It’s hard for me to explain it, and I only know it as the Darkness.
Something Dark behind everything the four of them did. I know the Darkness of R___, the underlying sexual abuse in everything he did. The other three, they don’t even know about, yet it’s still there.
A__ and H__’s weird put downs, all the time. They were so good at it. Subtle ones, public ones, even confidential ones, like they were my therapist and telling me about myself.
Then there were the broad assumptions of who I was, that I could never escape from, like a Black man in the 50’s, no matter what he did or accomplished, he’d still be assumed an ape.
As I got older I became more and more aware of my surroundings, became more familiar with my own perception and natural intelligence.
That’s when I began to pick up on their inconsistencies. At the time I only could catch that -- the inconsistencies -- and I couldn’t articulate them to myself or anyone else, and knew even less about what they could mean.
Mom, A__ and H__ were pretending that what they were doing was as natural as breathing. They could say _you are less_ with the same effortless legitimacy as if they had said _this water is wet._
But really they were forcing the seeming effortlessness and were doing everything on purpose. All of that Abuse was a lie, they were lying.
One of the catalysts for this new, frightening awareness was their aggressive jealousy concerning me and girls. Their inappropriate interest in my sex life. Once, when I went to driver’s ed class with A__, I sat down at an empty table, out of the usual shyness. Afterward, every girl who walked into the room for the class sat at my table and were very sweet to me. After class, A said the reason was because I was a _whore._
The reason I most often call it the Darkness and not Abuse is because they didn’t and don’t seem to have any awareness of their own behavior.
When I cut ties with them they were genuinely hurt, and genuinely felt wronged, which is an exasperating dynamic.
It puts me in the position of being Abusive to them by my being firm and assertive about relinquishing myself from the Darkness.
They were so good at Abuse .. it’s difficult for the Abused to feel proud of surviving something that seems so intangible, when the reality is the Abuse was sheer violence. They could easily say to strangers that it was all in my head, they were so good at Abuse.
The humiliation -- the Abuse’s main directive -- keeps me feeling like I don’t deserve my Self (all those entitlements as a human being) ..
The sexual abuse all on its own was profoundly humiliating. Having sex dreams while still in Kindergarten .. I wasn’t innocent anymore, I wasn’t a Real boy like the others -- I was something perverted, unnatural.
They did this all because I was a boy .. If I had been me but born as a girl, none of this would have happened .. their reason was just as arbitrary as skin color.
There is a mystery between the sexes, hence each sex is sexy to the other. (Ego kills the Mystery, same as it kills Life, the Wildness, the Masculinity and Femininity.)
I have no idea what it is like to be a girl. It’s impossible. Same as she has no idea what it’s like for a boy. The House said different. It’s women said different; they insisted exactly what a boy was. All that Ego .. they were lying.
No wonder I infuriated them. There was no way they could know me. The best they could do was trick me into not knowing myself, and the miracle that is every human being’s entitlement.
I can never ruin it, nor not deserve it, nor forfeit it. Gender is a gift. It is the gift that connects the spiritual soul to the physical world.
(_I feel big as a mountain,_ Bromsden says to Jack Nicholson in _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)
The hard part was that I was dog. Born in the year of the dog, and also the month of the dog.
When I have my name read, or tarot cards laid, or psyche felt, it’s always the same descriptions: Loyalty, sensitivity, dutiful, dependable.
In that House I was the same in each individual dynamic. I was the dog like in that true story where a man takes his abused dog out on his boat, in order to drown the dog; instead the man begins to drown and the dog saves him.
(_I was a ninny,_ said Jessica Lange in _A Thousand Acres._)
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