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*Trigger warning-sexual assault
Thumbing through my record collection, I came across the double compilation album The Beatles’ 1967-1970 (The “Blue Album”), the one with the photo of the fab four on the balcony of a building—one side the innocent young Liverpool lads with mop-tops and toothy grins ready to take on the world, prior to all the early Beatlemania hysteria; the other side, grimacing hirsute hippies after experiencing life, the anxiety of accolades, and the stress of success. Ironically, I acquired the album, which helped heal my pains throughout my teenage years, on the weekend where I inadvertently lost the remains of my childhood.
I went through some difficult and distressing experiences at a pivotal impressionable age. I was ten when my parents divorced, and my father left us. Not that he was an active or attentive father, but his absence definitely shattered our family unit and put undue stress on my mom, who had to somehow provide for us seven kids when he withdrew financially as well, which in turn affected our upbringing. Suffice it to say, I was in need of positive male role models.
Jonathan, a neighborhood kid, was younger than me, but had a similar scrawny build, sense of humor, and sensitive disposition, and also possessed an affinity for the Beatles. His parents had recently divorced the year before mine, so we could relate to each other. We used to pal around town–riding bikes, swimming at Green River, and having adventures. I had my first sleepover at his house just down around the corner, after a neighborhood party at the Naylor’s house. We watched the Muppet Show that night with his mom, who smoked and laughed throughout the show while sipping wine. Jonathan and I would often bike down to the Package Store where his father worked. He would give us various jobs–filling bags with ice and collapsing discarded boxes down in the old basement–and in return paid us in candy and cokes. It felt good to help out and to be praised by a male adult.
One weekend, Jonathan asked if I wanted to sleep over at his dad’s house. It was his weekend with the kids, so Jonathan’s brothers Tommy and Joey and his sister Tasha were all going to be there. His dad drove up in his tan convertible, and I hopped in the back seat with Jonathan and Joey, bringing along my two Beatles records A Hard Days Night and the White Album. Arriving at the house, I met his dad’s roommate Ron, who showed us his record collection and let us play ours on his stereo in his room. Movie posters from Heavy Metal and Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams adorned the walls. When he said he hadn’t heard the White Album in years, I offered to trade him my copy for his Blue album, and he surprisingly agreed. The first night, his father took us to a ballet performance, and I remember chuckling with Jonathan about their revealing gray tights, in typical ten-year-old boy fashion. The next day was spent visiting the neighbor, who had an extended model train set up in the top of his barn, shooting Jonathan’s pellet gun at tin cans, and bike riding down and around Lakeville. At night, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was on TV, I was spellbound by the intriguing story, which we watched until bedtime.
Jonathan’s dad came up to the boys’ room, and we all piled in Joey’s bed to listen to him read a story. He sat at the foot of the bed. While Joey read, I suddenly felt a hand resting on my leg. I ignored it at first thinking maybe he didn’t realize it was my leg under the blanket. When his hand moved further up to my thigh. I froze. I did not know what to do, so I just concentrated on the story, figuring in a child’s logic “If I ignore it, it will just go away or not be a reality.” At one point, I looked over at him, but he seemed rapt in the story, not paying attention to what his hand was doing to me, smiling as Joey handed the book to Jonathan to read a section. Suddenly, I felt his hand slowly move between my legs. Again, I froze, like I was in suspended animation, not knowing what to do. When the book was finished, we all got up and started to go to our respective beds we’d slept in the night before, but his dad suggested to Jonathan that “we should make your guest feel comfortable,” and told me I could set up in the adjacent TV room.
The small room had a jigsaw puzzle poster, a collection of beer cans in a display, and a small TV in front of the mattress on the floor. When the door was open, you could see down the stairs. I clicked off the light, and turned on the TV, lying down on my stomach with my arms folded under the pillow. I’m not sure how much time passed, but soon I heard the creak of footsteps on the stairs, so I pretended to be asleep. He turned off the TV, but didn’t leave. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel him in the room. He sat down on the mattress. Suddenly, I felt him rest his head on my back, and slowly his hand made its way under the blanket working its way up my leg again like a snake. He moved his head and I felt his whiskers snag the blanket making a slight abrasive ticking sound like static electricity. I could hear his breathing. I kept my eyes closed, my futile defense, stupidly thinking he would realize I was asleep and go away.
Again, his roaming hand moved until it reached my crotch, and he began to massage, gently squeezing and releasing, in a rhythmic pulse, my body part reacting to this sensation. The world began to spin, but at the same time, I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed in place. He released his hold, slid his hands out from the covers, and I felt his head lift, snagging the blanket as before. But he didn’t leave. He gently rolled me over, as I let my body go limp still feigning sleep. He began undoing my belt (I hadn’t changed into my pajamas that night for some reason). He fumbled with the belt finally getting it undone, and pulled my pants and underwear down together, I felt his breath on me and he let out a whispered “Ooooo.” I felt a warm wet feeling I had not felt before along with the scratchiness of his facial stubble rubbing on my skin. I suddenly began to panic. I had the feeling I was going to pee and didn’t know if I could hold it back. Suddenly, the world went blank and I had the sensation that I had lost myself, that I had been transported somewhere, beamed up like in one of the old Star Trek episodes I had watched on Sunday afternoons.
The next morning, I felt like maybe I had dreamed the whole thing, but discovered my pants were still undone. I pulled them up and fastened my belt. I heard voices downstairs and could smell bacon cooking. I descended the stairs and crept gingerly into the kitchen. The boys and Tosha were at the table, and Jonathan’s dad was at the stove making French toast. He greeted me with a smile and a hearty, “Good morning.” Jonathan made a joke about my hair being a mess as I sat in the one empty chair available at the end. Jonathan’s dad placed a plate of French toast and bacon in front of me. “How did you sleep?” he asked. The next seconds seemed like an eternity, but in an instant, I uttered a phrase I’d heard my sister use. “I slept sound,” I replied matter-of-factly. A regrettable moment, as those three words assured him of my silence. He paused, and turned back to the stove, busying himself with breakfast cleanup. I stared at the stack of French toast, the pad of butter on top slightly melted. Covering it with a layer of syrup, and I dug in as time seemed to move onward within this new dimension I found myself inhabiting. On the way home, the wind blowing through my hair as I clutched my new Beatles album under my arm, I began the day anew, the innocent world that was once my childhood was gone, floating somewhere over the ether of Lakeville.
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As a young boy on the brink of adolescence, having this first sexual encounter an uninvited, unwanted violation on my body had a lasting effect on me in the four decades to come. My whole concept of love, trust, and intimacy were shaped by this one incident, shame and guilt being lifelong consequences of any inappropriate sexual experience where one feels overpowered, powerless, and paralyzed. Self-doubt, self-loathing, and self-punishment are emotions that work their way into your being and remain lurking in the deep recesses of your mind only to resurface again and again as blame is turned inward. Why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I yell, “Stop!” or “Get away from me!” Did I do something to make him think this was okay? My intrinsic homophobic teenage boy brain even panicked thinking, “Does this mean I’m gay?” The dreadful natural biological response of pleasure the body elicits from that kind of stimulation created a complex whirlwind of emotions, and when the mind has reached a tipping point, it kicks into self-survival preservation mode, shuts down, and stores those emotions away. These shameful feelings and paralyzing guilt cowed me into remaining silent about what had happened, forcing the feelings into an emotional jack-in-the-box, which periodically pops up when triggered by anything relating to the memory of the incident.
During my formative adolescent years, I went through a difficult time trying to process what had happened. Already predisposed to depression through heredity, dark thoughts ran through my mind whenever the incident resurfaced. I wrote apocalyptic poetry about death, read dark stories by authors like Edgar Allen Poe, and listened to heavy bands like Blue Oyster Cult to feed my angst and embrace the darkness in order to avoid being swallowed by it or the intermittent thoughts of wanting to enter the eternal void forever. I often turned to the Beatles to counteract the darkness and help heal my inner hurt. Music was a miraculous distraction; a comforting, calming, and consoling cure for all that ailed me. I’d bury the incident deep down in the recesses of my mind, and carry on as if nothing had happened, only to have it resurface when I had my first physical moment with a girlfriend in the summer between my sophomore and junior years. Once we got physical, everything changed in the relationship, and I broke up with her in the first week of school. This was the only relationship I would have during my high school years.
In my late teens and twenties, I was fortunate to have a few close friends and significant girlfriends, with whom I was able to establish a bond of trust and talk to about what had happened. With each telling, I felt a little more of the burden lift, and was able to have a number of significant healthy relationships. One St. Patrick’s Day, I ran into my old classmate, who took me out for a drink. She was studying psychology in college, and for some reason, I ended up confiding with her about what had happened. I told her my worst thought was that I could not have been the only victim of this man, and that by staying silent I may have let another person fall victim to him. The guilt of that idea would sometimes come back to haunt me at various times throughout my life. She asked if I’d ever considered getting in touch with a lawyer and pressing charges. In the next days, emboldened by our talk, I called a lawyer I looked up in the phonebook, who told me that the statute of limitations had run out, so I again, let it go and carried on, pushing it back into the box. As the decades went by, a number of high profile media incidents, TV and film stories, or novels inspired me to go public with my story, but each time I decided against it. Again the same questions came up: What would people think of me? Would they treat me differently knowing about this? Would they blame me for what happened? Would they even believe me? It would be my word against his. What if they asked me why I didn’t speak up sooner? What would or could I say to that? Each time, I talked myself out of the humiliation of exposure, embarrassment, shame, and spectacle of revealing what happened.
After my parents’ divorce, I felt not only emotionally detached from my father, but emotionally inaccessible from my mother as well. I began to hold some resentment toward her for the fact that I couldn’t come to her and confide in her what had happened to me back then. People didn’t talk about this kind of stuff, certainly not my family who tended to repress emotions (being raised Catholic), avoid all conflict, and let things build up until they exploded. In my late twenties, I confided to my sister Cheryl and arranged a time to talk to my mother to clear the air and bridge the divide that the incident had created between us. When I began speaking with her at my sister’s that day, my mother got defensive explaining how she had to take the brunt of our feelings toward my father, which we took out on her during our turbulent teen years. I finally broke down crying and blurted out the whole story. After a long silence, she asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her I didn’t know. I told her about the lawyer and what he’d said, and how I just wanted to get the story out of me and fix all the animosity it caused between us. Later that week, I found a book titled “Happiness is a Choice” on the doorstep of my apartment, my mom’s way of providing support, saying she heard me and cared about my wellbeing.
As the ubiquitous Internet ushered in the information age, I used Google and Facebook to track down the location of the house where the incident occurred, as well as information about the man who’d done this to me. I tried to contact his roommate, his children, and relatives on a number of occasions with no success. I often wonder if there are any other victims in the places he took residence, or if there were any incidents that occurred while he was a fifth-grade science teacher for the school district back in the 60s, or if I was an isolated incident.
Over the years, I have come to a better understanding of why I reacted the way I did, and know now that it was not my fault. Being a product of a broken home made me vulnerable, made me yearn for the acknowledgment from a male role model, a father figure, an adult who would reassure me I was a good kid and that everything would be okay. Predators often identify and target young, lost, weakened children and prey on their vulnerability, tragically making them even weaker as a result of their interaction. They rely on the fact that their victims won’t speak up or out about what they have done. When my eldest son turned eleven in 2015, many of these emotions came flooding back, as my adult eyes saw a reflection of the young, naïve, and innocent child I had been when I was preyed upon by this individual.
This one unfortunate incident has significantly affected many aspects of my life, but over the years, I have slowly been able to disempower its hold on me, forgive myself, and realize that it has provided me with a special empathy and understanding as a teacher, a husband, a father, and a reasonably informed human being. The internal scars of childhood traumas can never fully be overcome or ever completely healed, but may be resolved somewhat with love, understanding, self-forgiveness, and speaking about it into the world in order to let others who have suffered the same fate know they are not alone. In some ways, I am lucky, my incident was only a one time deal, while some have suffered repeated acts and long-standing physical and sexual abuse much more severe than what I experienced. I cannot imagine the devastation that that would cause to a person’s spirit. I am also fortunate I had the Beatles music to help me make sense of my world, to soothe my pain, comfort my worries, heal my soul, and to alleviate the burden I carried so many decades. If there is a takeaway from this, it is that I acquired a special empathy from this incident, and a unique ability to recognize and connect with others who are suppressing deep emotional pain, and may need guidance and help through their own tunnel of emotions. Over the years, I have met people who have shared their survival stories with me, including countless students who have been through similar traumatic circumstances, and have let them know hope, when they felt no hope.
If something like this has never happened to you, count your blessings, and hear, believe, and support survivors by maybe trying to do something in your community to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone you know and/or love. The statistics on reported cases are staggering, but just think about the number of cases that go unreported due to the perceived stigma of shame that paralyzes so many of us. I chose to report this now because I have been silent too long and the present climate seems to be digressing back to the days when people refused to discuss these often awkward and controversial accounts and issues. It is my hope that maybe one person will read this and work up the courage to tell someone their own story, freeing themselves from the power that predators have over them, and maybe working toward creating a more fulfilled life, not letting these incidents reduce, define, or break them. Know that there may be others in the world, right in your town, down the street or right next door who wear the mask and carry the burden as you do, and who are here to reassure you it was not your fault, you’ll be all right, and that there’s nothing that cannot be overcome with love.
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Photo by Romain Lours on Unsplash