The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  When I began a deliberate inquiry into my past, starting in 1989, I thought of myself as a man walking around with shrapnel sealed in his flesh, and I wanted to get the fragments out. The doubts and images I had put aside for years were now starting to fester. I felt more or less continually seasick, confronting every day a harrowing absence within myself. I imagined it as a mine shaft of bleak, empty space, which neither the love of a spouse nor the companionship of friends nor professional success could efface. The thought began to work on me that a single, bold step, however, some sort of confrontation with the past, might sufficiently jar this frame of mind and change it. I could, I thought, dramatically cure myself in this way.

  I phoned Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. No, there was no Harry Shier buried in any of their cemeteries. I couldn’t find an obituary for him in any of the Southern California papers either. I called Evelyn and asked whether I could come to California and interview her. I would begin my healing, my ablution, by speaking with someone who had known him well. And on that same trip, I decided, I’d drive the rental car to 12003 Riverside Drive in North Hollywood. If the sanitarium was still there, I’d walk through the front door.

  Shier’s rooftop apartment, nearly hidden behind the branches of several Norfolk Island pines, remained just visible from the sidewalk. I parked in the shade of a pepper tree on Ben Street and walked through the main entrance of the white stucco building, which now housed a private secondary school, a yeshiva. No one took any notice of me standing in the foyer. If someone had come up to inquire about my business, I was prepared to say that I had been a patient in this place thirty years earlier, when it had been a hospital. But I seemed to be invisible.

  I walked down the main corridor. In rooms to my right, where I’d once seen the bedridden lying in dim shadow, lights now blazed. Attentive students sat at desks, avidly scribbling while someone lectured. I arrived at an intersection and suddenly found myself staring at the foot of an interior staircase. The door to the stairs, slightly ajar, revealed steps winding upward to the left. My throat clenched like a fist in my neck.

  I left the building as soon as I was able to turn around. I ran across Riverside Drive into an outdoor nursery with a fence around it. I went down a pea-gravel path, past potted camellias and oleanders, past blooming primroses and azaleas. After a few minutes, breathing easily once more, the rigidity gone out of my back muscles, I crossed back to where I’d parked the car and drove away.

  Later that afternoon, at the Central Library on West Fifth Street in downtown Los Angeles, I gathered several San Fernando Valley phone books from the 1950s, trying to remember the names of my mother’s friends, guessing at the spellings—Emery, Falotico, Ling, Murray—hoping to dislodge a memory, to find a thread to follow. When my right index finger came to Shier’s name, it halted there below the stark typeface. My bowels burst into my trousers.

  In the men’s room, I threw my undershorts into a waste bin and washed my pants in the sink, trying to keep the wet spot small. I was in my stocking feet, putting my pants back on, when a guard entered abruptly and stood alert and suspicious in the doorway. He informed me that the library was closing. I’ll be only another moment, I assured him.

  A few minutes later, shielding the wet seat of my pants with my briefcase, I met a friend for dinner nearby. When the maître d’ asked whether we preferred eating outdoors or in, I suggested we sit outside. I didn’t tell my friend where I’d been that day.

  Over the years, I’d spoken to very few people about Shier—my brother, serious girlfriends, my wife, a few close friends. I didn’t feel any need to be heard, and the chance of being misunderstood, of being taken for no more than the innocent victim, long ago, of a criminal’s heinous acts seemed great. Pity, I thought, would take things in the wrong direction for me. What I wanted to know now was, What happened to me?

  In the months following my visit to the building on Riverside, I placed an occasional call to state and county agencies in California, trying to track down some of the details that might have framed my story. Doing this, I came to suspect that I was missing the memory of certain events. I could recall many scenes from my childhood in the Valley, even remember some vividly; but I also became aware of gaps in that period of time from which nothing surfaced.

  In the fall of 1996, I visited a therapist for the first time. I’d briefly seen a psychiatrist when I was in college, but we were not able to get anywhere. Years later, I understood it was because I hadn’t been capable at the time of doing the required work. My expectation was that she would somehow simply fix me, get me over the anxiety, over the humiliation.

  I chose therapy because my own efforts to clarify my past seemed dramatically unproductive, and because I was now, once again, of a mind that something was wrong with me. I had begun to recognize patterns in my behavior. If I sensed, for example, that I was being manipulated by someone, or disrespected, I quickly became furious out of all proportion. And I’d freeze sometimes when faced with a serious threat instead of calmly moving toward some sort of resolution. I suspected that these habits—no great insight—were rooted in my childhood experience.

  Also, a persistent, anxiety-induced muscular tension across my shoulders had by now become so severe that I’d ruptured a cervical disc. When a regimen of steroids brought only limited relief, my doctor recommended surgery. After a second doctor said I had no option but surgery, I reluctantly agreed—until the surgical procedure was drawn up for me on a piece of paper: I’d be placed facedown and unconscious on an operating table, and a one-inch vertical slit would be opened in the nape of my neck. I said no, absolutely not. I’d live with the pain.

  From the beginning the therapist encouraged me to move at my own pace through the memories I was able to retrieve, and to resist the urge to fit any of these events into a pattern. I remember him saying in one of our first sessions, with regard to my apparent inability to protect myself in complex emotional situations such as my stepfather’s betrayal, that I did “not even understand the concept of self-protection.” I resented the statement. It made me feel stupid—but it also seemed like a start.

  We worked together for four years. I described for him the particulars of the abuse: the sandpaper burn of Shier’s evening stubble on my skin; his antic Chihuahua, which defecated on the floor of the apartment and raced around on the bed when we were in it; Shier’s tongue jammed into my mouth. I described the time he forced me to perform fellatio in my home while my mother and brother were away. Shier lay back on Mother’s sleeping couch, self-absorbed, palming my head like a melon, supremely at ease. I told the therapist about my inability to break off the relationship with Shier, and about my mother’s apparent intention to look the other way.

  At the start of therapy, I speculated that the real horror of those years would prove to be the actual acts of abuse—my choking on his semen, the towel forced over my face to silence me, the rectal bleeding. After a while I began to see that the horror was more elusive, that it included more than just betrayals and denials and being yanked around in Shier’s bed like a rag doll. The enduring horror was that I had learned to accommodate brutalization. This part of the experience remained with me long after I walked out of Shier’s apartment for the last time.

  Caught up in someone else’s psychosis, overmatched at every turn, I had concentrated on only one thing: survival. To survive I needed to placate. My response to emotional confrontation in the years following that time, I came to see, was almost always to acquiesce, or to overreact angrily, with no option in between. Therapy led me to comprehend that I had not, as I wanted to believe, been able to tough out the trauma. I had succumbed, and others besides me had experienced the consequences of my attempt to endure. I had ahead of me now a chance to do better, to be a person less given to anger.

  I visited the therapist twice a week to start with, occasionally for double sessions; then it was once a week or less frequently until we decided we’d come to a resting place. In our final sessions, I fitted the
pieces of my story together differently, creating “another narrative,” as therapists are wont to say, of the early years in California, a broader context for the physical and emotional damage. After that, long-term sexual abuse no longer organized the meaning of my life as it had during the years I believed that I’d simply walked away from it.

  One night in 1998, driving from the town where I had been seeing the therapist forty miles upriver to my home, I suddenly felt flooded with relief. The sensation was so strong I pulled over and got out of the truck. I walked to the edge of what I knew to be an unfenced, cultivated field. At first I thought I was experiencing physical relief, the breakdown of the last bit of tension in my upper back, which, after many weeks of physical therapy, no longer required surgery. But it was something else. A stony, overbearing presence I’d been fearful of nearly all my life wasn’t there anymore. I stood in the dark by the side of the road for a long while, savoring the reprieve, the sudden disappearance of this tyranny. I recalled a dream I’d had midway through my therapy. I burst through a heavy cellar door and surprised an ogre devouring the entrails of a gutted infant, alive but impassive in the grip of his hand. The ogre was enraged at being discovered. What seemed significant was that I had broken down the door. It didn’t matter whether it was the door into something or the door out.

  Therapy’s success for me was not so much my coming to understand that I had learned as a child to tolerate acts of abuse. It was discovering a greater capacity within myself to empathize with another person’s nightmare. Most of the unresolved fear and anger I once held on to has now metamorphosed into compassion, an understanding of the predicaments nearly everyone encounters, at some level, at some time, in their lives.

  A commonplace about trauma, one buried deep in the psyches of American men, is that it is noble to heal alone. What I’ve learned in recent years, however, is that this choice sometimes becomes a path to further isolation and trouble, especially for the family and friends of the one who has been wounded. I took exactly this path, intending to bother no one with my determined effort to recalibrate my life. It took a long while for me to understand that a crucial component of recovery from trauma is learning to comprehend and accept the embrace of someone who has no specific knowledge of what happened to you, who is disinterested.

  We need others to bring us back into the comity of human life. This appears to have been the final lesson for me—to appreciate someone’s embrace not as forgiveness or as an amicable judgment but as an acknowledgment that from time to time private life becomes brutally hard for every one of us, and that without one another, without some sort of community, the nightmare is prone to lurk, waiting for an opening.

  I’m not interested any longer in tracking down the details of Harry Shier’s death, or in wondering how, if it is still there, I might reenter his apartment above the building on Riverside Drive to gaze out at the sky through the corner window. I’m on the alert now, though, for an often innocuous moment, the one in which an adult man begins to show an unusual interest in the welfare of someone’s young son—especially if it’s my grandson. He still, at the age of nine, reaches out for my hand when we start to cross a dangerous street.

  CHRIS OFFUTT

  Someone Else

  FROM River Teeth

  BY THE TIME I was fourteen, my family was accustomed to my absences—wandering the woods, sleeping in town, eating at other people’s homes. What mattered to my parents were academic grades. I maintained all A’s, an easy task in Appalachia during the sixties and seventies. Of equal importance was granting utter obedience to Dad, and never causing my mother public embarrassment. With this veneer of civility thus attended to, I was free.

  I don’t remember how I met the fatman. I assume he approached me. He lived in town on the second floor of a small building, where he rented a single room with a bathroom in the hall. He was nice. He bought me candy bars and bottles of pop, which my parents never allowed me to have. I told him about my life and girls I liked. At four feet eleven inches, I was the shortest kid in high school, with the longest hair, reputed to be the smartest but lousy at sports. The fatman listened to me. He offered a kind of sympathy and attentiveness that I needed. He accepted that I wanted to be an actor or a comic book artist when I grew up, and he believed such aspirations weren’t ridiculous. He didn’t talk about himself but implied that he’d experienced life beyond the confines of Rowan County, and that I would like it out there when I finally left.

  I was vulnerable, I suppose, although not a dire misfit. I was open and friendly, having gone through eight years of grade school with the same small group of kids, then riding the bus ten miles to high school. One by one my classmates began losing the habit of attending school. It was not expected but certainly accepted, and of little concern. After all, we were from Haldeman, the community farthest from town, site of the main bootlegger, weekly drag strips, occasional shootings and arson. We were at the bottom of a pecking order that didn’t start very high. Bused into town, we became aware of our status. Some of us responded by staying at home, changing our style of dress, or becoming withdrawn. I explored town.

  The fatman’s room was small, with no chair, and we both had to sit on the bed. The whole time I pretended it was happening to someone else. Afterward, the fatman said he liked me. He gave me money. I left the room and walked to the drugstore, where my mother picked me up after shopping for groceries. I bought a lot of comic books at the drugstore. She didn’t ask where I got the money.

  I don’t remember his name or what he looked like. I don’t recall the print on the wallpaper or the color of the bedspread. What I do remember is the overhead light fixture, a plain bisected globe in a ceramic setting that emitted a dim yellowish light. Surrounding the globe and painted over many times were plaster rosettes with narrow leaves. I remember the light because I spent all my time staring at it and waiting until I could leave.

  When I returned, I climbed the steps very slowly, trying not to make any noise because I didn’t want to get the fatman in trouble. A clot of tension rose along my spine, vibrating like an embedded blade. I felt hollow—my heart pounding, sweat trickling down my sides, mouth dry, my stomach congealed to stone. The fatman opened the door and ushered me in. The bed sagged when he sat down. The money lay in sight on the bedside table. Time stopped as I slid away from my body to rove the air, imagining a life beyond the hills. I would be a movie actor. Beautiful women would throw themselves at me as I left French cafés. I was the mayor’s son, the governor’s nephew. I was secretly adopted. I inherited a Lexington horse farm. I was anyone but a lonely kid feeling the dampness of fat fingers.

  Just before I started being someone else, I decided my parents would be proud of my open-mindedness in such a small town. They considered themselves progressive. My mother wore miniskirts and my father had a tidy beard. They traveled often, leaving me in charge of my younger siblings for a few days at a time. They went to exotic locales for science-fiction conventions—Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Nashville, once even Florida. I thought that what I was doing with the fatman made me similar to my parents. They wrote porn. They had affairs. If they knew about the fatman, they would respect me, maybe even like me.

  The fatman took me to the movies. We stood in line but didn’t have to buy tickets. The fatman looked at the owner, put his hand on my shoulder, and nodded once. The owner looked at me without changing expression and let us in free. I felt important.

  The fatman bought a large buttered popcorn and gave it to me. I was not allowed to have popcorn at the movies because my father said it was too expensive. Occasionally Mom made popcorn at home, but she never put butter on it. I felt special eating buttered popcorn and watching The Godfather, which affected me in a very powerful way. I’d never seen a movie that long or that slow. The world was utterly foreign but I understood its insular nature, the power dynamics, the violence and loyalties. After the movie the fatman gave me a dime because I insisted on calling my father and telling him
that if anything ever happened to him, I would avenge his death. I was crying into the phone. My father said little.

  The fatman wanted me to touch him in his bed, but I refused. I explained that I liked girls, though I’d never been with one. I’d kissed three and touched one’s bra strap, but never got any further. The fatman offered me two hundred dollars to help him make a movie. They’d shoot the whole thing in a hotel room nearby, but I’d have to touch a man, maybe another boy about my age. I told him that I really wanted to be with a girl, and suggested we make that kind of movie instead. He said that if I made a movie with a man, he would provide me with a girl to be with afterward. I told him no. He told me to think about it, but I didn’t. Instead I looked at the light fixture and went away in my mind. I’d developed the ability to go rapidly, to vanish from the circumstances and enter a trancelike state in which I was a prince with a personal garrison at my command, a lavish kingdom to rule, and a harem of lovely women. I fell in love with a commoner and abandoned all my riches for her. We lived by the sea in Italy. Our eyes never left each other. We were together throughout the ages, each era presenting its version of our love. Abruptly I was back in the dim room. My legs were bare and cold, my body tense. The fatman was breathing hard. I took the money and left.

  The last time I went to the room, I encountered another boy on the steps. He was a year older than me, with long hair, new to school. I’d seen him before, outside the building, but we pretended like we didn’t see each other. This time he was crouching on the steps. He motioned me to be quiet. I joined him, moving silently. We were midway up the staircase. The bathroom was at the top of the stairs and the door was not fully closed. Through it we could see the fatman standing in the shower, his vast naked bulk exposed. He was vomiting and defecating simultaneously. It was a sickening sight, so repulsive that it was hard to stop staring. I realized the fatman was crying. Not just weeping but an uncontrollable sobbing that made his shoulders quake, his torso ripple. He leaned on the wall as if in surrender.