The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “To this day I don’t know how I maintained the illusion of being a practicing psychiatrist for as many years as I did. Reparenting was something that I stumbled on by accident. There was a nurse at the hospital where I worked, a very warm and loving woman, a Mother Teresa figure.

  “One day I asked her to hold me, privately, in my office. All I knew was that I needed to be held, and loved, that my child self needed to be nurtured. I never realized for a second the extent to which my child self depended on that love as a cure to all my grief. My dues have been paid with sweat and heartache. The fact is, Peter, I’m the only person alive doing this kind of therapy. No one else out there has figured out the obvious, that the child can only cry for so long before going into despair. That’s where you’ve been for the last, well—I don’t know that you’ve never not been in despair.

  “We’re all running around the same track of life, Peter. The only difference between you and me is that I’m a little further ahead of the game than you are. That’s it.”

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  In my writing workshop later that day, my professor returned our graded one-act plays. My play, Off the Wall, however, contained no grade, only the handwritten note: “Please don’t write plays in the absurdist style.”

  I had long been a lover of existential theater, including plays by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Edward Albee, and the writings of Antonin Artaud. In my own three-character play, a Young Man awoke sitting high up on the ledge of a wall, unaware of where he was or how he’d ended up on the wall. Perched next to him was an Older Woman, whose vacuous attempts to mother him, as the play progressed, left him bereft. When a Little Boy began bicycling up and down the street at the foot of the wall, and then screamed up at the Young Man, in one short monologue, about being “kidnapped” and made to do “really dirty stuff” which caused him to “grow up and see a doctor ’cause they never believe me when I tell ’em,” the Young Man decided that he had to jump off the wall, no matter the consequence, which he did, moments before the play’s final blackout.

  Like many plays from the Theater of the Absurd, my own play ended as it began: with the Little Boy climbing up on the wall, then falling asleep with the Older Woman still sitting next to him.

  I approached my teacher, a mid-thirties gay man, during morning break. “I notice you didn’t grade my play. Do you mind telling me why?”

  He motioned for me to follow him around the corner, away from other students. “I didn’t grade your play because…frankly, I don’t know how to grade it. I don’t understand Theater of the Absurd. I’d appreciate it if you’d not write in that style anymore.”

  “Oh.”

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  Back home, I thought about my session with Alfonzo, the fact that my father had never talked directly to me, to any of my siblings, about his life “before” in quite the same way that Alfonzo, like a father to a son, was already talking to me about his.

  My mother at least had relatives, if far away in Europe. My father, however, was like the shadow of a man without a past to call his own. Everything about him was a mystery, even the sound of his voice. As a child, I’d never thought about the fact that he had an “accent”—all I knew was that he always seemed to stress the “wrong” syllables so that his words came out sounding lopsided. He also could not pronounce “th,” which, no matter how hard he tried, sounded like another “t.” His English embarrassed me. Why can’t Daddy sound like other daddies? I’d think, ashamed of my embarrassment.

  The only time I’d glimpsed his history was late at night, when he played the upright Yamaha piano after dinner. Unlike my siblings and me, who all took lessons, my father could not read music. Instead his fingers seemed to channel storms still raging in his worn, weary heart.

  Sometimes Pisti and I joked that Daddy should have been a priest, because the only thing he seemed the least bit interested in talking about was God.

  “Don’t you ever want to ask him about his own life?” I’d asked Pisti, after lights out one night. “Where he came from? His past?”

  “Don’t ask him. You know we’re not supposed to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because you know what’ll happen if you do.”

  I did know. The only questions we were allowed to ask were those that reinforced his religious beliefs. If we ever disagreed with anything he said, exerted our own minds over his or contradicted him in any way, punishment was meted out accordingly.

  “What was your father like?” I’d asked him once.

  When his slap came without warning, the suddenness of his fury reduced me to ashes. I ran to my room. By the time my mother arrived, seconds later, to comfort me, I was crying into my pillow.

  “Doesn’t he want me to know who he is? Who his parents were?”

  “He’s scared, that’s all,” she said. “He’s just scared.”

  “One day he’ll be dead, and I won’t be able to remember him. I won’t remember my own father because he didn’t want to tell me who he was…”

  If I begged my mother when we were alone, sometimes she offered up a morsel from my father’s past, but always making me promise never to discuss any of it with him for fear of causing him more pain.

  Growing up in 1930s Hungary, she’d told me once, “bastard” was not a word that anyone said aloud, but my father always knew what he was, what the other children, and even some of their parents called him behind his back.

  Abandoned by his mother as an infant and sent to an orphanage in Budapest, he was shuffled from one foster family to another every two years, from one surrogate mother to another, but none belonged to him, none knew or loved him as their own. His body had not come from theirs.

  Some nights, my mother said, he dreamt that one day soon he would find his way back into her arms, the arms of his birth mother. Then there would be wholeness again. Completion. Maybe then sleep might become restful, dreamless.

  News of her death reached him at the age of fifteen, in 1945, while living with his latest foster parents across the border in Slovakia. It was as though my father’s hope, the blood and breath that kept his spirit alive, had been eviscerated, my mother told me. Now there would be no one, not even in his dreams, to show him the way.

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  “We don’t know why a person turns out gay,” Alfonzo told me when we were alone in his private office after my most recent group confession. “In your case you’ve obviously misplaced your maternal needs. You would never have sought homosexual love if you’d received the love of your mother as a child. But then the father comes into play as well. Your father was a passive little boy with pockets of unexpressed rage, exploding onto his children. He never provided strong role modeling. I don’t think you even bonded with your father. Clearly, all your sexual liaisons with men have been an extension of that need you found lacking in your father.”

  “So, it was my mother…or…what? I’m confused.”

  “You’re confused because you’ve been searching for the love of your parents in every man you’ve been with sexually.”

  “So you’re saying that no one is born gay?”

  “Rarely is anyone born homosexual. Only a small percentage of people are born with a predisposition to homosexuality. But it’s rare.”

  “Do you think I’m one of those people?”

  He paused, looked me up and down.

  “No. You’re definitely heterosexual. You don’t have any of the characteristics of a homosexual.”

  “Characteristics?”

  “Effeminacy, passivity, desperation to get a man, a drug addict, an alcoholic: you aren’t any of these things. The fact is, Peter, most gays learn their behavior. Therefore, it can be unlearned, though with great difficulty.”

  This had always been my greatest fear: that my attraction for men had been created, and not by God; that my sexuality had been like a descending staircase I’d been pushed down, one step at a tim
e, into the cellar of my homosexuality. Now I was trapped inside that prison, fearful that what had been done to me as a child, I would do unto others. Alfonzo was saying that I could unlearn my homosexuality, unlock my trap door, and ascend into the light of heterosexuality. But he might as well have said that we could prevent me from becoming like the fat man in my elementary school toilet: a dirty old man, preying on innocent children. Alfonzo’s words were like a lifeline, thrown out to me at sea.

  “Ultimately, Peter, it’s up to you. What sort of life do you want? Do you want to have a life filled with casual sex in public toilets and bathhouses, always hiding, never being accepted by friends and family, a life of secrecy and shame, compartmentalizing your relationships? Only you can answer those questions.”

  “Of course that’s not what I want.”

  “Then you have to listen to me when I tell you what to do.” He rocked forward in his chair. “You have to stop arguing with me. During groups, in your individual sessions: You have to do as I tell you. Do you understand me? God created Adam and Eve, Peter. He didn’t create Adam and Steve.”

  He laughed. I forced a smile, but his joke reminded me of how the boys used to crowd around me in my elementary school playground, pecking me and calling me “faggot,” or worse, simply my name, like a curse: “Gay-dicks.”

  “When you get right down to it, we’re all heterosexual. Your true sexuality has been buried beneath years of self-abuse, but you’re just as heterosexual as I am.” His voice trailed to a whisper. “Only in my unique hands do you have any hope. You know that. You’ve seen what’s out there. You’ve lived the life of a homosexual. This is it, Peter. This is your last chance. You either fix it here, once and for all, or else you go back to the life you were living. It’s up to you. Only you can decide.”

  By late spring 1990 my primal sessions had deepened; so too had my feelings of dependency. I believed that Alfonzo understood my suffering as no one else. I began to accept—or, at least at first, to not contradict—his views about the apparent causes of my homosexuality. Both in private and in the presence of other group members, he called me his “experiment.”

  “I am going to revolutionize the field of psychiatry by being the first psychiatrist to find a cure for homosexuality,” he told one of my groups, looking at me sitting across from him.

  In a matter of weeks, I had changed from arguing with his views on homosexuality to defending him if another patient objected to the way he screamed at me. I blinded myself to his faults (the way he chastised patients whenever they stepped out of line or disobeyed his instructions) and magnified his positive traits (his unexpected warmth and charisma).

  Meanwhile, the insomnia and panic attacks that had driven me to seek help in the first place worsened. To counter this, Alfonzo again prescribed a dose of Surmontil.

  “It’s your choice, whether or not to take the medication. But if you don’t, you’ll never get anywhere in your therapy. You need restorative sleep. Eventually, you won’t have the energy to do this therapy without some type of medication.”

  There didn’t seem to be much of a choice in what Alfonzo told me. Either I took the medication or discontinued therapy.

  I had the prescription filled that same night.

  The medication’s dose was increased quite rapidly, then replaced with Sinequan, another tricyclic antidepressant, and used in conjunction with Rivotril. Elavil, yet one more tricyclic, soon followed. Alfonzo explained that we would need to “tweak” my use of various medications and that some experimentation would be inevitable. The medications led to a great deal of sleep; for the first time in years, I didn’t have to worry about going to bed. No longer was I plagued by nightmares. Tossing and turning for hours, or lying in bed obsessing about what being gay would mean for the rest of my life—these all became events of the past. Sleep turned into something I no longer had to do. Sleep was done for me.

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  One night, as the city slept and I should have also, I walked the streets, past stone cathedrals, antiquarian bookstores, coffee shops and boutiques, and to his office, my new church. Dr. Alfonzo, Psychiatrist, I read on the roster through the chained black iron gate out front. There was a wooden bench, ten feet from the door. I sat there, maybe for an hour, taking comfort in the knowledge that I could be near the one place in my world where I felt safe, and seen, even if it was the middle of the night and I was alone.

  But I was not alone. Not anymore.

  “Alfonzo loves me,” I said aloud to no one but myself. “I know he does. And I love him.”

  Several days later the two of us were in his office, after one of my individual sessions, when I told him my secret. “I wanted to ask you something,” I said.

  “Yes?” He looked up from his note-taking.

  “I wanted to ask you, I mean…I wanted to tell you…” My voice, and spirit, faded.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it’s just that, I’ve been having these feelings lately, after my sessions. Sometimes at night. About you. And me. Like I want to tell you something.” I couldn’t say the words.

  “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  “That…I love you. That you’re my daddy.”

  The moment I said the words, I wanted to rescind them. Outside the cage of my heart they frightened me, sounded obscene, too childlike for a man my age of twenty-five to be saying, admitting. I expected him to get angry, to laugh, but he didn’t. Without another word he stood and opened his arms.

  “Come here,” he said, and then he clothed me in his arms. They were strong. His body was warm. I felt his belly jiggle as he let out a little laugh. I breathed him in and smelled his cologne.

  “Do you love me?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course.”

  When he released me, I felt myself as half the person I’d been in his embrace, maybe less than half, because now I’d known his warmth, his love. He sat down and so I did, too. I imitated him. I wanted more, to talk some more, to tell him more, but then he was already writing notes.

  “Can I tell you something?” I said.

  He glanced at me.

  “I was twelve. There was a boy I used to babysit.”

  He placed his pen on the desk, leaned back in his chair.

  “One night I was standing in front of him and I pulled down my pants. I wanted him to give me oral sex.”

  “How old was the boy?”

  “Five. Maybe six. I was in some sort of trance, like I was sleepwalking. The boy resisted. And then it’s like I woke up. I saw the boy and saw myself, standing there, in front of him, what I was doing. I pulled up my pants and I backed away, terrified.”

  “I’m doubling your prescription today,” he said, picking up his pen. “I want you to bring the extra medication back to me. Half is for me.”

  “Oh.”

  He handed me the prescription. I looked at it.

  “Is this okay?” I said. “I mean, should you be doing this? You can’t get prescriptions from your own doctor?”

  “Peter,” he said, with a sudden edge, “I have spent years on that mattress in there, paving the way for the type of therapy you’re now taking for granted. Do you know how many years I’ve lost for the sake of your sanity? Yours, and your brothers and sisters? You owe me.”

  I stood, and started to leave his office, confused.

  “Oh and Peter?” he said, calling me back. “Don’t talk about this little arrangement with anyone. Okay?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Never.”

  Alfonzo’s secretary, Yvette, was waiting for me as I left Alfonzo’s office.

  “I want to talk to you before you leave,” she said, drawing me into her own office. A native of Montreal, Yvette’s French accent was as pronounced as Alfonzo’s Spanish accent. “We’re thinking of organizing a house for some of our single patients, and Dr. Alfonzo and I thought that you’d be a good fit. We think that you should move in.”

&nbs
p; “What sort of house?” I asked, already a bit skeptical. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s nothing to be scared of. We had one back east, years ago. We called it the Sticks because it was in the middle of a forest. Somehow the name evolved into the Styx, ‘S-t-y-x.’ A small group of you will just rent a house somewhere and share expenses: rent, utilities, food. At least this way you can all support each other while going through your therapy. Primal can be an overwhelming experience. This can only help you, Peter.”

  Alfonzo entered Yvette’s office behind me and said something to her in French. Like my parents, whose German and Hungarian I never understood, I had no idea what they were saying. With my parents, in fact, I remembered that they’d often use their own languages around us kids when they wanted to keep secrets.

  “I don’t think you can continue with your therapy if you don’t live in the house,” Alfonzo said to me. “It’s your choice. But you either move in or we discontinue your treatment. It’s entirely up to you. One of my patients from the first house is organizing the setup. He’ll be calling you. His name’s Clayton.”

  9

  “EVERYONE CALLS ME CLAY,” Alfonzo’s former patient told me one hot summer’s day two weeks later. We were at a beachside café, eating fish and chips wrapped in newspaper while staring out across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and beyond, to the Olympic Mountains of Washington. “It’s a pet name my first surrogate mother used to call me, in Quebec. Somehow it stuck.”

  “Clay…”

  “You also probably didn’t know my father’s a psychiatrist.”

  “That must be weird. Being in therapy with a psychiatrist and all.”

  “Every day during my childhood he went to his office, helping psychotics and schizophrenics, manic-depressives. At the end of the day, he’d come home, pour a Scotch, then he’d chase me around the house, raging, screaming that he was going to kill me. My father was a big man, six-six. I didn’t stand a chance. Finally, he’d pin me to the floor and he’d wrap his fingers around my neck, choking me. My father had thick fingers. I still remember the moment before I’d pass out, staring up at his face, the way it turned bright red—the veins in his forehead and his neck, bulging through his skin.”