“Do you have to talk about that?”
“How would you like me to say the truth so it doesn’t off end you? You have some kind of weird idea about what it means to be a homosexual, and that’s crazy.” I turned to leave, turning back to him like I was caught in a turnstile. “No, you know what’s crazy? What’s fucking crazy? The fact that after all these years, after everything I’ve been through, that at the age of thirty-three I am still standing here, defending myself to you: my brother. That’s what’s crazy.”
His glazed eyes told me all I needed to know.
“Forget it,” I said, opening the door to leave.
“Aren’t we going to the movie?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “I’m tired.”
|||||||||||
In May 2001, I attended my parents’ forty-fifth wedding anniversary dinner at a high-end French restaurant. At the table was Pisti, who I’d not spoken to since our last visit, my middle sister, Barbara, and her husband, and my eldest brother, Frank, and his wife, Lisa. Kriska, despite being invited, was, as always for such events, a no-show.
After more than a few glasses of expensive red wine, I didn’t even mind so much that I had nothing whatsoever in common with anyone at the table. When I noticed everyone lost in their own private conversations, I leaned over to Lisa, sitting next to me.
“Have you ever considered the possibility that one of your boys might turn out gay?” I whispered, discreetly. I knew that I was taking a risk by asking the question, but considering Lisa had always prided herself on being “open minded,” I figured it was a risk worth taking.
“Oh yes,” she replied without hesitation, “of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about that just like I’ve thought about them becoming alcoholics or drug addicts. But I know they aren’t because they’ve never been sexually abused.”
I expected her to crack a smile.
“Every gay person I’ve ever met has been sexually abused as a child.”
Lisa had never made a secret of the fact that she herself had been sexually abused by her father, before her parents’ divorce when she was eight, but her own history did not seem to factor into her current argument about me.
“What about all the straight people who were sexually abused?” I asked. “What about all the gay people who weren’t abused?”
“Well were you abused?” she asked, turning to face me square on.
Lisa knew that I’d been abused because I’d told her, years earlier, before I’d moved away. My eyes scanned the table. My father was staring at me from across the table. “I don’t think that made me gay.”
“You don’t?” She sounded genuinely surprised.
The dinner was winding down, so our conversation came to an abrupt end. I left the restaurant angry, reminded of the frequency throughout my life with which the same belief system—ideologically insular, pointing to nothing in the real world that validated its flawed argument—had caused me years of depression and confusion, self-hatred, not to mention had walked me straight into the office of one Dr. Alfonzo.
Instead of walking home, I marched directly to the nearest gay dance club. Like a joint that needed popping back into its socket, I needed to be around my own kind, if only to undo the effects of my family.
I arrived close to midnight, bought a drink, and watched as the dry ice seemed to lift the shirtless, sweaty men off the dance floor like a cloud. Then I spotted him, recognized him instantly, standing across the floor, alone. Memories of another time and place assaulted me as they flooded back without warning. A couple of minutes later I walked over. He saw me standing next to him, glancing at him. His cocky expression told me that he thought I was cruising him. He didn’t remember me; then again, why would he? More than twenty years had elapsed since we’d last met.
“Your name’s Jonathan, isn’t it?” I asked, leaning into him.
“Yes,” he said, looking pleased, if a bit leery.
“My name’s Peter Gajdics,” I said, pronouncing my name like I did as a child—Gay-dicks. “Do you remember me?”
He turned and looked at me, closer, up and down, but did not respond.
“We went to high school together.”
For a moment I thought he’d acknowledge me. Then he turned his attention back to the half-clad men on the dance floor. Perhaps because he did remember me, he did not wish to acknowledge me. “Sorry,” he said, distantly.
“You used to call me ‘goots.’”
He didn’t look at me. Just saying that word, goots, reminded me of the way I was taunted daily, starting in elementary school: threatened and assaulted when Jonathan and his friends ran up from behind, pecking me like vultures, punching me in the ribs, slapping me across my face, the singe from their handprints like red hot irons to my flesh. Once, when we were in tenth-grade gym class, he and his friends pretended to like me and called me over to join their group. When I did, he threw an open bottle of liquid paper in my mouth; then he spat in my face and ran off with his friends, chanting, Faggot…faggot…faggot.
The disco beat of Donna Summer called me back to my surroundings.
“You don’t remember me?” I asked again.
“No,” he repeated, still not looking in my direction.
He was lying. I repeated my name again. “Gay-dicks.”
He would not look at me, but mumbled, “Sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Well I do,” I said, stepping around to face him so he’d be forced to look me in the eyes—two boxers squaring off in a ring. “I remember you well. You called me names like ‘fag’ and ‘queer’ throughout high school. You were an asshole to me.”
I waited for him to look at me, for his eyes to focus in on mine. When they did, I continued. “I saw you standing here, and I wanted to come over and tell you that I lived in fear for years because of you. I thought you should know how much pain you caused me.”
I held his gaze until he looked away. Then I turned and walked away, through a cloud of dry ice on the dance floor.
23
THE MOMENT DR. REIMER opened the door to his downtown hotel room, I thought of Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—stout, with snow-white hair, a full but nicely cropped beard and gleaming blue eyes that twinkled as he said, “Come in, come in.”
Our conversation began almost as soon as I took a seat next to him at a round table next to a small kitchenette. Then he clarified what I knew already. Dr. Reimer had been hired by Mackenzie to provide an expert medical opinion in my lawsuit against Alfonzo. Without a moment’s delay, with pen and paper in hand, he asked me to tell him about my life from the time I was a child to when I left therapy. I did, and without interruption, he listened. Without judgment, he asked for clarification. So supportive was he of my experiences that all three of our four-hour conversations, beginning September 21, 2001 and extending well into October, were the antithesis of all my years with Alfonzo.
When I reached the part about my collapse in the Styx, I asked Reimer what he thought had been its cause. The only explanation Alfonzo had ever provided was that I’d “expiated” my “parental introjects” to the point that my “mental image” of my “self had become dislodged”—one of Alfonzo’s many obfuscations roughly translated as: primal had hollowed me out. The medication, he’d always said, had never played any part.
“You most certainly suffered a breakdown of some sort brought on by medication toxicity,” Reimer said without hesitation.
“So, in your opinion…it was the medication, not necessarily the therapy, that caused my collapse.”
“I’m sure the therapy didn’t help. But you were taking well in excess of the recommended doses of extremely powerful psychotropics. Simply put, you overdosed. You’re a lucky man. It could have been far worse.”
“Worse, as in…”
“As in not surviving.”
|||||||||||
Several weeks after Reimer’s interviews concluded, I met with the defense’s psychiatrist, Dr. Benning
ton. The day of our first meeting, I sat alone and waited for him in his tiny office chock-full of gray metal filing cabinets, a brown laminate bookshelf, a coat stand, scattered papers, hardcover books, and a large oak desk that split the room in two—a dividing line separating doctor from patient. On his wall were several large framed certificates of medical studies. His business cards, displayed facing out on the desk, read: “General and Forensic Psychiatry.” I slipped one into my coat pocket as the doctor—a large, brooding man of sixty-plus years—entered the office, twenty minutes late.
Speaking in a refined English accent, he introduced himself as Dr. Bennington, and then repeated that I should also call him Dr. Bennington. I declined his offer of a Sprite or Coke before he settled in his reclining leather chair, facing me behind his desk. He breathed in a deep sigh, as if he were about to undertake the first step in what he knew would be a thousand-mile journey.
“Now,” he said, “before we get started, why don’t we set some ground rules. I am a psychiatrist, retained by defense to act as their expert medical opinion in your suit against—” He flipped through his opened file. “Against…Dr. Alfonzo. My job is to talk to you, to get to know you, to ask you a few questions about yourself. Do you understand me?”
I wanted to tell the good doctor that English was my first language—of course I understood him—and that while we were at it, I also did not have a mental illness, such as borderline personality disorder, which I was sure would be his eventual diagnoses.
“Yes, I understand,” I said instead.
“So. How are you feeling?”
“Well, it’s six years since I left the therapy. Things are better now than they were.”
Bennington began writing furiously, waving his freehand like a traffic controller, motioning for me to proceed.
“I suppose I’m dealing with the same issues that most people deal with: family, friends, relationships. Except that it’s like I’m waking up at the age of thirty-six and I’ve lost the last ten years of my life.”
“You mentioned relationships. Are you in a relationship?”
“No.”
“Dating?”
“I tried, I mean I have, but…”
“Yes?”
“I’m not seeing anyone right now. I’m single.”
For one hour, Bennington asked me about my “coming-out” process, my family’s attitudes toward my homosexuality, my reasons for moving away. When we finally returned to the therapy, I repeated Alfonzo’s comments that because I did not possess “any of the characteristics of a homosexual,” he thought I could be the first to make “the switch over.”
“Sometimes I feel guilty about suing Dr. Alfonzo,” I said, interrupting the flow of our conversation.
My comment seemed to have been the first interesting thing I’d said to Bennington. He stopped writing, removed his bifocals, and leaned forward in his chair, staring down at me like Gulliver to a Lilliputian. “Please, continue.”
“Dr. Alfonzo was like a father. I felt a great deal of loyalty toward him.”
“When did that change?”
“About a year after the therapy ended, in 1996. I hadn’t talked to my family or friends in years. I was living on my own. I’d go out and—I mean just four or five times—I’d buy a bottle of wine, go home, and drink it down in ten minutes and pass out on my bed. That’s how I dealt with the pain. I’d never drunk like that before.”
“What sort of pain?” He repositioned his glasses and resumed taking notes.
“Pardon?”
“You said you were in pain.”
“Well, I’d just spent six years of my life crying and screaming, drugged out of my mind, isolated from the world and twisting myself in knots to become something that I wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do with all of that. I was numb. Empty.”
“And you left the therapy in what year again? Nineteen ninety-six?”
I repeated that it was 1995, but wondered why he was asking me something that was surely in his file, and that I’d told him only moments earlier.
“Sorry, I should have asked you before: Is there a history of mental illness in your family?”
“What? No. Not that I’m aware of.”
“Alcoholism? Drug dependency?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” For a moment he continued writing, then looked up from his notes. “How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“Do you have a history of mental illness? Alcoholism?”
“No. To both.”
“Well that’s not true, now, is it?” His voice had taken a sudden, accusatory tone, like my seventh-grade teacher was suddenly reprimanding me. “Just a minute ago you told me how you used to buy bottles of wine and drink them down and then pass out on your bed.”
“What I said was that after I left the therapy I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling, so I bought some wine four or five times and drank till I passed out at home. I didn’t know how else to deal with the last six years of my life. That’s what I said. They were isolated incidents. I never drank like that before, and I haven’t since.”
He looked back to his file, appearing bored by my response. “It says here you cut yourself.” When he looked back up, I saw nothing in his eyes.
“I never cut myself.”
“You pierced your nipples with a safety pin. It’s all right here.”
This time it was an accusation. I blushed. Details from therapy, like confessions to a priest or, for that matter, admissions to a lawyer, were fair game.
“Do you still pierce your nipples?”
There was no “right” answer to the question: either I said “no” and he would write in his neatly summarized treaty that Alfonzo’s therapy had helped “cure” me of my pathology, or I said “yes” and my borderline personality disorder would be verified.
“No,” I said.
“Tell me about the sexual abuse. You were abused? A stranger, was it?”
I told him about the incident when I was six years old. He continued taking notes for a moment after I finished. “That’s it?” he said, looking up with a start.
“Pardon?”
“That’s the sexual abuse? That’s all that happened? Tell me,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, eyes narrowing, as if looking into a microscope, “do you remember if you were attracted to men prior to that incident, or if the attraction began only after it happened?”
“I was six years old.”
“Yes, but can you recall being attracted to men before it happened?”
“I was six years old. I don’t think I was attracted to anyone, man or woman, at six years old.”
“Did you ever tell Dr. Alfonzo that you wished to be heterosexual? That you wished to be straight?”
“I recall saying that I felt like a crippled heterosexual, yes.”
“Well,” he replied, tossing his pen on the desk, “if you walked in here and told me that you felt like a crippled heterosexual, I’d think that we’d just need to get rid of everything that’s in your way and then you would be heterosexual.”
“Or,” I flipped back, “you could think that I was homophobic and that we’d just need to get rid of my fear and hatred of homosexuals and then I’d be able to admit to myself that I really was gay.”
Another faint smile crossed his lips as he picked up his pen. He asked me to explain how Alfonzo attempted to treat my homosexuality as an illness and to make me heterosexual. When I mentioned “the shit thing”—my way of deflecting what I really would have rather never talked about again with anyone—he seemed genuinely surprised and asked for clarification, which I provided. For some reason, I expected a look of horror. Something. He did not acknowledge what I’d said, but once again changed the subject. “So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, expressionless, “I imagine it’ll be difficult to get the people you knew to testify against the doctor.”
“I don’t know. I guess if they’re subpoenaed they’ll have to.”
“They know about the case?”
“I called some of them a while back. Most were still in his therapy. I do have one witness, a woman I met in the therapy. She’s—” I stopped myself mid-sentence. “I don’t know that I should be talking to you about this.”
“That’s okay, I’m not taking notes. But let’s stop here. Do you need a break? Coffee?”
“No.”
“Mind if I get one?”
“No, no, of course not.”
“Why don’t we take ten minutes and then we’ll continue.”
“Fine.”
And, with that, he left the room.
I sat, alone, and waited. Street noises surfaced, honking cars, muffled conversations from down below his third-floor window. Outside his office door, I heard nothing. My own words from the first part of our interview flashed through my mind.
I feel guilty about suing Dr. Alfonzo…
Dr. Alfonzo was like a father…
I’d go out and buy a bottle of wine, go home and drink it down in ten minutes…
I felt like a crippled heterosexual…
A streak of panic washed over me. My face flushed. I had wanted to tell him the truth, to be as truthful as I could about everything, but maybe I’d been naive. Unwise. Foolish. I felt stupid, totally unprepared for what I’d stepped into.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said as he entered the room again, smiling.
I prepared myself for more questions, for something, an onslaught.
“Well…let’s see. Where were we…?” He sat down and glanced at his files. Flipped through a few pages. Then he closed the files and he looked back up at me. “I think I have what I need. Thank you for coming down.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
|||||||||||
Toward the end of November, Mackenzie called me down to his office. Defense had sent him taped recordings of my primals between 1993 and 1995, considered a “normal” part of disclosure of evidence between parties in all civil cases brought before the Court. He wanted to play me portions from several so that we could discuss them face-to-face.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 26