And When He Gets To Heaven,

To Saint Peter He Will Say,

“I’ve Had My Fill Of Hades, Sir,

It’s Here I Wish To Stay.”

–the Survivor’s Creed

I’m really down. I mean really down. I feel so flat, drained and sad. We all get this way. Survivors include most of the people of Planet Earth. Victims, every one. In some countries disease, hunger and living in filth with no hope, day after day. No hope for help. A mother who raises a child to adulthood may have lost six to disease, malnutrition or any of a thousand other horrors.

In other places, suppressive government rule robs the people of simple, basic human rights.

In still others, people have lived with war all their lives, maybe on and off, but mostly on. Sudden violent death and severe injuries cripple the young and the old. Children die of diseases which could be prevented by vaccines and medicines routinely intercepted by warlords so evil they could make the devil himself burn with envy.

We all have our down days. Then we get to thinking about those people who live hellishly every day.

It should be a comfort to we who can get medicine and sleep in a bed after a meal.

I am blessed, but I often, at this time of year, wonder if I deserve to be.

I hurt. Plenty of pain in my body, more in my heart. But it’s not about me. Not only me.

I also hurt for others. I don’t care who they are or where they are. If they’re hurting, I know them. I know survivor’s agony.

You see singers, celebrities. The Me Too movement. You hear their stories, and as bad as they are, they appear so happy with their lives, their success. Some even accommodate the paparazzi by smiling for the camera.

But underneath it all they get alone and cannot avoid their pain, the demons that come with being hurt by someone who had power, leverage. Someone evil.

You may at times see a tweet that just doesn’t seem right coming from them. They remove them but always someone has a screenshot of it. You, bewildered, never know what darkness they so often are surrounded by.

Most people think that it’s rare for men of power to sexually abuse those who have talent and want a contract. Behind closed doors all over the world, people who seem like upstanding members of society force themselves on the weak and the desperate. Every single day. The victims, later called “survivors”, hurt. They hurt way down deep into their very souls.

Forever.

These people are my brothers and sisters. I cannot help but love and pity them. So many more live in silent agony and never speak of the things that haunt their nightmares, the waking kind and those dreamt in sleep.

September-October: a Curse

There’s a special hatred in my heart for the months of September and October.

So many hard memories come back to me every year this month, and the stupid ones probably more than any others.

First, school started after Labor Day. The first day was always the worst. I might make a new friend but I knew we wouldn’t stay friends for very long. That never happened.

Bullies were always like strutting roosters trying to impress the girls and scare weaker or meek kids. The playground was a place I loathed.

The first time I had a girlfriend, we had spent every possible minute together over the summer of 1968. Barbara was long-legged like a foal but somehow graceful. Looking at her made me dizzy. In her I found all the affection I was missing. She wasn’t hesitant about kissing on the mouth. As much as it was possible for our age, we were very much in love with each other. She sought my company above anyone else in a community full of kids. She was happy and quick to smile and she gave me happiness at a terrible time in my life. But in September, after-school playtime was limited by homework. We saw even less of each other in October when Daylight Savings kicked in. By the winter, early December, her father announced they were moving to Thailand and I had to say goodbye. Well I didn’t want to say goodbye. And I knew I couldn’t. The day she told me, she was hurting. I remember I asked if I would ever see her again, and she said softly but with certainty, “No”.

My heart broke.

When their moving day came, her dad stopped by on their way out. He accompanied her to our door and I, hiding under the bed with a quilt hiding me so nobody could see me if they looked under the bed, stifled little sobs. I didn’t want to be found. It was rainy and cold so everyone knew I wasn’t outside playing. It was a dark day anyway. December rains are like that. They depress and suck the life out of you.

I guess that was fitting.

In a child’s way, we were soul mates. I dare say many kids never get to experience something that wonderful. I did.

Mother did come into my room. I’m sure she looked under the bed. And she probably knew I was hiding. But she went back downstairs and said she couldn’t find me.

And that was it. I never heard from Barbara again. The Vietnam War was responsible; he was military, her dad, and probably Air Force because our bombers and some smaller planes were stationed in Thailand.

I’ve never forgotten her. She was a gift I could not repay God for if I lived a thousand years.

Many times I have known, without a doubt, with absolutely pure faith, that God put certain people near me so we could cross paths. Usually for the better, and almost always in times when I was heartbroken, confused and in tears more than usual, and that’s saying something, believe me.

I don’t believe in coincidence; too many times there were things that just didn’t happen every day, stunning things to astonish the most jaded bookies in the world.

The following September I fell in love at first sight with a girl named Lee Ann. She was beautiful like an angel. I never spoke to her. By the year after that, I still loved her. Only her.

No other person alive. Just her.

September of 1970 was a blur. I tried not to, but I’d catch myself staring at her. I never spoke one word to her. That was horrible. But I remembered Barbara and I never wanted to feel that kind of pain again. But then, near the end of October, the Los Angeles Rams and QB Roman Gabriel went to Minnesota to play the Vikings on Monday Night Football. Gabriel was one of my heroes and the Rams one of my favorite teams. I snuck down the steps just a little bit to peek at the TV through the railing. Another floor down, my father caught me. He was mad. I was supposed to be sleeping. But when I tried it again my mother told him I was on the steps again. I don’t know why I did it. I was a football nut, even playing football with the Lake Shore Spartans. I traded football cards at school. Trading cards was the only thing I could connect with other guys on. It was a lot of fun. Everything that I loved either had to do with Lee Ann or football.

This time my father didn’t just yell. I knew what was coming; it’d happened so many times before. How long it took him to wear himself out I don’t know, but that night he literally spent himself swinging that dreaded belt. It cut deep into my back and I kept hearing his rage-filled voice screaming “Move your hands, boy!” and I wouldn’t do it because it’s natural to protect yourself with your arms and hands. He beat my back, the end of the belt curling around my arms. Blood was on them, they were wet. He didn’t give a fuck.

I’ve had to live with the stupidity it took for me to push it, the terror I feel every time I remember it; another trauma thrown on the pile.

But you had to be an NFL fan back then to get it. How pure the game really was. Gabe had a style of play like few quarterbacks in history; if he couldn’t find an open receiver he’d pick the biggest pile of linemen and try to barge through them. At one time he held the record for most career fumbles. He was a blast to watch. It was like he wanted to be hit. Hall of Famer. It was a time before the lacrosse helmets of today, a time when men tried to maim each other every single down.

I guess if I’d known what would happen I wouldn’t have done it. Any other father would say something like “you can stay up until halftime” or anything, but not beat the kid bloody.

The next day was going to be warm. I had to wear a long sleeved shirt. No dressings covered my oozing red stripes. It wasn’t just warm, it was hot. At recess I overheated and got dizzy. Heck, considering I was probably in a mild state of shock and dehydrated, I was lucky to live through it. People have died from surprisingly less.

A teacher’s aide had me sit at a desk and put my head down. With a wet paper towel on my forehead. The door to the outside stood open. Two people came in. I had a funny feeling and looked up. Lee Ann looked at me, maybe for the first time. I felt like crying, her seeing me like this. I put my head back down in shame.

I didn’t know that one of my sleeves had walked up with my arm bent, my head resting on my wounds. The teacher’s aide told me that I should pull my sleeves up to cool off. When I said I couldn’t, I knew she looked at my arm and saw the end of a stripe but she said nothing. She left me alone.

The September-October curse followed me every damned year and I stopped, at some point, appreciating the colors of autumn and even looking forward to Halloween. Oh, I’d still go, and there were friends I’d usually go around with. I made the best of it.

I just did the best I could.

Then there were the three sisters who lived uphill, two houses away. Laurie, Sue and Katy. I became, at their hands, the only guy I knew to be harrassed by girls to the point that I dreaded going to the bus stop. First day of school and Laurie, the eldest, older than I was, called me “Bambi” because I had long eyelashes. I never got to go see Disney movies until I saw “The Boatknicks” with a friend in the summer of 1970. And Bambi was not on my wish list.

Sue didn’t say much around me. She clearly did not like me and I didn’t like her either, never did. She had made up her mind very fast that despite her older sister’s jokes at my expense, I wasn’t worth even that. The youngest one appeared in a dream a few nights ago. Strange things, my dreams.

In the dream, Katy was defending me against someone and I thought it was pretty cool. I saw little of her but once, we tried hanging out. Just innocent talk. I got the feeling she was lonely and a loner. Kind of like me. She told me I was supposed to be some bad boy. I tried so hard to tell her I wasn’t and she acted like she believed me but I never saw her again.

In the fall of 1975 I was put into a private school. A tie and jacket kind of school. By then I hated school with everything I had, was seriously traumatized and learning disabled. My father thought money could buy anything and I would automatically excel academically. Little did he realize that he and mother had done so much damage that there was not a chance in hell that I’d ever graduate. And I never did.

So now, tonight, I’m down. I think back on how Kerry, my crush in the summer of ’74, said something on the bus one day to Sue. It must have been something like “I think Mike Smith likes me”, to which Sue shouted incredulously, “Mike Smith!? He’s terrible!”

Like I was some kind of loser.

But I wasn’t a loser. Of us three, I was the winner. The fortunate one because I could love. And there’s nothing about love that is negative. Sorry, girls.

I never saw Kerry again but her dad had been a mentor to me, a friend. I did get in touch with him a while back but he wasn’t keen on it so everyone I knew is gone from my life now. I’m so broken and alone.

The time then comes, as it always seems to, for the bad memories, triggered by the September-October curse, to begrudgingly allow good ones to flood my head, great memories of lost loves, of having such fear of losing again to keep me away from Lee Ann that I never once, from third to sixth grade, spoke to her. And I remember loving her enough to stay away because by then I knew. Every day I knew it more certainly than the day before: I was a terrible mess and I would have said or done something to hurt her. I managed to fail every woman I’ve been with, and I’ve lost them, but Lee Ann was someone I’ve loved every day, even now, and the one I dared not get close to. It was a kind of respect, I guess; one of the nobler things I’ve ever done.

Tonight I think of her and wonder what might have been had I not been a victim. If tonight I didn’t have to write as a survivor.

Let me tell it again: a survivor is not someone who beat PTSD from incest, rape and horrendous mental, physical or sexual abuse. They just managed to get out alive. Some, like me, tried suicide. Most just do the best they can. God has great pity on the abused, the survivors, because He knows what they’ve been through and what haunts them every minute they live, even in sleep. He sees the pain of the wounded, He counts their tears. What we do to each other is hateful and a horror to Him.

To you, if this time of year is a trigger, I say, seek help for depression and suicidal thoughts. Your life matters. It always has and it always will. Pass on what you’ve learned and don’t be afraid of reliving pain when writing or blogging, because the pain will be with you always. Together we can change the world a bit at a time.

I do have good memories and I treasure them. The painful ones, I never stop learning from. But I have to admit one thing before I go.

I’ve been through hell. And I hope I’ve done some penance for my hate, anger and hurtful things I’ve done or said for failingthose who loved me, especiallymy children, who are in Heaven, and I pray I’ll get to Heaven. I’ve had quite enough of Hell.

As always, I humbly thank you for stopping by, and letting me be a small part of your life.