The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  Game-playing became an integral part of my nurturing sessions. When I asked Alice if she could be my mother, and I her baby, she always said yes. The sounds of her breaths, rhythmical waves, calmed my mind as I lay in her lap and listened to her paint a picture of the two of us by the windows in our house. There were plants all around, and sunshine. Warmth and security. We were cuddling, and I was just a toddler, age three. Later, the two of us went in search of chestnuts. All was well. Then lions and wolves surrounded us, backing us deeper into a clave of fear. But Alice squeezed tight to my hand, never letting go, and together we shouted at them to go away, to leave us to our chestnut outing, and as soon as they did, the spell was broken.

  The love and safety that Alice created was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. At the batting station, I drained the emotional poison from within; in her arms, I was filled back up, like a balloon whose air would one day carry it away.

  Details of my sessions were always relayed back to Alfonzo through Alice’s and my weekly mandatory written “reports,” after which Alfonzo always reinforced in me just how much progress I was making.

  “You have recovered the need for the need,” he told me. “Soon you’ll be getting better, and only then will you grow up and go back out into the world.”

  |||||||||||

  Eighteen months into my therapy, I attended my first weekend “marathon”—an intensive group session held at the office: ten hours a day, two days in a row. Like an elite club, only select patients were invited: Styx members and intensives. Because British Columbia’s government-administered Medical Services Plan prohibited the billing of ten patients over a two-day period, Alfonzo scheduled the marathon prior to his vacation so he could bill for each patient throughout the two weeks that he and Yvette were away at Club Med. Alfonzo’s billing methods were no secret amongst “family” members at the Styx.

  Saturday morning began with a guided visualization led by Yvette, who, in addition to acting as Alfonzo’s secretary, co-facilitated many of his group sessions.

  We all picked a spot on the floor and lay on our backs. Candles were lit, lights dimmed, soft music with the sounds of chimes and light rain played in the background.

  “I want everyone to close their eyes,” Yvette instructed, stepping around limbs like rungs on the floor. “Take a deep breath through your nose, slowly. In…then out. In…out. Feel your stomachs rising and falling like waves on a sea. In…out. Good.”

  Our visualization lasted thirty minutes, after which everyone sat in a circle around the room and was encouraged to work on the mattress or at the bat as many times as possible. The process was relentless, offering little respite between primals. For two days the world outside would cease to exist as ten of us dove deep into ourselves, like un-swum oceans, waiting to be chartered. The stated goal: to break through our defenses and submit to our “primal pain.”

  Saturday night was spent as a group at Ludo’s house. Ludo was one of the marathon’s members and a past Styx intensive. Originally from Denmark, Ludo was an architect and had designed his multimillion-dollar dream home, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, on the crest of a wooded property. Everyone ended up in pairs after dinner, taking turns playing their favorite LPs from one of Ludo’s hundreds of records or enjoying a few minutes of banal conversation following our day of intense “body work.” I went out to the house’s veranda, closed my eyes, and breathed the scent of pine deep into my lungs. Inside I heard the Moody Blues’ “Isn’t Life Strange.” After a minute, Ludo joined me on the veranda.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it,” he said.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Ten years. It was my present to my soon-to-be wife.”

  “This was your wedding gift?”

  It was always strange talking to someone outside of therapy. On the mattress we bared our souls, our histories of loveless childhoods, of abuse or neglect, but in reality, no one knew much about anyone’s “real” life of wives and children and daily trials. All I knew about Ludo, from his session that morning, was that he’d been profoundly affected by his father’s inability to express any sort of physical affection, his “wall of silence.”

  “Are your parents still alive?” I asked.

  “My father is,” he said, slowly, as if each word were a painful effort. “My mother died three years ago. I hate saying it…but I think it would have been easier if my father had gone first.”

  “Why?”

  “At least then I would have a parent I could talk to. I have never been able to talk to my father. He refuses to talk to me. I became an architect to please him. I thought maybe then he would be proud of me. Now all I think about is how he’ll die and I won’t know what to say at his funeral. Once he even said to me, out of the blue, he said…‘What will you say during my eulogy? You don’t even know who I am.’ He’s my father, but he’s a stranger to me. I worry sometimes about my own children.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “A boy and a girl. Everyone expects you to be a good parent to your children, to hold them and to love them. You’re expected to do for them what no one did for you. Sometimes it feels like too much to learn in one lifetime.”

  Yuen poked her head out of the house and said that meditation was about to begin. The scent of frankincense wafted onto the veranda as we slid open the Japanese partition and returned to the group.

  Within the hour we were all in bed, some of us in shared rooms, or on the floor in sleeping bags. I ended up on the bottom of a bunk bed, curled like a peanut in the child-size frame the shape of a toy truck. Blurry white elephants filled my vision as my nighttime medication, 350 milligrams of Elavil, smothered me to sleep.

  |||||||||||

  Alfonzo joined the group Sunday morning. I was the first to volunteer to work on the mattress, but before I could, Alfonzo told me to lie on my stomach on the floor.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “You want a good trigger for your session? Just do it.”

  I followed his lead, nervously, and lay on my stomach on the side of the room.

  Alfonzo told Claude and Clay to lie on top of me and to pin me down. I glanced over as one held my arms above my head, the other pinned my legs to the floor.

  “Now,” Alfonzo said, “try and break free.”

  I turned my head and glanced up at him: he was standing next to me, above me, arms folded, smiling.

  I did not move.

  “Feel familiar?” he continued, bending down to where I lay, staring me in the eyes. “How many times have you been fucked in this position? Huh? Fucked up your ass by some man you didn’t even know. And you just lie there and…take it.”

  He must have motioned for Claude and Clay to release the prisoner, because their hands let go, their bodies lifted off me, while the weight that bound me, the shame inside me, was heavier and more powerful than any man who had ever held me down before.

  I rolled from my stomach onto the mattress and immediately I started to work: closed my eyes, moved my arms and legs like I was walking, then running, sank back into the endless pit of shame. Within minutes, I was using my screaming, pounding, and writhing on the mattress like an ice pick to chip away at my defenses. My internal scale had tipped to one side, and the conflicted feelings over being gay that I had struggled with for years had given way to the militant conviction that homosexual acts were unnatural, abominable, and disgusting, and that homosexuality itself was the result of historical pain.

  My homosexuality, moreover, was the result of the sexual abuse. Or so I screamed while lying on the mattress. Like a cartographer, I was involuntarily mapping out my life through primal, one word at a time. Promiscuity was the nature of homosexuality. All gay men dissociated while having sex. Shame and a lifetime of lovelessness were synonymous with homosexual desire. There were no shades of gray. My life was black and white.

  Better yet, there was someone I could blame for my life’s unhappiness: my parents. If it had not been for my
parents’ poor role modeling, their lack of intervention, I would not have spent my teenage years in public toilets and bathhouses, behavior I still equated with homosexuality. My parents were the cause of my misfortunes, as surely as if they’d walked me downtown and into the arms of every man I’d encountered. My body was a grave, and I was falling deeper into it, word by word, as I talked without interruption about the sickness of my homosexuality, digging myself deeper into the pit of my self-hatred.

  After an hour on the mattress, something inside me cracked wide open. I hit bottom, or center: tears flooded out of me, overwhelming me with grief, clouding my vision. The next thing I knew, someone was guiding me by the arm, leading me into Alfonzo’s private office. The door slammed shut and I collapsed, sobbing, in Alfonzo’s arms.

  “One-quarter cc,” I heard him say to someone in the room.

  Then I felt a cold prick like a bee sting near my bicep as Alfonzo injected me with something. The next thing I felt were his powerful arms as he wrapped himself around my middle, squeezing the screams out of me like a blow-up doll wailing out its pain.

  Everything blurred as the boundaries of my body dissolved and I floated up. Up and outside myself, I looked down upon my body. I had given up the fight, let go, and released into his containment. I had surrendered.

  “Ssshh,” he whispered in my ear. “Papa’s here now. Baby’s safe in Papa’s arms. Everything’s okay…Papa caught you.”

  |||||||||||

  The walls to my “self” took hold as I returned from wherever it was I had gone. I was a body again. Peter. Eyes opened, fingers stretched wide, the world was seen anew. Structures and boundaries became evident. Wetness was tears and sweat and snot. They were wiped away by a cloth Alfonzo handed me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Go slow,” he said. “Drink this. You may feel slightly dehydrated for a while.”

  He handed me a glass of water. I sipped and my parched throat, a tunnel, opened.

  “Stand up slowly.”

  I did, and like my parent, he was watching me take my first steps. Then I heard the bat in the adjacent office and I remembered where I was: at a marathon. The others were still working, sweating, pounding, crying.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “We’ve been in here about forty-five minutes.”

  “Oh. Okay. I guess I should go back…” I stumbled toward the door, weak and disoriented from our session.

  “Wait a minute.”

  He moved to his desk and pulled a bottle of cologne out of its drawer.

  “Come here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Papa’s scent,” he said, spraying the pungent odor over my shirt. “So baby feels safe. Now you have me on you wherever you go.”

  13

  I ATTENDED A FRINGE Festival production of my play, Off the Wall, in Vancouver, with the same cast as from the previous production. Recurring regressions had taken possession of my body and I was infantilized, constantly on the verge of tears. One local reviewer wrote that I was “a playwright to watch,” but I could not enjoy my success. I was a child in need, five years old and away from my parents, Alice and Alfonzo. All I wanted was to return home to the Styx.

  In Victoria, my radio play, “Deluge,” was broadcast on the university’s radio station, following which I was briefly interviewed. Near the end, the interviewer, a graduate student, asked me what I was working on now.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Myself,” I said. “And then, maybe, another play.”

  |||||||||||

  Ketamine hydrochloride, most commonly used as an animal anesthetic, was the drug Alfonzo had injected in me that first time.

  “I use it only in very small doses,” Alfonzo told me upon his return from vacation, weeks later, “mostly during the nurturing sessions to help remove the patient’s observing ego. I’ve been waiting for the exact right moment for your first injection.”

  “What would happen if you didn’t use it?”

  “Your therapy would be jeopardized. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  “No…no, of course not.”

  “The medication helps the child self bond directly with the surrogate parent during your regressions. It’s in your own best interest to use it. Without that bond, the parent loses the child to despair. That’s where you’ve been the last twenty years of your life. It’s imperative we create that bond.”

  Weekly injections of “K” followed that first one, and were always administered immediately prior to a nurturing hour with Alice or Alfonzo. Like a schoolboy about to get his flu shot, I would roll up my sleeve, but within minutes, the fog of K had flooded my body and I was curled up with Alice or Alfonzo, regressed to pure need. For sixty minutes, all sensation became intensified as I floated, formless, through a pool of black terror or a sense of timeless euphoria. Then, as if guided by a stream that swam me back into my self, I returned to the brick-and-mortar of my body as the medication waned.

  Although I was aware that others in the Styx were also receiving this “mild hallucinogenic,” I was privately instructed never to talk about its use to anyone, not even with my housemates. At times, I slipped and referred to my use of K. Looks were exchanged, I knew I was doing a “bad” thing by talking about it, even tangentially, and then I changed the subject.

  After one of my nurturing sessions with Alfonzo, still buzzed and “outside myself,” Alfonzo took me to a nearby dessert shop for frozen yogurt, then later, for a ride in his shiny new black Mercedes Benz. When he opened the sunroof and sped through the winding city streets, I felt like I was out with Daddy, and I laughed like a child for the first time in years.

  Back at Hampstead, I stepped out of the car like off an amusement park ride: disoriented, but every bit alive, tingling with excitement, joy.

  “You’re getting fat,” he said, looking at my stomach. “How much weight have you gained?”

  “I don’t know…” I said, aware that I had gained a lot of weight due to the water retention brought on by the medications he was prescribing.

  “Well you should watch that.”

  My heart sank.

  |||||||||||

  As the dosages of my medications increased, so too did their side effects: dry mouth, labored breathing, heart palpitations, involuntary twitching, constipation, and weight gain of more than forty pounds. I learned to walk through dizziness. Stopped reading books because of blurred vision. Tried to pee but nothing came out. Concealed from the world the dead weight of my penis as it pulsed inside my pants, heavy but lifeless, like a broken limb. A shell of dry, flaky skin crusted over my scrotum, yet I couldn’t dig deep enough to reach the itchiness inside. I did try, however, scratching my scrotum with a wire hairbrush until the sores cracked and bled fire.

  Whether triggered by too much medication, a contraindication of medications, or a trapdoor that prolonged regressions had dropped me through inside myself, threat of annihilation appeared around every corner. Demons rattled beneath the floorboards of my soul, and helplessness overwhelmed me. Passing faces on streets were like Francis Bacon nightmares, cadaverous, moribund, and doomed.

  Once, convinced that someone “out there” was trying to kill me, I locked myself in the Styx bathroom for hours, tucked in the corner beside the toilet, waiting, barely moving or breathing, praying a Styx mate would arrive home soon and save me.

  Fantasy and all erotic sensation receded. My imagination was being whitewashed. One day, in desperation, I bought a gay pornographic magazine and masturbated, less an act of eroticism than a fight against the currents of my physical decay, and as I did, in order to take me over the hill of orgasm, I pierced needles through my nipples.

  The next morning, caught in the familiar grooves of desire mixed with shame, regret, and then despair, I confessed the entire ordeal to Alfonzo during an individual session in his office. He rose from where he’d been sitting and started pacing about the workroom.

  “Why didn’t y
ou go to one of your housemates?” He looked down at me with that familiar, menacing glare.

  “I don’t know…”

  “You think sticking needles through your flesh is productive, is that it? What sort of dysfunctional house are you guys operating there, anyway?”

  I couldn’t answer, was scared and infantile, could barely look at him.

  “You think this is a game? Is that what you think?”

  “No…”

  “You lie in bed and jerk off to pictures of men, acting out your historical neuroses, and then you stick needles in your nipples? Is that all you care about, getting off? Why don’t you just move back to your hometown and fuck another man in a car? Pick up another trick in a washroom or a bathhouse? What do you think this house is for anyway? This type of behavior is grounds for eviction!”

  His final threat scared me most of all. If I didn’t change my ways and do as I was told, I would be thrown out of therapy and the Styx, lose my new family, and be exiled to the life that had almost killed me. I began to cry.

  “Oh stop pouting. At the least you should have woken one of your housemates and worked in the workroom, even if it was two in the morning.”

  Alice had been waiting for my nurturing hour to begin. Alfonzo stormed out of the workroom and into his private office.

  “Don’t listen to a word he tells you,” she said, positioning my head in her lap. “The man’s a homophobe. A lot of men are. That’s their own stuff, though, it has nothing to do with you.”

  “I try and let go of my fantasies,” I told her, “but sometimes I can’t control myself and I still think about men.”

  “Of course you do. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “But there is; there is. I’m supposed to be letting go of my homosexuality, not reinforcing it.”

  “Says who?”

  “Homosexuality is wrong. It goes against nature.”

  “Why would you say that?”