The End of the World as We Know It (24 page)

On the night my mother and father met, she walked into a party and my father turned to the man he was standing with and he said, “That's the woman I'm going to marry.” He picked her out of a crowd. He knew she was the one. And he did everything he could to win her heart, that's how sure he was, then.

We tend to start out not wanting to cause damage. To ourselves or to others. We only want to give love, and be given the gift of love in return, bestowed without reason and beyond our deserving. We never know why we are loved. We tend to start out wanting to be, in fact being, happy in our beloveds, happy in ourselves.

My mother showed me great affection, most of the time. She would come in to say my prayers, and she would touch my hair with her hand and I would be completely at peace at those moments.

There is a loveliness to life that does not fade. Even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency toward grace that does not fail us. There is a persistence of song, as one poet said.

It is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. It is the loveliness
that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. It is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. And it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be.

It is in the photographs of our mothers and our fathers. It is in a piece of costume jewelry, left in a drawer, in the sounds of other people making love in the next hotel room, or on the edge of a razor blade in the glowing darkness. Even in the razor in the darkness.

It is in the nostalgia for the moments we are passing through even as we pass through them, the sense of loss as each slice of time leaves us.

My father was not a monster. Even at that he was a failure. He was a man whose desires got short-circuited on a hot late drunken summer night, leaving him with . . . leaving him with I still don't know what. A sense of violence thwarted. A sense of love unanswered. A sense of shame that liquor couldn't kill. Something.

And they had born in them that night, both of them, a fear of me, of each other, of the world of illusion they had created and themselves believed in with all their hearts. It was all a terrible secret. It couldn't be helped.

It was all a cruelty suddenly and unreasonably unmasked in the dark. It was an endless and living and palpable lie, despite the seersucker jacket and the white bucks and the photographs of the happy smiling son and the cocktail parties and the going out, the always going out, to talk about books and ideas and the small-town scandals that existed then.

I believe that he did not mean to do what he did. I believe
that he did not mean to whisper in my ear. I believe, because I know, that he did not intend to drink so much. I believe that he did not mean to rob me of my childhood, of the sense of innocence and wonder that is childhood's proof, what we are left with to remember and cherish when it is gone.

I see it in the faces of young men walking home from work at night, eager for the night and its chicaneries that their bodies enter into without fear or shame. They look as though some part of their innocence, some part of that beauty, had never left them. There is a flush on their cheeks. They look as though there is someone waiting for them. They look as though it excites them, this sense of being whole that carries them through a life in which things tend to get better as they go along, except the inevitable sorrow and frustration of aging, of leaving the beautiful youth behind.

It is what sustains us through the loss and the heartache and the relentless monotony, the getting up in the morning and just getting through the day. It is what keeps hope alive in our hearts.

Losing it was everything; it was the end of something that should have gone on for a long time, and once lost it was gone forever and I was never the same. Soul murder, the psychiatrists call it, the sexual violation of children.

Unimaginably small boys. Boys whose heads do not reach to their father's waists. Girls who are no more than infants. Boys and girls whose lives are ineradicably violated. Whose trust and innocence are lost to them forever.

I do not believe he meant to change the course of that life, my life, so inexorably, to create a distorting lens through which everything that happened subsequently was viewed.

The sorrow was not in all that I became; it was in the becoming. It was not in the razor in the night; it was in the fact that my father's phantom hand stretched my skin wide while my fingers sliced into the veins. It was not in the whispered kindnesses from dark strangers, or the willingness to suffer fools gladly; it was in the wandering through the night looking for the shadowed faces, for the knife at the throat, for the ultimate assignation that would signal the end, the end of the loneliness, the end of the pretense.

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it, like an amputee who never stops missing his leg, like the ex-smoker who wants a cigarette after lunch fifteen years later. It sounds trite. It's true.

You will look for it in objects that you buy without want. You will look for it in faces you do not desire. You will look for it in expensive hotel rooms, in the careful attentiveness of the men and women who change the sheets every day, who bring you pots of tea and thinly sliced lemon and treat you with false deference, a false deference in which you desperately want to believe. You will look for it in shopgirls and the kind of sad and splendid men who sell you clothing. You will look for it. And you will never find it. You will not find a trace.

I bought the house in which I grew up. It is very old, and it has a name. There is the creek that still runs by it, the gardens, the lawns and the giant box bushes; there is Roy's old farmhouse through the trees, although I don't know who lives there anymore.

I will not go into the bedroom where my mother and father slept. I have taken the old bed and broken it apart nail by nail
with my own hands and thrown it away. I wanted to burn it in the yard, but there would have been questions. Too many questions.

I sit and write in the room where my father wrote and paid his bills. I have spent more than half my life trying to restore that house to a splendor it never had, to make it more than it was. People seem to admire it. I think it looks like an over-dressed whore, trying too hard to please. Trying too hard to say everything is fine.

I miss the simplicity of my grandmother's white linen slip-covers, the summer slipcovers with the red piping, the simple freshness of it, like furniture on a summer porch in a country where it's always sunny. I miss my grandmother. I miss my mother, dead twenty years. I miss my father, dead fourteen, too lazy to love, too drunk to know the difference, to know what he was doing in the dark.

I have not told this story to the people I know and try to love. I have not told it to my family. I am afraid to tell it now.

You must wonder why I tell it at all. You must wonder at the selfishness, at the hurt inflicted, at the terrible aches revisited for no real reason.

I tell it for this reason. I tell it to you now because I'd like to think that somewhere, sometime, one thirty-five-year-old father will look at his four-year-old son and not touch him and not whisper in his ear and not put his hand down his son's throat and not invade his son's body with his own and they will both turn away and sleep in innocence.

Even one single father. One single child. That would be enough of a reason.

I tell it for the fathers. The priests. The football coaches. The Boy Scout counselors. The lonely men in secret basements. Murderers.

I tell it because that one child, that one son, will have a childhood, will grow up with hope in his heart. He will take joy in his first love, the kind of sweetness and hunger country singers like Tim McGraw sing about, in beautiful, sad voices aching with longing. Lying in the back seat of a car with rain falling on the rear window, the wipers going. The hand on skin. The taste of a tongue on a tongue. Making love wearing your watch, with the television on.

I tell it for the first time the sheets are drawn back and that boy lies down with the person he loves and he is alone with his lover and happy to be there. He will stand in the shower with his lover and every idea he ever had will vanish from his mind and every cell of his skin will thoughtlessly come into being, and never again will that skin be just the membrane that holds his body together, and those hungers will never leave him.

Because everything, every single thing is sensual, every gesture, every idea, every moment of every life. A white T-shirt. The taste of food. Holding hands. Being seen. Being famous. The young women in their summer dresses. The young men who speak longingly in low voices on their cell phones on rainy street corners late at night. The men who move through the gloomy hallways of the homosexual baths, insatiable want moving their blood through their veins, quickening their pulses. Everything that makes us desire, and makes us feel desirable. It is not a life I know, but that is how I imagine the world. Perhaps I'm wrong.

When I see, on television or in the movies, people winning
things or people kissing, I cry. My heart breaks, every time, for all that they know, for all that they will ever know and be. I cherish them for winning and kissing.

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I cannot accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I cannot accommodate myself to it.

A
ND NOW
I
WILL
have to be that person forever.

I K
NOW THAT
I
am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their e-mail, doing the crossword.

I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware.

T
HIS IS WHAT
it takes to get me through the day: 450 milligrams of Eskalith, 1,000 milligrams of Neurontin, 2 milligrams of Klonopin, 6 milligrams of Xanax, 80 milligrams of Geodon, 200 milligrams of Lamictal. They do not begin to touch the anguish and shame of being what I have been, of becoming what I have become. I take Ambien to sleep. Sometimes I take it in the afternoon, just to shut off the noise. I still sleep badly at night.

I
TELL THESE STORIES
because I have lied about my life to people who have been kind to me and I am tired of the lying.

I tell it because I don't want people to think that I have fucked up my life over and over and over just because I was in a bad mood.

I tell it because I have been pulling myself up by my own bootstraps since I was four years old and the effort has left me sickened and exhausted and angrier than you could imagine.

I tell it because there is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I have been locked out, and it never goes away.

I tell it because I did wish in the graveyard, because I do wish, that everybody could be the way we were at our best: funny children, a marvelous house, the mother everybody wanted to have, the mother sitting by the creek in her red flat shoes, the adorable Dickensian father who believed in Christmas. I am not the hero of my own life, I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; I am peripheral to the whole of my family, to the whole of my small circle of friends, and I always was.

I tell it for the sorrow of lying in Frette sheets in hotel rooms in foreign countries with a razor blade on the bedside table, a talisman of my own death beside the full ashtray and the clear cold glass of water, knowing that not one other soul I love knows where I am.

And I apologize. I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because, while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible. A
tableau vivant
of the death inevitably to follow.

I tell it because I try to believe, because I do believe with all my heart, that there is a persistence of song.

I
TELL IT
for all the boys, for the life they never had.

This has to have been a difficult story to tell. Why did you decide to write it?

That's what most people ask me. Why dredge up the past again, why redig the graves long grown over? Why go through the pain of telling this story? Why not just get over it and get on with your life?

Some asked in sorrow, some in horror, some in anger, but everybody wanted to know the same thing. Why did you write it?

Here's one reason.

I was raped as a child of four by my drunken father while my mother watched. It is the seminal moment of a damaged life and I at last had to speak out.

Here's another.

There are approximately 90,000 reported cases of child sexual abuse in this country every year. Estimates are that 80 percent of the actual cases go unreported. That means approximately 500,000 children, boys and girls, are violated every year, and nobody is doing anything about it. It is epidemic in this country, and it has got to be stopped.

There are tens of thousands of boys who have been molested by Catholic priests. They grow up, they try to live the best lives they can, but they are forever shattered.

Many grew up straight, some gay, some relatively unscathed, many damaged and drugged and alcoholic and lonely and forever broken. I wrote the book for them. For us. Every story is different, and my story is unique to me. But I wanted somehow to speak for them, for the 500,000
every year
, for the Catholic boys whose lives and faiths were forever altered, for the little boys and the little girls, in most cases with no one to tell. No one to believe them. No parents. No friends. No police. Nobody.