Sebastian, on the other hand, had always wanted to be a successful businessman—the “father” that he’d wished his own to be. Resume-writing, job-hunting, meetings with executive personnel at various agencies around town: Sebastian was forever on the lookout for his next “big break,” but seemed instead to return home every night broken, hapless, and headed to the workroom where his tears and rage, on the mattress and at the batting station, subsumed him completely.
“You’re still a baby who wants to be a man,” Alfonzo would tell him. “Maybe you need to stay a baby for a while and not engage too much ‘out there.’ But maybe you need to get punched down for a while before you figure it out yourself.”
Without mentioning it to anyone, I often wondered how it was that Sebastian’s childhood sexual abuse had “left him heterosexual,” whereas mine had “made me homosexual.” The question was a knot in my mind that I could not untie. Still, Sebastian’s love of women never stopped me from imagining us a couple: his dark, brooding eyes and velvety lips, the way he’d wave his arms through the air while speaking French. Imagining us in love and out on a date was never much a challenge.
Yuen, a wannabe artist, organized her studio in the small living room on the ground floor of the house, oil painting Black Madonnas on life-size canvasses, throwing slabs of clay till all hours of the night, sculpting one black, pregnant Goddess after another. For a time I joined her with the clay, listening to Peter Gabriel’s “The Rhythm of the Heat” while sculpting the bust of a man in full primal scream, his tongue like a slithering snake jutting from his gaping mouth. I dripped liquid cement over another sculpture, a large, twelve-legged spider, so that once dried it seemed to be encased in its own venomous goo, like one of the creatures from the film Alien. This one I named “Mother.”
The charter, and Alfonzo’s repeated reference to it, kept our priorities and all of us firmly on track. “Just read the charter,” he would say. “Refer to the charter.” At the top of the list was “Formal Acknowledgments of Emotional Triggers.” Two people sat face-toface, one told the other how they triggered their “historical pain,” and the other received the words without comment. A primal session in the basement typically followed ten minutes later, after an obligatory “cooling-off period,” in which both parties and maybe even everyone else in the house “took it all back historically,” one at a time at the bat or on the mattress, until our bodies and the air inside were all depleted. We were never to go to bed resentful, concealing unacknowledged triggers, and if that meant demining our childhoods all night long in a padded basement cell, we knew where our priorities lay.
On Sundays we brunched at Mirabel’s, a sixties-style diner with red vinyl booths, 45-rpm’s of one-hit wonders hanging like earrings from the ceiling, film and television memorabilia from The Godfather and Annie Hall, and tin lunchboxes of Charlie’s Angels and The Partridge Family plastered on all the walls. No matter what Yuen ordered, she always ended up mashing it to a pulp, as she did with almost all her food at the Styx.
“Why do you always have to do that to your food?” Sebastian asked her one Sunday, staring at her bowl of gray goop resembling something like lumpy papier-mâché.
“I like my food to look like pabulum,” she said, picking up the blackstrap molasses to pour over her dish. “I like baby food.”
“You like to stay a baby.”
“Whatever. What’s the point of growing up if I have to regress all over again the next day in my primals? Besides, I feel more like a baby than an adult—why shouldn’t I eat only baby food?”
If Yuen preferred pabulum, Claude ate only the highest fat count possible. Every night before bed he slurped back at least two bowls of sugary granola drowned in 6% yogurt and whole milk. In all the time we’d lived together, I had also never seen Claude chew any of his food. At Mirabel’s, he poured enough maple syrup over his stack of buttermilk pancakes until they floated like caramel clouds on his supersized plate, cut a large, pie-shaped slice, stuffed it in his mouth, and then swallowed it whole, an almost violent-sounding kerplunk emanating from the back of his throat.
Clay’s ailing body, as he often reminded us, required him to eat only organics to help cleanse his system of all toxins. Systematically, before putting anything in his mouth, he cut whatever was on his plate into bite-size pieces, and only then would he chew each piece of food, slowly and purposefully, at least fifteen times per mouthful, until, as he also often reminded us, “the saliva breaks down all food compounds in my mouth in order to make it easier on my digestive system. Mastication is, after all, the most important step in a healthy diet.”
On some occasions we all piled into Claude’s beat-up 1984 Plymouth Sapporo after brunch to drive out to a national park and swim in the waterfalls. There was freedom in the country, if only because we were nowhere near Alfonzo, his ego or his office, the workroom and intensives. Toward the end of one afternoon, I noticed Claude and Yuen holding hands and kissing on the lips, just as I’d seen them do on many other occasions late at night at the Styx after dinner or a movie. No one ever commented on their obvious transgression of “charter rules”—that there never be sex, or sexual relations, and never between house members, while living in the Styx. On the contrary, allowances always seemed to be made for their coupling.
“Theirs is the best kind of union,” Alfonzo had once commented about them during a house meeting at the office, “because they come together as spiritual brother and sister, emotionally naked and able to see the other for who they are. Only from this kind of nakedness can one receive another.”
Watching Claude and Yuen embrace and kiss by his car, I yearned for that same kind of union—the same, only different. If real love truly was based on a kind of “nakedness,” I thought, then there was no logical reason why two men, whose souls were neither male nor female, couldn’t experience it as well. I thought all of this, and then just as quickly tried to turn my back on it and, by extension, myself. I’d not yet returned to my “innate heterosexuality” everyone, and even I, rationalized, as if my homosexuality itself were just a brief sojourn from where I was still meant to depart.
Some nights Sebastian and I drove around town in his white Chevy van that he’d purchased to start a new business painting houses, stopping at large charity bins set up at various residential street corners near our house. We had done this for months so our routine was down pat: Sebastian stood guard for passersby as I reached down into the large slotted openings and fished out anything in arm’s way: records, cassette tapes, books, clothes. One enormous charity bin, several blocks from the Styx in an alley behind a K-Mart department store, was our last stop of the day; small pieces of furniture were often left in the open: kitchen chairs, ripped ottomans, scratched and rickety wooden night tables. A bonanza of a day meant finding something, anything, we could lug back to the Styx and possess as our own.
I didn’t need Sebastian to go fishing for other people’s discards, though. Nearly every afternoon I was out on my bicycle at the downtown Value Village, scouring the moth-ridden aisles for something to buy for under five dollars: teapots, vases, artificial flowers, books, or used LP records, all of which I brought back to the Styx to fill an emptiness my therapy seemed to carve out of me, one session at a time. Browsing for hours, I didn’t have to think about my primals, all of them like grenades in my gut. I didn’t have to think about the medications, a daily grind of pills that served only to combat rising infernal pressures. My parents, my childhood, my blood family—all was out of mind. I had a new family, and if I wasn’t happy, at least I was distracted.
No matter what our activities the night before, though, every workweek morning I was up before the crack of dawn, dressed, and on my bicycle to the university campus, where I served up smiles and stews at its student union cafeteria, intermittently hiding in a nearby bathroom stall to pop an extra Rivotril and breathe through waves of panic. The university’s drama department had chosen my play, Off the Wall, for production, and so after my writing w
orkshops, my afternoons were consumed by rehearsals and discussions and rewrites, all of which I savored like delectable midday meals I wished never to end.
But they did end, and by early evening into every long and dark night, I was once again a primal patient at the Styx: preparing gourmet vegan dinners for intensives, joining my soul siblings in various house meetings, meditating by candlelight in our bedrooms, and reading passages from A Course in Miracles as a group in the living room—and most typically, almost always, swinging a bat in our basement dungeon: raging at my parents, sweating and screaming and crying on the mattress, resurrecting myself like a sunken ship from the wreckage of my childhood.
12
I WAS SITTING IN Alfonzo’s waiting room when a slight mid-forties woman, another patient, I assumed, emerged from his office. The moment our eyes met, she stopped dead in her tracks.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just—you look exactly like an ex-lover of mine from twenty years ago.”
“Oh…well, I’m not,” was all I could say.
The woman continued through the waiting room, then turned around again. “The resemblance is uncanny,” she repeated. “You look exactly like him.” She continued out of the waiting room and down the hallway to the bathroom.
I waited for Alfonzo’s office door to open again, for him to invite me in. This had been the day he’d told me about for months, the day I’d meet my new surrogate mother. I dried my sweaty palms against my pant leg, closed my eyes and breathed.
I thought about my mother. I remembered us together when I was a child, the way she sat on the edge of my bed, singing “Que Sera, Sera,” lulling me to sleep; and then the night terrors, waking to her naked body with three breasts, an apparition beside my bed.
“Peter?”
I opened my eyes to Alfonzo, motioning for me to follow him into the workroom. “So you know what we’re doing today, right?”
“Yes…”
“There isn’t going to be any nurturing. Not yet. I’ve explained all of this to Alice.”
“Okay…”
“I just want you two to meet. Talk. Get to know each other. Sound reasonable?”
He’d hardly finished talking when the woman from the waiting room reentered and was introduced to me as Alice, my new surrogate mother. That I appeared to look like my newfound “mother’s” ex-lover was the worst possible introduction Alice and I could have had, and we both knew it. Alfonzo left us alone and before another word, she tried backtracking, telling me that she hadn’t had her glasses on when we first met, that I looked nothing at all like him. But it was too late: the spell had been cast, and I was terrified of my new mother.
Alice and I sat face-to-face on the mattress, as I studied her wiry, shoulder-length brown hair, the way she spoke with gentleness in her blue saucer-eyes that both surprised and scared me. At least she didn’t look or sound like my mother, I thought, as I started in on my family history, beginning with my mother.
“I was an emotional acrobat around my mother,” I told Alice. “I don’t want to do the same with you.”
“You don’t need to protect me. That’s not your job.”
I told Alice about our father’s rage, about the night Kriska ran away from home, my own escape through sex. I said I wasn’t sure that I was gay because I liked attractive women, although I didn’t want to have sex with them, and that I didn’t like men, but was sexually aroused by them. At one point, Alice tried to take my hand, but I jumped back and told her not to touch me.
My most childlike feelings emerged when I talked about how much I loved my mother, wanted her to sing me to sleep each night, but feared the moment that she did because of the way her nightie draped wide open and I’d glimpse her breasts. Even though I talked openly about disturbing memories, I never cried. Instead, whenever I felt my most vulnerable, I laughed. Alice seemed to understand, and sat and listened through it all without interrupting.
At one point I began to shiver. Without missing a beat, Alice found a nearby blanket and tucked it neatly around my sides, took my hand in hers and rubbed my chest with her other hand. I could feel the muscles in my body constrict, and I had to make a conscious effort to breathe. All I wanted was to suck my thumb and lapse into baby talk, while familiar feelings of shame and need cloaked me in a deadening silence. Through it all, Alice sat by my side, her warm eyes drawing me into her world of compassion.
Our subsequent sessions were consumed with heightened emotion. All week long, at work at the student union cafeteria or during my writing workshops, I looked forward to my nurturing sessions, or else I dreaded them. I liked Alice; then I resented her. If I arrived at my session excited to see her, as soon as she asked me what I wanted to talk about I became depressed, anxious, angry without apparent cause. I didn’t want to think about what I wanted to talk about: I wanted her to take care of me.
Alfonzo sat in on our early sessions and explained that it would take some time for me to know the “mother space,” that my own mother’s seductiveness had totally unbalanced me, which had led to my fantasies about men.
“You need to let Alice touch you,” he explained, “and then use your emerging feelings by taking them back historically on the mattress or at the bat, by making the connection between how you felt as a child and how you feel as an adult.”
If I resisted Alfonzo’s advice, he became angry and threatened to throw me out of therapy unless I complied with all the rules. After he left the room, Alice would hold me and I’d remember my father screaming at me, at all my siblings, that it was his house, his rules, and if I didn’t like it, I could leave.
Sometimes Alice’s mirroring of my pain contrasted so sharply against my mother’s refusal to do the same that I had to physically separate myself and move to the batting station. And then for twenty minutes or longer, I would bat and scream at my mother about all the years she’d reflected back to me not who I was, or what I was feeling, but who she wanted me to be, what she needed me to feel in order that her own pain not be reignited. The disorientation of never having had my truth reflected back to me had left me reeling through years of anxiety, fearful that I was imagining things, going crazy, or with a rage too large to call my own. After exhausting myself at the bat, always I was more able to feel Alice’s love for me without my mother coming between us.
Whether Alfonzo was present in my sessions or not, I talked about how much I loved and trusted him, that I wanted my new parents to take care of me, to love me unconditionally. Once, while Alice was shouldering me in her arms, I said that I would give my life for Alfonzo.
“No,” she said, physically separating us so that she could see me, and I her, as she spoke. “You should never trust anyone that much.”
This confused me, and secretly I wondered why Mommy didn’t trust Daddy.
Progressively, though, I resisted Alice’s bodywork less and became more and more relaxed while cuddling in her lap. My mind was calmer and clearer than it had ever been before, as if the hard drive of my brain were being reformatted back to its original state of love and peace. Sometimes, during her bodywork, my lungs felt like they were being constrained. But I always pushed through it, and if our sessions ended with my head nestled in her gentle hands, I’d feel her butter-soft skin against my cheek and smell a familiarity that made me safe and childlike in her arms. If terror stabbed through me, like ripples surfacing from the hauntings of my childhood, I’d call out for Alfonzo.
“Papa!” I’d scream.
He’d rush in, then both he and Alice would reassure me that everything was okay and that it was just my biological mother, like a parasite, forcing her way back inside of me.
“Just make contact with the mommy space,” Alfonzo told me as I breathed and lay with Alice, heard her coo me back into the comfort zone. “Keep in contact with Mommy…”
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I returned to Vancouver for one night to attend a new, all-female, production of Off the Wall, as part of an arts festival for dance, musi
c, theater, and multimedia.
Two local acting students had also recorded my fifteen-minute piece for sound that I’d written the previous year, called “Deluge.” Each evening, after Off the Wall, the audience filed into a smaller, darkened theater where they played “Deluge” over speakers with another artist’s sculpture of a candlelit coffin at the front.
Primal was an assault on my senses, and my goal with “Deluge” had been to convey that same sense of overwhelming cacophony. Based in part on psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s slim book Knots, as well as my own childhood night terrors, overlapping voices, like mental tapes, looped back in on each other from different times in the narrator’s life, a disorienting, sometimes “psychotic” experience I was becoming more and more familiar with, considered “normal” in primal.
At the end of the play, not one of the roughly forty-member audience moved, spoke, or clapped. Slowly, after several minutes, everyone filed out of the room.
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Therapy continued four times each weekday afternoon: two groups, one nurturing hour with Alice, and an individual with Alfonzo to keep me “on track.”
In bed at night I spent hours crying for “Mommy,” visualizing Alice instead of my biological mother. At the batting station, I called out for “my soul mother, Alice,” at times sounding as though I were exorcising a demon, and not my mother, from within. Switching between little-boy Peter, who was sucking his thumb while lying in his mother’s arms, to grown-up Peter, who was a university student while working to pay his bills, became increasingly difficult. Countless sessions were spent with me crying, fearful and anxious at going back out into the “real world.” At these times, Alfonzo would tell me to “sit up and pay attention” as he outlined the whole deal.
“Everybody has these feelings of not being able to function in the outside world while going through primal,” he’d reiterate. Regardless, the disparity between my child and adult selves continued to mirror my boyhood years, when I’d felt myself forced out of childhood innocence in order to protect my parents from their pain.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 12