The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  I felt a weight with every breath, a crushing pressure on my chest, like a body, forcing its way inside. Random memories emerged, each as if they’d never ended, only waiting to be felt.

  My arms and legs kept moving; but in my mind, I saw myself, six years old, inside the toilet stall. I felt myself forced back against the cold metal door behind me, my little boy’s body squished up against the fat man’s stomach, like a drum, held solidly between us. On the mattress I breathed in, then out, in, out; and then I heard Alfonzo, like a voice in my head, reminding me not to talk, but to “focus on the past.”

  And I did: I couldn’t stop, couldn’t help but see the man, the three-quarter crown on top of his head with dandruff, like snow, dusting his shoulders and the front of his body; the dirty blue lint, like stuffing from his insides, falling out of his navel; his nose, bloated and purplish, that looked like it would crack wide open and spill out yellowish pus.

  All I wanted was to move, if not away from him then outside myself. But then he was reaching down between his pale, hairy legs, and his eyes, they flickered, like he was dreaming. When he groaned I smelled his breath, dirty, cigarettes, and I heard the sound of a zipper being pulled down as his fingers reached around inside my pants.

  “I love you,” he whispered, pulling me in toward his cracked lips. “I love you.”

  “Keep moving!” Alfonzo screamed. “Faster!” I did: my legs and arms clipped faster, faster, as my heart pounded in my ears. “Faster!”

  Then I was running, running on the mattress, kicking on the mattress as the pressure rose from within. When my back arched up, up off the mattress, I heard the scream, like a windstorm through the channels of my body, echo out of me and off the walls as I lay there, frozen, drenched and dizzy, spinning, extremities tingling, ears ringing, lightheaded, as if I’d dove off a cliff and was falling through air.

  Only after the dizziness stopped, minutes later, did I open my eyes. I saw snow.

  “Sit up,” Alfonzo said. “Slowly.”

  I did.

  “Now…I want you to go to the batting station—Peter, can you hear me?”

  “Yes…”

  “I want you to go to the batting station, at the end of the mattress. Then I want you to kneel in front of the punching bag and face the wall.”

  Beneath the window at the head of the mattress was a boxer’s punching bag lying on the floor. There was an aluminum baseball bat next to it, and on the wall directly in front a large “X,” marked like a bull’s-eye with red electrician’s tape.

  I did as I was told and crawled over to the “batting station.”

  “We lie on the mattress to connect with deep pain. If we feel anger, even the slightest bit of anger, we move directly to the batting station. Pick up the baseball bat.”

  I picked up the bat lying next to the punching bag.

  “Keep looking at the red ‘X’ on the wall, and start hitting the bag.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Did you hear me?”

  The whole exercise seemed foolish. I didn’t feel angry. If anything, I was still weak and weighted with sadness from the exercise on the mattress.

  “I’m not angry,” I said.

  “I said hit the bag.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Peter, this is not a question. I said hit the fucking bag.”

  I tapped the bag, halfheartedly, with the baseball bat.

  Alfonzo stood up and walked over to me, took the bat from my hands, and knelt down next to me. “Do you see what I’m doing? Watch me. Grip the bat, and hit the bag. Simple.”

  He handed the bat back to me, and I started to hit the punching bag, weakly at first, but quickly picking up speed.

  “That’s it,” he called out over my bats. “Don’t forget to breathe. And remember: no talking. Think about your mother or your father. See them sitting before you when you stare at the ‘X.’ And keep vocalizing your breaths: in through your nose, out with a grunt through your mouth. Don’t stop till I tell you to stop.”

  Soon I was whacking the bag with all my strength, grunting all the while.

  |||||||||||

  With each subsequent session lying on the mattress, eyes closed, limbs moving, I’d visualize myself at seven, already withdrawn but with a fury in my eyes that both frightened and surprised me in the present. When the rage came like a heat wave through my body, I didn’t even stand but scurried on all fours to grip the bat, cold and hard, and channel whatever I’d never been allowed to feel into repeated swings high into the air with every muscle in my back, shoulders and arms constricted, then down with a stabbing thump against the bag, like a body, lying passively before me.

  For the next several weeks, we excavated my body. Every time I backed away from a memory, a feeling, rage, Alfonzo was there, nudging me on into myself, deeper into the fury, like a room I’d long since abandoned out of fear. Those feelings still took up residence in me whether I acknowledged them or not. Nothing was taboo, no memory off limits. All was encouraged, welcomed, given room to breathe, to spread its arms as if waking after a long night’s sleep and ready itself to stand up and be.

  Be angry. Become it, because that was the point, this was the time, there were no excuses.

  Alfonzo, it seemed, could see inside my room, the room of my fury: he knew what was in me and how to coax it out of me. After weeks of me kneeling, grunting, batting, he called out to me from across the workroom.

  “What have you always wanted to say to your mother and your father?” he said as I imagined the bat like all the knives I’d ever wanted to slice into them, into everyone who’d teased me, mocked me, called me names, or worse: who’d denied me my feelings, aborted them, each and every one, as if they’d been unwanted children—my sadness, my terror, even my joy.

  “Say it now!” he screamed. “Say all of it! Only this time, win! You have to win! Scream twice as loud as their denial! Don’t back down!”

  Breaths and grunts morphed into words as I screamed at my mother, at both my parents, asked them why they’d never talked to me about the fat man in the toilet stall, why I’d been silenced, as if bound and gagged, throughout my childhood, why they’d never come to rescue me, to help me. Didn’t they love me?

  Then one day, while “walking” on the mattress in the middle of a session, an image popped into my mind, as clearly as if I’d opened up a curtain and allowed in the light. The fat man and I were still inside the stall, but thirty feet away, outside the bathroom door, standing like a guard, I saw my mother. As if I were above it all, omnisciently looking down upon a scene from my life, I was witnessing what could not have been, what I could not comprehend.

  And then the image cut forward, like from a movie, and I was back with my mother in the church bazaar, holding her hand amidst a sea of people. The fat man approached us. I had stopped moving on the mattress and my palms were sweating, my heart, thumping. I didn’t want to look, to see, but when I did I saw his stained and jagged teeth, fangs. Then he handed her money, “For your son’s hospitality,” patting my head, before he turned and walked away.

  “Go to the bat,” Alfonzo called out.

  But I could not move. I could not stand, roll over, or crawl anywhere. I could not believe what I was seeing, imagining, and I did not want to fight.

  “Stop,” I heard him say. “Peter, open your eyes. Do it. Now.”

  My eyes opened. Everything looked blurry, surreal.

  “Sit up.”

  I didn’t want to move, but I did as I was told.

  “I want you to listen to me. Peter, are you with me?”

  “Yes,” I said, because I knew that’s what I was supposed to say.

  “When you connect to a painful memory it’s vital that you go to the batting station. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes…”

  “You can’t just lie there and stop moving. If you do, you’ll go into despair. This is how it works. This is how everyone does it, how it’s always been done, and if you don’t foll
ow the rules, you’re out. Out. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said, lying.

  7

  GROUP THERAPY STARTED IN late January 1990, several weeks after my individual sessions. I could only imagine the other patients had all been referred to Alfonzo through their general practitioners, as I’d been through mine. Alfonzo sat on his squat chair in the middle of one side of the room, with ten of us in a circle, backs up against the outer walls, around the mattress. Yvette, his secretary, a French Canadian, took notes on a pad at one end of the group.

  “I could summarize my therapy with three C’s,” Alfonzo said, holding up his three middle fingers for added effect. “Confession. Confrontation. Communion. First you confess your story—tell someone your life, expose your shame. Then you confront those who wronged you in some way, which is why we have the batting station over there. And finally—and this is the most important part—you commune with the divine through the act of reparenting. Without this final step, receiving the love you were denied as a child, no true healing occurs. A Course in Miracles says it all: ‘Only love is real, all else, illusion.’ A loveless mind is a mind in error. And a mind in error can only be corrected with the help of my therapy and the aid of reparenting.”

  Understanding Alfonzo through his Spanish accent was sometimes difficult, but everything he said about only love being real, all else illusion, made sense to me, much more than the Catholic doctrines of my youth, which had taught me sin and forgiveness. I listened to him, we all listened to him, as he continued on about his theories around reparenting, which, he explained, had evolved over the course of his own therapy, beginning in the late 1960s with none other than the father of primal therapy, Arthur Janov, at his Primal Institute in Los Angeles.

  “It’s amazing to me now, the fact that Janov never thought to bring us Mommy. All of us, a sea of primal patients, all lying on our own mattresses in a room as big as a gymnasium, crying out for Mommy’s love, and Janov never thought to give us the obvious: Mommy’s love. Reparenting with the mother, and to a lesser degree, the father—it’s the glue that holds that baby’s mind together. It’s the missing link in all of psychotherapy, and I discovered it. Such is the level of denial of the male mind. But of course you can’t get to Mommy and Daddy before going through yourself.”

  He stopped talking long enough to look at us one at a time, each as if we were merely obstacle courses he was about to begin.

  “So, who goes first? Who wants to confess their shame?”

  All our eyes turned to the floor.

  “No volunteers?”

  An image of Brother Roberts, cassocked and white collared, popped into my mind—the way he roamed the aisles of my grade nine sex-education class, all of our faces, mine especially, buried in our books as we prayed he wouldn’t call on us to read aloud.

  “Okay then. We start at one end and go in a circle.”

  Just like class, I was sitting somewhere in the middle, time enough to mentally prepare or pray for the hour to end before it was my turn to speak.

  First up was a woman who we all could see was anorexic, even before she opened her mouth. Her voice, when she started explaining her reasons for not eating, was frailer than bone china.

  “Speak up,” Alfonzo repeated throughout her meek, disjointed soliloquy, her skeletal arms wrapped tighter around her body each time she heard his voice.

  Next up was a mid-thirties Rastafarian who wore faded Bob Marley T-shirts. He shared his story about his wife he’d not had sex with for over three years. “I don’t know what her problem is,” he explained, tugging at his dreadlocks.

  “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with her,” Alfonzo reproached. “Maybe there’s something wrong with you.”

  “My sixteen-year-old daughter’s the problem,” another patient, a late-thirties, single mother, shared with the group. “She stays out late, comes home drunk, skips school. And now I’ve met her dropout boyfriend, who I’m sure is a member of some pot-smoking gang.”

  “So why are you here?” Alfonzo asked.

  “Well, I wanted her to come, but she refused.”

  “So why are you here?” Alfonzo repeated.

  “I don’t know. My daughter’s the problem.”

  “Okay. Get on the mattress.”

  “What?”

  “Lie on the mattress, and let’s see what’s inside you.”

  And so she did, reticently, moving her arms and legs as if she were underwater, the sound of her voice bubbling up but blocked somewhere between her chest and throat. After twenty minutes on the mattress her body broke open, like Pandora’s box.

  “You think I wanted you?” she screamed, her body thrashing on the mattress, eyes locked shut, limbs like clubs against the insulating mattress beneath her. “You think I wanted to have some ungrateful brat I never loved I never wanted I never asked to have and now I have to support and feed and worry about all the time? Just die, goddammit, just die and leave me to my life so I can live my life!”

  The woman’s eyes flashed open, and she tumbled off the mattress and toward the door while looking back as if the mattress itself had possessed her into what she’d said, into what she’d felt, into what had come from her.

  She left before the end of the hour. We never saw her again.

  The anorexic also didn’t return the following week. When Alfonzo told us she would not be returning, he added that her eating disorder, her refusal to feed her body, was directly related to her fear of love.

  “Love is to the self what food is to the body,” he told us. “Without it, you die. You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you, Peter?”

  Everyone turned and looked at me. Alfonzo smiled. I blushed but said nothing, embarrassed as if being singled out in class.

  The Rastafarian lasted one week longer before he, too, vanished. Presumably, when Alfonzo called his home to check up on him, his wife said that he’d dropped off the face of the earth and that no one, not even she, could find him.

  “One day he’ll show up,” Alfonzo told us in the group the following week. “And when he does, he’ll still have the same problems that he left with when he disappeared.”

  Week after week, the other original patients disappeared from the group like characters killed off in an Agatha Christie novel, until all but myself of the original group had been replaced with new patients from an ever-growing list of patients referred to Alfonzo for treatment.

  When it was my turn to share, to confess my shame, I told the ever-changing cast of characters about a time, after the time in my elementary school toilet, that I had sex with another man.

  “I had skipped out of school,” I started, still sitting in the circle.

  “How old were you?” Alfonzo asked, perched on his squat chair directly across from me on the other side of the room.

  “Thirteen.”

  “This is very important,” Alfonzo said to everyone. “Before beginning a memory, you have to always say how old you are and where you are. Go ahead…”

  “I was downtown, alone. I was in grade eight. It was ‘1950s day’ at school so I was dressed as my favorite TV character, the Fonz. White T-shirt and blue denims. This man passed me on the street. His face was covered in pockmarks, like craters. He smiled. I glanced back. He walked back to me and asked what I was up to. I told him I was just walking around. He told me to meet him at his apartment later that afternoon.”

  “He told you?”

  “I mean he asked me.”

  “Okay. He ‘asked’ you. Go on.”

  “I guess he gave me his address and then he walked away. All I could think about all day was maybe getting from him what I couldn’t find in anyone else.”

  “And what was that?”

  “A connection. Attention, maybe? Anyway, I waited outside his apartment for over an hour. It was late in the day, three thirty. I knew my parents would be expecting me home from school, but I couldn’t leave. I cou
ldn’t go home without…it. Whatever ‘it’ was. At five o’clock he arrived. I saw him from one end of the street, strolling toward me. I was so mad for waiting all that time and then all he said was hello or something, no apology, but he told me that he was glad I was there and I should go upstairs with him.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “To his apartment. I followed him in. He told me to get undressed…to lie on his bed. He scared me. He was ugly. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I couldn’t leave.”

  “Why couldn’t you leave?”

  “I…just…couldn’t. I took off my pants. He told me to take them off. I felt ashamed of my body. My skin was still hairless. I was thirteen. Then he took off his pants, and I saw his penis. It was huge, like a club. He told me to lie on my stomach. I wanted to leave. I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember thinking about my mother. I could see her at home, making dinner. And my dad…arriving home from work, so tired. I could see them asking where I was. I should have been home hours ago. Where was their baby boy?”

  I started shivering. I glanced quickly at everyone in my group, then over at Alfonzo. I had never talked about any of these details with anyone before, and while I was scared to keep going, remaining silent, at that moment, seemed worse than the fear of anyone’s judgment.

  “I could feel his pubic hairs against my behind. They were sharp, like bristles. Then he…stabbed himself inside me. The pain was…raw…and unbearable. Jagged glass through bone. My body…jumped off the bed. I can still see me, running down his corridor, hysterical. Like my body had…burst or come undone, somehow. He got mad. I don’t remember much, but I remember his anger. And then…I don’t know. After that I don’t remember. I guess I must’ve calmed down. I mean at some point, I must’ve stopped crying. Got dressed…put on my underwear, my pants, shirt…my coat. I’m here today so I must’ve left his apartment and walked to the bus. Rode home…entered the house and faced my parents. Made up some excuse about why I was three hours late. I can’t remember but…it must’ve happened. My mind…fell out of time…or something.”