My Story - Part 1

March 31, 1996

It was a beautiful autumn day and for the first time in months, I had nothing to do. I filled up my 1968 mini with fuel and drove out of the city. The mini's little wheels sang over the smooth tar as I drove further and further up the coast, past a stream of small fishing villages. Late afternoon found me in a barren stretch where the only sign of human habitation is the deserted road running along the ocean. I pulled over and climbed out, drawing my lungs full of the cool, salty air. I climbed through the barbed-wire fence, and out onto the rocks that had replaced the smooth, sandy beaches a few kilometers to the South.

I don't know how long I sat there, but I remember that, as the time passed, I noticed the fog bank on the horizon getting thicker and closer until even the breakers became hazy. Slowly, as the fog moved in, I became aware of something beautiful.

Happiness.

Happiness caught me by surprise. It wasn't a sudden, overwhelming rush, like a heroin or cocaine high. It wasn't wild excitement, like a party with too much alcohol. It wasn't an adrenaline rush, and it bore very little resemblance to relief, or even sex. It was quiet, peaceful and comfortable. It was a space devoid of fear and anger, that I was perfectly comfortable to occupy by myself.

As I set there, basking in the happiness, one thought kept coming back to me - its over. I got away. I was no longer at the mercy of men or drugs. I had lost a lot in the process, but I would recover. Like a gecko, I have dropped my tail, and left it to preoccupy the enemy while I escaped. And like a Gecko, I will grow another tail and life will carry on.

In the beginning

I grew up in a small, low-income community, sandwiched between the heavy industrial plants, mountains, and the city centre. The wrong side of the tracks.

Our house was small - two bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen and lounge. I shared the second bedroom with my twin brother John (not his real name), and my older half-brother Peter (not his real name). Because the room was only big enough for two single beds, John and I shared a bed. We were poor, but not impoverished.

My father had a barber-shop, that somehow managed to survive despite the fact that he was hardly ever there. He spent most of his time on the couch in the lounge, listening to the radio and drinking cheap brandy. My grandmother once told me that he used to be different, until he joined the army. He was deployed for a year and came back an alcoholic. I might have had compassion, knowing this, if there was any way that PTSD could explain his sexual perversion.

My mother worked at a florist, when she was sane enough to report for work. Between them, they earned enough money to ensure that we always had food, although it was sometimes just bread. We always had clothes and shoes, even after paying for my father's brandy. I often wonder how much money we would have had, had the bulk of my father's income not gone straight to the liquor store.

Lack of money, however, was not the worst part of my childhood at all. My father was a sick, twisted man. Under the influence of Brandy, he was aggressive, beating us with his fists or with any tool he could lay his hands on. One of his favourite tools was an electrical cord. But neither his fists, nor any tool could hurt as much as his words. The wounds he inflicted on my body have all healed long ago, but I am still fighting to recover from the wounds his words inflicted on my soul.

And then there was the sexual abuse...

Spring or early summer, 1976

When my brothers and I came into the house, my father was sitting in his usual spot on the couch, listening to the radio and drinking brandy. He called me over to him. I was reluctant to go because I knew that he would send me on some errand. On the other hand, I knew that disobeying him would only end in me getting slapped, or worse - beaten. My body was still aching from the last beating and I really didn't want another one, so I obeyed.

I realised quickly that something strange was going on. Instead of barking an order, he held his hand out to me. I stood staring at his hand, unsure of what he wanted. After a while he reached out, grabbed my arm, and pulled me onto his lap. He told me to sit still, he wanted to feel something. Then he put his hand down my shorts.

Strangely, I don't remember being afraid at the time. My father was giving me attention - non-violent attention - and I remember that as being vaguely pleasant. At the same time, I found the feeling of being touched so intimately extremely confusing, my body's response doubly so. I didn't understand what was happening to me, or why it felt like it did. I just sat quietly, trying to not do anything that would anger him and turn him violent.

When he let me go I went to our room and continued to play with my brothers, trying not to think about it.

I didn't think about it again for a long time...

Late summer / autumn, 1977

A few months after my father first touched me, he started visiting our room at night. Sometimes he would pick one of us, touch him, kiss him and fondle his privates. Sometimes he would make all three of us stimulate him. He would make us take turns to perform oral sex on him until he came all over one, or all of us. To distract myself while this was going on, I often fantasied that I was a gecko, able to run up the walls and cling to the ceiling out of reach of my father's groping hands. Some nights the fantasy became so real that I actually saw our room, with our father in the process of abusing us, from above, as if through the eyes of a gecko. On those nights I didn't feel my father touching me and I couldn't feel his rough skin under my fingers. Those nights were much more bearable.

After several months of this, he evidently wanted more. One night, he got into Peter's bed, forced him to turn over onto his stomach and penetrated him while John and I watched. We felt utterly helpless lying there and watching them, hearing Peter sob with pain. On his way out the door, he turned around and told us - if anyone opens his mouth about this, all three of you are dead. I will kill you and hide your bodies where the police will never find it.

The next morning there was blood on Peter's sheets. Peter was silent. From that day on, Peter spent most of his time sitting on the wide windowsill in our room, staring out the window into the distance. He wouldn't play with us anymore and he spoke only when spoken to. The older brother I had always idolized, died that night and in his place a strange, distant boy was born. I will never know what went on in his head. We never spoke about it.

A few more months passed before he did the same to John and me. He raped us. We were only 6 years old. The pain was excruciating, but the worst part was not the pain - it was the experience of having my own body betray me. I didn't understand then, that the male body is pre-programmed to respond to such stimulation with an erection. I only knew that my body was doing what his did when he came to our room at night, and I wanting nothing to do with that. He told me that my body's involuntary response signaled enjoyment, and that I was dirty, perverted, and a faggot... Perhaps the most damaging part of it all: He also told me that I would never be good for anything other than being a sex toy for older men.

When you are six years old and your father tells you something, you believe him. He's a grow-up, after all, and grown-ups know these things.

Crying or showing fear when any of this happened, earned a beating. Showing emotion was absolutely not allowed. So I learnt quickly to shut down my emotions. I became a robot - quiet and compliant. I believed that if I did what he said and didn't make a sound, it would be over sooner. Only later, when he had left the room to either go to bed, or more often to get drunk and pass out on the couch, would we allow ourselves to cry, sobbing quietly, holding onto each other, deriving a tiny amount of comfort from the fact that at least we had each other.

I have often thought that sharing a bed with my twin and the closeness it fostered between us, played a majour role in helping us survive those early years. Sometimes, there really is safety in numbers.
Our mother never said a word about the blood on the sheets. I don't know if she ever even noticed.

Where was our mother?

Our mother was a strange woman - not evil, as such - just confusing, and often absent. One never knew what to expect from her and if one dared expect something, she was almost guaranteed to do the exact opposite.

Some days she was kind, loving and generous. She could conjure up surprisingly good meals from almost nothing, served with a joyful flourish. She could read bed-time stories with flair - complete with funny voices and weird sounds. More often she seemed to completely forget out existence. She would cook for herself and our father, but not for us. She would go days without speaking to us, or even acknowledging us with the flickering of an eye. She would stop washing our clothes. It was as if we were invisible to her, as if we didn't exist. During these times we would spend most of our time out on the streets, begging for or stealing food and often getting ourselves beat up by older boys for trespassing on their "turf". We learnt a lot about surviving on the streets - how to pick pockets, how to fight and even how to use knives. Most of all, we learnt when to fight and when to run!

Some days, she would be strangely paranoid, telling us to stay in our room, to hide! We were not to come out, if we heard someone in the house, we were to hide under the bed and not make a sound, not even breathe! She would dart around the house, drawing all the curtains checking and re-checking the locks on the doors. She was obviously terrified, but we had no idea of what. All we knew was that something terrible was about to happen...

We were never able to depend on her. If you told her something, she would either have forgotten by the next day, or remember you saying something completely different. She seemed emotionally incapable of soothing either heart-ache or injury: either ignoring it, or freezing up. Today I can appreciate that she had her own emotional problems, and possibly even suffered from severe mental illness, but when I was a little boy, needing his mother's love and protection, she was simply absent.

I tried to tell my mother what our father was doing to us more than once. I started off subtle, telling her that he was making us do things we didn't want to do. She seemed to misunderstand me completely, telling me that he was my father and that gave him the right to command us to do things. We had to obey him, or risk punishment. I tried again, telling her that he hurt us. She said that he was within his rights to punish us, because we were very naughty a lot of times. If we behaved, he wouldn't hurt us.

This went on for a while, with our mother continuing to either find excuses or put the blame on us, regardless of what I said. I eventually got angry with her unwillingness to listen. I started screaming at her, graphically describing what he did to us at night while she was asleep. Hadn't she seen the blood on the sheets?

She slapped my face.

The shock of the slap knocked the breath out of me. It was the first and only time she ever laid a hand on me. Unable to continue speaking, I just stared at her as she hissed, with an ice-cold anger, that he was my father and the head of the house. I was to respect him at all times and in all circumstances and that if I ever made up such stories about him again she would send me to an orphanage or a juvenile detention center.

I'm not sure which scared me most, the orphanage or the juvenile center, but I learnt two lessons that day.

Lesson 1: There is no one you can depend on, not even your own mother. People will turn against you when you need them most. It is safer to never depend on anyone.
Lesson 2: Adults are allowed to do what they want to you, and won't get in trouble for it.

From that day on, for many years, I would keep my pain and anger inside, where it would grow and fester and eventually poison my soul and destroy my sanity.

Winter, 1983

One cold winters day, my mother, quite uncharacteristically, got up early to cook us breakfast. The breakfast wasn't much - just porridge. What mattered was that it was warm, which was a relief after spending a cold night sharing a worn-our blanket with my brother, wearing too-small pajamas. After breakfast, she walked us to the door and stood there, waving goodbye. It was unusual, but we believed she was in one of her loving moods, so we just accepted it and hoped it would last a few days.

When we got home from school that afternoon, she wasn't there.

At first we didn't make much of it - after all, she had a habit of disappearing for several hours, or even a few days every now and then. When she still wasn't back by the next morning, we started getting worried. By the second night, we finally plucked up the courage to ask our father where she was.

His reply was short and curt: "She's gone".
"When is she coming back?"

I won't quote what he said in return, but he made it clear that she wasn't coming back, even if she wanted to, which she didn't. The only explanation he was willing to provide for why she left was that we were bad and didn't deserve a mother, and that she left because she got sick of our constant whining...

I wouldn't see my mother again for almost 30 years. When asked, I usually tell people that she died that day.

Like father, like son

Winter, 1983

I wasn't long after my mother left that I stole a packet of cigarettes from my father. A friend and I sat in a vacant lot near where we lived, and smoked a cigarette each. It made us cough and feel slightly nauseous, but we pushed on and finished our cigarettes. The next day we smoked another one each, and it was much more pleasant. By the third day my friend was bored with smoking, but I was determined to go through with my rebellion. I would break all the rules I could, just to show my father that I wasn't afraid of him and his beatings. I finished the packet by myself. The next packet I stole from the corner cafe. I can't remember where all the future ones came from, but I would not voluntarily be without cigarettes for almost 20 years after that.

A few months later I found a half-full Brandy bottle lying on floor in the lounge. I picked it up and took a sip. The smell revolted me - it smelled like his breath when he came into our room at night. On the other hand, I liked the warm sensation it gave me. I decided to try other types of liquor.

By then I was progressing fairly well as an apprentice pick-pocket (even sometimes actually paying for my cigarettes), so getting money was well within my abilities. I bribed a bum to buy me a bottle of what he would recommend, as long as it wasn't brandy. He bought me a 5 litre foil bag of cheap, red wine. It tasted terrible, but nevertheless I took the bag home, and got blissfully drunk behind the shed in the back-yard. Being only 12 years old, that first bag lasted me more than a week. Subsequent bags or bottles would not last that long.

Over the next few months, I became an expert at begging, borrowing or stealing money, and bribing miscellaneous bums and losers to buy me any kind of booze my money could afford, as long at it wasn't brandy. I didn't care what it tasted like. I was only after that already-familiar warmth in my gut, and the spacey, relaxed feeling that accompanied it.

I was on my way to becoming a drunk, just like my father. I was only 12 years old and heading full-speed towards the point of no return.

Part 2: Foster Care