Where is this coming from? Why am I not pushing him away? What should I do? What could I do? Why is my body responding? I must want this. I must like this. This must be who I am. I have to get out of here. But what will he do? What will he say? What will I do? Who will believe me? How do I explain why I was with him? How do I explain all of the meetings I’ve had with him for months? Who can I speak to who will understand? How do I make this go away? Why am I responding? Why is my body responding? Why can’t I stop responding? Why can’t I say anything? Why can’t I stop him? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
It all happened in utter silence. There was a radio on, no doubt to muffle sounds, but I could no longer hear a thing. All I could hear was the blood pumping through my temples, pounding in my ears, the sensation of being removed from the world around me and locked in my own space. At least, that’s how I remember it. Or maybe that memory came from the hundreds, if not thousands, of nightmares I’ve had ever since. What I know with absolute certainty is that I couldn’t hear a thing.
He rubbed my legs. He fondled me. He masturbated me. He exposed himself. He rubbed himself on my face and inserted his penis in my mouth. He returned his focus to my feet. He masturbated and ejaculated over my feet and shins.
I did nothing. Well, I guess that’s not completely true, as I did respond in a small way, with a kick, but it was, at most, a halfhearted one, more a straightening of a leg than anything else, something you do when you’re pretending to wake up with a jolt rather than hit somebody deliberately. Whatever you’d call what I did, it certainly did not prevent him from accomplishing whatever goals he had set out to achieve.
He groaned. He turned away, turned his back to me, and walked away, leaving me by myself for several minutes. And when it was over, once he had finished with my body—well, how could I make sense of what had just happened? How could I explain that I didn’t attack him, that I didn’t lash out and stand up to him and stop him right then and there? And today, how can I reconcile what I wish I had done back then to avoid this, to stop it, with what I didn’t do then?
I covered myself back up as quickly as I could. But I didn’t run. I didn’t know what to do. I sat there until he came back in. And then we talked. Rather, he talked, I listened. He talked for a long time. He calmed me. He comforted me.
“You’re progressing so well. You have so much talent, your legs are so strong, you have limitless potential. You know, people like us have to support each other. We’re not like others. They would never understand who we are. They don’t see things the way we do. I know you’re a bit lost right now, but I understand you. I see who you are and what you can be. People like us have to look out for each other. We have to support each other. But people like us, working together, can make anything happen.”
That expression again: “people like us.”
Graham had just shown me he was different. Now, with those words, he was telling me. Maybe he had been telling me all along and I just hadn’t understood. I thought “people like us” had referred to the talented jock as geek, geek as jock. Now, with what had just happened, I was pretty sure he was telling me that I was gay.
And then he confirmed it: “If our secret ever gets out, everyone will think you’re gay. Nobody will want you on their team or in their program. It would be the end of everything for you because nobody wants to deal with people like us.”
I don’t know if he meant it as a threat. I mean, of course he did. But back then I saw it as something he feared would happen to me if “the secret” ever got out, something he didn’t want to happen to me because it would cause me pain and suffering and he was there to look out for me.
The things a goalie doesn’t see when he’s screened.
I should have run away from him forever. I didn’t. I could have stopped him right there. I didn’t. If I had stopped him, nothing would ever have happened to Sheldon, to Todd, to Theo, to all of his other victims who came after me. Except that I didn’t. I didn’t stop him from anything, and that is my shame. I’m not ashamed of what happened to me. My shame is that I didn’t stop him and that others after me had to suffer as a result. Their suffering is all my fault. I could have prevented it all.
Instead of running, I felt sorry for him. Oh, I was full of rage and fear, but at the same time he had somehow made himself come across as a victim in all of this, presenting his homosexuality as something that caused him pain. He showed a vulnerability and needed support. I felt sorry for him. I actually felt sorry for him.
I walked home, a zombie detached from the world around me. I cried like I’d never cried before in my life. It was a long walk, a route I usually jogged at a leisurely pace, but I couldn’t breathe properly. It was very cool outside, that I remember, but that’s about all. I couldn’t feel anything. I was off in my own world, far removed from this one. Lights were blurry, and once again I couldn’t really hear anything. Was I in shock? Probably. I cried in solitude during my walk home. There is so much that I don’t remember, that I don’t want to remember, that I have actively tried to forget over all of these years. But there is also so much I will never, ever be able to forget.
When I got home it must have been late, but there were several lights still on.
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
It was the normal reply of a normal teenager. I, the supposed golden child, had never had a curfew. I had my own room in the basement all by myself, and I could pretty much come and go as I pleased, often without anybody even noticing that I was away. With that one word I went down the stairs, taking the twelve quick steps down to the low-ceilinged basement I had to duck to enter, and stumbled into my dark bedroom with the one small window up at ground level, the room that flooded whenever it rained.
Alone in my own home, I had no one to turn to, and I certainly wasn’t about to start talking to anybody about what had just happened anyway. I was supposed to be perfect, and what had just happened was not perfect. I had no perspective that night, no ability to take a step back and process what had happened, what was happening. I was caught up in the middle of something I did not understand, something so horrible that it was beyond anything I could remotely consider. Who do you turn to when the only person you have to turn to is the person who has just done something horrific to you?
His words haunted me: “People like us have to stick together.” I thought I knew him, that I had understood him. I hadn’t. Who was he?
More importantly, who was I?
That’s a question we all ponder at some point in an attempt to find the meaning of life. But that night it was just something that kept echoing in my head as I lay in bed unable to sleep, quietly crying through the night until the darkness was broken by the early morning light straining to make its way through our back windows and downstairs into my room, the only place where I would ever again feel safe.
Even though Graham’s homosexuality was something I couldn’t really understand, it didn’t scare me. The way he had constructed things, positioning himself as a lonely and misunderstood victim, made me sympathetic toward him. In fact, it made me think he was even better than the rest. He, a lonely man, an outcast in society (remember, this was nearly four decades ago), was still engaged in the most manly of Canadian sports and at a level where he was seen as more progressive, more intelligent, simply superior to others. I liked his story and its appeal of an underdog triumphing against all odds over the know-nothing Neanderthals. His story got to me at both an emotional and an intellectual level.
The reality, of course, was that he was no underdog. He was just a sociopath, a serial sexual offender. He was the powerful one. I was his victim and the true underdog. But I couldn’t see that, for he had groomed me to see the world his way.
Graham had been very clever. After physically assaulting me, he didn’t come out and tell me he was gay. He simply referred to “people like us,” leaving it to me to connect the dots (a disgusting metaphor given what he had just done to, or rather on, me). He left m
e to process what had happened and reach my own conclusions. He hadn’t presented me with something I could reject out of hand. Rather, he positioned his own desire for a sexual relationship as an inevitable conclusion for me to reach myself, for me to conclude that I wanted what he wanted.
His implications that I too was gay, that people like us needed to stick together and support one another, that we needed to keep our secret, and that I needed to come back to him for his support all fit into the narrative that he had constructed from the information I had given him over the past months. Graham had slowly made his world my world, and my world was now being further defined by him as he wanted me to see it. In this construct, his physical actions toward me made perfect sense. He was bringing me out of my shell and showing me my true self. He was liberating me.
To me, Graham’s interest and support were the actions of someone who cared about me. They were actions that respected who I was and what I needed to do to become the best me that I could be. The furthest thing from my mind was that I was being groomed by a sexual predator so that he could abuse me. No, to me he was the one delivering to me all that I needed, all that I wanted, all that I deserved. The physical actions were just a new dynamic in my development of who I was and what I would become. In this light, he was helping me be me. I believed that he and only he knew anything about me and who I really was. I believed that he cared about me.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself when I was crying the hardest.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was gay. I had thought I knew who I was. I mean, I had an ability to understand who I was through outside feedback about school and hockey, but my sexuality had never been on my radar except in respect to the normal issues all teenagers deal with. Graham was now introducing something dramatically unexpected.
I had previously always thought, never doubted, that I was heterosexual, and had never for a moment thought otherwise. I had never fantasized about anything other than girls and women and, while I was quite shy, I was very interested in girls. So it was confusing for me to find my body responding to him physically. I try to make it easier on myself now by noting that the average teenage male can have an erection simply because a breath of wind hits the right place. This protects me from facing a difficult reality that I continue to grapple with to this day, notwithstanding all of the therapy and the greater insight I now have into how the body operates. Whatever he was doing to me, I was responding to it physically.
Although I had always thought that I was heterosexual, evidence to the contrary was piling up. The result was a great deal of confusion and a huge impact on my personal development and self-image.
The easiest part of assessing the impact of sexual abuse is considering the actual physical actions themselves. Still, words like massaging, touching, fondling, groping, masturbating, oral sex, and ejaculating don’t come close to describing the horror of what was going on. And all victims, whatever they have experienced, live with that horror of the physical actions. There is no erasing the memories, and until they invent a pill that allows you to control your own dreams and nightmares, I will never know from night to night whether I will or won’t revisit those horrors in my sleep.
It is harder to deal with the lingering uncertainty and confusion created by the disconnect between who you once thought you were and who you now see yourself being. A single incident of abuse by Graham left me with deep questions about myself, questions I answered in ways that left me less than whole.
Who am I? I must not be who I thought I was.
Why did my body respond to his advances and actions? I must have liked it.
Why didn’t I stop it? I must have wanted it and I deserve what I’m feeling now.
But there would be more than just a single incident. Much more.
I was, on the outside, still succeeding at everything. But sexually confused, isolated from my parents, and without close friends at school or a support network within my own hockey team, on the inside I was now alone with a secret, which, if revealed, he had told me, would shatter all of my dreams.
But was I gay? I didn’t have any girlfriends during high school. Oh, I had crushes on girls and I had dates with girls, but I had little free time outside of my extracurricular activities for dating. As much as I thought that I was heterosexual, I couldn’t honestly and unequivocally confirm to myself that I wasn’t gay, especially now that I had had this physical response to a man. There was no Internet to consult about sexual abuse. There was nobody I could speak with, nobody to counsel me. My physical responses to him were all I had to form a judgment against myself.
And I still had him, his interest and his support. In poker parlance, he was now all in with me. All in.
Me? Who was I? I had no idea. I thought I did, but not anymore.
Me, that teenaged kid, lost, all by himself?
I, as I had known myself, had ceased to exist.
I was now nobody at all.
FOUR
TRAPPED
I WENT BACK TO him—and hated myself for it. Part of me knew I should run away from him, but the rest of me knew I needed to go back and stay with him because my dreams depended on him. I couldn’t run away, because I was locked inside a reality established and controlled by him. I had no ability to step back and rationally assess the situation.
Why couldn’t I run? Why couldn’t I just end it? The one truly at risk if our secret ever came out wasn’t me but Graham. He was the adult, he was the teacher, he was the hockey coach, he had everything to lose. It should have been easy for me to tell somebody what had happened, right? It should have been a no-brainer to go to my parents, to a teacher, to my coaches, to anybody, and let somebody know what Graham had done, right?
Wrong. Wrong not because it is wrong, but wrong because I couldn’t even conceive of a world where Graham was at risk for anything, where reality was never anything but what he was telling me it was. I just couldn’t. I saw him as having the power and me as having none, because that’s the way it was.
I was alone, I was stuck, and I could see no way out. And so several weeks later, after he contacted me again, I went back to him.
I walked to meet him in a trance, numb, constantly asking myself whether or not I should keep going. I walked with my head down, looking only at my white athletic shoes with red striping (the brand of shoes is lost in the ether of memories long gone, though for some reason the red against aged white remains clear). I didn’t want to see anything or be seen by anybody. I fell into myself, a hulking young man slowly, inevitably retreating as much as possible into nothingness. I barely noticed where I was or what I was doing. I was almost run over by a car, unaware that it was barreling toward me until its horn briefly startled me out of my self-interrogation. I kept asking myself the same questions, over and over again:
Whose feet are these?
Why can’t I control where I go and what I do?
I promised myself that I would ask him to explain what was going on and what he had meant by everything he had said the last time. I convinced myself that I had to see him again so we could talk things through together so he could see that he was doing something that he liked but that I didn’t. I told myself that he would see things from my perspective, that he would understand that if he wanted me to succeed, it could never happen again.
By the time I met him, the easily won debating points I had secured when facing only myself in my own head fell away in his presence. So did any resolve I had been able to arm myself with. But it didn’t seem to matter. He acted as if nothing had happened, and for a few brief moments I was able to make myself believe that maybe what had happened before was an aberration, something that would never happen again.
But I was wrong.
He started by breaking me down mentally. I was too afraid to stand up to him. He said that I needed his help to succeed and that I would risk losing everything if anybody found out what he was doing for me. Just like that I was back to being a puppy dog, an athletic giant, but
ultimately nothing more than a toy he was playing with.
This time he was less tentative, more confident, and more aggressive. This time I was less surprised but more terrified of him because of what he was doing, more terrified of myself for simply being there in the first place. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I felt total and complete shame for being there, for letting it happen to me.
You stupid, stupid boy. You’re pathetic. You knew this was going to happen. You knew it all along. Big talker, all the things you were going to say to him. What, he’s got some magical control over your mouth? You can’t even speak now? You must like this, you must want this. How awful are you that you would go through this just because he wants this? How weak are you? This is you. This is who you are. He knows it. Now you know it too. He’s the only one who understands you. He knows you better than everybody else. He knows the truth. Stop pretending you’re anything else.
Afterward he was, as before, calming, seemingly understanding, even nurturing in positioning himself not just as a hockey mentor but also as a life mentor who understood who I really was. I hadn’t done anything I had planned to do. I hadn’t stood up to him. I hadn’t asked him to explain. I hadn’t tried to get him to see that this wasn’t what I wanted. No, in his presence I believed everything that he said about me. I couldn’t wait to leave, yet as I was leaving, I also knew I would come back. I knew that he had me. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to get away from him, even though getting away was as simple as walking through the door and never coming back. I just knew.
I have zero memory of taking the bus and walking home that night. I have zero memory of anything that followed other than that I cried so hard into the afghan blanket that covered my waterbed in my basement bedroom that I didn’t notice until the next morning that I had heaved so heavily that part of it was covered in vomit. Fortunately, Renaissance Man that I was, I was able to do my own laundry as the washer and dryer were in the basement next to my bedroom, and nobody in the house was any the wiser.
I Am Nobody Page 6