The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “How long did this go on?”

  “Most of my childhood. So I decided to kill him.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen. I mapped it all out in my mind, every detail: how, when, where. I was still weak, though. I’ve always been a small guy. I figured that once I killed him and got thrown in jail, for sure I wouldn’t survive. That’s when I met Dr. Alfonzo. The only reason I started therapy was to get stronger, you know, to build up my internal resilience so I could sustain a trial and my years in jail.”

  “And now?”

  “Now?” he said with a slight chuckle. “Instead of killing my father I got chronic fatigue syndrome. About two years ago.”

  “How do you do this therapy if you have chronic fatigue syndrome?” I said, glancing at his pale, bony face, and the dark circles, like crescent moons, sleeping beneath his eyes.

  “I couldn’t live without this therapy. Meeting Dr. Alfonzo saved my life. I’d be dead today if it hadn’t been for him. Or in jail. Where else in the world can you kill your father with a bat, every single day…or lie on a mattress and howl like a wolf, then go home to your own bed?”

  Clay’s story could have been my own. I had never plotted my father’s murder, but I’d also never forgotten the way he’d chased us through the house as children, raging that as long as we lived in his house we belonged to him, our bodies belonged to him, and he could do anything he wanted to us.

  In Clay I’d met a soul mate.

  “How would this house function anyway? I mean our expenses, rent, food…”

  “We’ll share everything communally. Don’t worry, everything will work out. We just have to support each other emotionally, that’s the main thing to remember. The fact is, if you’re not living in a house like this, you won’t go very deep in your therapy. And everyone else—all the outpatients, who just go to the office for their sessions—they’ll start looking to you for guidance ’cause they’ll see how much progress you’re making. And you know: the faster you progress, the sooner you finish therapy altogether.”

  Like the medication, there didn’t seem to be much choice in what was being offered. Three times a week I was returning to my tiny rental room after revisiting the unresolved pain of my childhood. Crash-landing back inside my aloneness. Who else would understand the process of primal, if not other primal patients? I needed a family.

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  Over a period of weeks Clay and I searched the city for a house large enough to accommodate up to six patients, since Alfonzo had told us—or, at least, told Clay, who related it back to me—that he planned to send additional patients to our house for three-week retreats, or “intensives,” as he called them.

  Inside the first house we visited, black and yellow beach towels were tacked over all the windows, hundreds of empty glass pop bottles lined the perimeter of each room, and a series of sketched pentagrams led up the wooden stairs to a second floor that was littered with empty Styrofoam takeout containers and a sea of half-burned candles.

  “It feels like little children were murdered in this house,” I told Clay, as we walked from room to room.

  “We could clean it up,” he said.

  “This house doesn’t need to be cleaned, it needs to be exorcised. There’s no way I’m living here…”

  Perhaps because the first house was so dismal, we jumped at the next one, a 1970s rancher with multicolored shag carpet and wood paneling in a family-oriented area next to an elementary-school playground and a twenty-minute bicycle ride to my university. In October 1990, the two of us moved into the house with Alfonzo’s only other gay patient, Brent.

  The main floor of the house, off the front hallway, opened into a small living room with gas fireplace, and then two additional bedrooms, which in turn led directly into a laundry room near the back with exposed beams and half-finished walls, like the skeleton of a house beneath the facade of its exterior.

  Coiled metal stairs in the front hallway rose like the steps of a submarine to the main living room on the top floor of the house, the “upper deck,” as we began to call it. Running the width of the floor adjacent to the living room was one slim corridor with a bathroom at one end and three box-like bedrooms situated evenly along its path. A galley kitchen, near the opposite end of the floor, provided space for a large wooden table, six chairs, and much conversation.

  No sooner had we unpacked than Brent was hanging framed male nudes throughout his master bedroom and en suite bathroom, constructed a twig canopy above his queen-sized bed, filled our living room with ten of his six feet cacti, and strung his complete collection of Carmen Miranda plastic fruit—grapes, oranges, pineapples, apples, and bananas—throughout our downstairs laundry room. Finally, as if to save the best for last, he set up a tall, husky mannequin with bouffant hair, dressed in a floral sequin gown and cowhide high heels next to the metal staircase in our front hallway.

  “This is Bea,” he said, introducing Clay and me to his mannequin.

  “Bea?” Clay said.

  “After Beatrice Arthur, you know, Maude? I’ve had her for years. We found each other in an old junk shop years ago. We go everywhere together. I thought she could greet all our guests to the house.”

  The next day Brent returned home with a second half-mannequin (waist and legs), which he promptly turned into a living room side table, and named “Bea’s half-sister.”

  As Brent helped “decorate” the house, Clay took charge of converting an enclosed storage room on the ground floor into our new makeshift “screaming room” that we’d had planned to use for self-administered primal sessions. We tied old mattresses, purchased at a used furniture shop, up against its four interior walls. We lay another mattress on the floor for regressions. A punching bag and wooden baseball bat, provided by Alfonzo, were placed in one corner of the room to function as our “batting station.”

  It didn’t take me long to learn that there were rules for everything in the Styx, and everything needed to be documented in a “house charter,” which would later need to be edited and approved by Alfonzo. Our diets would be vegan. Smoking, drinking, and sex would not be tolerated. Cablevision, radio, and newspapers were prohibited. Tuesdays would become our “entertainment night,” which typically meant family-oriented video rentals like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Born Free. Movies that endorsed a parent/child relationship were especially recommended. Members were to return home to the Styx every day after work, or their sessions at the office, or in my case, school.

  And social contact with anyone outside therapy was forbidden.

  “Styx members are your new family,” Alfonzo explained. “It’s in your best interest to spend as much time together as possible.”

  So Brent, Clay, and I talked together, walked together, meditated together, shopped together, cooked together, and ate many of our meals together. When Brent and Clay told me that I was spending too much time in my room writing poetry and plays for school or reading books that weren’t related to our therapy, I felt threatened and wanted to escape.

  “You shouldn’t be reading anything other than Janov’s books,” Clay told me. “Janov, or else Dr. Alfonzo’s own scientific paper: those are the only things you should be reading.”

  Instead of arguing, Clay told me I should take my feelings of resistance to the workroom. “If you have an issue with any of the theories of Janov or Dr. Alfonzo, then you need to take your feeling back historically to the first time you felt this fear of being overpowered,” he said, repeating what Alfonzo had said time and time again. “This is a trigger, as good as gold in therapy. You need to work it in the workroom, we all need to work our issues in the workroom, not argue them upstairs in our living room.”

  So that’s what we did, up to four hours every night in the workroom, sometimes falling into bed only with the rising of the sun. Clay raged, with the bat, at his father; Brent begged, like a famished child, on the mattress for the love of his mother; and I screamed on both the mattress and with the bat a
bout all the sex with men I’d had throughout my life, as if doing so I might diminish my desire for more in the future.

  If primals were our gravest undertaking, dinners were our greatest reward. Every night we spent up to two hours washing and cutting vegetables, cooking, spicing, and plating, and then eating together like the new soul brothers that we were, all the while swapping stories about our day’s workroom extravaganzas. Never before had I eaten vegan, but these new homemade meals, recommended by Clay and following one of his recipe books, were anything but plain. We had Chinese feasts with miso soup, pickled radish, rice noodles, and chow mein with freshly peeled ginger and crisp sprouts; whole-wheat pastas with organic carrots, broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes; “chicken” burgers and “fish” fillets both made from tofu, everything smothered in almondaise. And desserts: mocha parfaits, chocolate carrot cake, or warm gingerbread teacake with cashew whipped cream (our favorite).

  After dinners and dishes, the three of us went for walks, one in front of the other like Buddhist monks, the hoods of our newly acquired matching purple sweatshirts drawn up over our heads. At the beach we talked openly about how we’d finally “come home to our new soul family” and that we never wanted to leave ever again.

  Back at the Styx, our day’s activities were completed with meditation. One member would ring a bronze gong, at which point we’d all focus quietly on a candle in our rooms. The maze of my mind led me mostly through alleys of sex in cars and public washrooms. Thirty minutes later, the gong was sounded again and we all returned to the incensed living room, sipped herbal tea and warmed ourselves before a crackling fire as we shared whatever thoughts or images had arisen during our time alone.

  Brent usually shared a variation on the same theme. “During meditation tonight,” he said once, “I really understood how my mother held me back my whole life from loving other women. It is just a matter of time before I have a relationship with a woman, I’m sure of it.”

  Brent’s “acknowledgments” were always dissonant, considering the life-sized casting of Michelangelo’s “David” that he’d positioned next to his canopied bed, not to mention the framed male nudes hanging on the walls of his bathroom. Staring into my own future, on the other hand, was seeing neither women nor men, so I talked about how grateful I was to Dr. Alfonzo and the members of the Styx for providing me with a war-free zone to call home.

  Finally, someone would read a passage from A Course in Miracles, a book that Alfonzo had instructed us to read nightly before we all went to bed.

  If any one of us needed more medication than our prescriptions allowed, the others offered up their own, like shared candy-colored goodies amongst siblings: “I’ll give you two Rivotrils for one Surmontil.”

  Following our days of gut-wrenching primals, dreamless, medicated sleep was all we desired, and knew, without doubt, we deserved.

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  As I stepped off the bus near our home one night, I heard the thumping of primals from a block away. No matter how much junk we piled on the opposite side of our workroom’s exterior wall—four gothic columns salvaged from a nearby demolition site, metal travelling trunks, flattened cardboard boxes, rolled up used mattresses— nothing seemed to fully insulate the outside world from our primals inside. By the time I neared our front door, pained howling from inside our house mingled with the joyful cries of children playing in the schoolyard next door.

  Before entering the house, I walked to the schoolyard. I stood at the swing set, and then the monkey bars and slide, and waited, listening for the usual sounds. Nothing.

  Clay and Brent were already upstairs in the kitchen when I entered the house.

  “Come in here,” I heard Clay call out. “We have a surprise for you.”

  When I entered the kitchen, I saw that both he and Brent were bald. In the middle of a sea of black hair sat a chair, and on it, electric clippers.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Dr. Alfonzo shaved his hair today, too.”

  “He did?”

  “He said it would be a good idea if we shaved ours, so we did. Now it’s your turn.”

  I had been growing my hair for years, and it was long, an inch below my shoulders, tied in a ponytail. The thought of having it cut off, like Samson, scared me.

  “It will only help your regressions,” Brent said, coaxing me into the chair.

  “How so?”

  “To connect to the child self. After all, babies don’t have hair.”

  Clay aimed the clippers near the base of my neck. “Ready?” he said.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  When he flicked the on switch, I heard its motor buzz through my ears. The razor’s cold, steel teeth slid up against my skin as long, dark curls floated down to a sea of encircling hair.

  “Next we do your beard and mustache,” Clay said. “Then all three of us will be like babies.”

  10

  SOON AFTER MOVING INTO the Styx, I arrived home from school one night to a letter from my mother. I had spoken to my parents only infrequently since beginning therapy when I sent them a letter “demanding” that they mail me money. If nothing else, batting and screaming for nearly a year had at least armed me with some sense of entitlement.

  Brent was home when I opened the letter. My mother wrote that they were just about to start their retirement, were leaving for a seven-day Alaskan cruise, and had no money to send. The letter sent me into a rage. My parents hadn’t been able to protect me as a child, and now they could not even support me financially while in therapy. I told Brent I needed him to come with me to the workroom, since we were strictly forbidden to primal alone, and we disappeared downstairs.

  Often at the start of a primal we moved to the batting station only if and when emerging anger, always a defense, interfered with our pain on the mattress. I didn’t even lie on the mattress this day, but picked up the bat and began beating it into the punching bag. My mother couldn’t help me now, just as she had not helped me in my elementary-school bathroom as a child or when I was walking the downtown streets as a teenager. My mother could not help me, and her inability to help, I screamed, had walked me straight into the arms of every man I had ever met in a bar, in a bathhouse, in alleyways, and in parkade stairwells.

  After twenty minutes and a hundred swings, exhausted and sweaty, I returned upstairs with Brent. We sat at either end of our new dining room table that we’d constructed out of a ten-foot sheet of stained plywood.

  Brent asked me to tell him the circumstances around my “coming out.” I told him about The Letter to my parents, the conversation with my mother in my old bedroom, her confession to me, and my secret about her.

  For several minutes after, Brent said nothing. Then, finally, he spoke. “I told my mother I was a fag when I was ten.”

  “Ten?”

  “I was doing up her bra, you know, the type with the snaps in the back? I said I thought I was gay, that I was a fag. I think I still have that bra in Bea’s trunk.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She asked me to pass her her lipstick.”

  “So…”

  Brent and I had never been in a group together, so his admission confused me.

  “I’ll tell you another secret,” he continued, smiling. “Alfonzo told me to leave all of my porno magazines behind when I moved into the Styx, but I didn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Throw out all my pictures of Richard Locke and Jeff Stryker, gay icons extraordinaire? I don’t think so! They’re all in a box in my bedroom. Just in case.”

  Clay arrived home and so our conversation came to an abrupt end. But, afterward, all I could think about were those magazines. The moment I was alone in the Styx, I went in search of them, like mining for gold. When I found them, on the top shelf of Brent’s closet, I rushed to the bathroom and I masturbated to the photos, as I’d done throughout my childhood, terrified that someone would arrive home and punish me for my transgression.

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  Weeks later, Alfonzo called one night and asked Clay if we could housesit his pet cat, a Siamese Persian named Fred, while he was away on vacation at Club Med. Clay covered the phone and asked Brent and me what we thought. Since Brent was allergic to cats, Clay told Alfonzo that we were sorry, but could not oblige his request.

  I could hear Alfonzo’s raised voice through the receiver. Clay said nothing, looking stunned as all three of us listened in disbelief to Alfonzo’s tirade, telling us that we were “spoiled children” and that he was “sacrificing” his life for the betterment of our “souls”—how could we “deny” him anything? The conversation came to an abrupt end; Clay hung up the phone.

  “He just threw us out of therapy,” Clay said. “He said we were ungrateful brats and that we needed to be taught a lesson.”

  Confused, we finished our evening’s chores in a daze, feeling as through our dad had just thrown us out of the house—which, in a sense, was true. And if we were no longer in therapy, did that mean we were no longer patients? That we should not go to the office for our sessions? And what about the Styx? What about the other patients who were about to arrive at the house for their three-week intensives?

  Two hours later, close to midnight, someone pounded on our front door. Brent opened it and Alfonzo walked in, wearing dark sunglasses and a long beige trench coat. He said nothing, but proceeded past Bea and up the coiled metal staircase. He sat in a heap near a corner of our living room floor, next to the fireplace.

  “I’ve thought about the Fred situation,” he began, “about your unwillingness to help me in my time of need. I want you to know that I forgive you for everything.”

  We said nothing, too afraid to open our mouths.

  “I should never have asked for anything from any of you. It was my fault, and I’m sorry. It will never happen again.”

  His face turned in my direction. I looked to see his expression, to see if what was happening was all some kind of joke. Dark Armani sunglasses hid his eyes.