“For Christ’s sake, you can be a man, you know, Peter? You can be a fucking man. You don’t have to be Mommy’s little boy for the rest of your life. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Jesus Christ, she crucified you, she blasted you, she killed you! How old are you now anyway?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“You’re not going to stay in the middle your whole life, are you? I would be kicking and screaming if I were you, kicking to get out: ‘Help me, please, tell me what to do.’ Instead I see you sitting, waiting—waiting for what?”
She looked at me for a response. I said nothing.
“I could just kill your parents—kill them, cold blood—for what they did to you. They steal you from the most wonderful thing a man and woman have the chance to share: the possibility to get together and feel what real love is all about, the vehicle of love, and they steal that away from you? That is about the only thing worth living for in this fucked up fucking life, and they steal that away from you? They robbed you of your masculinity.”
My silence seemed to aggravate her even more.
“Look at you. You’re not a man or a woman. You’re sitting on a fence, like a passive little boy. You’re about as homosexual as I am a lesbian, Peter, so it’s time you wake up and you kick that fucking shit out of your brain and you start looking in the other direction. Because, I’ll tell you, this is a disease. And you know that. Don’t you. You were not born a homosexual, Peter. You know bloody well…”
She was right about one thing: I did feel passive. But the idea that my passivity could have been the result of the helplessness I felt at the futility of trying, for almost five years, to “correct” my desires would never have been considered, let alone tolerated.
I looked over at her. Hanging on the wall above her head were the same words from A Course in Miracles that had stared back at me for more than five years:
This is a course in miracles.
It is a required course.
Only the time you take it is voluntary…
“So what if I choose men?” I said. “What if I say that I’m a homosexual…that I choose men…that I’m gay?”
Clearly, this was not the response she expected.
“Then you’ll be dead within the year.”
|||||||||||
Dizziness swept through my body as I floated up toward consciousness one Saturday morning.
“Something’s wrong,” I told Yuen in the kitchen.
“You’re probably just coming down with the flu,” she said, feeling my sweaty forehead.
The first blister appeared on my face within the hour. By mid-afternoon, my temperature rose to 101. A dozen pus-filled welts appeared across my torso by early evening. When my temperature reached 104, someone called 911.
Inside the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, my mother’s naked body with three breasts floated toward me as I slipped in and out of consciousness until I lost all track of whether I was asleep or awake.
The next thing I knew, my stretcher smashed through the doors of the emergency room and a crowd of white-jacketed bodies swarmed around me beneath the blare of overhead fluorescent lights. When I awoke again, there were cold plastic tubes stuck up my nose and in my arm, and a young, pimply-faced doctor was leaning over me, asking if I’d ever been tested for the AIDS virus.
AIDS? Did I have AIDS? Oh God oh God oh God was all I could think until there was not even a me only thoughts and then not even thoughts just a sinking, drowning fear in the fire of my flesh.
Sebastian was holding my hand when I opened my eyes, sometime later.
“Am I dying?” I asked, as the doctor reappeared from around the curtain, stethoscope dangling around his neck.
“No, no, you have chickenpox,” he laughed. “We’ll have to keep you overnight until you’re out of danger. For a man you’re age, that was a close call. But you’ll be fine.”
I was home in days and lay in bed for weeks, with cool, damp cloths stretched across my blistered body. After my recent back injury, chickenpox was one more obstacle to overcome, as if my body knew something that I hadn’t yet figured out. The only time I didn’t sting was when I slept. And so I let my body heal itself, unconsciously, as scabs fell off, and in their place, beneath the wounds, my skin grew strong.
Like a snake, I was shedding dead skin.
|||||||||||
Still too weak to go anywhere, I spent days in the Styx office, a small room at the front of the house, trying to edit Alfonzo’s book on our house IBM. Mostly, I stared at words, too confused by rhetoric or nonlinear life stories to make much sense out of any of it.
One day Sebastian arrived home with a friend. It was still unusual to bring anyone other than another patient to the Styx, and this person, I knew, was not.
“This is Shane,” Sebastian said, as I shook the man’s hand. He was about my age but taller with intense, chestnut eyes and short, sandy, wind-blown hair.
“I met Shane at work. We got to talking, and, well, he was hoping to talk to you. Privately…”
“Oh?”
“Shane has been…how shall I say…he’s been going through some ‘issues’ lately. With his sexuality.” Shane blushed, glanced at the floor. “I told him about the work you’ve been doing in the therapy. I thought you could help him.”
The work I’d been doing? Help him? I felt like an imposter.
“If we could just talk some time,” Shane said. “I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure,” I said.
|||||||||||
We met a week later. By then, Sebastian had told me about Shane’s mental breakdown one year earlier, brought on after he’d recovered memories of being raped by his father as a child. More recently, he’d been struggling with his increased same-sex attraction, which, as he told his current therapist, he’d denied for as long back as he could recall. Then his therapist told him that the rapes had created those sexual feelings. This confused Shane even more. When Sebastian mentioned my abuse, and that Alfonzo was helping me “correct” my desires, all Shane could think about was joining the therapy.
“I never used to believe in repressed memories,” Shane confided in me during one of our walks by the ocean, “until it happened to me. Out of the blue, I started having dreams, waking up sweating, screaming, terrified. I don’t know what I would’ve done if it hadn’t been for my AA meetings. Start drinking again, I’m sure.”
“What sort of dreams?”
“About my father, and the rapes. I remembered everything, not just in my dreams. It was like a veil protecting me from the events had dropped away and now I could see what had always been there, in the background to my life. Everything made sense.”
Shane expressed his desire to join the ranks of Alfonzo’s therapy.
“I want to reclaim my true identity,” he said. “I don’t want to live in the shadow of my father’s abuse.”
Like the private who’d yet to go to war, he wanted nothing more than to face the enemy, his same-sex desires, and blast it to pieces.
“Do you think Alfonzo can help me the way he’s helped you?”
“I don’t think you should jump into anything. Until you know more.”
“I agree. Which is why I’ve set up an appointment with him.”
“You’re going to see him? Dr. Alfonzo?”
“Next week. Seriously, I don’t know what I’ll do if he can’t help me. This is my last chance, Peter.”
|||||||||||
Shane and I met again at a bustling courtyard shopping bazar.
“I’m really damaged,” he said as we walked in and out of Middle Eastern clothing shops. “At least that’s what Dr. Alfonzo told me. He said I’m one of the lifers, that he’s the only game in town.”
“What did you say?”
“That I want his help like he’s helped you.”
“You said that?”
“I hope that’s okay.”
“And then what did he say?”
“He said he
’s still considering me as a patient for his therapy, but that I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. His one condition is that I do the therapy in his home. He said he’s trying to get a group of men together. In the meantime I need to start on medication.”
“What sort of medication?”
“Clomipramine. Clonazepam. Amitriptyline.”
I recognized the names as Alfonzo had prescribed the same brand names to me: Anafranil, Rivotril, Elavil.
“He said he makes all his patients take the same medications. I’ll do whatever he tells me. I have to; there’s no one else.”
Shane was entering into something that was beyond a simple explanation, but I didn’t know what to say, where to begin, how to help. Nothing about my own years in the Styx was clear yet to me. He wanted to be fixed, and Alfonzo, it seemed, offered a cure.
We sat on a bench in the courtyard.
“All those nights I lay in bed,” Shane said, “too afraid to close my eyes. I used to think that as long as I kept my eyes open he couldn’t hurt me. But…every night at midnight, like clockwork, there he was. I couldn’t move. He’d peel the covers back…take me in his mouth…rub my belly with his hands…tell me to lie on my stomach. Once he had to stitch me up.”
“What do you mean, stitch you up?”
“What do you think I mean? He poured a shot of whiskey and told me to drink it down.”
“You were how old?”
“Five…six…seven? He did it to my older brothers, too. He went from bed to bed and made us watch as he did it to all of us.”
“Where was your mother?”
“Not there. The last twenty years of my life, all I could think about is that my father made me into something that I’ll never be able to change. And since I can’t not be who I am, what I’ve become…I might as well not even think about what he did to me. And now…now it’s all I can think about. I don’t want to be gay…” He started crying as shoppers wove past us, some glaring, others ignoring, many numbed by the drug of their own addictions. “I don’t want to be gay…I don’t want to be gay…”
I looked at Shane, but through him, the window of his suffering, I saw myself, recognized the familiar illogic, the years I’d tried not so much to even become heterosexual, but to not be myself. For Shane, “not being gay” still meant undoing his past; it meant not being what he thought his father had made him into.
Two weeks later, he called me at the Styx.
“I’m calling from the payphone in the hospital…”
“Why are you in the hospital?”
“Because I’m in the psychiatric ward.”
“Why are you in the psychiatric ward?”
“Because I had a psychotic breakdown.”
“You—what? Are you okay?”
“I’m better, now that I’m off most of all the meds, except for clomipramine, my psychiatrist here said I still have to take clomipramine, at least for a while, oh and he knows all about Alfonzo, he says he’s a wacko and I should stay as far away from him as possible—”
“What’s his name?”
“Who? What?”
“Your psychiatrist, in the hospital.”
“Scarborough, I think. A Brit.”
“Wait a minute, I don’t understand, what exactly happened?”
“The medication, he prescribed too much medication, or the wrong medication, or a combination of—”
“Who? Who prescribed too much medication?”
“Alfonzo, who do you think? And then I started taking the Nozinan…”
“He put you on Nozinan? But why?”
“He said he needed to plug up holes in my defenses…”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know anything right now; all I know is I took what he told me to take until I went psychotic and now I’m in the psychiatric ward and, Peter, can you come and see me? Please? Can you? Please?”
For weeks I visited Shane at night next to a dumpster in the parking lot outside the back door of the psychiatric ward. We smoked. Janitors came and went. I said that I’d do what I could to help. And as he talked about how Alfonzo was a wacko and that he did not need his help to reclaim his true, heterosexual identity, because he would do it alone after the hospital, I thought about how much I wanted to kiss him.
|||||||||||
Within the week, Yuen shared news of her own.
“I want to live on my own,” Yuen announced to Sebastian, Clay, and me in the kitchen one night as we were preparing dinner. “Maybe go back to school.”
Sebastian and Clay exchanged a knowing glance. They’d heard it all before.
“And then what?” Sebastian said.
“What do you mean? Live.”
“Yuen…” Clay said, the hint of a smile sneaking in around his lips, the way he always looked right before ordering any one of us to the workroom for “acting out.”
“What about your therapy,” Sebastian continued, “or the Styx?”
“I am forty years old. Forty, and I have nothing to show for it. No house, no marriage, no husband, no formal education. No family.”
“You’re just acting out again,” Clay said.
“We’re your family,” Sebastian said.
“You are not my family.”
We all stopping chopping and looked at her.
“You’re a bunch of people I met in therapy after I left my husband. Now I want to leave.”
She started to leave the kitchen, but Sebastian grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute,” he said.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, swinging free.
“What’s going on here?” we heard Claude say, from behind, as he entered through the side door.
When we turned back, Yuen was pointing a chopping knife in our direction.
“Yuen, what are you doing?” Claude said.
“Yuen, we’re going to the workroom,” Sebastian ordered. “Now.”
Clay opened the basement door.
“I don’t want to work.”
“Stop acting out, Yuen,” Clay said.
“If she doesn’t want to work…” I said.
“Now, Yuen,” Sebastian repeated.
“I think you’d better,” Claude said, guiding her gently toward the door.
Yuen dropped the knife on the counter, and then all five of us, like schoolchildren filing in from recess, marched down to the workroom.
Word of Yuen’s “break” must have reached Alfonzo, because Yvette called a house meeting at the office the next day.
“Yuen was right in one regard,” Alfonzo told us the moment we sat in a circle on the floor. “You all need to deal with your anger upstairs in the house, not down in the workroom. Continuing to run downstairs every time you have a feeling is no longer feasible, or practical. Somewhere along the way, ‘working’ your feelings replaced your real life of feelings. All of you have a disconnect between the anger you express in the workroom and how you conduct your lives upstairs. Unless you correct your life patterns, now, by practicing more tough love on each other outside of the workroom, none of you will survive in the world out there. Frankly, I don’t want you living with me if you haven’t corrected your life patterns at the Styx. Yvette and I don’t go running to the workroom every time we have a lovers’ spat. We confront each other in the moment: every day, everywhere, no matter what. Either you learn it now, or you go back to the world and you figure it out on your own. End of story. Got it?”
We took his words to heart. In the safety of our dungeon, we had summoned our demons through the Ouija Boards of our bodies; now, in our upstairs living room, the kitchen, or our bedrooms, we had nowhere to project our near-constant state of primal rage but on to each other. Caged primates were what we became, as “fuck you, me first” supplanted the governing rules of the charter. No issue was now off limits, and all of our issues were now fair game, including my homosexuality.
In all my time at the Styx, in fact, the moment I ever mentioned anything about sex and
men in general, the others had always ordered me to the workroom. “Work the issue downstairs, or shut up about it,” they’d command. Usually, I would start down a path in my mind about the sexual abuse as a child, the fat man in the bathroom stall, but before long I was talking about all of my one-night stands over the years—in alleyways, bathhouses, parked cars, and toilet stalls— mounting desperation fueling my every word as I gleaned some sort of inadvertent pleasure out of mentally revisiting all the sex I’d had but did not think I should have enjoyed, until, finally, exhausted, I’d blurt out, “But I am not a homosexual.”
After all, if I was a homosexual then the fat man and I were the same.
Except we were not the same. I was not the same as my abuser.
My own contradictions left me in knots, and the others enraged.
“I don’t want to hear it anymore,” Sebastian interrupted one such frenzy, midstream, while I was in the Styx office. “I don’t want to hear any more about your neurosis, Peter. It’s bullshit.”
Clay and Yuen appeared from around the corner. “You are not the same as your neurosis,” Clay said. “Getting fucked up the ass when you were a kid: you act out whatever crap was from your parents, but that was not you. We don’t want to hear it anymore.”
“You are not a faggot, Peter,” Yuen added, the others joining her seconds later. “You are not a homosexual,” they all repeated, each time louder than the last, and every time like I was the red “X” marked on a wall and they were letting me, their projections, have it. “You are not a homosexual.” It seemed the same words used by them meant something else entirely—my negation, perhaps—and not at all what I had meant when I had said them. The incongruity of it all left me spinning.
“Fuck you all!” I pushed past them, ran up to my room and slammed the door.
Seconds later, I heard them pounding up the stairs. Then the door swung open.
“This is my room,” I said, backing in a corner. “Get out…”
“It’s not your room,” Sebastian said for all three, blocking my exit. “It’s our room, too. This is our house.”
The Inheritance of Shame Page 18