This essay is intended for adult audiences only! Contains sexual imagery and adult themes. It describes the sexual abuse of a child.
Commentary on the following essay:
The article which follows describes a particularly disturbing recollection from the author’s childhood. It has taken half a century for these words to be written, they are true and honest words, recalling the horrible abuse of an eleven year old boy, the author as a child. They are not offered as an excuse for why a life as been lived as it has, or why the author failed to accomplish in his life what he had hoped. Nor is it a condemnation of a religion or its ministers, nor a request for damages, or even a desire to set things right. The abuse of a child by a pedophile is a terrible thing. Our society condemns the crime and the criminal, yet there is little comfort in such actions as may be brought by dedicated and often horrified public servants.
Each life is a mosaic of all the events experienced, but it is not linear, not sequential by hour, day, month or year. Connections are made when we are children which persist through out the span of our years, threads which, seen or unseen, tug us one way or another. Some threads pull us up, tug us toward understanding and acknowledgement, they enlighten us. A coach, a teacher, our mother or father, a preacher or friend; we live better lives because we feel their influence lifting our spirits or strengthening our resolve. We go forward through time seeking a better self, believing we are good and worthy of reward.
Other threads are anchors which hold us in a darker place, pull us toward the shoals, strip us of hope. Some of us are irreparably damaged, those children have hope dimmed and then extinguished. Others, like the author, cling to the warmth, the vague feeling of being loved, wanted, needed, understood by some powerful yet unknown force, repressed by fear and disgust, unseen yet always present.
Pedophiles seem to be clever people, they know the right bait with which to catch the child, be it a candy bar, a puppy dog or filling an emptiness that the child expresses in confidence to a counselor, a minister, a family friend.
Some act alone, driven by their demons, and snatch and grab and rape and take the life of the child, they make newspaper headlines, their victims are the subject of alerts and are the top story of the evening news. We are fascinated by the horror of the act, terrified by swiftness of the act, confounded by the meaninglessness, and saddened by the inevitable outcome.
Others, the vast and silent majority of pedophiles, seek not only sexual gratification, but most perversely, they seek a union with the child, the malevolent control of another’s life, the molding of the child’s character to the end’s, to the needs of their own corrupt psyche.
These men and women need adulation and respect for the very acts they commit, they need a sense of normalcy; they need to influence the child not only to give sexual gratification, but even more, to give their acquiescence and affection, to give them love.
This desire for acknowledgement, acceptance of perversity is no different than in those cretins who sexually and physically abuse their wives and girl friends, and in many ways the emotional needs of the victims are similar.
Pedophilia apparently is a common human condition, an anachronistic, vestigial trait that we now see occurring more often, or have finally begun to notice more often, as media and the internet make available source material: pictures, videos and stories of little boys and little girls subjected to this perversion. It can not be long before the psychologists will determine that some percent of the population is born with the condition, and that so called non-violent acts of perversion should be decriminalized.
After all we read of boy love in ancient Sparta, of intercourse with little girls at Roman bacchanalia, of the marriages of prepubescent girls to elders in Asian and African cultures. We objectify our own children in child beauty pageants, our culture encourages immodesty, sexual precociousness, the near worship of fashion and film portraying innocence taken or worse, willingly surrendered.
The minds of children are blank tablets, but not of paper that can easily be erased, but of clay, and what is written into those minds remains for a lifetime. We must strive to keep our children safe, not just from the obvious dangers that maim and kill, but from the many silent assassins that destroy innocence and hope, that deeply mark the clay tablets that for our recollections and that even if forgotten, even if deeply repressed, shape our children’s destiny.
The Small Room
It seems an odd thing, to be haunted by dreams, to be tugged to and fro by shadows, to question the facts of life as they are known by yourself. A man in full, entering his seventh decade, should be sure of himself. His history should be recorded in full view of truth; no secrets of self should be hidden. This is a story about a rediscovered memory, or series of now remembered events, that are the riptide beneath the surface currents of a lost life. Lost? Lost to demons hidden by waves of repression. “Life is a Beach” they say in Florida, a place of golden years and diluted memories. The waves that hide the sands of memory can as well, in a perfect storm, erode them.
For decades I have known little peace, which wasn’t disturbing because I learned to live atop the shifting sands. From a precocious boy, to pubescent “lad,” to adolescent lover, the shifting sands of memory masked my fearful need. Need of what? Need ignored, need forgotten, youthful corruption, repressed horror, expressed affection; unanswered questions all leading to that illicit image of a mature mad man.
Am I in an asylum? Am I certifiably crazy? Neither. Am I the man I might have become? Have I done the things that I was meant to do, that by mind and temperament I was capable of doing? Have I any knowledge of inner peace. No, no, no, and no.
I am a southern man, a keeper of tradition; by our culture taught to be a gentleman. Read of honor, duty, obligation, bred to be like the paragon, to emulate our pinnacle of true virtue, our beloved R E Lee. I grew up on the banks of Peachtree Creek, whose swirling waters still revealed the hidden minnie balls, whose receding banks yielded the brass of the fallen. I was born into a society within memory of a epochal conflict, where the children of Confederate veterans still spoke the living memories of valiant yet defeated men. Our unique culture spoke of a war lost to exhaustion, not of zeal or spirit, but of materials; and of a time and way life of life gone with the wind. My mother was southern by birth, but progressive by marriage to a man of the West, she was a convert to an ancient roman religion. I was raised on rite and ritual, which always seemed unnecessary to me. I was born in mind and heart a protestant: I would read my mother’s family Bible, it was the King James Version, it was the Word in prose and poetry. It was written in the voice of my maternal ancestors and it was elegant. The roman Bible lacked any pretense of elegance, it was written as a reference source, a handbook for theologians, translated by French monks into English. It was seldom used, excerpted only for sermons, treated in parochial schools as neglected literature; it had not the weight of the Baltimore Catechism, nor roused any curiosity of the faithful, whose sins were so easily forgiven by a penance of praying three Hail Mary’s. I always imagined those devout Catholic mobsters of the Northeast had to say at least a decade of the rosary for each life they ended.
I began this story talking of dreams, of shadows, of repression and I will return to those hidden memories, but first, I must share a humiliation. I must tell of an often recalled shame, never forgotten, never repressed. Picture a young boy eleven years old, kneeling on a black and white subway tiled floor before a white ceramic toilet bowl. He kneels before it naked. His pale white back faces you, his buttocks are streaked with narrow red whelps. If you could hear him, you would hear his sobbing, the catching breath, the heaving moans, the deep and sharply drawn spasms called hick-ups. Before him, the toilet lid is lifted, and his arms lay over the bowl lip, his are hands plunged into the cold water; he is scrubbing a white garment, it is stained. Holding a bar of ivory soap, he scrubs to clean the stain, to clean the brown defecation’s streaks from the under wear’s crouch. The tile is cold, the water is cold, the room is cold. The bathroom is doubled-doored, it is shared between two bedrooms, to his back faces his bedroom door, ahead to the right the second door opens into another bedroom, one which by happenstance, is occupied by guests, one of whom is his favorite cousin, dear Cousin. Little boys, pubescent little boys are often aroused by the cold, and by the actions of their hands. As the boy plunges the stained briefs into water, lathers them to clean the stain, the cold water splashes onto his hairless bare belly and trickles down from his belly button, and a recent distant memory seizes his hands and he rubs the soapy soiled ivory bar on his private flesh, erect from the cold room and cold water, tugging, stroking along as if he had been taught, and at the moment when his pupils were rolling up and his slim sinewy limbs were taunt and convulsing, when his breath was frozen in his lungs, at that moment, his nude cousin pushed open the guest room door, a green towel draped like a cape over her shoulders, coming to bathe before bed. She froze mid-step, her arms flew out extended, flinging up the towel, her little girl’s body opened to his inspection, revealing what he had never seen, the female body in full.
He saw not only what was not there but in her face what her eyes were locked on, her almond brown eyes wide as saucers on her face, the white corneas pie pan size, the dark pupils fixed as in death at the convulsions she saw. Her face flushed pale, them turned crimson. He watched her breasts harden, the tiny penny sized dark buttons of flesh stiffen and pop out of her pink chest like arrow heads shot toward him. His little boy eyes recorded her image, his brain drew a topo map of her body, a indelible record, and as his eyes fell he saw the crease between her thighs where their was nothing, nothing to hold and tug and stoke. Nothing with which to pee , just a slightly widening crack that seemed to part as she stared at his erection, at his hand full of his little hard jutting stem, and at the soapy crinkled sack beneath it. The white lather and milky discharge coated his peppermint red stem and he suddenly let go of it; his eyes followed her eyes, and then their eyes met. Suddenly, just at that moment, she pulled her towel down around and in front of her shoulders, and she pirouetted around yanking the door shut! He fell back into the bowl, and began to furiously scrub the stains until his briefs were spotless. He would latter remember how her exposed butt had a different shape than a man’s, how it looked full and round and so much softer. Neither he nor his cousin ever spoke of what occurred, but the mind is its own master, and he would relive the humiliation and arousal of the moment ever more.
To his parents, it seemed the young man would not control his bowels, that these frequent stains were a regression to his earlier years of potty training, a means of seeking attention or punishing them for some unknown perceived inequity or rule. Over the year they lasted, they even sought medical help for the child, concerned that the rectal fecal stains, the occasional blood stains were a sign of illness. A doctor of internal medicine found no disease, a proctologist found a few polyps that might have bleed but noted nothing now. Resigned to the embarrassment, the parents sent the child to a psychiatrist. The child sat in a an overstuffed leather chair, and spoke of Marcus Aurelius and Camus and Kierkegaard and of sputnik and the stars, and of his hatred of the roman way, but nothing came of it. The psychiatrist said, “He’s just very bright and very sensitive.”
Sixth grade was a very bad year. Everywhere he looked, he saw the budding nipples of the girls beneath their starched uniform blouses. He smelled their earthy, warm wet sweat and the odor of their first periods. He was enraged by their diffidence, and their cruelty. Other boys began to grow muscles, and some even facial hair, but not him. School became work, and he looked elsewhere for pleasure. He served as an altar boy, and grew fond of drinking the Christian Brother’s wine, and the languor and bleariness it brought him. He was often sent to the mother principal’s office, and slapped hard for an outrageous comment he made about the church or God, or country. He read Mein Kampf, and read of National Socialism. He thought he had a vocation to be a priest and thought to ask the priest who had befriended him about it, but the subject never came up.
He began having strange unusual thoughts. He found a nursing text book of his mother’s, a text book of Gynecological Nursing, 1934, and with interest began to read it. The first half of the book dealt with obstetrics, and he read with wonder of the act of birth and the care and attention that pregnant women required. At the beginning of the next section, a very accurate drawing of the female genitalia drew his eyes to its very center. Their, exposed, was what was hidden in the crease between his cousin’s thighs. Terms like labia, clitoris and vagina leapt from the page, and he flipped back and forth between the drawing and the pictures of mothers delivering their babies. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he felt a distending erection, painful and bulging. Having just read of how babies are conceived, he realized that his penis was aroused by looking at the drawn shape of the female genitalia, the shape stimulates the response. This knowledge was more exciting than what he felt. Sitting at the desk in parent’s library, he removed his clothing, and taking large white sheets of paper, he began to draw these shapes, and as he did he became more aroused, and soon he found is hands on his penis, and quickly all the tension of his life escaped from him, and he fell back in the chair, the semen sticky and sweet in his hands. He now felt a strong connection to earlier unknown acts of relief. Laying his left leg over the arm of the chair, he wrapped his right arm around and under him, and his fingers tugged at taunt rim of his anus, and then one finger slipped in, rubbing the tight knot of muscles around the inside of the orifice, then another finger, and then another, rhythmically plunging, twisting in and out, in and out. His left hand slid over the small head of his penis, and rubbed and turned, flesh against flesh. His state of consciousness altered, his eyes dreamily rolled around the reddening sockets.
He felt warmth, he smelled cigarette smoke and tasted wine. With him, in the room, dream shapes emerged, and he felt kisses on his neck and cheek and lips, he felt a tongue where his left hand was, then the alternating warmth and coolness of lips moving up and down his penis. His right hand pressed all his fingers into the willing opening anus and buried itself, turning left and right, rotating around the stretching muscle wall. He felt the warmth of a body next to his, the tickle of hair on his face, his jaws and teeth being racked apart by hot hard bony meat. Gagging, gagging, the inflamed inserted object rolled his head over and to the side, and he shook with surges of tidal waves that filled his throat with hot salty sea water. Then it was over. His left hand was filling his throat with his own fingers oozing with semen, his tongue was licking his own palm. His right hand, streaked with brown and blood, pulled sharply from his anus, and the twelve old lay exhausted on the brown leather armchair.
He hesitated, as if waiting for another kiss, for a sign of love and warmth. His head spun around looking for…for what, for whom? He saw, he knew he was alone.
Swaggering up, he smelled his hands, saw the drawings, felt warm and slimy between his butt cheeks. He grabbed the drawings, he gathered up his clothes, and crept to the library door. He listened, heard nothing, cracked the door, saw no one, and bolted across the hall to his room. Locking himself in the bathroom, he washed his body even as it still shook with quaking rhythms. Were there such things, he queried himself, such things as demons?
That Sunday, as he pulled his red cassock over his head in preparation for mass, he noticed a door to the right of the sacristy, next to the chancel door. The oak door seemed familiar, but was locked. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? After Sunday High Mass, he normally loaded his Raleigh 10 speed bicycle into the the trunk of his father’s sedan and rode home with his family. This Sunday he asked his dad if he could stay, help the janitors, enjoy the exercise. When all the Missals were put in place, and the track cards all straightened, after the janitors had said goodbye, he walked past the flickering light of the ceborium, and went through the Epistle door into the sacristy.
In a vestment drawer he found a chain of keys, tried several in the oak door, unlocked it, and followed the steps down with sure certainty. The cathedral basement had been a girl’s high school, it was divided into class rooms, many of which were accessed from the narthex stairs but none of which were here under the sacristy. Here were storage rooms, and the physical plant, the boiler and and its piping, a maze of rooms and nooks. There was even a door to the tunnel built between the church basement and the rectory. It was said that it, and a companion tunnel to the convent, were built to allow the Catholic clergy to escape the Klan.
Though frightened, he was not hesitant to follow his feet; they seemed to know a familiar way. Toward the back, around a bend, on the left was a small room, tight against the street side below grade concrete foundation wall. It was locked, but his fingers found the key to it on the chain, and he unlocked it and opened the door.
The small room smelled of cigarettes, but otherwise was spotless. A porcelain wash basin hung from a wall, two armchairs faced a couch, candles lined a shelf, a black shiny silk caftan was draped over the couch’s end. In a cupboard were several cases of sacramental wine, and several silver cups. He began to shake, to feel hot, to feel confused, to feel aroused, to feel…. He slammed the door shut, locked it, turned and felt nothing at all.
That afternoon, at home, he told his parents that he no longer wished to be an altar boy. Being one, he said, took up too much time.