“Sex with men has never brought me any kind of pleasure.”
“Maybe it’s not the sex that hasn’t brought you pleasure, but your feelings about the sex. What part of love between two men goes against nature?”
I had no answer to that question.
“Besides, you are not just your sexuality, my dear Peter. You are a child of God. And you’re loveable, gay or straight. I’ll love you no matter what you are.”
“Can we just lie together?” I was more confused now than before we’d started talking. “No talk, just lie together?”
“Of course.”
Alfonzo reappeared at the close of my session fifty minutes later, dropped into the stance of a sumo wrestler, and stared me in the eyes. Alice had moved to the side.
“Your homosexuality is an addiction that must be given up if you want to go anywhere in your therapy. Do you understand me? You need to carry your cross with dignity, Peter. Not act on your insanity.”
His anger had shifted to a gentleness that confused me more.
“No one but your mommy and daddy can give you the deep primal love that’ll relieve the pressure you feel inside. No one. That awful feeling of having had your lovability rejected by your biological parents?…It’s our job to fix that.”
Again, I began to cry. Alfonzo wrapped his arms around me. “You need to hang on,” he said, rubbing my back. “You need to hang on.”
I had drilled a hole down toward the center of me, and the earth above, I feared, was filling back in on me like a grave.
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My all-consuming primals continued unabated. There seemed to be no limits to the depths of my anger toward both my parents—“my crucifiers,” as I now called them. A recurring theme that I was “not homosexual” also overwhelmed my regressions to the point that I became convinced of my “non-homosexual” identity. “I am not a homosexual!” I’d scream out in full primal, lying on my back in the middle of the dimly lit therapy room, eyes shut, neck craned, back arched up off the floor. Afterward, as I’d wipe the tears from my eyes, Alfonzo would reframe everything I had said about being “not a homosexual” as proof of my “innate heterosexuality,” reiterating time and again that “primals don’t lie”—the fact that I could articulate my “non-homosexuality” during a regression was proof that my false homosexual self was slipping away, soon to be replaced by my underlying, inalienable heterosexuality.
“You’re in a classic place of primal rage right now,” Alfonzo would say. Only after I felt the pain of never having been loved, he’d reinforce, would my integration into the outside world become possible. For the time being, however, all I needed was to allow myself the right to feel what I’d suppressed as a child.
One early evening at the Styx I grabbed the phone after dinner, hid inside a crawlspace beneath the coiled metal staircase, and called my mother after not having spoken with her for over a year.
She was overjoyed to hear from me. I interrupted and reminded her of our conversation in my old bedroom, the day she told me she’d been raped. Horrified, she denied ever having told me about the rape.
“That never happened, she said. “I never told you that.”
I continued, reminded her of all the times my father had chased me and my siblings through the house with his black leather belt, asked her why she’d smothered me in her breasts every night before bed, accused her of turning her back on me instead of wanting to hear the truth, told her that she had no idea of the damage she’d caused.
“Damage? Son, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘damage.’”
She told me what I knew, what had kept me from saying any of this in the first place: that she and my father were orphans from the war, that they couldn’t speak English when they’d arrived in Canada, had no money, or jobs, and that if they’d made mistakes it was only because they didn’t know better. She begged me to understand. I understood, I told her—I had been in therapy already for years. I understood, but understanding did not change the way I felt. The best thing I could do now, I said, was stay with my anger.
“Anger is a flame that burns itself out,” she said. “Anger will destroy you.”
“My anger has saved me.”
Then I told her what I had been encouraged to repeat a hundred times over at the batting station: I told her she was no longer my mother, and that her husband, “that pathetic excuse for a man,” was no longer my father.
Again, she begged for me to stop, but I raged on, said that she had been poisoning my mind and body for my entire life, and that I gave it all back to her. I did not want a birthday card from her or a Christmas card or an Easter card; I did not want to have anything more to do with her, with either of them, ever again.
“But we love you!”
“You don’t love me—you crucified me. I was your fix!”
“Oh my God…you really are cracking up, aren’t you? I don’t think there’s a doctor alive that could help you now…”
Before I hung up the phone, there was a shard of a moment where my heart throbbed with compassion through a fissure in my rage. But then the moment passed, the rage again possessed me, and I smashed the phone down like a lead gavel onto a cradle, leaving behind my parents and everyone who had known me before.
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Alfonzo upped my doses of medication.
“It’s normal for a person to need more medication the deeper they go in primal therapy,” he said. “You’re nowhere near what I was taking when I had my own breakdown, my dark night of the soul. Don’t worry about it.”
But I did worry about it. In addition to weekly injections of K, I was now taking 4 milligrams of Rivotril, 550 milligrams of Elavil, plus Surmontil and Sinequan daily. Nothing helped. Nothing stopped the panic and the fear; nothing stopped grief and despair. The more medication he prescribed, the worse my symptoms became and the faster my fear intensified about ever stopping the medications at all. There was no rational thought, no trying to figure out whether my worsening symptoms were the result of extended primal therapy, or the medications. No energy was left to think. Crawling out of bed every morning and bicycling to school or to work or to the office: every act, thought, movement, conversation, sound, syllable required more from me than I could give, became a chore, an endless weight, like chains wrapped ’round my body, dragging me down deeper, every day, down deeper.
Then one day my body would no longer sleep.
“Five hundred-and-fifty milligrams isn’t working,” I told Alfonzo at the office. “I haven’t slept in days.”
“Well, I can’t prescribe more than five hundred-and-fifty milligrams. The pharmacist won’t fill the prescription. But I sometimes take more myself. Just take an extra fifty milligrams, if you need to. We’ll renew your prescription a bit earlier next time.”
So that’s what I did. The 550 milligrams turned into 600 milligrams. Still sleep eluded me, like the sexuality that remained always beyond my reach. Every morning I crawled out of bed earlier and earlier for work; it was that or lie awake, drenched in icy sweat, immobilized by fear. By the winter of 1991, I was bicycling to my job at five in the morning, over snowy roads, numbed by the blizzards. For three hours until my shift began, I would sit alone in the half-lit, empty university cafeteria, smoking and drinking endless cups of coffee in an effort to awaken my body from its medicated stupor. And I wrote: about my mother’s escape from the camp and my own body’s imprisonment. Like an emotional bulimic, I was attempting to purge from my insides with pen and paper every last thought and feeling that had possessed my mind for years.
Then, one winter morning, the moment I crawled out of bed, something inside of me unhinged. I collapsed, feeling the air rush past me as if I’d plunged down an endless elevator shaft. Clay found me sometime later, conscious, lying motionless on the floor beside my bed, still feeling as if I were falling through space, the endless landscape of my shattered mind, rootless to myself and my surroundings. He fed me a dose of his antipsychotic, Nozinan, an
d called Alfonzo to the house.
The days and weeks that followed were a jumble of events. I imagine someone called my employer at the university’s student union and told them I would not be back to work; I never returned to school. Alfonzo placed me on medical disability and added Nozinan to my regime of daily medications. Elevators, escalators, even cars and buses—any and all involuntary movement of my body—exacerbated the sense that I was plummeting down inside myself and toward my own untimely end. Only walking, remaining physically active, counteracted the dread and so, every day, all day, through parks, inside shopping malls, down streets, I walked. Clay walked with me. I could not be left alone.
Sometime later—weeks, months, I don’t remember—Alfonzo told me to start working in his office. With blurred vision and short-term memory loss, I could barely see let alone concentrate, but was given notes to type and did my best. Mostly he talked to me between patient visits. My collapse had been “a close call,” he told everyone in the Styx. He wanted to keep a careful eye on my recovery.
For months, time ceased to exist. My days were clocked by experiences, not minutes: feeling the jigsaw puzzle of my mind break apart; repeating entire conversations because I’d forgotten I’d had them already; hearing all sounds, traffic, wind, and voices swirling around me as if I were locked in the eye of a storm; carrying the weight of my body around like a suit of armor I wished only to remove so I could sleep. Maybe I slipped away for an hour or two, inconsolably exhausted, and yet I always surfaced again by three or four in the morning and lay panic-stricken in my bed till dawn.
Arriving at my sessions zombielike, my speech was sometimes incomprehensible.
“I’m in so much physical discomfort,” I told Alfonzo once, “I don’t know how much more I can take.”
To which he repeated what he’d said so many times before. “You need to feel the bond with Mommy. Just be in the mommy space.”
My body was an earthquake that I was trapped inside.
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Then one day, we were moving. Alfonzo must have told the others that we needed a bigger house, “more rooms for more intensives,” because everyone was packing, and movers were arriving. Conversations I could not follow overwhelmed me with fear.
The first time I saw our new neighborhood, I thought we’d stepped into the movie Futureworld. Prefabricated houses lined a treeless, dead-end street near a dank and gloomy swamp at the outskirts of the city. The inside of our split-level house was vacuous and drafty, like a barn. Within days of arriving, patients I’d never met before began moving in, converting an upstairs, enclosed sunroom into an additional bedroom and the downstairs’ expansive living space into three tiny sleeping quarters large enough for single-sized cots.
Wooden stairs that creaked like bones popping in their sockets led down into a gutted basement, with cement flooring and overhanging cobwebs. In one dark distant corner, behind the steaming furnace, was a tiny crawl space just large enough for our newest workroom. Two-by-fours were raised, gyprock was attached, and a portable door was secured to the loosely hanging frame. So poorly constructed was our newest dungeon that it often tipped from side-to-side, like Dorothy’s house in the cyclone, as we thrashed about inside, batting and screaming and calling out for the love of our mommies and daddies. Sounds of exorcisms had long since become the norm at the Styx.
We’d been in the new house only days when I heard the shrill cry for the first time, followed by a thunderous reverberation. I went out back, near our neighbor’s dilapidated property. Standing knee high in a sea of overgrown grass, mice scurried underfoot. Next door, through a dangling wire fence, I watched in horror as a fat older man with a yellowing beard decapitated chickens. One by one, he hurled their blood-soaked torsos inside enormous, rusty canisters, where the convulsions of their still-alive bodies echoed like a drum.
Awaking each morning in my cell-like room in the basement of our barn, the reality of my life shifted slowly into focus. There was no waking from the nightmare I was living. Then I heard the chickens’ squeals from outside my bedroom window, as if each were calling out to me for help.
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“How are you feeling today?” Alfonzo asked me weekly.
I understood his meaning. He could have just as easily asked me if I was still thinking about or attracted to men. The truth was I had never stopped finding men attractive, clocking in at about a six on Alfonzo’s revised “Kinsey scale” of one to seven, and my inability to “flip to the other side” was feeding into my obsessions about the possible “causes” of my homosexuality.
Viewing my obsessive-compulsive thinking as one more symptom of my pathology, Alfonzo reminded me that I would never be able to make the “switchover” if I continued to obsess about “the gay side.” Anafranil, my fourth tricyclic antidepressant, was prescribed specifically to deaden my sex drive. The medication made me feel numb, lifeless, passive. Any light that had remained alive in me was now switched off. Erections were eliminated; fantasy and arousal, eradicated. Fear of the world, my vulnerability and dependence on Alfonzo, increased. On a number of occasions when we’d discuss my increasing passivity, he told me that homosexuals were passive by nature.
“You need to push through your passivity. Remember: your unexpressed anger is what’s keeping you from your heterosexuality.”
If I talked about my ongoing fear of the world, Alfonzo said that there was only one fear, and it was of not being loved. Repeatedly he told me that if I ever didn’t know what to do, I should just talk to my mom (Alice) or dad (himself).
“Papa has your best interest at heart” were the words I heard so often, as I picked myself back up and headed out the door.
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“How are you feeling today?” Alfonzo asked during one of our sessions, as usual.
“I still think about men.”
“We may need to try something new. Through the years you’ve learned that homosexual relations are pleasurable. This is incorrect data. Homosexuals have confused their sex organs. Why else would they stick their penis where they shit? We need to correct your brain’s faulty wiring. I want you to go home tonight and bottle some of your feces in a little film container. Every time you’re attracted to a man— if you’re out on the street or on a bus—I want you to open the bottle and sniff the contents. You need to be reminded where homosexual men stick their penis. You need to be reminded that homosexual relations are not pleasurable.”
Listening to Alfonzo, I was free falling into space, falling backward from the top of the stairs, trusting he would catch me.
If the film container did anything, it reminded me of how often I still thought of men. Whereas before I had always unconsciously noticed a man on the street or the bus, now I had a means of counting every last one that caught my eye: I’d reach into my shoulder pack, pull out the container, my firearm, discreetly hold it up under my nose, open it and take a deep, powerful whiff, like I was back snorting poppers in a bathhouse. Only this time its perverse stench was a bullet to my soul, silencing, but not killing, me.
One night after sniffing the container three or four times on a bus, I caught the evening’s front-page headlines: Persian Gulf War: One Man’s Story of Torment. Yes, I understood. Alfonzo was my commanding officer, and I, his enlistee, had been sent to wage the war of my life, the war within. Desperate times required desperate measures. Or so I told myself.
Some weeks later, he asked me again how I was feeling.
“There’s no change,” I told him.
“You’re still sniffing the vial?”
“Yes. And I’m still attracted to men. Only now I smell shit all the time. It’s confusing me.”
“Well, then…ordinarily I don’t like gimmicks, but we may need to begin hooking your genitals up to electrodes. We may need to help retrain your penis.”
14
IN EARLY 1992, YVETTE called us down to the office for an “urgent family meeting.” In the past, meetings of this nature had typically m
eant that one of us wasn’t pulling our weight with chores or that Alfonzo had a new idea for a family-run business that would allow us the freedom to withdraw entirely from the “outside” world while earning enough money to continue with our therapy in the Styx. No one knew just what to expect this time.
Once seated in the workroom, Alfonzo explained that he had just received a letter from Kirsten, an ex-patient from Styx 2, and that he wanted to read it to his “spiritual family.” Together, he said, we would decide on our next course of action.
The letter began with Kirsten apologizing for her precipitous departure from her house and treatment, but that she’d been wrestling for some time about whether or not to stay in the therapy. The tone of her letter shifted when she described her conflicted feelings toward Alfonzo, the way he’d been injecting her with ketamine for well over a year but telling her never to discuss the drug with her housemates, since none of them were considered “lifers”—they weren’t receiving injections and did not know about its use. This “culture of secrecy,” she wrote, was “deeply troubling” to her, as she felt it just “reinforced the dysfunctional, compartmentalized patterns” from her childhood.
She considered Alfonzo’s use of ketamine to be without informed consent, since by the time patients were told about it they were already “vulnerable, childlike, in a bonded state of mind, had given up their entire lives, associates, spouses, families, children, and were already deeply invested in the therapy.” She wrote that if Alfonzo did not tell her ex-housemates about his use of ketamine within a matter of weeks, she would tell them herself. She would also have to consider what to do about the fact that other healthcare professionals continued to refer new patients to him for treatment. She might need to report him to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the governing body of all registered and licensed physicians in the province of British Columbia.
After Alfonzo read us the letter, no one said a word. There, in black and white, were all the words that we could not admit to ourselves, let alone write down. Kirsten had said what we could not even allow ourselves to think.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 14