The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “I don’t want to hear about your little problems,” he said, standing up from his squat chair near the mattress. He walked out of my session and slammed the door to his private office behind him. On the other side of the wall, I could hear him mumbling in Spanish. Seconds later, the door swung open and he stormed back in.

  “Didn’t Yvette talk to you?” he said, looming over me. “Didn’t she tell you not to bother me with Styx logistics? You do as you’re told or else you’re out. Do you understand me? Out.” He stepped an inch closer, lowering his voice into a deep, threatening growl. “I’m carrying the weight of your fucking soul, and you want to talk to me about the meals? You should try doing my job for a week and see how you like it. Now get out of here and tell the others that they’d better not talk to me about logistics or else you’ll all end up on the street. Every last one of you. Got it?”

  We never talked to him about the meals again. Instead, we did as we were told and worked our anger at the house, all four of us spending hours in our basement workroom, a dungeon, batting and screaming that Alfonzo seemed “just like Daddy.”

  |||||||||||

  Several months after moving into the Styx I received a letter from Pearl, my “past life” friend. Worried that I’d been sucked into a cult, she wanted to see me.

  I discussed her letter with my Styx housemates, all of whom cautioned me against our meeting. Pearl would surely try to lure me back into my old life, they warned. We decided as a family that I should go only as a means of ending our friendship. I would have one final hour with Pearl, and then return home to my family at the Styx.

  When I entered the ferry terminal café that afternoon, Pearl looked at me in shock. In addition to my buzz cut, I also had gained more than fifteen pounds since we’d last seen each other, most of it as a side effect of the medications Alfonzo was prescribing.

  “What happened to all your hair?” she said, as I approached her table.

  “I shaved it.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Babies don’t have hair.”

  She laughed. I didn’t. I sat down across from her.

  “How have you been?” she asked.

  “I can only be with you for a few minutes. They’re waiting for me back at the Styx.”

  “Who are? At where?”

  “My family. My new family.”

  “Peter, I’ve been worried about you. Don’t your housemates give you your phone messages?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy? Peter, what’s going on?” She leaned in closer, reached over to grab my hand.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said, recoiling.

  Pearl said nothing as I opened the menu. Page after page, I saw only blurred letters, distorted images. I folded the menu and placed it back on the table.

  “I only have a minute. They’re waiting for me at the Styx.”

  “Have you talked to your parents?”

  “I’ll never talk to those two criminals again.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I wouldn’t have spent years having sex with men if it hadn’t been for them. Just thinking about it makes me sick. They should be in prison for what they did to me. They crucified me.” I looked across the café to hail a waitress.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” Pearl asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dating. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I looked away. Her question nauseated me. “To say that I’m a homosexual would be to say that I am what my mother and father did to me, that I’ve become the symptom of their abuse. I haven’t. I’m not. There’s nothing gay about being gay, you know. And I still haven’t figured out what they’re all so damned proud of. All those homosexuals out there—who do they think they are? Fighting for the right to live out their lifestyles of sickness and perversity. They should look at their own histories. All homosexuals have been sexually abused.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “What do you know?” Her ignorance disgusted me. “You don’t know anything. Why did you want to meet with me anyway? What do you want?”

  “I…I wanted to see you.”

  “Why?” I said.

  She stared at me and said nothing.

  “Do you love me?” I asked.

  “You know I do…”

  “No matter what?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  “Do you love me unconditionally?”

  “Unconditionally? All friendship has conditions…”

  “So you don’t love me.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You just said you don’t.”

  “I don’t think that’s what I said.”

  “I don’t think we should be friends anymore.”

  “Peter…”

  “I came here to tell you to stop calling me at the house.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “I have no time for you. I have new friends now, a new family. They love me. Unconditionally.”

  The waitress arrived to take our order.

  “I should go.” I stood to leave. “They’re waiting for me.”

  11

  THE STYX WAS, IN Alfonzo’s eyes, a huge success—so much so that in early 1991 he announced plans to open two more houses, which would become known as Styx 2 and Styx 3. Eight other patients, handpicked by Alfonzo as psychological “best fits,” soon moved into the new houses, four patients to each house. Members of my house, Styx 1, continued cooking Alfonzo’s meals and delivering them to Hampstead. Talk of our “chores” quickly spread throughout the other two houses, and all the other patients refused to follow suit. We’d been “brainwashed into acting as the doctor’s domestic servants,” some of them commented. Alfonzo was infuriated, and still they would not concede. All of us at Styx 1 viewed the others as traitors, unworthy of Alfonzo’s love. We, after all, were Alfonzo’s “family”; everyone else was just a “patient.”

  “Let’s leave them alone,” Alfonzo finally told us on the phone at the original Styx. “We know our priorities. We’re a family.”

  After a four-year therapeutic hiatus, Claude returned to active primal work, moved out of Hampstead, where I discovered he’d been living with Alfonzo, and into the Styx. Gradually, I learned about his past as well, if not from Claude himself then from Clay when the two of us were alone.

  Like Clay, Claude had begun treatment with Alfonzo years earlier in Quebec during a stressful time in his own life. After waking from a drunken haze in which he’d blacked out, he’d chased his then-girlfriend through his dream home with a rake, then tried to strangle her with a telephone wire. Beneath his calm, French-Canadian Boy Scout exterior, Claude was not at all what he appeared to be. His therapeutic relationship with Alfonzo had quickly turned to friendship, as it had with Clay, when he abandoned his career as a promising young architect to manage the minutia of Alfonzo’s personal and professional life, including car repairs and house renovations, dry cleaning drop off and pick up, medical licensing and insurance matters, shopping, cleaning and banking, and, of course, overseeing the planning and construction of the new office, and organizing our new Styx house.

  Soon after Claude moved in, in mid-1991, I arrived home one day to the news that Brent had moved out. Apparently, while we were out of the house, he had packed up his belongings, including Bea and Bea’s half sister, informed Alfonzo by telephone of his decision to leave, and then all two-and-a-half of them had left the Styx for good.

  “He’s moved in with another man,” Clay told me, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Another florist that he met at work, I think.”

  Brent’s departure was unexpected, but I was secretly relieved. With his plastic fruit and life-size cacti went all of his pornography. Temptation, any and all reminders of my past life, had been eliminated.

  As if orchestrated, Brent’s departure provided a vacancy for Sebastian, another long-term patient and a member of the original Styx house, who arrived the fo
llowing week.

  “I’ve just driven across the country,” he announced, suitcase in hand. His French accent, like Claude’s and Yvette’s, was pronounced.

  “From where?” I asked.

  “Montreal. I’m here to continue with my therapy.”

  The next day Sebastian met with Alfonzo at the office, who called us that night to tell us Sebastian would be living at the Styx while continuing with his sessions at the office. Sebastian was “a lifer,” he said, “a dedicated brother.”

  Yuen and I went to the basement that night for Sebastian’s first session, an experience that proved anticlimactic, at least for me, because he worked in French. Though I may not have understood his words, however, his tears, while lying face up on the mattress, were all too familiar. After he finished he sat up and faced Yuen and me, his two new siblings, still crying.

  He apologized for working in French, his “native language,” then said he wanted to tell us something about himself since “I guess we’ll be living together.”

  The story was grim and hard to believe.

  When Sebastian was seven years old, he told us, his father sodomized him in his bedroom late one night. Afterward, he tried to strangle Sebastian so he wouldn’t talk. Sebastian ran away from home, but was returned by the police. He kept running until his grade-nine math teacher offered to let him live in his home.

  “I was so happy,” Sebastian told us. “He made me dinners and took me camping.”

  Then his teacher raped him in the middle of the night. He couldn’t go home, so he ended up on the street, pulling a shopping cart “like a vagrant,” sleeping in bus terminals.

  “Before I met Dr. Alfonzo in nineteen eighty-five,” Sebastian continued, “I had pretty much decided to move to LA and start treatment with Janov at the Primal Institute.” He was desperate. He considered shock treatment and met therapist after therapist, until finally he found Dr. Alfonzo. “And only because I looked in the white pages under ‘P’ for primal, and there he was.” Dr. Alfonzo with his very own primal institute in Quebec.

  “Dr. Alfonzo is the only person alive who understands my distress, who understands mental illness. Dr. Alfonzo is the only therapist I know of who practices anything close to what I need, not ‘talk therapy,’ but something deeper that’ll get inside my gut. The truth is, I’m lost without his therapy. I’m lost without Dr. Alfonzo. He’s the only family I’ve ever known.”

  By the time Sebastian had finished talking, twenty minutes later, Yuen was crying along with him; it was impossible not to be affected by his honesty. We hugged him, first Yuen and then me, and then all three of us together, bound in arms and tears.

  “I don’t even know you yet, but I already love you,” Sebastian told us. “I love you both, I love you like the family I always wanted, that I needed…”

  Our Styx family had increased to five, three of whom—Claude, Clay, and Sebastian—had known Alfonzo for many years. Soon after and without warning, Alfonzo began shuffling patients like a deck of cards from one house to another, rearranging us according to what he saw as psychological “best fits.” Every couple of months, a core family member from Styx 1 was also invited to live with Alfonzo, “Papa,” in his private home, with him and Yvette, which was viewed as a privilege and a great honor.

  He never invited me, and when I asked the others why, I was told I had years left in my therapy. I wasn’t yet “clean enough.”

  Then, suddenly, in late summer 1991, Alfonzo told us that Yvette herself would be moving out of Hampstead and into the Styx with us, presumably because of “daddy issues” that had arisen in her own therapy.

  I had known for some time that Yvette and Alfonzo were a couple. Initially referred to him when she was a nurse and he was the practicing psychiatrist at a university hospital, she also had lived in the first Styx house with Clay, Sebastian, and Claude. There were many nights, Sebastian had told me, where she would leave the house after therapy with Alfonzo, and everyone would find out days later that she had driven to Alfonzo’s house and spent the night with him. They started living together after the house disbanded. Becoming his secretary, she told me, was a natural progression, though difficult at times because he’d never stopped being her psychiatrist and even “reparented” her as a surrogate father during nurturing sessions.

  We were alone after dinner one night when I asked about her early years with Alfonzo.

  “When I started with Dr. Alfonzo, primal was nothing like it is today.”

  The batting station hadn’t existed “back then,” she said. They had a mattress, but the process of regression was “much more primitive” and not at all as effective as what Alfonzo was doing with us now. “You know, Peter, this process was not handed over to anyone. It was etched in blood from other people’s failures—the doctor’s, and many others’, as well as mine.”

  Her words, it seemed to me, were a warning.

  “I had a lot of trouble connecting with my primal pain when I started,” she went on. “I acted out a lot, talked back, argued, challenged. Like you. After several months he locked me in a padded white room where I stayed for twenty days.”

  “Why was it padded?”

  “So we couldn’t hurt ourselves. On the twentieth day, I broke through my defenses and submitted to my pain. That’s when my real therapy started. You’ve got a long way to go before you get there.”

  “Isn’t it confusing to you? Your relationship, I mean.”

  “Of course it is. He’s therapist to me. He’s Daddy, lover, and employer to me. It’s a lot to get straight in my head. Sometimes the lines start blurring, and I still act out. Which is why he sent me to the Styx.”

  “To punish you?” I prodded.

  “To work through my ‘stuff.’ Otherwise our relationship won’t survive. This is my last chance. This is everyone’s last chance.”

  |||||||||||

  Alfonzo called me to the office one afternoon. He said it was “a private matter.”

  I sat on the floor in the workroom, as usual. Other than Alfonzo and Yvette, who sat in her regular spot whenever she’d take notes, the three of us were alone.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Alfonzo said to me.

  “No…”

  “Yvette?”

  Yvette looked scared. “I have asked you here,” she said, “I mean we, we have asked you here, because I want to work in front of you. I have witnessed your primals, and now it’s only fair I share with you.”

  Yvette lay on the mattress, closed her eyes, and started moving her legs and arms, breathing gutturally from her diaphragm. With the rest of us, it usually took several minutes to “get into the feeling,” but with Yvette it was instantaneous. Her neck arched up off the mattress, tears spilled out over the corners of her eyes, her arms thrashed the mattress, she howled. If everyone else had been in primal school, we were all in kindergarten, and Yvette was primalling a dissertation. The walls to the office shook.

  Alfonzo sat, as if on the sidelines of a boxing ring, watching. By the look on his face as he leaned forward, I expected him to cheer.

  As with Claude and Sebastian, everything Yvette said while on the mattress was in French. The little I could decipher told me she said something about father, père. She was pleading or begging—for his love, I was sure, because I recognized the desperation.

  Alfonzo called out in French, mentioned père. Yvette choked back words, she gurgled, tears swelled out of her as if being pressed up from within. Then Alfonzo ran out of the room and I heard commotion in his private office, rummaging through his desk drawers. He returned with a large crumpled paper bag. “Ici, maintenant!” he screamed.

  Yvette sat up and moved to the end of the mattress on her knees. Clearly, they had done this all before. Alfonzo opened the bag and pulled out a large prosthetic dildo. It must have been over a foot long.

  He screamed something more in French, ordered her down as if heeling a dog. And then he held the dildo with one hand, forcing her face over it with the o
ther. She gagged. The entire motion was violent, and I realized I’d been holding my breath. Yvette was crying; her face was red and puffy. She looked nothing like the woman, Alfonzo’s secretary, I had known till then.

  “Okay, enough,” Alfonzo said. He stuck the dildo back in the bag, and Yvette rolled over onto the mattress again. She had stopped crying but was panting like a wounded pet. Alfonzo disappeared into his private office again, then returned and plopped back down on his squat chair.

  “I’m sorry…” I said. “I don’t speak French.”

  “Details aren’t important,” Alfonzo said. “Yvette? Do you want to add anything?”

  Slowly, Yvette sat up, still in the middle of the room on the mattress. “I was a barmaid in Quebec. I had sex with many of my customers. Many times. For love…for companionship…for Daddy’s affection. To all of them I was just a whore with a hole. It’s Daddy I really wanted. My father. I think you know what I’m saying, don’t you, Peter? You and me…we’re not so different.”

  |||||||||||

  The heartbeat of our house, like that of any family’s, fell quickly into place. Alfonzo and Yvette relied on Clay for their office bookkeeping, so most days, after his individual or group sessions, Clay worked with Yvette at the office before busing to his accounting courses at community college. Then he came home and detoxified his body for up to two hours in Epsom salt baths, which resulted in a constant skunk-like body odor that seemed to follow him from room to room like Pig-Pen’s cloud of dust in Peanuts. After particularly intense primal sessions, he skipped school and slept all afternoon.

  When Sebastian and Claude weren’t talking in French, like impassioned characters from a foreign film I could not understand but loved to watch, Claude played tunes by Joe Satriani on one of his four electric guitars displayed on pedestals in his bedroom. Alfonzo had said Claude’s father, a blue-collar worker from a small town in rural Quebec, had emasculated him of any passion, but it wasn’t evident when he played his guitars, or even when he drafted his next “dream home” on his slanted architect’s table beneath the ledge of a window in the corner of his yellow room.