8

Looking back, it is now clear why I joined the Military. All these years up till now it had remained a mystery: the haphazard events that had landed me there.
I wanted to be a soldier, same as any other boy, way back in the House. I played with one GI Joe figurine. Before I knew words, I knew the sounds of fight and missions.
After the Mustang, and its tight-in-the-chest kicking violence, I stopped playing with the GI Joe. I began to feel like I must not be a real boy, for these things to be happening to me. Only real boys play with GI Joe’s.
The Abusive have a great talent in feeling out and recognizing another’s secret insecurities. And the House’s females were no exception. With innuendo, and opportunistic watchful eyes, the sentiment was taught, implied, and said outright, that I wasn’t a real boy, and all that I think, and I feel, and know, does not apply to me.
The Man of the House -- a title that would turn out to have always been mine -- did not mind his one true threat being beaten up, and down, and sideways by the clever truth-twisting of the women.
Meanwhile there were the books, like All Quiet on the Western Front, purposefully chosen from the library hard-back, with blank covers so the other family members could not know what I was reading. And especially there were the films. To my little-boy eyes there was nothing more masculine than a soldier. It's not the loud, aggressive, heroic side of it that made me addicted to them. But the quieter, genuine, old-soul masculinity that I liked so much; even though, at the time, I didn’t know those words. I wanted it for myself, but felt I was not allowed it, due to the extraordinary happenings in God's Country.
We couldn't be real children, and I couldn't be a real boy, real children do not live lives like this. We were unnatural freaks, and I was the most stark of them, because even the other can‘t-be-real children, my sisters, called me a liar and insisted the ridiculousness of my need to be difficult.
Then there was the rest of those eighteen years, starting when I was eleven, when I switched sides. While before, it had been the other inhabitants of the House insisting my numbness, by their insistence that I was of so little value that I wasn’t even real, now I fought on my own to stay numb, seeing no other way of getting through those days.
The only dream allowed, the only goal I could set for myself, was to survive. All the rest had to be seen as expendable, and in the end, they were proven to be. Now that I was a ghost's true opposite, a disappeared-live human being, all my original wants and sentimentalities were just-as-disappeared into the Dark, secret places of God’s Country.
It became an easy joke, as I hung out with my sisters in their big bedroom and they told me their social adventures, stories I found fascinating because I knew no one my own age, and the ones I did stayed away from me because of my looks and silence.
_How can you not remember kindergarten?_ A___ would say jokingly, as she chose her shoes and flicked her hair back, then held it tight and up, deciding how to wear it. _I mean everyone remembers kindergarten .._
The older I got, the more I’d find was being eaten up by the Dark Nothingess of the House and its haunts. Later, at church, A___ asked me, _Don t you remember him? C___ J___? From the church when we were little? He was the preacher s son?_
Of course I didn t.
She laughed again.
Maybe it was a chilling laugh. I don t think she had any idea the life she was living either. Every once in awhile I d catch her eyes giving a look of thoughtful recognition, but there was such Anger and Defensiveness there, that little could be done with it.
It turned out I did know C___ J___ very well, though it was true that I had never met him before. And my actions concerning him would turn out to be executed brilliantly. Even though during that time with him, and the many years afterward, they would also be a complete and baffling mystery to me, seemingly completely insane, and contradictory to logic.
Unknowingly, to my young and word-less mind, I had worked hard for over a decade to handle the likes of C___ J___. The Knowing knew what it was doing, because it, and the real me, long gone into numbness, wanted to play. Like the way a cat plays with its only-half-dead prey.
He was a weird guy, twenty-nine years of age, and later thirty. He went through jobs the way others go through moods. The church we went to was not his father's. This one was in the next town over and was very modern, with a band, and no dress code, and only A___ and I went out of out family. It was so suburban and yuppie, it was like nothing else existed but suburbia, and all other worlds were simply wrong. And at times I believed them.
There was no confusion about C___ J___. He was actually a frighteningly debase person, only no one else saw it but me, until it was too late. He was habitual in his dealings with adolescent boys, and his treatment of me was no different. He had no idea who I was, but due to my experiences with A__, H__, and R__, I wordlessly Knew who he was.
He invited me to lunch after church with other members, ones who amazingly had no idea his evil. He invited me to the mall afterward, and would even give me a ride home. It became a regular thing on Sundays. And I was inexplicably happy to encourage this seeming friendship even though I already knew in-words that I didn't like him, and found him creepy.
Once, in a mood to play, I asked the acting youth pastor, _Don t you think that guy s weird? I mean, come on, he s weird,_ and the youth pastor jumped to his defense.
Even though the pastor s anger and quickness seemed hurtful to me, it actually made me happier, and I found myself talking more during these times. I was enjoying this game of putting all these people s purposeful stupidity on display. I tried to make the case a few more times and always met the same response. It didn t seem to bother me.
Only much later, when I was done with C___ J___ and was working on Sundays instead of going to church, did I hear that their stupidity got them in the end; when C___J___ gave a dollar to a little boy to take his pants off in the church men s bathroom.
Only then did I look back on my actions and wonder what on earth was going on. I didn't even know the words 'child molester' or 'sexual abuse' back then, and the past was still a blank dark color in my mind, with no words to make sense of it.
Dealing with C___ J___ was effortless, habitual, one thing I knew exactly how to do. The house had made me an expert. I was easily manipulative, to the point where I could make him furious, even in public, so that he made a fool of himself. I assumed I would feel bad, a grown person furious at me, but instead it actually made me hyper. He would look at me and see that I was male, so I had to have the other-side-of-the-skin masculinity he was looking for, whether it was gay or straight or bi, it was still there, because it had to be. But due to the House I was an expert at hiding it.
My unknowingly-self-taught habits were the perfect foil for those on the lookout for masculinity. For all the women in the House who were hungry for fresh masculine-blood, and for it s patriarch, who had wanted to do-his-business to it. And for all the unsuspecting C___J___'s who for the first time in their lives had found a boy they wanted to kill instead of f---. Because it went against all the rules they had counted on, went against them purposefully, as if this boy knew ..
Old habits I had a hard time shaking, because I didn t know their origin or purpose. Habits that had made C___ J___ inexplicably lash out at me at times, which seems like, should have made me feel bad.
Habits that I would feel ashamed of as I grew bigger and within more reach of leaving the House. Even then, at seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, I didn t have my own words, to describe any origins, stories, or reasons; I only knew what the words were saying. If I had had the words, any words, of my own, I doubt I would have been unable to listen to them anyway.
Like the night Rob__, my coworker at the time, got out of the convertible with M___ and Big B, and turned to me with an angry, playful, grin, that proved to its audience that there really were people who seemingly inexplicably flat-out-enjoyed murdering. He said: _Why do you have to act so f------ gay sometimes?!_
Hence I knew one thing, while the truth was the opposite: soldiering was not for me.