Steve, late sixties
Author’s note: I have tried to stay faithful to the flow of conversation with Steve, and, as a result, some passages may be unclear.
What I think changes all the time. It goes to different thoughts.
Different. My life has been different. Because of how dumb my mother and father were. And how dumb the doctors were in my generation. They couldn’t connect the dots on what was wrong with me. The doctor was cold. The way he talked to me scared me.
I was shy as a kid. I lived with my family of six in a small house, and I would cry all the time when I wasn’t picked up. Until my brother hit me in the head with a baseball bat when I was five years old. And that’s when things went sideways. I started worrying that people were looking at me through the windows of our house.…
In school, nobody wanted to play with me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. It’s because I had these glasses. All the other kids were wearing plastic glasses. My doctor had this one pair of glasses and he stuck them on me. They had a metal rim. They were different, and so they made me feel different. My glasses were silver and black. They made me feel ugly. They made me have low self-worth. And so I was depressed.
My brother—I have a younger brother—we went to summer camp together. I was twelve, maybe. And my brother wouldn’t talk to me. My mother told me that I would have to look after him, but I left him, and he never forgave me. I saw him three weeks ago for the first time in twenty-two years. Three weeks ago, our father died. We were at his funeral. He was ninety-five.
Our mother is eighty-nine. She always put our father down at dinnertime because he had dyslexia. My mother is on the Facebook. She’s an artist. She is really into her art but not so much into her kids. She’s the type of woman who glorifies other women. My brother took fifteen years to get through school; he got a PhD. He was married, but he divorced her because she gained weight and she got too big. He was at the funeral with his new girlfriend. He has become a playboy, and his ex-wife still loves him. He’s a creep. Unique, over-the-top kind of guy.
I could never talk to girls when I was in school. Couldn’t trust them. I never had a girlfriend until I was thirty-three. I thought to myself, Oh, I guess she likes me.
I had a hard time as a baby. It was a cesarean birth. They used the forceps to pull me out. It crushed my head a little bit.
Suicide is constantly a threat to me. When my uncle is gone, I don’t know how I’ll pay the bills. Maybe I could find another old guy that I could live with and I would make his life better because I have lots of room to care for other people. I work a little bit here and there, but it’s hard to run a business. I painted my truck all different colors. People don’t like different.
I took LSD when I was in college. I tried college for one year. We smoked pot and drank. I went into stores and thought I was going to die. LSD made me feel normal the first time I took it. But afterward, it messed me up worse. I was 115 pounds. I couldn’t eat. The doctors were crazy! So now I’m addicted to the medication. I can’t get off it.
Where I live now, I live with my uncle because he needs someone to take care of him. He’s old. They don’t like different here. Back when I lived in Arizona, they went after me because rumor started that I was more expensive than everyone else. Everyone chimed in, and that’s what I became.… But here, nobody knows that I’m a decent person. No matter what I do, I am wrong. They inflict pain on people who don’t fit. It’s one of these small towns that stick together even when they’re wrong.
I went into Walmart one day, and all the ladies who work there were lined up behind the cash register and they were looking at me, they were staring at me. At one time, I thought that everyone was staring at me. I was looking at them for approval.
It is a crime of society that I never got treatment until I was thirty-four. I don’t look at faces and eyes anymore; I glance over their heads. “There’s that guy that stares at everyone,” they say. There’s dead silence, and everyone is staring at me. They spread the rumor at Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe’s. They want to hurt me so that I can’t approach women. Because I’m from the wrong side of the tracks. Black ladies think I’m pretty cool, and I like them all right, too.
I run my own business. I am a handyman, and I charge very reasonable prices. I’m good with my hands. I have my own truck.
People lie to me constantly. I was attacked twenty years ago. I have a fear of being attacked again. I am also afraid of people in groups. And I’m afraid people in groups will attack me.
My medication hurts me sometimes. I have never had an orgasm. My girlfriend is 275 pounds.
They put me on Nardil. It’s one of the first antidepressants. It came out in the sixties. When I tried to get off it, I got suicidal. It consumed my thoughts. I wanted to get off the medication for a long time. It made it so that I can’t communicate with people. I was in a group for anxiety. If you looked at people in the eye, they would feel bothered.
I am very lonely. I want to talk to people, but they don’t like me. They watch me when I’m not paying attention. I have a genetic predisposition to anxiety, but my brother says that I am delusional. He tried to tell me at the funeral that I need help, but I am okay. I am perfectly fine. I’m different, and people don’t like different. I didn’t get any help until I was thirty-four, and even then the doctors just wanted to put me on drugs. I want to feel good about me, I don’t want drugs.
I can’t work now because people say I charge unfair prices, so my business went under. My uncle gets some money from his pension, and we live together. When I was going to buy materials for work, people at the stores were whispering behind my back. It was dead silent except for their whispers. And they were saying, “There’s that guy that overcharges.”
“There’s that guy with the truck.”
“There’s that guy who is always staring at people.”
I try to set people at ease that I’m a good guy. I look just above their faces, and I smile at them.
My father was an Eagle Scout. He was very difficult to communicate with, and my brother is impossible to communicate with. I hate my mother. I think I was molested as an infant. But she doesn’t care. She cares about her art, and that’s it. People are not good. This world is not good. I used to think that the world was an okay place, but that happened until I was in grade school. So the world is definitely not good, and people cannot be trusted.
I try to be helpful even though I can’t work. I don’t like living off people. My brother doesn’t like me living with my uncle because he thinks I’ll inherit everything and my brother won’t get anything. I help my uncle take his medication, and I keep him company. I change his sheets, and I help him wash up when he needs it. And I go out and do the shopping for us. I don’t like to do it, but I do. My uncle understands me. He’s not like my parents, who moved into a retirement community and only care about themselves. He cares about me. I will be sad when he dies, but maybe I can find another old person.…
I don’t want to talk about it. I like talking to people but not about what happened. I think it happened when I was a newborn.
I try to find people to be friends with, but it’s difficult to control my emotions.
I can look back now, and it doesn’t hurt in the same way. I am glad I never actually tried to kill myself.
I keep trying. I always looked at my life as climbing a mountain, where I slipped and fell down the mountain. I tried to get over an agoraphobic existence for thirty years. You feel sick when you eat, go anywhere, or do anything. I got over that at fifty-eight and then was further humiliated by bigots in their small world. They were taunting me with “He stares at everyone.” The people here showed how small people can be with their small-town attitudes that made no sense to anyone outside this area. All this was to show others how powerful they were while I can only feel sorry for all of them.
I tried to wash windows to make money, but after ten years someone started a rumor I was a rip-off with my prices.
&nb
sp; That was another mountain I had to climb after winning my inner battle at fifty-eight with agoraphobia. I had to be strong enough to stand up to the idiots giving me dirty looks and talking to other people when I was in a store about how I was this person no one liked. I got back up and started climbing again. Things have settled down after the first years of this dilemma. I now wish to meet other people, and I may have to relocate to do this. Another mountain to climb, because I know I could fail again.
It only takes me to make a few mistakes and things start to unwind pretty quickly.
It’s a man’s world; the male is the one looked at as the evil one, and the woman is usually looked at with much more empathy by both sexes. I do know that in society, men are more the evil ones to other men and women. In my case, to hang any negative slant on my existence has been easy for others to do even if it isn’t true.
I lived with an uncle at the time, and to celebrate my anxiety getting better, we started to go to a local restaurant where I felt happy to look around the room at different women, married or single. I noticed that they didn’t like that too much because they started talking among themselves about me.
I told my uncle I don’t think we should go there anymore. He said he had to have the salmon dinner each week, so I said okay reluctantly.
The last time we went there, there were three people waiting for us at the car. My ninety-year-old uncle got so nervous that as soon as he got in the car, he said he never wanted to go back there again. I told him it was a little too late for him to understand this.
Yes, it is sad.
FAMILY
Lee, early fifties
I was a scrawny kid with thin, little matchstick legs that stuck out of my shorts. My mother combed my hair carefully every morning before school. She always smelled sweet—like fully bloomed roses in the peak of their beauty—and I cherished the few seconds before the bus rounded the corner when she would touch my shoulder and hand me my lunch box. She never touched me or showed much affection otherwise, so those few moments of closeness shocked my body, and I felt in high spirits all day.
I was eleven when it started, just before my father died. My cousin Joe came over every day that summer, and we would spend hours running around and causing trouble. When the sun started to hover over the horizon and I could see the heat rising from the asphalt in ripples, I knew that any minute, my mother would call us in for dinner. The anticipation of the end of the day made my chest swell with a mix of sadness that it was over and excitement that we’d get to do it all over again the next day.
These are the only days that I felt truly, simply happy. I was sticky and tired, my knees were scraped up and bloody, and my clothes torn in more places than my mother could patch up. But that summer serves as my only reminder that I was once a child, and that things weren’t always so hard, so complicated.
On that particular night, Joe and I took turns showering while my mom and uncle, my mother’s brother, set the table. I was voracious, and my eating was punctuated only by spontaneous giggles. My cousin would shoot me mischievous looks over his plate of pasta, and we both reveled in the memories of the day’s adventures.
When it was time to sleep, I let my full stomach weigh me down onto the clean linens of my childhood bed. I felt just the right amount of tired, and my body relaxed into the thin mattress as I relished the way that the sheets covered my legs with their cucumber coolness. If I remember these moments, these sensations, so clearly, it’s because I’ve spent many a sleepless night wishing that I could freeze time here.
I was slowly drifting to sleep when my uncle pushed open the creaky bedroom door.
He sat by Joe’s bed and started whispering in his ear. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I strained to make out the words. I hated being left out of conversations, and the tone of my uncle’s voice made me feel like I was the only one not in on the secret. But the more my eyes tried to peripherally pick up on what was happening, the more I felt a sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach. The situation felt predatory, like I’d just walked in on a lion stalking his kill and, if I made myself known, I’d somehow put a target on my own back. I gave up trying to hear after a while, allowing the rhythmic sandpapery sound of my uncle’s hand as it rubbed Joe’s chest lull me into a shallow calm. I hovered there for maybe ten minutes.
Suddenly, I sensed movement, and I cracked my eyes open just slightly to assess the source. My uncle walked across the room slowly and sat on the edge of my bed. I kept my eyes shut, and tried to steady my breathing, but I felt inexplicably panicked. I knew immediately that I was in danger. Even though my experience with sex was limited to the summer before, when I’d summoned up the courage to look at the lingerie section of the Sears catalog, I just knew that something bad or shameful was going to happen, or maybe had already happened.
For no reason that I could understand then, I started crying, quietly at first. My uncle tried to comfort me, telling me that he wasn’t doing anything wrong or bad, that it was natural, that it would be our secret. He mentioned nothing specific, but I knew what he was referring to—maybe a part of me had always felt that it was weird that he’d come into our room and sat on Joe’s bed for so long.
My sobs got louder, and my uncle got up and stood watchfully over us for a moment’s time. Then he did something that I just didn’t understand: he picked Joe up and he put him on my bed but over my sheets, our bodies overlapping slightly on the twin mattress. Then he swiftly walked out of the room. I finally looked at Joe, who was motionless and seemed to have stopped breathing altogether. His expression was one of fixed terror, and even his tears seemed to be petrified on his sad little face.
As if roused from a daze, he carefully peeled himself off my bed and robotically, limb by limb, scooted under my sheets. We held hands the whole night. I could hear my cousin crying well into midnight, but my own confusion kept me awake and struggling to understand what had happened, what it meant. I know now that my uncle was planting a seed for the future. He was grooming me.
After my father died, my uncle started coming over every week, or he’d invite me over to his house under the pretext of being a “father figure.” Joe would come up to me and say, “My dad wants to see us.” My uncle would usually start out by talking to us about sports or whatever else, and then eventually Joe would leave and I’d be there by myself. He usually gave me oral sex. He’d try to get me to do things, too, but I’d just freeze up my body so that he couldn’t move me. It didn’t happen very often, actually—probably only five or six times in the span of two years. I don’t remember why it stopped. It just did.
Needless to say, as an adult I have a very unhealthy relationship with sex. I am addicted to pornography, and I have cheated on my wife about a dozen times throughout our marriage—a couple of women over an extended period of time. My wife found some porn on my computer. This was long before the days when you could just go on a website and clear your history; I had downloaded all the stuff I was watching. So she started asking questions, and I just came out with all of it, told her everything. I wanted affirmation from her—but I think she thought I was just using my past as an excuse for my current behavior. There was also rumor, and I found this out long after I’d married her, that her father, who was a gymnastics coach, had abused his students. So maybe she just wanted no part of it.
I found no understanding in her, no healing for my wounds. We have three daughters—the eldest is twenty-one. Once we decided to divorce, my wife made me sit down and tell the children about the affairs and the pornography. And about the abuse. So they all know. They weren’t supposed to, and I didn’t agree to tell them. My wife, however, needed to be vindicated. She needed to feel that leaving me was the right thing, and that I was a cheater who had broken our marriage.
Telling my daughters was the wrong thing to do, and it felt dehumanizing. I’ve always thought that as a parent, I had to have it all together, or at least seem like I did; I had to be the adult they trusted with their probl
ems. But the looks on their faces betrayed that something was lost between us. It was a cross between disgust and bewilderment. My wife led the narrative, so, of course, the focus was on the cheating and the porn addiction, and the childhood trauma was an afterthought. At the end, I could tell that they saw me differently, I could just tell. I don’t think it would have mattered to me if their reaction had been one of sympathy, although I did hope that what happened to me as a child would soften their judgment. But it’s not their end of the equation that mattered so much as mine. My perception of myself as a father just didn’t survive this revelation.
I had lost touch with Joe after we graduated from high school. I spent a lot of time wondering what had happened to him. And then, four years ago, I found out that he had filed a civil suit against my uncle for the sexual abuse. He reached out to me to get me involved, and I was really unsure about it. I was going through so much with my own family, and the last thing I wanted to do was make things worse. But it did bring about an opportunity to talk to my mom about what had happened, to finally tell her about what her brother had done.
I thought she would be surprised. I thought that maybe she might cry, even though she was never a crier. I thought she would be angry and ask questions. I thought that she would blame herself, and I imagined myself saying, “No, there was no way you could have known.” I thought she might want to know how long it went on for, to which I would say, “Only a few times.” I thought that she would try to reach her brother, to threaten him with death and serious bodily injury. I thought that she might even touch my shoulder like she used to, as we waited for the bus together. I thought she might hug me and apologize for not being more suspicious, more watchful, more careful.
Craigslist Confessional Page 19