“There’s nothing gay about being gay, is there, Peter?” Alfonzo said as I finished my story, chilled, but tearless. “In all my years as a practicing psychiatrist, I have never met one happy homosexual.”
In my silence, another group member, Natie, a deeply commanding, handsome, older woman, spoke up. “Maybe the reason why you’ve never met a happy homosexual is because you’re a psychiatrist,” she said, “trained to treat unhappy people, gay or straight. Besides, Peter’s story had nothing to do with being gay—he was raped!”
“Are you challenging my lifetime of experience?” he said.
Natie was a therapist herself, as I’d learned from her own introduction, so her opinion seemed to matter to Alfonzo above the quibbling of the other patients.
“You had better shut up,” he told her. “Or else.”
|||||||||||
Later that night, after my writing workshop at school, I arrived home to a phone message. Before I could hit “play,” the phone rang. It was my old childhood friend, Tommy.
“Peter, what’s going on?” he said on the phone.
“What do you mean?”
“This therapy, Peter, I’m worried about you. I don’t hear from you anymore. I feel like this doctor is a body snatcher. What’s happening to you? Have you talked to your mother?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think you should?”
“No.”
“Well maybe she’s worried about you.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Maybe you should think of her feelings.”
“Why? Has she ever thought of mine?”
Just the thought of needing to take care of my mother’s feelings, again, made me think of the baseball bat in the office, and in an instant, I was swinging it through my mind, faces smashed like piñatas in the air.
“Does this have anything to do with all those men?”
“Which men?” I asked, knowing full well what he was asking.
“That you’ve had sex with. I don’t know why you can’t just date one man, like me. Peter, whatever’s going on, I’m sure your parents care about you and you need—”
I hung up the phone, picked up the first thing, a water glass, I saw, and threw it across the room. It bounced off the floor and landed next to my bed in a thud.
What I needed was the baseball bat.
The blinking light on the phone machine caught my eye. I pressed “play.”
“Peter, it’s Dr. Alfonzo. How are you? That was quite a session today, wasn’t it? Peter, please don’t give up hope. My thoughts and love are with you. You’re not alone.”
Love? Not alone? In all the time since telling my parents, “I am a homosexual,” two years earlier, they had never said such supportive words to me, on or off the phone. I rewound the message and listened to it again, and again.
|||||||||||
“What I want to know,” Alfonzo said, starting my next individual session, the following week, “is how a thirteen-year-old boy ends up downtown alone, getting fucked up the ass by a man three times his age.”
I lowered my eyes. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“Isn’t that what it was?”
“I skipped out of school. I told you.”
“Why? What was going on at home?”
I looked at him, but said nothing. Knew only that I couldn’t be at home. Or at school. Both had been worse than wandering the streets, alone, downtown.
“Lie down,” he said.
In the month that I’d been working with Alfonzo, my regressions on the mattress had been like diving back into a wreck, the furthest reaches of my past where events and circumstances, feeling images caught on film, played through me, the Moviola of my body. I never knew just what to expect, which memories I would have to swim through and survive, until I lay down, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and moved.
When I did, there was my thirteenth birthday, the Dobos torte my mother had spent all afternoon baking just for me, and the feeling of depression settling into my young body like an influenza that I couldn’t fight. I wanted to go to bed, to turn life off, as if unconsciousness could hide me from myself. It never did. In sleep, my dreams enunciated everything I couldn’t bear the weight of while awake.
In one dream I was inside my parents’ bathroom when I realized my thumb had been severed from my hand and that I’d have to fix it, somehow reattach it to my body. No one else could help me now. But then my mother was banging on the door, wanting to see, to help, to know what had happened, and I was hysterical, panicked, without a thumb, crazed and alone inside the bathroom. I couldn’t breathe or scream for her to go away, to leave me to my shame. But what I wanted most of all was for her to come and somehow help make me into who I’d been when I was whole.
In one of my regressions, I thought of dinners, all seven of us around the blue Arborite kitchen table as my father joked with my two older brothers that they’d better not talk back to him or else he’d stuff them in a potato sack and tie it up so they could never get out again. Everyone would laugh, or maybe only smile. Potato sacks aren’t big enough for my brothers, I’d think. But I understood his message perfectly well: We were not, under any circumstance, at any time, to speak back to our father. If we did, we were slapped across our face or else he told our mother to pass him the fakanál—the Hungarian word for “wooden spoon,” pronounced “fuck-u-null”— which usually meant that someone was about to get the slapping of their lives.
Every night we listened to Walter Cronkite’s voice from our black-and-white Fleetwood console in the living room, telling us of Vietnam and Watergate, the atomic bomb, of Washington politics. It seemed the world was splintered into pieces—filled with betrayal and heartache, at war with itself, imploding and coming to an end. Later, after dinner and the dishes, my brothers and I repeated our father’s Hungarian word, fakanál, while forcing its first syllable through our lips and back and forth at each other like darts hurled through the air.
“And that’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite signed out in the background of our lives, as we raced around the house, chanting “fakanál…fakanál…fakanál.”
“Where are you now?” Alfonzo asked, and then I was remembering, seeing with eyes I’d never used before, the night that Kriska ran away from home.
“Okay, keep moving and talking,” Alfonzo said as I continued to breathe, to move, to see myself lying in bed later that night, after my mother found Kriska’s goodbye note on her bed.
“Your sister doesn’t want to live with us anymore,” she’d said, shutting my door and leaving me adrift at sea. When I cried, I begged for God to tell me why, why life took from me my sister that I loved. But no one answered, not God, not my parents. There was only silence and pain: the breaking apart of what was supposed to have always remained whole.
“Daddy’s bringing Kriska home tonight,” I remembered my brother, Pisti, telling me; and then I saw us, weeks later, crouched beneath the kitchen table, peering through the rain-streaked window, beyond our fenced-in yard, down the potholed laneway, at Daddy dragging Kriska by her golden hair as she kicked and punched him like an untamed animal being dragged back to its pen. When they entered the house, through the basement below, their screams were like a fire that burst us all up in flames.
“Sit at the table and eat your dinner,” our mother, our protector, ordered my siblings and me before Kriska ran past us, escaped her beating in the basement to run up the stairs, through the kitchen, and around the corner to the bathroom, as our father, her captor, closed in on her; and all of it, the beating and the screaming and the fear, the threat that I could be next, that if he did it to her he could do it to me, was all like an ice storm to my body.
“Go to the bat,” Alfonzo ordered.
I didn’t want to, wanted instead to hide, to do what I knew and allow the quicksand called despair to take me, but I crawled to the batting station as instructed.
I had not yet learned to talk and found no w
ords, like tools, to use against my father.
“Just keep batting,” I heard Alfonzo, my leader, say. “Breathe and bat and stare at the ‘X.’”
And then I was twelve, thirteen, standing in the kitchen with my father after he’d returned home from work, listening to him talk about God, His love for all His children, when all I wanted was to ask how God could love His children when he, my father, beat his own.
“Keep batting,” Alfonzo called out. “And keep your eyes focused on the ‘X.’”
And I did, batting up against his words as I heard him talking about Kriska, whom he’d hardly ever mentioned in the four years she’d been living with a foster family.
“She had the devil in her,” he said. “You don’t want to end up like her. You’re a good boy. She was a troublemaker.”
“Bat!” Alfonzo screamed.
“No she wasn’t,” I shot back to my father as a child, unable to contain myself.
“What did you say?” my father asked.
The tremor of his chin and a burn in his eyes warned of what was coming. Like a paddle he raised his hand, backed me into a corner of the kitchen.
“Bloody hell…”
I darted past him, heard the snap of his belt buckle, like a bullwhip, and ran, as if trying to run outside me, through the living room, the dining room, up the wooden stairs, and down the hallway to my room.
At the batting station, kneeling and still clutching to the bat, a rage pulsed through me, and all I could do was breathe, gutturally punch the air before me, and bat. Breathe, bat, and visualize all the years I’d imagined grabbing the kitchen knife and stabbing it into him, into both my parents. As a child, those thoughts were bigger than my body, were rage that blistered, then, unexpressed, deflated, leaving me numb inside an igloo of depression. Now I was breaking out, through years of ice, one bat at a time, back into the rage.
Once in my bedroom, I locked the door. Then he was pounding up the stairs; he was on the other side, banging with fists like clubs for me to open up and let him in.
“Open this door!” my father screamed in the past as Alfonzo screamed in the present for me to “Bat! Keeping batting!”
“This is my house, this is my door, as long as you live in my house you will open my door!”
As a child nothing, not one word, breath, escaped my body; everything, all fear, incomprehension, knotted in my belly. Then a stiffness I didn’t want or understand swelled between my legs. Outside the door, my father gave up and returned to my mother and The Lawrence Welk Show downstairs. But, in my room, crazed with tension like angular objects jabbing in and out of me, I rubbed my pants to make it stop, to stop the stiffness.
“Don’t stop!” I heard Alfonzo as I continued batting.
In my memory in my room something exploded, like a pipe bursting down below, and was shooting out of me, inside my pants, and then a release of all of everything that had been trapped inside me spun me down onto the floor in a flush of lightheadedness. Chilled and still dizzy, I unzipped and looked with horror at a whitish substance oozing from my penis. I had broken myself. Oh God oh God oh God…forgive me, please…
I finally stopped batting minutes later because of sweat pouring down my face, stinging my eyes, pooling on my back and chest, preventing me from gripping the bat one moment longer. I fell back into a sitting position, still clutching the bat, panting like a dog whose owner had forced it on a run, and no one spoke. For several minutes, neither one of us exchanged a word.
“I guess that’s it,” I said, dropping the bat, wiping my brow, crawling back to the mattress, where my session began.
I looked to Alfonzo for guidance. He looked at me and waited, knowing, no doubt, what I had not yet learned. Clearing away the rage had allowed the underbrush of mourning to appear. Which it did, moments later.
“Lie back down and move,” he said, I think, because by then I could barely hear, could not follow instructions, thought nothing, really, was already awash in tears, mourning a constellation of losses.
He touched my chest, gently guided me back. “Move,” he said, “keep moving.”
I tried, but there was nothing I could do but cry, as powerless to sadness as a shore is to its waves.
And then it stopped. My body, in its infinite wisdom, knowing it had accomplished all it could for one day, stopped its tears.
Later, after I didn’t die from shame, all that had remained was the experience that what came out of me that first ejaculation had released me from myself when I was still unable, like my sister before me, to escape. Whatever it was called, whatever I had done, all I wanted was to do it again, and again, for it to come out of me again, and again…
“Good work,” Alfonzo said as I lay there, spent.
8
“SO HOW DOES IT feel, now that you’re sharing?” Alfonzo asked me in his private office, when we were alone after one of my group sessions.
“Like I’ve dropped twenty pounds. Like I want to run away and hide.”
“And the therapy in general? How are you finding the therapy?”
“Draining. I have to go home and sleep. I’m exhausted.”
“That’ll pass. In the meantime, you should take extra B vitamins.”
“B vitamins?”
“For the stress. Overall, though, you find it helping?”
Was it helping? I didn’t quite know what he meant, how to respond. I felt worse than when I’d started, fatigued and unable to suppress unwanted anxiety, but I figured that was normal. Poison rising to the surface before draining from the body, I told myself.
“I want to cry all the time. At work, at the student union building when I’m serving chili, or at the cash register. It’s embarrassing.”
“At some point you may need to take medication. For your own good. But we can talk about that another time. What about sex? Are you still having sex with men?”
His question cornered me. Despite having shared my sexual history, my shame, in groups and with Alfonzo personally, I’d still not talked much about my current life situation.
“I had sex a while ago. In a gay bathhouse.”
“So, did it help?” he asked, with an edge of sarcasm.
“Help?”
“Did you get what you were looking for?”
I looked at him, unsure of how to respond.
“No,” I said.
“Well then maybe you’re starting to learn a thing or two? This isn’t all a waste of time? You know, Peter, at some point you’re going to have to make a choice between sex with men or therapy. You’re like a chocolate addict who wants to go on a diet but doesn’t want to give up his fix. I don’t think any therapist would treat you while you’re off fucking in a bush.”
I was not off fucking in a bush, at least not anymore, but I received his words as if each had been hammered into me, the same tiny spot inside myself with all my other shame.
“I understand your difficulty,” he continued. “Believe me. I’ve been on this path since before you were born. Not with men, but with my own demons. Like you, my therapy was forced upon me. It was sink or swim. I had no parents to guide me.”
“You didn’t have a father?”
“My father died when I was a child.”
“Really?”
“He was a writer, like you. Completely outspoken. He had his own press, nothing fancy, just a little newspaper where he wrote articles against Franco and his army. One day they came to our house, took my father outside, lined him up with all the dissidents, and shot him.”
“You saw this?”
“And a lot more.”
“How old were you?”
“Five, maybe six.”
“Where was your mother?”
“My mother couldn’t help me. No one could. I was alone before I knew how to talk.”
“So, your mother raised you alone?”
“Me and my brother, but…let’s just say my mother knew how to twist the knife.”
“What do you mean?”
> He smiled.
“You know what I mean. Our curriculum may be different, Peter, but we’re all in the same school. I left Spain to get away from her, her and my wife. Another woman who also knew how to twist the knife. Twist and turn.”
“You were married?”
“I have a son back in Spain. I hope to bring him here soon. I think he needs to get away from his mother. Before it’s too late.”
“How long have you been in Canada?”
“Just over twenty years. I graduated from McGill and then I worked at a psychiatric institute in Montreal. I was at the forefront of treating gay couples when you were still in diapers.”
Alfonzo’s disclosure, his willingness to share so much about his life, surprised me, especially considering his past reluctance to do so. But I liked that we were talking, that he was talking about himself. The inner sanctum of his thoughts and feelings was a cave into which I wanted to crawl and be comforted.
“Was this before or after you were with Janov?”
“Before. I started therapy with Daniel Casriel in New York. Have you read his book, A Scream Away From Happiness?”
“No.”
“You should. But then I heard about Janov, and his institute in LA. After a couple of years with Janov, I got a job in a hospital in Quebec. That’s when the fun and games began. I built my own sound-insulated workroom, next to my office, continued on with my primal sessions, alone. Every day, between seeing my own patients, I’d lock myself in my office and I’d lie down on the mattress, and the tears…well let’s just say there was a sea inside, and it wasn’t long before I was drowning in it. I primalled and I primalled. Without a life raft. I primalled till there was nothing left of me to primal. Till my child self was completely wiped out.”
“What do you mean, ‘wiped out’?”
“The tether connecting me to the mother ship had been severed. It was my dark night of the soul—an emptying of the well of my identity. My mind was shattered. You think you know grief? Anxiety and panic attacks overwhelmed my system. My sleep deteriorated. The amount of medication I was taking, just to function, would have killed a horse.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 7