Boy Erased (13 page)

“I couldn't really see him in the dark,” my mother would later say. “But I could hear the click of the gun safety.
That
was very clear.”

My mother sat up as the man's cold, rough hand fell against her skin. How did he not feel my father lying there next to her? This detail, like so many others, would remain a mystery. My father found the shotgun and, in the darkness, before he could adjust his eyes, he aimed the twin barrels at the space where he thought he could make out the man's silhouette, mistaking the back of my mother's head for this man's. My mother was directly in the line of fire. Once the man heard the click of the
safety, he leaped from the bed, and my father chased him through the house until the man was able to escape out the back door and disappear somewhere in the cotton fields.

Though my father had been able to identify the intruder, he was never able to offer up any clear proof to the authorities, and my parents' only option was to fire the man immediately and place a restraining order against him. The one other time my father met his former employee in town, my father said, “Come anywhere near my wife again, and I won't just kill you. I'll torture you the way you intended to torture her.”

My mother found it impossible to sleep after this incident. Blaming her insomnia on my father's snoring, she left the television going all night. She would take my top bunk when she couldn't sleep. I would hear her breathing slow within minutes of entering the sheets. When the two of us slept in the same room, the world outside seemed to recede, our fears along with it. We felt safe.

“My bunkmate,” she would say.

“Love,” I would say back.

My father never seemed to forgive himself for accidentally placing the twin barrels of the shotgun to the back of my mother's head. Raised to see himself as the protector of the family, the head of the household, he felt that he had failed to do his job. He had already failed with the first baby, had been unable to cure whatever complications had lain dormant in my mother's body. If he ever had a chance at another child, he promised
himself he would never again let harm come to his family. But he could never predict what would come to all of us once I left his house.

•   •   •

A
FEW
HOURS
after the church service, I was in David's room, and he was dipping his index and middle fingers into a can of motor oil. “We have to protect ourselves from sin,” he said. He walked to the dorm window, stood on a chair, and smeared the oil in a line above the metal casing. “We have to cleanse this room of demonic forces.”

He began to speak in tongues, what sounded like a faux African dialect mixed with long English vowels. He was wearing the outfit I had grown so fond of in the past few months when I'd seen him in the dorm.

“That's enough,” I said, laughing. I sat on the topmost rung of the bunk ladder. “Stop it.”

I loved him in that moment. I loved the way his leg hair snaked in a lowercase
j
that stretched from the back of his knee to the elastic band at the bottom of his briefs.

“Maybe it's not the best,” he said, stepping down from the chair, “but it works.”

The youth pastor had run out of anointing oil at the church. “You'll just have to use this,” he'd said, leading David and me out of the old post office to the back of his car, popping his trunk, and removing a one-quart yellow Pennzoil bottle. He
invited several of the congregants to pray over this bottle, to bless it with God's anointing power. “Thank you so much,” David had said. “This is a life saver.”

David dipped his fingers into the bottle again. He skipped around the room, playfully cocking his head at various angles, trying to decide what to anoint next.

“
Hmmmm
,” he said. “I don't know.”

“You're ridiculous,” I said. “You don't expect me to believe this, do you?”

He walked over to me, looping his free arm through the rung where my bare feet were resting. He reached up with his other hand and placed his oil-covered fingers in front of my leaning forehead.

“Don't you dare,” I said.

“Out, demon!” he shouted, half serious now, flinging back his hand. A drop of motor oil landed on the frozen avalanche of bed sheets that fell from the top bunk where I had flung them earlier.

He pressed the oil to my forehead, used his thumb to blend it into my skin.

•   •   •

A
FEW
HOURS
PASSED
, and then it happened. At first, it was like baptism. I felt my body go under, but someone else's hands urged me below the surface. Like my baptism, I had worried what it would feel like, what I would be asked to do, the exact
logistics of the act.
Would I feel differently? Would I be changed forever, as people said I would?

I worried about how my body would look. I worried about the stretch marks. Even as he forced my head down, I worried that I might not do it right. Even as I gagged and struggled, pulled at the hairs on his calves, trying to do anything that would make him stop, I worried about upsetting him.
This was not what I wanted it to be,
I thought.

I had thought this before. At the age of twelve, standing inside the baptistery of our family church, I had clutched at the gown that clung to the fat rolls along my waistline as the congregation looked on and clapped. I was a new man standing on new territory. Born again in Christ's image. Members of my church family shouted, “Amen!” I looked out at their faces, feeling as though I had stripped off all my clothes and revealed the most vulnerable part of myself. I was no longer invisible.

•   •   •

E
VERYTHING
ELSE
that led to my enrollment in Love in Action felt like a deserved punishment. David confessed, the same night that he raped me, that he had also recently raped a fourteen-year-old boy in his youth group, that he didn't know why he did it, couldn't explain it. I'd been unable to move from the bed where he had placed me afterward—I believed that God was punishing me physically for my mental transgressions. Somehow the demons had entered this room despite our charms against them.

“I wanted to be a youth pastor,” he said, sobbing so loudly the neighbors pounded on the other side of his concrete-block wall. “How can I be a youth pastor now? After what I've done?”

I didn't yet recognize it, but the logic of ex-gay therapy, the idea that my sinful urges were somehow equal to David's, began to invade my thoughts. Of course I was sitting on the same bed as a pedophile; according to scripture, I was no better than a pedophile, or an idol worshiper, or a murderer.

When I told the Presbyterian pastor at our college what David had done to the fourteen-year-old boy, she told me to stay quiet. That I had no real evidence, that it was a bad thing, yes, but there was nothing to be done. I believed my silence was due punishment. I didn't tell her about what he had done to me, in part because I suspected that rape and shame was what gay sex was all about, but mostly because I was too embarrassed to admit that I hadn't been strong enough to fend him off, and I was worried that she would interpret this weakness as a submission to homosexuality.

“Okay,” I said, reading the leather-bound spines that circled her office shelves, wondering if these theologians, too, had found a way to dodge such difficult issues. If life was ever going to make sense again, I would have to search harder for clear answers.

David called my mother a few weeks later, out of his own desperate guilt, and told her that her only son was a
homosexual
, a
gay
.

“He's disgusting,” he said to her. “A monster.”

I found out from a mutual friend that my mother was on her way to the college to take me back home, and I sat in my friend's dorm room quietly sobbing into a plush pillow while she patted my back. According to a friend who'd heard it from David, my mother had said over the phone that my father wasn't going to continue paying for my education if I was going to be openly gay. I turned off my cell phone, hoping I could block out what was coming to me.

My mother drove to the college that night and asked me to come home to talk to my father. She brought another woman from church with her because she was afraid to face me alone. The other woman waited in the car, her eyes avoiding mine, as my mother and I sat on a bench just outside the quad. My mother asked me, in a voice quieter than I'd ever heard her speak, if what she had heard was true.

“No,” I said at first. “David's a liar.”

A minute of silence passed. Then, feeling I could no longer keep it inside, I burst into tears and told her it was true, that I was gay. Saying the word aloud made me feel sick inside, and I wondered if what David had forced me to swallow had somehow grown inside of me, rendered me permanently gay.

Embarrassed, my mother led me to the car. The other woman didn't say a word. As I lay in the backseat quietly sobbing, watching the high-line wires move among the stars, I thought,
What else could have come from this?
The moment I'd stepped away from the shower, the PlayStation soaking in the tub behind
me, I'd taken on an independent life. I'd taken on too much at once, and I'd gagged on the freedom of it.

Later that night, when my father said, “You'll never step foot in this house again if you act on your feelings. You'll never finish your education,” I thought,
Fair enough
.

I looked up at the gilded picture frames covering our living-room wall, at all the smiling faces of our family members looking down at me from happier vantage points, at Aunt Ellen when she was beautiful and oblivious, and I thought,
Anything. I'll do anything to erase this part of
me.

W
ake up. Shower. Eat breakfast. Travel. Arrive at office.

By the third Moral Inventory, by the fifth day of therapy, I had already revealed to my LIA group what I felt were all of my carnal sins, though I never actually told them what David had done to me, too afraid God would punish me further if I revealed the secret. I felt hollowed out. Certainly not cured, but no longer filled with the sins I'd kept secret for so long. Yet rather than feeling relieved, I felt—what, exactly? My guilt and fear had all but disappeared in only a matter of days, replaced by what I could only describe as Nothing. It was Nothing that led me through the facility's white hallways. It was Nothing that brought the fork to my mouth during lunch breaks. Nothing steadied my voice as I read aloud my list of sins before the group. And it was Nothing that sent me to the bathroom to stare into the mirror at the gaunt, hollow-eyed
face of a boy who, only a week before, I would have considered on the verge of some vague, awful business. It was the face of a newly minted addict, a stranger you might see on the city sidewalk carrying his childhood stereo to the pawn shop, rainbow Lisa Frank stickers still curling around the edges—but rather than the soiled T-shirt that usually accompanied such a face, here was a white button-down, a perfectly pleated pair of khakis, and the smile this face mustered was, despite the lack of emotion behind it, as real as any waiting outside the plywood door. In the brief moments when Nothing left me, I felt, just above an eddy of unsourced pain, a kind of pride.
I can do thi
s, I thought.
I can do this better than anyone else here
.

In my saner moments, I wondered why I'd ever indulged such hubris. Here was J, devoted to God as a slave to his master, as a “bond servant” to his owner, as our Addiction Workbooks instructed us it should be. Here he was, telling me he'd managed an almost perfect score on his ACT, an all but free ride to any university of his choice, and what did he make of it? “I know God can use this brain,” he'd said one day. “I just have to fix the weak parts, study more.”

And here was S, struggling with her sexuality for so many years and then suddenly discovered because of one act in the midst of a lonely afternoon in her trailer, an experiment you might hear about in any pocket of high school gossip—“Did you hear about that freak girl and her dog?”—now trying to twist her soul around so it could fit the image of corruption her parents saw in her.

And T, the man whose struggle was most evident; who took on all of our scars, Christlike, and suffered the almost daily stigma/stigmata of it while standing before our group—how could I compete? They had all been in the facility longer, knew on a day-to-day basis what the struggle was really like. They had gone through Nothing and come out on the other side with Something, even if that Something was the urge to keep struggling, keep fighting, keep denying the sin. But I wasn't so sure I would make it out of my doubt. One year of college had done exactly what my father and the church had warned me against: turned me into a skeptic, a heretic, someone who second-guessed everything he felt or saw.

“The more confused you feel, the closer you get to the source of childhood trauma,” Smid had said earlier that morning. The Source: Unlike my program's name implied, I was being carried out by an undertow into shoreless waters, lost in this constant questioning of my past. The night before, while filling out my Addiction Workbook, I'd gotten so confused by the questions that I'd sneaked out of the hotel room sometime after midnight to jog a few laps around the suburban neighborhood, yellow pools of streetlamp light drawing me deeper into the cul-de-sacs, my sneakers squeaking, endorphins kicking in midjog so that I could concentrate long enough on my confusion to question it.
Describe fully knowing others and them fully knowing you
. Had I ever fully known anyone? Had anyone ever fully known me? What did that even mean?

I felt like running all the way down to the ink-black
Mississippi and daring myself to jump in, to surrender myself to the pull. Though I wasn't suicidal like T was, I liked flirting with death. The glamour of Ending It All, and so suddenly, wasn't much of a leap up from the End Times sensationalism of our family's church. There was also pleasure to be had in knowing that the end could come at any time without warning. You might be going about your daily life, thinking everything is fine, when suddenly—
boom!
—the levees break, the waters rise, and every hateful object you know becomes treasure now belonging to a Lost Kingdom: artifacts for future, more enlightened excavators to ponder. Life taking on greater meaning in the aftermath. All this senseless pain somehow making sense in the end.

But suicide being one of the unpardonable sins, I kept to the suburban circuit, wrapped in amber-colored vapor light. I tried praying,
Lord, make me pure
, but all I felt was an echo in my head. For the time being, it seemed like God had abandoned me. Like the Underground Man, I was trapped in stasis, in Nothing.

•   •   •

T
HE
FEELING
reminded me of a story I'd heard when my family vacationed near Lake Norfork at the edge of the Ozarks. A local resident told us that an entire town had been buried deep beneath the water. Depression-era farmers and their families had been required to relocate once the Norfork Dam began construction. Schoolhouses and churches and post offices, all abandoned. Bodies in old graves exhumed and relocated to
higher ground. Apocryphal tales soon followed: a motorcycle buoyed up by the water—the weight of objects no longer a factor in this underwater world, everything released from its station in life—now resting atop a steel bridge. Old town names like Henderson, Jordan, Herron, Hand. All nearly gone, eroded by water, every trace erased in the name of progress.

“Don't let it worry you,” my mother said, catching sight of the fear in my eyes as I waded through the water beside our rented pontoon boat. I imagined steeples grazing my ankles. A literal hand from Hand pulling me under. “The towns are really, really deep.” My mother spraying Banana Boat suntan oil onto her freckled arms, spreading it up to her red shoulders: a creature, it seemed to me in the moment, of the land, resisting the inevitable pull of the water that would one day bury us all. This was a source of both comfort and anxiety. None of this really mattered, yet
none of this really mattered
, an equally terrifying idea. Except, of course, when I considered what the Bible had to say about our brief lives on earth, and then
all of this really mattered
.

Pillars of flame and sand, locusts devouring cities whole: The stories of Christianity were swift demolitions leading, ultimately, to fulfillment. Sodom. Gomorrah. But what happened when the fulfillment never came? What happened when you never adjusted to the loss of what had once been so familiar? You can only walk on water, like Peter, if you don't question it.
People once lifted their heads in prayer to the very spot where the balls of my feet now tread
, you might think.
People once
believed, and struggled, and lived—and now that's forgotten
. Once you begin to question it, you sink quickly to the bottom unless someone like Jesus pulls you back up and chastises you for your lack of faith, your lack of vision.

But where was Jesus in all my time at the facility? Where was His steady nail-scarred hand? The prayers I continued to recite each night became even more desperate and meaningless.
Please help me to be pure
.
Please-help-me-to-be-pure
.
Pleasehelpmetobepure
.

Nowhere. Nowhere was the answer.

•   •   •

I'
D
STILL
been able to return to the hotel room an hour after my midnight run. I'd still been able to sit down at the desk without fidgeting too much and write out the answers to the Addiction Workbook's questions to the best of my ability: “I've never fully known anyone. I only thought I knew who I was. And then the thing with David happened, and I suddenly realized that I'd been faking it the whole time. Because I didn't know myself, because I'd been faking it, I didn't know David. This was one of the reasons why I was unable to protect myself from him. I had allowed Satan to convince me that I was a strong warrior for Christ when, in fact, I was living a sinful life. I need God's strength to become stronger, to be filled up with knowledge of who I am and who others around me truly are.”

I no longer knew if any of this was true, if there were any answers for what had happened, or if God even cared
anymore. But even if I lacked my peers' conviction, I might still prove to be the best at public confession.

•   •   •

L
UNCH
. Moral Inventory. Short break.

All morning I stared at the pale patch of skin on my left wrist, willing time to jump forward, waiting for the moment when my mother would come again to pick me up.
One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day
. My father had often quoted this verse in a popular sermon of his, “One-Tenth of a Day,” asking congregants to consider the brevity of their lives. “Work out the math for yourselves,” he'd preached, “and you'll see that our lives are much too short.” It was to this idea that I returned as Nothing led me through each block of my schedule, as I prayed to Nothing when the counselors asked us to bow our heads before thick slabs of casserole and thank God for the Hamburger Helper. If I could just think of these two weeks as a few milliseconds. Once this was over, once my head felt less crowded, I might even find God waiting for me on the other side, ready to listen once again to my prayers.

“It's important to recognize the deficiencies in your life,” Danny Cosby, one of the main staff counselors, was saying now, standing in the middle of our group, his salt-and-pepper hair backlit by the glare from the sliding glass door. Smid wasn't scheduled to lead any workshops this afternoon, so Cosby was taking his place. Cosby was giving a talk, once again, on the necessity of sports. Cosby was telling us that a lack of sports in
childhood could lead to effeminate behavior. He told us he was just the man for the job. A recovering alcoholic who came by sports naturally, he was as straight as any man I'd ever met. He told us he used a work ethic he'd learned from being a team player to pull himself out of his alcoholism—all with the help of God, of course—his life containing all the necessary raw materials to form a full recovery. He had never experienced same-sex attraction (SSA), as LIA labeled it. He'd never been through LIA's program himself, since his only major impediment in life had been alcoholism, and LIA had hired him as a counselor because they believed his extensive AA experience was the only prerequisite for curing any and all forms of addiction. He couldn't seem to understand why none of us had come by the same straight impulses naturally, but he was prepared to talk us into it. He was as good, if not better, than any car salesman my father had ever employed, though I was skeptical of his qualifications. How could a man who never knew what it was like to live with our sin possibly know what was required to pull us out of it?

“Men, I'm talking to you,” he said. The girls from our group had been dismissed for a separate talk on femininity. “Some of you haven't had the opportunity to bond with other men your own age.” The shadow of the sliding glass door's rail fell over him like a dark sash. “Some of you have idolized other men's bodies because you didn't have enough physical contact when you were younger. Maybe you thought you were bad at sports. Maybe you thought you were different.”

J was sitting across from me today. I tried to keep from looking at him each time Cosby repeated “physical contact.” He looked up only once, and his gaze was so cold it made me wonder if I'd only imagined that we'd shared a connection earlier. Even so, looking into his eyes felt intimate, the coldness he shot in my direction an indication of something acknowledged and quickly hidden.

“The problem here is the powerful influence of labeling,” Cosby continued. “You've labeled yourself the type of person who doesn't play sports. Sadly, we grow into our labels. But we can grow out of them, too.”

I was scared of Cosby. He was a man who'd dealt with drug addicts and alcoholics for most of his adult life, a man who didn't see the difference between being gay and being addicted to heroin. He'd done LSD, huffed gasoline. He'd robbed a convenience store. He'd completed all twelve steps of AA. He'd written all about it in his testimony, included a picture of himself smiling on a Harley, the words “A Life Transformed” written in script beside him. I had no idea how to talk to him. For all of my shame and guilt, I still couldn't see myself as equal to a drug addict, a bank robber. My father always said you could tell the character of a man by how he treated “low” people, how a man who refused to talk to someone lower than himself wasn't worth a cent. But I still thought I was better than all of that, and I worried that Cosby would instantly see through to my hypocrisy. I thought he might already be able to tell that I'd stopped really praying to God.

“It's important to get in touch with this part of yourself,” Cosby said. “This masculine part that's been missing for so long.”

The blond-haired greeter entered the room from the back, wheeling in a television on a portable stand. I'd grown to hate this boy's self-satisfied smile, the same smile I saw every morning as he rummaged through my belongings in search of FIs. It was a smile that seemed to say,
I've lived through this, and what you're experiencing is only a small fraction of what I've experienced
. His smile said,
It only gets worse
, but without any of the pity I saw in Smid's face. The boy was too recent a graduate, his ex-gay status only recently conferred, and he seemed to have singled me out, to have detected in me some stubbornness he'd already put behind himself, some dogged rationalism that didn't belong in a place like LIA. “I hope you're here for the right reasons,” he'd said earlier that morning, his finger slipping into the folds of my wallet. “Because if not . . .”