The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  In 1969, I was three years old. My father had very dark hair back then, and he always seemed to be in the other room. He was not around very much, and I didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t like me or if he was just busy. When I saw him, it was mostly when he was sick with what I was told was epilepsy. My mother told me that I would stand on a chair and pat his head and say, “Poor Daddy, you’re so sick.” When he was not having seizures, he seemed angry. Still, I loved him, and I wanted him to love me.

  My mother wanted to teach my brother to read when he was about four: He was fourteen months older than I was. I don’t know how she went about it, but her methods didn’t work and she gave up. I wanted her to teach me to read, but she absolutely refused because she didn’t want my brother to feel bad. I didn’t think he would care. So, I taught myself to read when I was three, and my mother regarded this as a sign that I was stubborn and disobedient. She never let me forget it. She resented me for it and seemed to believe that in learning how to read, I had somehow injured my brother.

  My father was working in Manhattan and they had to cross the Verrazano Bridge to get to his workplace. My father didn’t drive very much, so Mother drove him. Once he took us to work with him for a little while. At his work, there was a smiling man and a lot of carpet and counters like one might see in a jewelry store that had coins in them. Best of all, there were candies that were neither gum nor just candy but halfway between. I liked the candies a lot.

  My mother held meetings for the SCA at our house back then, and she roasted something called a “suckling pig” which she said like “sucking pig” for dinner on Twelfth Night, or January 6. It smelled good. Everyone wore costumes, which back then already seemed fairly normal. It was nice to have so much food on the table, and it was fun. The light was warm, and people were smiling and happy. I smelled a hot spicy drink that was probably mead or mulled wine. There was a chair I liked which had dark woven straw on the back.

  Even though my mother was very busy and happy when people were around, when there were no visitors it was a different story. My mother was often angry and frustrated, and it seemed I never got finished finding ways to upset her. She felt everything was my fault. Even her private frustration with my father’s distance and disinterest was my fault. I just knew he wasn’t around a lot and they certainly didn’t kiss. They fought, but my mother would only say that Daddy was sick.

  Walter was obviously miserable, moody to the point of frequent tears, overtly suicidal, and he talked about his life and his feelings as though he was caught in the middle of a grand tragedy. When I was little, I couldn’t identify it as mental illness, but I was aware something was very wrong. He blamed my mother for his misery, which my brother and I understood. He felt completely powerless to rescue either himself or us from her evil clutches, and this also meant that although I could come to him and cry on his shoulders about the horrible stuff she did and said to me, he could never actually stop her from doing a thing. He was the tallest victim in a house of very small victims.

  Their relationship was a mass of contradictions. They loved each other, but they often fought noisily. Marion would cry, drink excessively, scream insults at my father—calling him “Oathbreaker” in particular—and threaten suicide. Walter would yell and storm and threaten suicide. He seemed to feel that she was a monster who had imprisoned us all. I was afraid of her—much more than I was ever afraid of him with his epilepsy and screaming. I never thought he wanted to hurt me.

  Sometimes her anger and frustration showed up in awful ways. It was as though there was three of her: Mommy 1, Mommy 2, and Mommy 3. Mommy 1 was friendly, Mommy 2 cried a lot and wanted something that didn’t make any sense to me, and Mommy 3 was utterly vicious. The only way to deal with Mommy 3 was to hide and hope she didn’t find you. I remember closets. I remember the conflicting feelings of hiding inside them.

  Darkness. Relief at being out of her way. Fear of what would happen when the light came back on.

  What I remember, more than almost anything else, was her constant talk about how sexually frustrated she was. I have always been aware that in her universe, her frustration was my fault. She thought that she didn’t look the same after I came along and that was my fault, that my daddy didn’t love her anymore and that was my fault, and that meant she was really agitated about something that didn’t make sense to me.

  This all finally came to a head when she was giving me a bath. I don’t want to think about what she wanted me to do to her. Or the hot water, which got too hot when she got mad. Or her hands around my neck. Or the water, which went around the top of my head in a circle that got smaller, finally disappearing. I can still feel it. All I knew is what I had to do if I wanted to stay out of the water.

  There are smells I absolutely hate to this day. I still smell them in my dreams and in my waking nightmares.

  All I could think about was the smell. The horrid folds of flesh with stuff growing in them, and the sitting on you, the crushing, the flesh, the smell, the burning water, the water in my face, me pleading and her stuff in my mouth. I hated the taste. Bitter and sour at the same time, and nasty white stuff. Dark red pinky little bits of flesh. Trying to get away. Scared beyond scared. No way to escape. I am a toy to her. She doesn’t get enough sex. I have to give it to her. I can’t breathe. I hate the smell. I hate the taste. And all the time is her, she’s so sexy, she’s so sexy, she’s so beautiful. Sexy and beautiful like a slug, like a sea cucumber, like a crushed snail. I hate her and her greasy brown hair, her huge fat belly, and her too-warm flesh crushing my face. I hate her thighs, her legs, the smell of that powder on her thighs. I hate her for making me do that to her.

  A mother is supposed to be a comforting person who bakes cookies for you and comforts you when you are hurt, not a terrifying, screaming monster.

  I imagine this is difficult to read. Writing about this is almost impossible.

  Chapter 11: My Father Begins My Education: Sex, Pot, and Kindergarten (1970–1971)

  “Incest is Nicest spelled sideways.”

  —Walter Breen

  In 1970 I was four years old. My brother had just started school at Public School 5. I was still too little to go, and I was jealous because I was stuck at home all day. Mostly what I did at home was read books like Frederick Phleger’s You Will Live Under the Sea. I was so enthralled by the idea of scuba diving to an underwater house that I would make masks and paper flippers and oxygen tanks out of red and green construction paper. I also read all the Dr. Seuss I could get my hands on and anything else I could find.

  We had a Siamese cat named Solange. I was terrified of big dogs, so Mother got me a German Shepherd puppy, and we named her Gretel. She told me a story about her being stolen because she was purebred, and then she escaped before being hit by a car on her way back home. From an adult perspective, I have no idea how my mother came up with a story like that. Why not just tell me she got loose and was hit by a car? I cannot say for certain because I have no way of knowing, but it does not seem likely that anyone would come to Staten Island to steal the kind of dog which would be owned by people of our means. She was obviously not bought from a breeder.

  Our family added another dog, named Griff, short for Griffin. He was half Lab and half Newfoundland, huge and strong. He used to take me for walks. It was impossible for me to control him, and in retrospect I don’t understand why she sent me out alone with him. Walking down our snow-covered rocky street by myself did not worry me. It was no problem, as far as I was concerned. Being dragged around by our huge dog was more frightening to me.

  Once when it was snowing, I had gone down the street to visit a little girl who lived there. I was wearing a little snow jacket, and my friend and I had fun. When I got home, my mother was furious: She said she had been looking all over for me. Somehow, walking the dog alone was not a cause for concern, but going to visit a friend alone was. I still remember her standing on the porch screaming at me.

  My mother wrote all the time:
books she called “pot boilers”: anything she could write for money, even if they ended up being used as kindling. I did not know what she was writing, of course. I only knew that she was writing and that we were not to disturb her; God help us if we interrupted her while she was writing!

  I know from my father’s autobiography that he was writing for Sybil Leek’s Astrology Journal and was the editor from 1970–1971. He did professional horoscopes for people and wrote liner notes for Parnassus Records. He took any paid writing assignment he could find: his version of writing pot boilers. I remember that there were astrology magazines all over our house: silver-grey and dark blue covers, with astrological charts like my father was so fond of making.

  My mother took me to get my picture taken one day, and it was a very strange and awful experience. Because I was always cold, I wore tights day and night, and on picture day my mother was intent that I would wear not only a dress but little ankle socks that folded down with frilly underpants. Cold, thought I. Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold!

  I lost that battle. It took both Mother and Father to hold me down by main force and rip me out of my tights. It might be imagined that I already had plenty of reasons to be frightened of being even slightly undressed, aside from the cold. Mother took me, dressed up like a very miserable little doll, down a long, cold sidewalk with the wind making my legs cold. On the way to the photographer, a little old lady stopped us and asked me, “Are you a nice little girl?” I responded, apparently rather dryly, “No, I’m a live banana.”

  Marion repeated that story many times, claiming, in her words, that I was “a master of irony” before I was six years old. Naturally, Mother was not concerned about WHY I would not want to be undressed. She was completely oblivious to the fact that being out of my tights prompted a fear reaction much like a severe phobia or a panic attack. Yet to me, I had been ripped once more out of my only security. The only thing I cared about when I got back home was getting back into my white tights, my only layer of protection from them. My safety was now partially ruined because the pair of them could rip me out of my tights whenever they chose.

  My brother made friends at school and began to bring them around, notably two brothers named Kenny and John. Kenny was six like my brother, and John was twelve. My parents let me go to their house with my brother, and that was fun. They had a screeching pet monkey, which was strange. I had never seen a monkey that close before, and I hoped it would never get out of its cage. I was afraid of it. The upstairs, where the monkey lived, was dimly lit, cramped, and crowded. My father was glad to have Kenny and John around, and he had them come over to our house whenever he could.

  One day, John did something painful to me that I did not understand. My father understood, though. In later years he would gleefully recount to me, with an awful look in his eyes and almost cartoonishly villainous hand-rubbing delight, how John kept trying to have sex with me, or, as he put it to my disgust, “get into me.”

  Walter talked and talked about sex all the time, using heaps of anatomically correct language which I will not repeat here. I felt so ashamed when my father would talk about my private parts as though they belonged to him. His words made me feel embarrassed and afraid, almost as if he’d smeared his icky words all over me. I knew I was not supposed to hate his anatomically correct language and I was not supposed to feel embarrassed by it; I was supposed to love it, to enjoy what John did to me, and to want to experience it again and again. That way, I would not be “hung up” about sex, which was what my father seemed to care about more than anything.

  I could never understand why my father was so happy about what John had done to me. He thought it was something wonderful, as though now I would be okay with experiencing more of the same, and I would stop being such a prude.

  I hate that word so much.

  A “prude” is anyone who runs away when they see Daddy getting that look in his eyes. “Prude” means I don’t want to have sex. “Prude” means I don’t want to have sex with my father. But I didn’t . I could not see what was wrong with wanting my father to love me like a daughter and not like that?

  Walter was a big fan of all sex, and I mean all sex. He simply could not see sex as damaging, frightening, or harmful to anyone of any age, and he thought that fear of sex, or prudishness, was a problem to overcome instead of a reaction to potential danger. He seemed to believe that one episode of sex would lead to more and more sex, that everyone’s willingness to have sex would increase, and soon everyone would be having sex with everyone—his Grand Vision for the world. He believed that the more sex everyone, had the better the world would be, no matter what pain it caused.

  The next year, my father tried a new solution to solve my prudishness: drugs. Walter loved pot and smoked it constantly. He did not love all drugs, only hallucinogens like LSD, MDMA, or ADAM, and psilocybin mushrooms. Strangely enough, he despised alcohol and coffee, and mocked them as “America’s popular diuretics.” Marion loved alcohol and LSD but hated pot, and was as judgmental about people smoking pot as he was about drinking alcohol. This meant that Walter had to be careful about what she saw him doing.

  Walter was eager to introduce my brother and me to pot-smoking, but he did not want my mother to know about it. So one day, he sent my brother and me down the rocky, snow-covered street to stay with two of their friends: Don and Donna. I believe he told Marion that they could babysit us. Back then, “babysit” meant more than one thing, although I doubt that Marion knew that he meant the other kind of babysitting, where we would be supervised through a drug experience.

  Don and Donna were a young married couple. They were nice, friendly, very kind, and they gave us something good to eat. I think it was chocolate hash brownies that were not too chocolaty. They also got my brother and me stoned by blowing smoke in our faces. This made me cough, but I only cried a little. Afterward I curled up on a heap of pink, fluffy fiberglass insulation and fell asleep.

  After this indoctrination into drug use, Walter smoked pot around me whenever he had a chance, invariably when my mother was writing or asleep. He thought it would be good for me to get a contact high even if he couldn’t get me to toke the joints. My brother was willing to smoke pot whenever my father wanted him to, but I hated it. It made me sleepy, which I think was what my father intended. Mostly it made me cough.

  I was always asthmatic, and I had to sleep on two pillows because lying flat on my back made it hard for me to breathe. Anything that interfered with my breathing was very frightening to me. I was afraid I would die. And no, there was no medical care available for my asthma. They would have me use my father’s Primatene Mist, an old-fashioned over-the-counter asthma inhaler, whenever my coughing got too bad. My father coughed all the time: your run-of-the-mill smoker’s cough, and he used Primatene Mist many times a day.

  I hated the dull, sleepy way that pot made me feel. Even then my nature was to prefer to be very sharp, very alert. Even when I was little, I was afraid that all kinds of bad things could happen if I didn’t watch out for them. I could not have articulated this then, but somehow I knew I needed to keep my eyes out for trouble.

  I do not know what drugs my father gave me other than pot back then. My brother Patrick believes he was given LSD repeatedly, and remembered this happening in a medical setting, as though my father’s Columbia University experiments from ten years before had continued. Patrick developed global synesthesia including visual hallucinations: more or less constant pineapples, fish and repetitive patterns floating across his visual field. His visual hallucinations have never stopped, although my brother is able to do artwork around them.

  Walter always told me that pot would lower my inhibitions, but when he talked like that, it made me want to run away from him. Of course, sometimes running away was not possible, as I learned on the day my father raped me.

  I do not know how Walter managed to catch me that day, whether he put something into my orange juice, or whether he just grabbed me when I was drawing or doing somethi
ng else.

  We were alone in the house. My brother was not at home and my mother had gone to a science-fiction convention. Walter was acting very strangely. He was not speaking in his usual detached, intellectual tone, but was yelling and grinning and rubbing his hands together. He was shouting that it was his birthday and that I was his birthday present. I had no idea why he was yelling, and the only birthday present I had ever heard about was when he used to read The Hobbit to us.

  I was scared, and more than scared, I was terrified, because he did not sound like himself.

  After he caught me, he took me into the bathroom. He held me up in his arms in front of him facing the mirror after getting my clothes off. He impaled me, holding me up so he could watch himself. I broke the towel bar trying to get away, but there was no getting away on the cold bathroom floor. It hurt a lot and there was blood. He was heavy and I hated him. I don’t remember a lot about the actual rape except that the bathroom floor was cold, and it hurt a lot, and there was blood. I believe that my screams were more than just upsetting to my father, they were extremely disappointing. I think he imagined that I would like what he was doing and he was angry to discover that I didn’t.

  It might surprise you to know that this was one of the very few times he raped me. Perhaps it was because I was a girl and he strongly preferred boys. Or perhaps he realized on some level that I would never be a suitable participant in his Grand Vision. He did not entirely give up, though. Instead, he went on trying to find ways to persuade me to be willing. The pressure to not be a “prude” never stopped, not the entire time I lived around him.

  But that day was one of his very rare lapses into brutality. He even said to me afterward, “Don’t talk or I’ll kill you.”