pK's story

I don't mind telling you my story.  It has become easier since I let a few close, lifelong friends in on my deal.  They (all three of them) were obviously curious about their good, unmarried, uninterested in any woman but obviously not gay friend.  My admissions to them about how dangerous, aberrant, and alone I felt (since I let them in on the whole truth) and which did not result in them pushing me away, as I feared it would, brought us closer together and renewed some of my faith in people.  None of them live close to me, however, and that makes the solitude even more palpable.

First of all, my poor reaction to your but for the grace of God quote (reference to another post)  wasn't because of my lack of a relationship with him.  I just don't believe that God dabbles in our lives.  He gave us what we got, including both conscience and free will, and lets us go our own way.  How could I believe he actively dabbles in earthly matters with so much pain in the world; if he is willing to make good things happen why wouldn't he be willing to make the bad things stop?

No, I see him as I learned about him through my experience, not that of others; as my creator and final judge.  Nothing in between, unless I someday choose to use my own peculiar view of him as a source of strength.  I included that to answer your first question.  God and I struck a bargain when I was 12 or so; I'd not ask him for the impossible and he'd let me sleep without nightmares.

Neither of us have lived up to that bargain, but no surprises there.  The two of us are only human after all.

Me by birth and him by popular, historical invention!

I do believe he gave me a special mix and that, along with my strong values due to a loving family, has allowed me to resist despair when I was young, find strength to turn adversity and perversity into focus in recent times, and the character to know what I am without making it about what I do!  But enough talk of God.

First, to know my story, you must realize how utterly Roman Catholic my family is.  Going back to my grandparents, everyone attended Catholic schools.  Among my parents very favorite people are numerous clergy; priests and nuns from their respective childhood and adult life as active participants in the church.

We lived 1 block from the parish grade school I attended for 8 years.  I went on, like my 2 brothers, to 4 years of Catholic high school in a neighboring city.  When I was 7, my family took in a 16 year old girl whose mother had just died and father was desperately ill, through the catholic field service.  J lived with us for 2 years, my only "sister.  Oh, how I loved her.  She went to the same high school I later attended and when she graduated and left our home I was devastated.

I still so vividly recall the night she told us she was leaving, my crying myself to sleep with her stroking my head telling me shed still be around, and she was right about that.  Her kids are my niece and nephew and she is family through and through to this day.

Later that year, when I turned 9, another young lady named T, age 18 I think, came to us the same way.  I was so thrilled to have a sister again.  But T was not J.  She quickly took a shine to me and began making me perform oral sex on her and I really hated that.  Imagine the mixed feelings I had; my new "sister, whom I wanted to love like J, making me do things I knew were wrong.  I didn't even equate it with sex.  I was too young and ignorant.   But the furtive and dirty undertones were quite obvious to me at that age.  Don't tell was implicit.

When I finally went to the priest and confessed my "sin", sought his help to make it stop, he and the other father must have decided that I was fair game and they began their own set of games with me.  And games they became; I learned to enjoy our sessions, even look forward to them despite the continued furtive, dirty, and shameful undertones that rapidly became overt overtones.

Dirty and shameful from the names they liked to call me in the throes of their ecstasy; furtive in the explicit demands that I not tell a soul under threat of eternal damnation, public humiliation since I'd be branded a queer and nobody would believe me over them anyway, and plain old adult over child intimidation!

This kept up until we moved away from the immediate parish locale and although I continued to go to that same school, their opportunity for sex with me was never the same and things just tapered off by the time I was 14 and out of that school and into a private high school.

The only bad years of my life, according to my parents and me, as measured by getting into trouble, were the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades when I was rebellious, angry, sad, crying if you looked at me wrong, messing my pants, making mostly As on the left side of my report card (academics) and mostly Us- unsatisfactory - on the right (conduct, attitude, etc.).  Go figure, right?

The one fact that still escapes me is how they never got caught.  As with T. first sneaking up on me in the semi-secure half-toilet in our basement; or with the priests who stalked the bathrooms and doorless toilets looking for action.  I do recall that it got worse from that standpoint after we moved, since before we moved I could at least "hold it" until I could run home for lunch and go to the bathroom there, or run home after school for the same.  But when we moved, I was stuck with a lavatory I couldn't physically avoid but could hardly bear to use.  No wonder I was shitting my pants.

To this day I can't pee with the prospect of someone watching or take a dump in an unlocked toilet.  I have a particularly acute sense of anger at the entire toilet and privacy invasion deal.

I spent 2 whole years in the HS classes with the boneheads while my friends (2 from my old parish school and the rest from other nearby parish schools) all went right to the accelerated classes.  I had to sit with the until my grades finally allowed me into the intelligentsia in 11th and 12th grades.  I seethe when I recall sitting in that strange HS room (the high schools study hall as it turns out) unable to concentrate on my HS entrance exam but having to take a dump and being petrified that the HS toilets were just like the grade school ones; no doors.

I fiddled, twitched, crossed my legs, and finally in the last break sprinted for the john only to discover with great joy (hooray for the next four years) and dismay (wow, I just fucked up my HS entrance test for no other reason than a rational/irrational fear).  That is still a hard one to let pass.  That I made it to the accelerated level in my junior year was some consolation but missing the national honor society by 4 class ranks (I was 28; 24 was the cut off) was the bullshit and unbearably bitter icing on the cake for me.

By then I had embarked upon a private crusade against the phony facade I saw then as the church and her minions but now realize were just people; very sad, confused, lonely people not wholly unlike me now; except of course in perpetuating the behavior I feel was quite likely a reality in their own respective pasts.  I understand the pull of the past.  But I, unlike them, seem to understand that I cannot fulfill my own needs without robbing another of his!

My desire, ability, or whatever is the normal motivation for trust has been fairly non-existent to this day.  My parents, to their credit, knew something was up and sent me to a psychiatrist when I was 11 (quite an avant thing to do in the mid 1960s), who did nothing but badger me for two months using the same line my parents had over and over (whats wrong with you?).   Today I look back and laugh at that morons clinical ineptitude.  I knew even then there was nothing wrong with me but I just couldn't find a way to tell them.  The negative scrutiny was too much so I just stopped.

Stopped crying, stopped acting up, stopped shitting my pants, stopped all that clinically clich stuff.  But I realize now that I stopped feeling too.  Feeling al most everything, that is, except fear.  I felt that fine, thank you very much.  I ended up acting passionate about all but which passion is truly about; love.

You might recall the line from my rap song, Oremus Pro OG (pray for the original gangsters in Latin; when you smile all the time you don't have to try; when all seems fine no one ever asks why. I just channeled it all into trying to excel at whatever I was doing; intellectual arenas, sports (although I always wanted to be more excellent than I was), class, boy scouts, being nice, whatever it is that I found myself doing at the time.

Focus on excellence and the other stuff won't come up!  To this day not much has changed on that score.   Except over the years that maddening line of whats wrong with you began to come from inside of me and not from others!

The priest-sex, which by the way was just like with T. (me servicing them all the time, having graduated to anal and oral as opposed to just oral but with no attention whatsoever paid to my desire, which was rampant by that time), just kind of ended when I moved on to high school.

But by that time I had begun puberty and all the new sexual knowledge I acquired (sex education), sexual feelings which were all messed up by that time, and my friends new attraction to girls when what I wanted to think of was anything but sex and having by then finally realized that sex was what I had been doing for those long three years, all pushed me towards perfecting a skill I was already really good at; ignoring my pain and any real feelings just to avoid any negative scrutiny.

What wonderful pleasure?, I remember thinking about sex, as my friends continued to talk of little else as we went from 12 to 13 and on to high school?  Are they nuts, I recall thinking?

During my early adulthood, I was quite aware that my sexual development just hadn't gone the way of those I have counted as my friends.  Particularly when I was a biologist and fresh out of college, a time that stands out as among my best and most special, sexual isolation became my island and all my friends and associates there just pretty much decided (I know, because the topic came up once or twice) that I was shy or was just "waiting for the right person".

Straight or gay was not as much an issue as sexual inactivity.  In a liberal place and time where preference wasn't much of an issue, lack of promiscuity became my brand.  I pushed the only women I ever truly loved out of my life when I was 25 because the sex was excruciating; exciting, yes, but it made me feel dirty, physically sick to my stomach afterwards, moving off someplace else, alone, crying and puking in that not-so-classic afterglow of sex, although I admit now that at the time it was at least novel to experience sex where my pleasure was part of the program.

To this day my M. is a dear confidante (she knows my story and my fears) and her trust of me with her son, since her first son died in her arms of SIDS, is one of my own emotional mainstays to this day.

And so here I am thirty years later.  I knew a long time ago (since I was 12) that when I thought about exciting sex, it was boys comprising those images, not girls or women or even men.  Then, now, and probably forever.  Boys on the edge of puberty or just into it; 11, 12 ,13, maybe 14.

I didn't have to work to conjure up that icon of excitement, nor do I seek to fan its flames so to speak, but I know, in a rather innate way, it has just always been that way.  Period.  And that it always would be that way, no matter what I tried!  And that excitement seems not so much to preclude attraction to adults but super-cede it somehow.  I don't understand it but do understand the cure; isolation!

And thus my lifelong dilemma; how to change the icon of my sexual excitement?  No therapy, procedure, or approach I have tried has had any effect.  And why it is that sex with women sickens me but the few tries I have had at sex with men as a man were at least not-sickening to me is truly a mystery to me even today.  I sometimes prayed that I was gay, as a teenager, but never really followed up on it for whatever reasons; lack of opportunity, conviction, or sheer overall distaste for sex?

Who knows.  I'm sure I don't. And why is it that sex with women is a disgusting notion but the notion of sex with guys is not, even though I am and have been quite sexually inactive for quite some time?  Well, I have no clue there either.

As I learn more about human beings, how we develop, and the affects of trauma on that development, I sometimes think I might have been born gay but had that taken from me too.  I still seethe to realize I am virtually celibate by choice in a way that those who so dramatically affected my life had promised to be but couldn't honor!

That particular irony can really drive me up a wall so I rarely go there anymore.  And my deepest regret is not what I am, my solitude, a life devoid of intimacy and dominated perhaps by a fear of it, or even my deep seated fear that one day I will just stop trying and go for it, but that I am a virtual stranger to my family.  They love me, care for me, we talk all the time, all is ostensibly cool with the world between us and they believe they know me in and out, but if they suspect that something is up with me they won't ask and I, apparently, won't tell.

One dynamic in my family has always centered around excellence and my mothers semi-frail emotional balance.  I call it the bring me no bad news syndrome.  I learned early in life to "suffer in silence.  Although generally said in flippant response to typical childhood whining, I recognized it as real then as I do now.

I once told my mom and dad about an Achilles heel problem I was having from too much tennis in some bad shoes and their response before I could tell them anything, how worried I was that it might be rheumatoid arthritis, although I know they care about me, was well, if you feel you have to tell us.  Its not that they don't care but ever since my younger brother almost died several times from the age of 3 months to three years, they just can't handle much emotion.  Or that's my theory on it, anyway.  I recently suffered a kidney cyst and unable to do a biopsy without surgery, they tried to remove it via external methods.  Ultra-sound finally prevailed and all the tests they could run indicated that it had been benign.  I got to keep a potential malignancy a secret from everyone, for the sheer lunacy of protecting them from worry, and when I told them after it was all over about it, they actually thanked me, again, for sparing them the worry.  No mention of none months spent alone with a cancer I never had but worried for every waking moment, not a word of sorrow for my solitude even during a feared malignancy!

Im sure it is much more complicated than I can know since my mother's father was a fun and wonderful grandparent but Im sure living with him, the Irish alcoholic through and through, was no picnic for a young girl or the woman who grew to take care of him since his wife died when I was still a baby.

And I feel quite strongly that telling them 30 years later about my life when they knew something was up with me even then but could not coax from me would crush them.  Making them feel that they put me in harm's way would hurt them in a way I think is selfish of me to want to bring up now.  As would the knowledge that I didn't trust them enough to tell them way back then!  Hell, I don't trust them enough to tell them now!

I guess my brothers will have to one day get let in on the secret.  However, the fact that they both have sons scares me.  Not that I fear that I would jump them but that my brothers, in their duly correct parental mode, would worry and even treat me differently because of it.  I have a hard time thinking any other way than who could blame them for that?

I learned long ago that I feared not boys I knew, those who trusted me, but the stranger, that grimy, wild child I know exists.  One who, much like me, learned at an early age that sex for attention and love was not a wholly bad deal!

I wrote a poem about a chance encounter I had with an injured street kid; Crossing Paths.  Helping him, stopping his pain & bleeding, bandaging him up, and then making him smile and even laugh at the end was wonderful.  Imagine hating yourself for doing such a good thing because down deep you know what you really want is a sexual encounter with him!  But I also know (and learned long ago) that wanting isn't getting, thoughts are not actions, and that not doing can be as important a virtue as doing when weighed against ones conscience!

So there it is...my story...is it about love?  Boys?  Boylove?  life?  the love of life even without love?  fear of life?  I truly don't know.

Whatever love is, I feel there's enough of it going around in my life without complicating it further by messing up other lives via marriage, breeding, or some other such soulful contact.

Frankly, in a weak admission and unusual moment of self-pity I truly don't feel as if I can chance, or deserve, much more!

pK
 

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