The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  Finally, Alfonzo turned to Yvette. “We need to draft a letter of informed consent. Everyone needs to sign it.” He scanned all of our faces, one by one. “Got it?”

  Two weeks later, the morning of the day he and Yvette were leaving for vacation at Club Med, we were called back to the office for “a follow-up meeting.” Once seated, with Alfonzo in his squat chair as usual, Yvette handed all of us a form titled “Informed Consent for the Utilization of Ketamine Hydrochloride.”

  “You need to sign it and pre-date it from before your first medicated session,” he said. “Ask Yvette if you don’t remember the date, she’ll look it up.”

  I read through the form. One phrase in particular caught my attention; it stated that I had “prior knowledge of the drug.” Because this was not true, at least not for me, before signing the form I penciled in a clause. Dr. Alfonzo did not tell me about this drug before injecting me the first time during a weekend therapeutic marathon.

  I handed it back to Alfonzo.

  “What’s this?” he said, staring down at my handwritten note.

  “I just added a statement about not having prior knowledge before—”

  “You just—what?” You think I can use this now? I can’t use this once you’ve scribbled on it.” He ripped up the form and threw it on the floor. “Yvette!” he called. Yvette! Give Peter another form. Vite!”

  Alfonzo charged out of the workroom as Yvette rushed over.

  “What are you doing, “Peter?” she said in a hushed tone. “You know we’re trying to get away on vacation.”

  Alfonzo reappeared from his office.

  “I don’t have time for this bullshit, Peter. Shut up and sign the form. Or else.”

  I did as instructed.

  |||||||||||

  A letter from the College of Physicians and Surgeons was waiting for Alfonzo at his office upon his return from vacation at Club Med, several weeks later.

  In sum, the letter stated that Yuen’s husband claimed that his wife had moved into a residential facility in 1990 following what was supposed to be a three-week therapeutic intensive overseen by Alfonzo; that she had refused to return home and was now working for the doctor without pay; and that the therapy as a whole was “a cult.” The College cited Alfonzo’s inappropriate involvement with his patient as “a boundary violation” and told him to terminate the relationship immediately. They requested a letter from Alfonzo, confirming he would follow the board’s direction within three weeks.

  Alfonzo was infuriated. He despised having to deal with “the outside world,” and was angry at Yuen for not taking care of her “other world business”—divorcing her husband before committing herself to the therapy—and for forcing him to get involved with that world. The week after receiving the letter, he recruited Yuen to help him write his response to the College. Every day, after the office had closed for regular business, they reviewed her medical files and listened to all her primal sessions on reel-to-reel recordings. Yuen had “severe borderline personality disorder,” he wrote back to the College; she had attempted suicide twice before being referred to him for psychiatric intervention, and in an effort to help improve her low self-esteem, his secretary (Yvette) had asked Yuen to “help her out” around the office, which had nothing to do with him. Still, he agreed to discontinue the relationship.

  The entire situation—the letter from her former husband, as well as the response she was now helping Alfonzo write to the College— humiliated Yuen. Following every one of her “writing sessions” with Alfonzo in the office, she lay on the workroom mattress and worked at the batting station to, as Alfonzo so often instructed, “take it all back historically.” Any anger Yuen felt over having to help write his response to the College, he told her, had everything to do with her father, and nothing to do with him.

  The day after mailing his response to the College, Alfonzo told Yuen to start work in the office early enough in the day, or else arrive late at night when the other psychiatrist who shared office space was absent. Two weeks later, Yuen asked Alfonzo to be paid for her “services.” He said that she was acting out her historical anger toward her father and refused her request. Soon after, Yuen called her own house meeting at the office. She even asked that Alfonzo attend.

  “I’ve decided to move out of the Styx,” she said, once we were all in a circle on the workroom floor. “I want to get my own apartment, try living on my own. I wanted to tell you all together, as a family.”

  Yuen seemed genuinely excited by her news, but a hushed silence fell over the group.

  “What are you going on about?” Alfonzo responded, squinting his eyes and shaking his head, as if something inside had come loose.

  “I just thought—” Yuen began.

  “You just thought—what? Is this what you wanted to meet about? You want to move out? You want…you want. If all of us did as we want, nothing would get done around here.”

  Claude spoke up. Though no one discussed the fact, we all knew they’d been sleeping together for years. “If Yuen wants to live on her own I don’t think we should stop her,” he said.

  “Oh we shouldn’t, should we?” Alfonzo said. “What do you know? You’re a drunk and a wife beater, and if it weren’t for my therapy and this house, you’d be lying in the gutter somewhere, clutching a bottle of wine, drinking yourself into oblivion—that’s where you’d be.”

  Alfonzo turned to Yuen. “And you, you’d be in that dead-end marriage of yours—no, you’d probably be dead if it weren’t for this therapy. Do I need to remind you where you were when you came to see me the first time?”

  “No…” Yuen said, her oval eyes hidden beneath the glare of her frameless glasses.

  “Out of the hospital for weeks, that’s where you were. How many suicide attempts?”

  Yuen said nothing, but began to cry, softly.

  “Paranoid and thinking that your husband was trying to kill you. I saved your life. I saved all your fucking lives.”

  Sitting around a circle, I prayed Alfonzo would not include me in his review of failing lives: sex in public toilets, sleeping all day because I’d feared being awake. He would have plenty to say about my life, I knew.

  “This is no time for any of you,” he continued, scanning our faces like a floodlight, “for any of you to be moving back out into the world. I’m just about to begin writing my life story, I’ve discussed this with Yvette, and we will need all of your help. All. We need to focus our energies on the office, and my book. Especially the book. That’s where your priorities lie right now: on the book. You think the world gives a shit about any of your little lives? This book is God’s will, and it will be written.”

  “But…” Yuen started to say. We all turned to her. “I still want to move out.”

  “Yes,” Alfonzo said. “And I want to retire, move back to Spain, and sit in the sun all day and drink margaritas. Now shut up and go home.”

  Back at the Styx, I passed by Clay’s room before bed. “Can we talk?” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  I entered his room and sat on the floor. In all the years I’d lived with Clay, he had never purchased a bed but slept on a one-inch foamy that he rolled up each morning and tied with a string, like a map. “Do you still want to kill your father?” I asked.

  “If my father walked in here off the street today I would kill him.”

  “How long have you been in this therapy?”

  “Ten years, not counting an eight-month break when Alfonzo closed his practice back and east before moving out west.”

  “Don’t you ever think about leaving?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Into the world.”

  “I’ve been in the world, Peter. It’s crazy out there.”

  “Don’t you want to fall in love one day? Get married? Have children? Even just have sex?”

  “Of course I miss the sex, but I got a vasectomy years ago. I’ll never have children.”

  “Why not?”

 
“Because I’d massacre them. I’d do to them what my father did to me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He smiled. “Listen, Peter, there’s nothing that I want to do for the rest of my life but this therapy. Nothing. Primalling on the mattress, batting at the batting station, cuddling with Mommy. My life now is about healing the damage that was done to me. My chronic fatigue is a symptom of what my father did to my insides. The only thing that’ll heal me are my Mommy sessions. Mommy’s love is all I need now.”

  Downstairs, I found Yuen sitting alone, cross-legged, staring into a fire. I joined her on the carpeted floor. Though it was only eight o-clock, Yuen had already changed into her red silk Chinese pajamas, as if sleep could not come soon enough.

  “Do you think anyone ends up living the life they imagined?” she asked, not turning away from the flames.

  “I think it took courage to do what you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Telling him you want to leave. That must have been really hard for you. Speaking up like that.”

  Yuen had never spoken up, not to Alfonzo, not to her ex-husband, definitely never to her parents. All her primal sessions that I’d witnessed had focused on one issue alone: overcoming the cultural taboos, as a Chinese female growing up in Jamaica, that had silenced her emotionally. Tonight, she had stepped up to the plate, and in one fell swoop, Alfonzo had shot her back down. There was something sadly ironic in the fact that he was the one person who had encouraged her assertiveness during therapy.

  “I was sitting here thinking about the night my parents drove me home from the hospital. The third time they drove me home. The whole ride, my eyes were fixed on my mother’s head in the front seat, at her long black hair, squeezed in a bun. She never moved, not once. She never even looked at my father, who was driving. Both of them: silent. Silence like if you close your eyes you’ll disappear. Even after, at the house, no one talked about it. Asked me, anything. How I felt, why I did it. It was like it had never even happened. But in the car, the whole way home, all I kept thinking was Next time I’ll get it right. Next time I’ll make sure I get it right.”

  Yuen hugged her bent knees up toward her belly. When she sniffled, I knew that she’d been crying, although I couldn’t see her face, all wet and swollen like a baby’s, no doubt, hidden beneath her long silken hair that was draped around her like a curtain.

  I scanned our living room. A cable-reel table, reclaimed from an abandoned sugar-factory warehouse that we’d used as a coffee table for years. A green plaid sofa and a broken orange winged-back chair purchased secondhand at Value Village. Chalk-white walls, blank as the day we’d moved in. Recessed bookshelves without a single book. For a time, I’d filled the bookshelves in our first house with hundreds of my books of poetry and plays that I’d lugged around for years. Then, for some reason, I repacked them all up in boxes and shoved them in the attic. I don’t know why. Maybe because by then I knew they weren’t an anchor. At least not the kind I needed.

  “When I was a child,” Yuen continued, still staring into the fire, “I remember that I wanted to say and do so many things, but no one ever validated me for who I was and what I wanted to do. On the contrary: they invalidated me and told me I’d amount to nothing. And so…I just stopped doing…everything. I have felt hopelessness and despair my whole life simply because I had no validation for who I was and what I wanted to do. For who I was.”

  I lay back on the orange shag carpet as heat from the fire pulled me toward sleep.

  The next time Yuen spoke, minutes or an hour later, her voice snapped me back inside my body.

  “I think we’re all born for greatness,” she said, the embers still reflecting off her hair, “but I think it needs to be kindled, inside us. Because if it’s not, it just dies within us and we become something else.”

  |||||||||||

  In the months following my collapse, a ribbon of imagery spooled out of me faster than I could write it all down. During this entire time I wrote poetry, or sometimes it seemed like poetry was writing me, each line surging forth fully formed and with such velocity that it was all I could do to write them down before another charged forth, all of them, some 220 in total, like voices demanding to be heard and documented. If my collapse had felt like I’d fallen down and through my self, language held me up, one poem at a time.

  I did not know, as a child, that even innocence was, for some, a meal.

  Or:

  The grief the son feels when the mother wills to live, but feels despair, and takes him in her arms to keep herself sane.

  Or:

  Even hails of prayer will not break silence when I, myself, inside, am still so loud.

  Or:

  Revenge is a knife and there have been, already, far too many stabbings.

  Or:

  I am, in the hands of the Sculptress, amazed.

  Often I brought all my week’s poems to my sessions with Alice, eager for her thoughts and validation. Poem after poem, I read them all to Alice; poem after poem, she told me just how talented her boy was at creating images with words.

  “You have a gift from God,” she told me, “and once you work through your pain and confusion, that gift will shine through and help to heal.”

  I’d hang on to her every word, asking question after question, just as young children do with their mothers. And as soon as she answered my questions, a wave of relief would wash over me, and I would dive back into her lap, where she’d match her breathing to mine.

  On K, I felt our bodies dissolving into one. I imagined us playing building blocks, and together we’d knock over all my little plastic soldiers. We’d walk to the park, and she’d push me on the swings. Later, we’d come back to the house to make dinner, and when Papa came home, he’d grab hold of me and toss me high up in the air, and I’d giggle and give him a great big bear hug, and when he laughed, I’d feel his belly jiggle. After dinner, I’d be bathed because I was still a “grubby-buggy” from the park, and there would be stories in bed as I twirled my fingers through my mommy’s hair, then drift off to sleep, peacefully, as children should, without the slightest worry.

  Sometimes Alice and I talked about going to the “big chair” where toddler Peter would lie with Mommy after his nap. Predictably, my biological mother appeared in the form of a giant scorpion, baring her teeth and snapping her claws, as if to want to eat me whole. Alice would talk to her, tell her to go away, that this was no longer about her, that she and I wanted time together to feel safe and loving and good. My mother would disappear for a spell, then after a while return again, lie on top of me, and press down into me. Alice suggested I feel her back and arms—to check that it was she and not my mother who was holding on to me.

  Alice described our surroundings, reminded me that I was not in my old bedroom with my mother, perhaps sang a bit, then rubbed my back. I looked at her—this woman who was not my mother, but who I believed loved me as I knew my mother should have all along—and I felt such tenderness and comfort.

  Some sessions were completely nonverbal, with Alice telling me to just be in the “mommy space,” as we lay belly to belly while she sang me lullabies and rocked me in her arms until I’d fall to sleep. The emotional space we’d created was different and distinct from anything I’d ever known before. Sometimes I’d feel someone sucking my penis—sensory hallucinations brought on by K—and Alice would come to the rescue, telling the men to go away.

  “We are strong and good people,” she said to one of the men, “and together we can take on anything. You don’t scare us, you don’t have a chance, so bugger off!”

  “I’m your one lung,” I told her, all snuggled and warm in her arms, because at times I felt myself merging with her, even breathing for her. But Alice told me she had two lungs, that I had two lungs, that I could rest against her and let her carry me, but that our boundaries were clear and strong and that we were two separate people.

  Near the end of my session, after I had surfaced fro
m K, Alice took me in her arms and began to cry.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to be leaving the therapy. My husband and I are moving away by the middle of next year. He got a job back east in Toronto, so…you know how much I love you.”

  For a moment I looked at her, as a child might when news of his mother’s departure seems baffling. “That’s okay,” I said.

  “And that I’ll always love you…”

  “I know, me too. I was scared when you told me, but only for a second. I know that distance won’t change the love we feel for each other.”

  “Oh my boy,” she said, clutching me tighter in her arms. “Do you know how proud I am of you, how far you’ve come since I first met you? You wouldn’t even let me hold you, and now look at you. All soft and cuddly and loveable in my arms.”

  “Can I ask you one question?”

  “You can ask me two.”

  “It’s about my writing. What should I do with it?”

  Without another word, Alice understood my meaning. “I think your writing is still a wounded passion. And when you’re more healed, it will naturally find expression, and it will become powerful and positive. First heal thyself. Your writing will take care of itself.”

  “Funny. That’s what Dr. Alfonzo said about my sexuality when I first came to see him.”

  We laughed; then we continued talking for the remainder of the session, at times cuddling, our bodies finding each other, all familiar and entwined, like branches from one tree that knows itself. She was Mama, I told her, not Mommy or Mom, just Mama, and I knew that I would miss her but that I’d carry the love she’d given me around inside me.

  “I keep thinking of a time with my mother,” I said. “Can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me anything.”

  “We were at the beach, all of us, my whole family, playing in the sand. Dad was throwing us up in the air, and we were swimming in the ocean like baby seals. Then we were all playing hide-and-go-seek. We were playing, and I was happy and free, and I ran away from the others and into a patch of forest. Something large and textured, like a piñata, crashed into the side of my head, and a swarm of bees exploded into me, my ears, eyes, nose. I started screaming, crying, flailing my arms. The next thing I knew someone wrapped their arms around me and pulled me into a clearing. I opened my eyes, and I saw her face. My mother. She kissed me on my cheeks, and she wiped away my tears, like you do during our sessions. She told me, like you tell me sometimes, she told me to lie quiet because Mommy was there, that now I was safe and sound.”