From that moment on, Pearl and I became inseparable: reading poetry and plays aloud till all hours of the morning; lying tangled like weeds on our beds, listening to This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow, dressed in drag at midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pink Floyd’s The Wall; sitting up all night on my frayed, plaid sofa to watch a sunrise, then falling asleep in each other’s arms moments before it did.
Once, following dinner at a downtown restaurant called Penny Lane that played nonstop Beatles, both of us moderately inebriated and taken with each other’s charm, I pulled her into the shadows of a condemned office tower where we kissed for hours, passionately, without reservation. When she asked me to take her home and make love to her, I froze. As with Cecilia, there was a sense of validation and intoxication from my relationship with Pearl that had remained elusive with men, whom I’d continued meeting secretly, in bushes and in bars, in “tearooms,” and in bathhouses. Two worlds anchored in me but never met.
Then I told her.
In the middle of one night in my basement apartment and a pack and a half of Camels later, I told her that I was a man who liked other men, that I was a “homosexual.”
“I thought as much,” she said, without so much as flinching.
“You mean you knew?”
“I had my suspicions. Most straight men I know don’t read Christopher Durang and Joe Orton. It’s okay, Peter. Really, it is.”
But it was not okay, at least not to me. Every movie I had ever seen had portrayed gay men as self-destructive and unhappy—The Boys in the Band, Some of My Best Friends Are…, Cruising. Even the TV movies The Day After, about nuclear Armageddon, and An Early Frost, about a new gay disease called AIDS, seemed to me to be about essentially the same event. Being gay meant staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. At least that’s what the media said. The Catholic Brothers had been blunter: If homosexuals were lucky enough to make it out alive, their souls would burn in Hell for all eternity.
I knew no other way of connecting my own divergent roads— who or what I knew myself to be with how I presented myself to the world—than to tell my parents my secret.
I wrote them The Letter.
I left it on their bed when they were out of the house.
Later that night, they arrived at my apartment with a bag of groceries and a leather-bound copy of The New American Bible. In and out, no discussion.
Several days later, my mother phoned and said she wanted me to come to the house “for a talk.” Once there, she led me upstairs to my old bedroom, where we sat, facing each other, backs up against opposite sides of the room.
“Your father sobs,” she starting by saying. “Do you know he can’t even sleep nights because of what you’ve done to us?”
“What I’ve done to you?”
“Oh, you are cruel, aren’t you? Cruel and self-righteous, caring for no one but yourself.”
“What did you want to talk about, Mother? Why I’m a homosexual?”
“Don’t say that.”
“I am not going to argue who I am.”
“You’re not—that.”
“You don’t want to talk to me, you want to change me.”
“I’ve read articles in the library, about homosexuals, the types of things they do. They say that once you’ve tried homosexuality, it’s very difficult to do anything else.”
“Right. I don’t think so.”
“You are so naive,” she said.
“And don’t call me naive. I am not naive. I may be a lot of things but I am not naive.”
“Your father’s not naive. He doesn’t like to read about these sorts of things, he doesn’t like to be reminded, but he is not naive.”
“So he reads the Bible instead.”
“Yes, he reads the Bible, it’s what he believes. It’s what we both believe. God created—”
“Can we please leave God out of this?”
“No. You talk about what you believe; this is what we believe. God created man and woman so that they might procreate. Have children. To be united with someone forever is what God intended.”
“Why? Why is it so wrong for me to love another man?”
“No, that’s—”
“A sin. I know.”
“Peter, you are asking your father and me to choose between everything we believe, our faith, and—”
“Me. Your son.”
My mother looked away, breathed and clasped her hands.
“Mother, I just want to be happy.”
“So, you’re going to sell yourself, body and soul.”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s more to life than being happy.”
“Now I’m not supposed to be happy?”
“You’ve been seduced into becoming a homosexual. Seduced by some old pervert. That’s not happiness, that’s perversion.”
My mother and I had never discussed the event in my elementary school toilet. So overwhelming was my fear that I would end up like the man who had abused me that in an instant I was buried beneath the shame of her words.
“Homosexuals live lives of promiscuity and debauchery. All they care about is their next sex partner. Anonymous, dysfunctional sex: that’s all they care about. Fornication, sex between two unmarried people, it’s a sin.”
Her final words blinded me with indignation. I lashed out, knowing full well that my eldest sister, Kriska, had been born not seven months after our parents’ marriage, a fact my siblings and I had always known somehow never to mention.
“Were you a virgin before you got married?”
“I was raped in the concentration camp.”
My mother looked stunned, as if this, her confession, were as much a shock to her as it was to me.
Then she doubled over, still sitting but clutching at her stomach, sobbing. I rushed to hold her in my arms.
“Please don’t tell your father,” she begged, cradled in my arms. “I’ve never told your father, you won’t tell him, will you?” Her eyes, like those of an orphan, gazed up at me. I’d never seen her cry, but tears were coursing down her flushed cheeks.
“Please don’t tell him…please…”
“Of course not,” was all I could say, as I held her in my arms. “Of course not…”
Days later, the entire confrontation still left me in shock. A salient pact had been forged between us, and yet—had I not come to talk to her, at her request, about my own “confession”? Conflicted by the news of her rape, my promise that I never mention it again to anyone, least of all my father, and the ongoing need to talk about my own sexuality—and my own sexual abuse—a divide between my parents and me only widened in the weeks and months that followed. Soon, it became clear to me that to mention anything about my sexuality would be a reminder of her rape. I didn’t want to cause my mother more pain, and so I learned what not to say, do, or feel, in order that she not be reminded of her past. In essence, our pact had bound me to a deafening silence. And beneath my silence, festering rage.
|||||||||||
My need for sex, meanwhile, consumed me like an itch I felt compelled to scratch. I stopped returning calls to my agent. Never showed up for planned auditions. Pearl left me a series of desperate messages on my answering machine, pleading for me to call and tell her where I was or what was going on. I escaped into a world driven by anonymous sexual encounters with men.
Poppers, amyl nitrate, became a staple at the local gay bathhouse. The drug seemed to release me from myself, from where I was and what I was doing, if only for the moment. Once, while kissing a man inside a cubicle, my feelings of shame beating down against the pleasure of the experience, I grabbed the bottle and inhaled the liquid deep into my lungs.
“Hey, watch that stuff,” the man warned, as I pulled him into me, our bodies, tongues, cocks, limbs, tangling, merging into one. The heart palpitations, a violent drunkenness that stole me from myself, came instantly and lasted seconds, seconds I would have risked my life to repeat, no doubt, before the si
ckness erupted through my gut. When the vomit burned the back of my throat I pushed his body, unwanted flesh, away from me and rolled onto the floor. I was a man whose food seemed poisonous to his hunger.
Two weeks later, I bused downtown and stood with the prostitutes.
By the third time his car had circled the block, I knew the man was interested. He pulled over and lowered the passenger-side tinted window. I walked to the curb and leaned in—the way I’d seen other young men in the neighborhood do it for months.
“Are you busy tonight?” he said.
|||||||||||
My decision to leave, to remove myself physically from my immediate environment as soon as possible, appeared inside of me with panicked urgency the morning after the night with the man who paid money.
I called the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, a two-hour ferry from my hometown of Vancouver, and asked for all the paperwork for undergraduate studies.
I told my parents I was moving to Victoria to start my bachelor’s degree in creative writing; then, to assuage their visible concern, added, “maybe journalism.”
Pearl knew nothing about the incident with the man. I told her my plan, and the day I left, on September 1, 1989, she helped me pack my books and clothes in her Toyota, and we drove to the ferry. In Victoria, I rented a room on the top floor of an unmarried couple’s home.
Before my first day of classes, I made an appointment to see a new near-retired general practitioner, referred by my general practitioner back home. When I saw him the next week, I told him that I needed to see a psychiatrist.
“Can you please itemize for me what you’re looking for?” he asked. Staunchly British, like much of the older generation in the province’s capital city, the doctor asked questions like he was completing a national survey.
“Some sort of therapy where I can do more than talk, although…I guess I also need to talk. I need…” I pushed my fist into the pit of my stomach, near my belly button, like I was trying to reach my own umbilical cord. “Something…deeper. I know I need to cry. But I don’t want to take medication.”
“There is one doctor, a Spanish man, who’s just moved to the city from back east. Quebec, I think. He’s also the only psychiatrist practicing psychotherapy that’s accepting new patients. I’ll see what I can do…”
5
I WAS SITTING ON the only metal chair in a yet-to-be finished waiting room when I smelled his pungent cologne, like the scent of an animal that had laid claim to its territory. Moments later, his office door swung open with a gust of wind.
“Are you Peter?” he said in a pronounced Spanish accent. “I’m Dr. Alfonzo.”
The smell was his.
I stood up and smiled, shook his hand, and followed him back through two adjoining doors that opened up inside a large, empty room, a windowless chamber, still being constructed.
“My furniture’s being delivered next week. Until then, we can sit here,” he said, pointing to two rickety stools.
We sat, and he started writing notes before I’d said a word. Olive skinned and around fifty years old, he was dressed in black, head to toe, with short, graying hair, wild, bushy eyebrows that hung over his long, dark lashes, and a closely cropped goatee. No doubt he’d once been handsome. Now he looked more menacing and slightly disheveled.
I glanced up, above his head, to a large framed quote from something called A Course in Miracles, hanging on the wall.
This is a course in miracles.
It is a required course.
Only the time you take it is voluntary…
“How do you pronounce your last name?” he asked.
“‘Guy-ditch,’” I said. “As in a ‘guy-in-a-ditch.’” I cracked a smile. He was not amused. “When I was a kid we actually pronounced it ‘Gay-dicks.’”
He looked up from his yellow, legal-sized notepad. “Why would you do that?”
“My father Anglicized his name after the war. I guess he wanted to make it easier on North Americans.”
“Which war?”
“World War II. He didn’t really know what he was doing, changing the pronunciation to ‘gay.’ He’s Hungarian; he couldn’t speak English. Growing up was a cruel joke.”
“Why?”
He waited for me to explain what I thought had been obvious. “Well, growing up with the name ‘Gay-dicks,’ and turning out gay.”
“You’re gay?” He raised an eyebrow, scanned me up and down.
“Yes…”
“You told your parents?”
“Last year.”
“What did they say?”
“That they’d never accept it, that it was immoral, and I should never talk about it again.”
He looked back to his notes and scribbled away. “Tell me about your parents.”
Before thinking, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind whenever I was asked about my mother. “My mother escaped from a concentration camp.”
“You’re Jewish?”
“Catholic. At least I grew up Catholic.”
“Why was your mother in a concentration camp?”
“All the Germans where she lived in Yugoslavia were placed in concentration camps after the war. Communist camps.”
I tried to focus on our conversation, and his eyes, not to glance down at the tickling of what I knew was crawling on my forearm. There was no way of knowing exactly when the transfer had occurred, when I’d been contaminated, but the signs had started three nights after the night in the local gay bathhouse, two weeks earlier. I was in my bedroom, working on an assignment for one of my creative writing classes, when I realized I’d been scratching my crotch for twenty minutes. I went to the bathroom that I shared with another student down the hall, pulled the string to the light bulb dangling from the ceiling, latched the wooden door, lowered my pants and underwear. What at first looked like nothing more than a freckle, a grain of sand, began to move, crawl with legs that stretched from its oval body across the fuzz of my black pubic hairs. I smudged it between my thumb and forefinger. Then I saw another, near the hair follicles. And another. All across my skin, my arms, legs, torso, I saw them, crawling. I was infested with body crabs.
“Mr. Gajdics?”
“Sorry, what was the question?”
“And your father?”
“I don’t really know that much about my father. He’s never liked to talk about his past. Even now he won’t mention it. Sometimes he hit us when we asked him questions.”
“So…why do you want to see a psychiatrist?”
“Why? I guess…I want to feel more control in my life.”
“You feel out of control?”
“I feel like I’ve lost everything that matters to me: my parents, their love. I was trying to be honest, telling who I am. And now…”
“Yes?”
“How do I come to terms with who I am when who I am causes so much pain and suffering to everyone I love?” I started crying.
“We won’t have any of that.” He motioned with a flick of his pen for me to cease all tears and to get on track. “No crying. Not now. Not yet.” His thick accent shook me from my pain. He looked back to his notes as I closed the door to my tears, something I’d become an expert at since childhood.
“How’s your sleep?”
“My sleep?”
“Do you sleep through the night?”
“Not usually.”
“Are you depressed?”
I blushed. The truth was I had lived in the country of depression for so long it felt like my home. “I suppose.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Do you want one?”
“I don’t trust men.”
He glanced up again, but this time his eyes seemed to be photographing my every inch for future recollection: my swarthy complexion, my long black hair tied back in a ponytail, my closely cropped beard and mustache.
“And women?”
“I’ve always had women friends, a gir
lfriend, even, but…sexually, that’s never really worked.”
“You can’t maintain an erection?”
“No. I mean, that’s not it, it’s just…I always end up thinking about men when I’m with women. But when I’m with men, I…”
“Yes?”
“I feel like a crippled heterosexual.”
The words hung between us like an onerous confession. He turned back to his notepad and scribbled some notes. I tried to fix my eyes on the upside-down writing, but all I could decipher were arrows and tables and what looked like some kind of shorthand.
“There was also an incident,” I added, almost as an afterthought. “When I was six.”
“Incident?”
“Sexual abuse.”
“You were abused?” His interest peaked. “Who abused you—a family member?”
“A stranger. During a church bazaar in my elementary-school bathroom.”
“Where were your parents?”
“Somewhere in the crowd, I don’t know.”
“How did it end?”
“I don’t remember it ending.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
“You never discussed it with anyone?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean, ‘not really’?”
“When I was thirteen, my mother sat me down in the kitchen after school one day and she told me that there were dirty old men who kidnapped little boys and made them do really bad things that turned them into perverts for life. Then she just stared at me.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know. I was too afraid to ask. ‘Beware who you’ve become,’ I guess.”
“Meaning?”
“Like I said, I didn’t ask her, and she never explained. I was too scared.”
“I’m thinking of setting up a group solely for gay men,” he said. “I think you’d be a perfect fit. But we need to take care of what’s really bothering you. It would be a mistake to focus on your homosexuality. Your sexuality will take care of itself.”
He was silent for a moment, still studying my face, then continued.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 4