person I ever loved, I hold them in my heart with a dearness that causes me to think of them every day. I wouldn’t say my relationships were failed so much as they were flawed and doomed from the start by my own feelings of self-loathing. You can fake a lot of things in a relationship, you can fake charm and generosity and passion, but you can’t fake self-esteem, and because of it, I wouldn’t let them in, I wouldn’t let them get close enough. And it drove them crazy.

  Sex is the ever-present bête noir of my life. I want it, I’m obsessed with it, but I’m afraid of it, too. I’m afraid of the first touch on my skin. Of opening my shirt and exposing my chest to the eyes of another human being, as though a knife would plunge deep in my heart.

  So sex and relationships for me are kind of like a death wish. I’m getting better, but it will never go away.

  Here’s another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it’s about to rain. As a friend of mine said recently, “We always knew there was a secret; we just didn’t know what it was.”

  You hadn’t told your family or friends about the things that you reveal in your memoir—what were their reactions?

  Some supported me with tremendous love and sympathy. Some stopped talking to me. The people who knew my parents well, some of my oldest and dearest friends, generally fell into the latter category. Some said I was a liar. One said I was the product of an “overactive imagination.”

  I knew there would be a price to pay. My parents were loved, and rightfully so. To look behind the charm and generosity to show the cankers growing inside was to risk ostracism and rejection. I have experienced both, both from family and from friends.

  To tell the truth, especially after so long, is to court disaster. Supporters feel helpless to do anything to help, they know the ruin is already long past, and detractors feel the anger of watching a certain world crumble before their eyes. Of course they don’t believe it. Of course they’re angry, and my heart goes out to them. But there’s nothing I can do about it now.

  Many readers responded sympathetically to your story, but some seemed to be angered by the very fact that you revealed some of the things you write about. Why do you think they reacted that way?

  I got so many heartrending letters, from people who had been abused, from alcoholics, from people who cut their own wrists in the dark, from people whose lives were completely cracked and alien to them. And, of course, you try to answer the letters, and you get into correspondences with strangers in cyberspace and you feel someh
ow responsible for their pain and uniquely able to listen at least to their sad stories. They are lonely. They are drunk. Their lives are wreckage around them, and they think you know some way to help them.

  And so you respond and say the inane things you can think of to say, and some you never hear from again, and some become regular correspondents, at least for a time. These correspondents made me feel it was worth it to write the book, and also made me realize that this anonymous object on the bookstore shelf, my book, actually has the power to touch and transform.

  A few were angry. Their general argument was that I should just grow up and get on with it. I didn’t know what to say to them. Of course they’re right. I should grow up and get on with it. I am growing up and getting on with it. And publishing the book was a necessary part of that process.

  I think that, for all of us, there is a tendency to blame the victim, to say, well, you’re still alive, just quit whining and act like a man. It’s not that easy.

  Has telling your story been a cathartic experience?

  The writing of it was not particularly cathartic. I was telling a story which was known to me, in which there were no surprises, and my effort was just to tell it as simply and plainly as possible.

  Having the book out in bookstores was more cathartic. Having my story be, finally, at least partly separate from me has meant that it haunts me less. I’m not particularly proud of my life; I’m not filled with wonder and self-esteem, but at least there is this book out there, my voice, speaking to people when I’m not even around, helping some of the world’s damaged ones, and I’m proud of that.

  What about the house in Virginia where it all took place, the house you lived in for fifty years, and the memories associated with it?

  Ironically, I sold the house the same week the book was published. I’ll never see it again.

  JEREMY LEADBETTER

  Robert Goolrick worked for many years in advertising. He lives in New York City. This is his first book. He is currently working on a novel to be published by Algonquin Books.