2

There’s the part where I’ve been doing Mom, behind R__’s back. I don’t know any better, at first. Mom is so angry when I won’t get all-the-way-hard for her. She is so pissed, for months and months pissed.
There’s the part where Mom faces her demon and decides she’s now the greatest mom ever, because she’s faced the demons. R__ is a loser going along with anything. Mom’s a b-tch like the grown up A___ and H___, but now she’s asked God’s forgiveness. She reads the Bible regularly. She goes to Tuesday night meetings where Social Services is doing recruiting for foster parents. Mom explains to me, A___, and H___ (who is a toddler) that one day we will be taking care of a kid each Sunday.
There’s the part where when they put me in the crib with my sisters I’d start humping in my sleep. So they never let me sleep near other babies or children. A social worker got suspicious of my silent terror and shock but Mom said I had been born twisted -- the doctor saying I had brain damage and would never learn to speak or walk. The social worker went along with this for awhile but then had me take an IQ test and had my parents put me in kindergarten.
There’s the part with Jonathan -- a different one than the one Mom was having an affair with before I was born. He and I had a sexual relationship that started when I was one year old. He was attractive, and after he had finished his own business he would gently suck me off. He bought R__’s blue mustang. I forgot everything when Trevor died, and Jonathan left me alone. He was regretful, in the end. He was nice to me, he disagreed with what R__ and Mom had done to me. He was R__’s friend from the Marines. He was blonde, young, muscular in a slim way, and good looking.
There’s the part where Trevor comes on Sundays. Sundays is when R___ has choir practice in the afternoons. Trevor and I play in the church balcony. I initiated it, I committed the crime, it felt like a crime at the time. In order to be the Alpha Male, you have to kill the other one. Even if it’s your best friend. And when you kill him, once you become the alpha male, your perception of him will change. It’s a Crime. Taking Power. Taking Him as your identity. But since Trevor was a true boy and I was true boy, the penetration didn’t make him not Him, and Trevor penetrating me didn’t make me not Him. We were little kids but didn’t know it. It was like we were young adults, consenting, who looked up sometimes at the knee of one of the giants walking by. Because of the sex I was an adult, aware, not seeing just the physical. It was like I was the me I am now -- Him -- and I lived amongst these giants. It wasn’t like I was a little kid. I had come of age and was simply a miniature Him. It’s inaccurate to remember the two little boy having sex, because it wasn’t like that. We didn’t know we were little boys. We were in the Soul place, we were Hims, the fact that that meant we were adults was simply assumed. We didn’t see each other physically, we saw each other as Hims -- no physical characteristics like diapers. He (Trevor) wasn’t like that until I initiated sex with him -- until I committed the crime of initiating it -- he liked it, because it was natural. I knew I could get away with it because I was Him, and because I knew I was Big, and Trevor knew. Once we played underneath a blanket at a babysitter‘s, wrestling, giggling, breathing hard, moving, thrusting.
There’s the part where we get caught once, at a babysitter’s house. We weren’t caught penetrating, but they were angry.
There’s the part where I have a girl playmate named El___. I initiate sex with her, not knowing any better. I kiss her nipples and neck. These sexual play dates happen a lot, and go on for a long time.
There’s the part where my chest would hurt from pounding with fear day after day, night after night. I would feel that wore-out chest pain regularly for years.
There’s the part where R__ caught me and Trevor.
There’s the part where on Sunday afternoons R___ is raping me in front of Trevor in the living room. R__ rapes me and I allow it so he won’t touch Trevor. R___ thought this made it even funnier, that’s why he always raped me with Trevor watching. Me and Trevor crying, looking at each other, crying, crying. Mom doesn’t know that R__ is raping me in front of Trevor now. She starts insisting he start taking A__ and H__ out on Sunday afternoon adventures sometimes, too, to make things even.
There’s the part where Trevor knows about cough syrup, he learned it from the home he was once at. He might have been older than me, not younger. We pretended both, including more violent penetrations. We pretended everything, every kind of sex we could create.
There’s the part where Trevor sees things differently. He thinks my choices are horrific. I was raped for years, and later R__ thought he was going to rape Trevor, but I wouldn’t let him. R___ told me he’d kill Trevor if I ever told. Telling is what I had threatened to R___, some way or nother, that’s how he gained control, that’s when Trevor got concerned, that’s when we started taking cough syrup. Him giving me the cough syrup. He knows it will make me high, it does. He gives me the syrup a few times, showing me how much. Trevor passes out. There’s screaming, but I’m not screaming, I’m silent and numb. He was right, the psyche can only take so much, but it was his death that did it, not the Abuse.
There’s the part where when Trevor died I couldn’t make sense of it: the impossibility of it. I couldn’t make sense of my horrible crime. My horrible crime. I wasn’t Him, Trevor loved me by mistake, I was a fraud, I couldn’t keep him alive, I wasn’t Him enough.
There’s the part where a hand would hold mine as I slept, then I’d realize someone was holding my hand and get scared, and the invisible hand would let mine go. Trevor didn’t die all the way.
There’s the part where I wet my diaper. I was in the Soul place, not a child but a sexual person surrounded by giants. Then I noticed I had on a diaper.
There’s the part of R__ raping me in the nights, in the bathroom just outside A___ and H___’s bedroom. Mom would stand in her bedroom door just a few feet farther I would yell and scream and cry. He was trying to destroy me. Mom and A__ and H__ silently agreed it had to be done. It went on through the fifth grade. It didn’t work.
There’s the part where I decide to kill myself but then decide to give myself till 25 years of age.
There’s the part where I remember the thievery I used to know, the third plane of living I had discovered. It evolved to the Lying, The Invisible Man days.
There’s the part where I succumbed to ignorance, I stopped fighting, and R__ lost interest in me. I wouldn’t even move my lips when he’d ram his member in my mouth. I’d give him nothing, not a word, not a breath, nothing. And he stopped. It was like a deal we made. I would pretend like none of it ever happened and R__ would stop raping me. He really hated me. He really really hated me. I was having sex with mom but that was such a long time ago. R__ was so pissed when he found out Mom was still sleeping with me way after they had stopped sleeping with me together. All this happens in a matter of years. He wants me to forget that I’m a penetrater, he wants me to only be a penetratee, he wants me to forget. He wants to teach me to forget by his penetrating me, but it isn’t working. He was so pissed it wouldn’t take, pissed that I had found another plane of existing that he couldn’t reach.
There’s the part where R___ decides he has stopped raping me because he’s decided I’m dead now. He doesn’t know I’ve been a soul a long time and can‘t die.
There’s the part where I’m numb. From maybe nine years of age until adulthood. It was like I was in a state of shock. Because he had been raping me in the bathroom until I got to Ms Att___’s fifth grade class.
There’s the part that I had to be Brave in a different way, brave enough to be numb so I wouldn’t go crazy or settle in some tragic, soul-dishonoring way; brave enough to pretend to forget and trust that I would be brave enough to remember before I turned twenty-five.
There’s the part where I am pulled out of school when I’m eleven. My parents claim they’re going to home school me but it’s not true. I am never returned to school.
There’s the part about the men around me back then .. It’s like they were glad there was one less rooster in the hen house. They never called the authorities, never showed the slightest concern that the situation was horrific. The didn’t know that I was lying, I was a rooster. If I ever showed signs of being a true rooster, Him, undercover, it would quick make them angry.
There’s the part where no one believes me. Police, social workers, church members, they all thought it was the most ridiculous idea they ever heard, my parents and sister loved it. They loved that there was nothing I could do about it. Whenever I tried to speak honestly about something I was harshly admonished by the cop, or the teacher, or the church member. I couldn’t get a word out.
There’s the part where really I am from the other side, not a human being like House, or Eric, or W___ or K___ , someone searching for the Truth -- for Reality -- but a soul, who was already dead before dying. He had nothing to search for he already knew.
There’s the part where Trevor walks me through the after life in my dreams, now that I’m out of the Johnston House and grown now. He keeps telling me, “We’re just right here, we’re just right here.”
There’s the part where I red the book Invisible Man and found out that I was living in the lion’s mouth the whole time, not understanding why, not remembering how it happened to me, why I had done this to myself.
There’s the part where I remember it was a choice I made, to be the hero of Invisible Man. To touch Trevor, to be worthy of such a big shoot. To not pretend but Really be Him. To be someone who realized that the waking world was all pretend too. Its history books, its libraries of words.
There’s the part where I notice my adult life is going in a direction where it’s mirroring my past, like it’s trying to surround me with as many reminders as possible, to somehow jog my memory: My friends are just one Trevor after another, my setup more and more like God’s Country, Sundays are my favorite days for some reason.
There’s the part where I realize this has all been one big trip, like when you get high and go on a trip, then realize it and come back to reality. My whole life has just been a battle of the psyche. A shfting, shifting, until I got it right.
There’s the part where Trevor still will touch me. I can feel his touch at the base of my neck, across my shoulder, I can feel it down to my loins. If I close my eyes I can feel the carpet of the church balcony, I can feel his lips trailing there way along my jaw bone.
There’s the part where The Soul knew what it was doing, he was in the Who Knows and was Brave. Then he was in the Life and was Brave. And when He dies and is back in the Who Knows Place -- I’ll be Brave.

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