I know that I have said that I wouldn’t make any videos, and I said that I had a face for radio but a voice for writing. I hated everything about myself then. I know I got that across.
But after Easter, I have been through continuing changes. My blog and website title has changed, even though I don’t have the power to change the web address.
Like my archived posts, I’m leaving it as it is. I want you to see the change in me. It’s real. Every day I thank God for another day and ask if there might be a way for me to help people. Because it’s easy to backslide into feeling useless and ineffective.
So, with a face for video and a voice for writing, I felt inspired to make a short video without a script, without notes, just winging it. It comes from my heart, it’s the real me, and I have to say that I felt not just inspired but also compelled to do it. I had faith that God would help me.
So here it is. If you feel so moved, give it a like or subscribe. If I get any positive feedback, I’ll do more. Please note that I’m not trained or educated in preaching, and I’m really just a sinner. Here you go then.
The seven super girls YouTube channels (7 of them) were obvious, prime examples of child exploitation and a red flag waving in front of the world. So why did it take so long to stop it all?
In this 2019 Buzzfeed article, you can go ahead and jump straight to outraged mode. First, if you have never heard of the channels, this article won’t catch you up on much. It is too short and lacks a timeline or outline on just how fucked-up the real story is.
First, let’s hit the channel for “‘tweens”, which according to one source, bracketed the ages of 8-12 years of age. All girls, all, I’m surmising, handpicked by an adult, one Ian Rylett, age 54-55 at the time of the criminal complaint.
Rylett set up a network of children who starred in YouTube videos. He directed the video content himself. It was supposed to show girls in situations that had the look of stuff kids made about kids in a kid’s world, but one of impossible and outlandish joy and perfection. At one point, the girls were assigned “best friends” and were then restricted to arranged public appearances so that they did not get spotted with friends other than their besties on the channel.
Who knows where or how it was started, but seems to me that it may have, or must have been, a trend at that time: kiddie videos. I don’t know.
I remember seeing lists of “darkest” and “most mysterious” channels on YouTube, and one seemed to monitor, without the subject’s knowledge, a girl or young woman, 24 hours a day. It was incredibly eerie, but later, this disturbing channel was “explained” as being recorded by the subject, who was very frightened of doing her own shopping or going out at all. I don’t exactly buy the explanation, but I have no better answer.
One does not need to venture far on the app to find disturbing things. But the Seven Super Girls that people thought was so cute hid a truth more horrible than I imagined when it appeared in recent news and videos. Lists showed up of “Channels banned by YouTube,” and the Super Girls made it.
Now, this Rylett guy, he did as predicted. He “molested” one of the girls. He squirreled out on the easy way and got a couple of years, maybe less because of time off for good behavior. But that good behavior is only because in prison, there aren’t any 10-year-olds to sexually assault. By now, he’s been out for a while and once again poses a danger to minors. Is that fair? No. It isn’t even justice.
In the CoV-2 crisis, no follow-up was made. Recent studies indicate that the Covid-19 virus has left many people in a “fog,” and it’s nothing to take lightly. It appears to be permanent damage and causes difficulty making decisions, concentrating, focusing, and short-term memory loss. Some of us never even knew about the Seven Super Girls or the hell they were put through. By early 2020, people were dying so fast that news channels kept a running total on the screen, and the words “Breaking News” never disappeared. Kids were forgotten or abused in different ways than you’d normally think.
Ian Rylett once announced a “sponsored” swimsuit event. It was a fake. A lie to get the girls to pose in swimsuits. Ian Rylett is a deviant predator and child abuser.
Those ain’t new. But the lengths he went through to get money and abuse children are really sickening, especially when one considers that those children had parents.
Parents who looked the other way, seeing only dollar signs.
They should all be wondering why they should believe for a minute that Rylett only molested one girl.
Which may be the most disturbing thing of all.
By 2020, it became known that the plea deal had given Rylett only 90 days in jail and had time served counted toward it. I and many others missed this news because of the pandemic, and far too many have forgotten it.
That’s what value we Americans put on child welfare. Every one of us should be ashamed.
When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?
I had to become a man. Between 6 years old and 12, I was sexually abused and being lashed. At the age of 12 I had to go to work at my father’s warehouse. At that age humping truckloads of 50 pound sacks of cocoa powder was a bit much. But I did it. Childhood? Never really had one. It lasted so little time. It ended much too quickly.
At young ages, when serious beatings combine with sexual abuse, there’s a moment. Just a second, really, when a child’s natural development is arrested. Nothing is ever “normal” after that exact moment and growth is warped and twisted from that day forward.
I did not ask to be brought up by monsters. No one ever does. My life has been drawn out, with misery and tragedy strewn in my footprints. I’ve hurt others and been hurt myself.
Losing my children was the worst thing I have ever endured. No past betrayal by my parents, no amount of abuse, ever broke my heart as much as getting the phone calls that they were gone. But the horrors don’t end there. They never end. I had to become an adult before I was prepared to. It wasn’t fair, but what ever is?
There’s a Facebook and YouTube guy. Skeeter-something. Probably used the first part because an ex-wife told everyone he’s got a skeeter-peter. That’s 70s slang for “tiny dick”.
I saw this video. On Facebook.
A Facebook video.
Skeeter-peter was working with a group who sets up pedophiles. Now, I have zero problems with anyone willing to catch predators, you understand?
Those animals are the dregs of humanity. I truly think, believe even, that they should all be executed.
I’ve studied shit like this for years, trying to figure out why what happened to me happened. Why it happens to anyone.
And I still have no idea why it happens.
All I know is that there’s something wrong with the scumbags that do it and that the world would be a better place without them.
But then again, this “sting” they did in Walmart was disgusting.
First, it’s vigilantism. I don’t approve of vigilante operations. They could be sued for what they do. Second, they engaged in a form of entrapment which some judges would use to disqualify any charges against the fuckwad in question. Oh, they had transcripts, and the bastard thought he was talking to a 14-year-old. He said sick shit like “can I fuck you without a condom” and worse. Absolutely a fucking piece of shit. At that point the file should have been submitted to local police. But they sent an operative into Walmart to make contact. Then more operatives entered the store with cameras. Skeeter-peter wouldn’t shut the fuck up, giving a running dialog that, judging by the comments, really turned people off.
I’m not going to say much more, except that the police did arrest the cockroach. The group got banned from Walmart, which is hilarious.
But they made jokes the whole time. Jokes!
Look. There’s nothing funny about child sexual abuse. These guys make survivors like me cringe. Your intentions to do something good can be lost in talk like that. It’s in bad taste, it’s bad form and it’s sick.
I’d like to be able to say I’m glad the cockroach was arrested, but the involvement of civilians risks them getting any kind of felony conviction. And predators learn from shit like this fiasco. Next time, he will be more careful and probably claim the victim he goes after.
He was incredibly stupid doing this, but he will not be so stupid in the future. And what happens if his victims won’t testify and don’t do a rape kit, and there’s nothing anyone can do?
You want to help police find predators, fine. I’m with you, but don’t do this. Because you’ll fuck it up. And I’d prefer you not get involved at all if it’s just a bunch of attention-seeking Skeeter-peter assholes who talk all the way through a 20 minute video. All you’ve accomplished is to get the guy detained and that’s not enough.
Who guards the “guards” like Skeeter-peter? They can gather all the intel and evidence they want, but actually confronting someone, no. You can’t do that. Work with the police and let them work. They can take it from there. Besides, how can you be sure that the confrontation doesn’t end up with you getting a bullet in your gut? Cornered predators are desperate and unpredictable. It’s a dangerous situation. If you’re not law enforcement, you’re taking chances with your life and anyone around you. Desperate men never stop at one shot and their hands shake. A customer 3 aisles away, maybe a kid with his or her mom, could die because of you. You can’t plan professionally and that’s dangerous. You talk the whole time and you sure aren’t aware of others. You put innocent lives at risk for your personal glory. And I’m sure you have Patreon members. Your motives, Skeeter-peter, don’t impress me. Your procedure scares me. You’re just a bunch of showboaters and hot dogs.
I have no respect for any of you. And as opposed to vigilantes as I am, I really wish you’d have just shut the fuck up and clipped the cockroach. Because you’ve created a true monster out of this predator. He will hurt kids next time.
You know, most police officers are competent. Dedicated. Some bad ones have surely gotten attention. The force does not miss them. But let them do their jobs. If you don’t, you are the goddamn bad guys. If you see something, say something. That’s how it works, Skeeter-peter.
To show how little the human race thinks of its children, then the Hamas attack of Yom Kippur proved it. I thought the attack was just rockets. It was so, so much worse. Tonight I found out. Hamas had planned this for two years. They had infiltrated Israel. They purposely targeted children. They tortured and killed them. It was an act and declaration of war and war is exactly what they’re going to get. Nobody will be able to stop Israel from the vengeance that’s coming.
Killing civilians, putting children in dog cages and torturing them to death? Crimes against humanity, war crimes and as evil as men can possibly get. And now it’s done. Hell comes next. Israel will never let this go. World War Three has probably begun.
“Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw? Oh curst Effects of necessary Law! How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan, Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.” —John Dryden
For years, I have been patient. “Calm, cool and collected”, as a departing friend at a state hospital once described as what he would remember most about me. Even in a madhouse filled with pedophiles, felons, psychopaths and the broken, I did my best to keep that part of my core self intact. I had the fight of my life doing it.
I wanted to break the madmen in half. I wanted to give victims the justice they deserved from the felons, who had escaped a stay in prison to come here. I wanted to drag the pedophiles into the woods, torture them, castrate them, then string them up and bleed them like a slain deer.
But I never did.
Growing up around truckers who would get furious over the slightest thing, having a father who worried more about outward appearance than the mental health of his own children, beating them bloody by flogging with a 50s-style thin leather belt in secret, I learned what a horrible thing true anger was. My lesson should have been to vent my own anger freely with all possible violence.
But that is not what I learned at all.
What happened to or in front of me terrified me, showing instead what evil looked like, and not the kind you see in movies, but true evil. As in, satanic, demonic and in every opposition to God’s will kind of evil.
Be kind to those who hurt you and spitefully use you. Do good things for others whom you don’t even know. Love, without condition, those who declare or show themselves to be your enemies.
These are things I retained from my life outside of school and my father’s business and home life. A dual life I had no way of understanding. By circumstance, a dual life forced on me by a man who wanted to appear to be a Christian, but, in secret, raped and whipped his children. Sometimes I felt I would go, or had gone, insane under his fucking rage and depravity. Aware that no child should ever have to endure what I and my siblings did, I felt but concealed and contained my rage, believing that, on the most basic level, abandonment (which he often threatened) was far worse than any whipping.
Ralph Leon Smith Sr. was a monster for the ages, yet he was not unique, and far from the worst. I’ve since read accounts of the deeds of both men and women who were in a class by themselves. Human beings who, on the inside, had shed every basic characteristic of humanity and given themselves to madness, power, greed and more.
How could I feel so hurt when compared with what others had endured, often to their dying breath?
The victims of the Holocaust…
I have never been able to reconcile the two. They are aat odds with my living code and sense of self, my soul.
Because even as a child, no matter what I endured, I felt the most outraged at–and for–my sisters.
How I wanted to love them. And how I did love, for so long, siblings who went through what I was sure was more horrible than anything I did.
Because girls were different. Old movies where the scene of a man slapping a woman triggered me. Badly. My father using the belt across my mother’s face fractured my soul and that part of it was lost. Since then, like Lord Voldemort, I’ve dropped many pieces of my soul all across the Eastern seaboard.
Out of all of this, I have one sister left, of four, whom I treasure, love unconditionally, and adore. She’s the youngest, and a special woman who endured too much but faced it with courage and honor, and raised an amazing family of her own. She once told me that after I left the House of Pain, she occupied my room. She sensed me in there, as she described it, as a piece of my soul left behind to protect her. I no longer doubt her.
But things happened with my older sisters. By terrorism and manipulation, our father encouraged snitching on one another. He divided us and put canyons between us that can never be closed. I have no love for my oldest and my next-youngest sisters. For years I pretended to love them. I honestly tried to.
I failed. Say goodbye to another piece of my soul. The failure to love and forgive cost me. It hurt me, but I buried that for a long time. Even that has a price. Terrible as it is, I’ve put paid that one.
As a child, then a teen, I usually spent my anger on myself, but I, being an asshole, could not stop myself from lashing out at neighbors. I destroyed property mostly, causing damages I never had to pay for. Oddly, I knew to pick on those whom I’d have no motive to quarrel with, so suspicion didn’t fall on me. Not once did the police question me. Occasionally I was seen in the act and punished. Not often. All the shit dumped on me had to come out.
With age I was able to reign it in. Then, I began to truly withdraw, avoiding party invitations and eventually dodging weddings and memorial services. I discovered I liked being solitary, closed off. Shut inside and watching movies and playing video games. I especially loved playing video games with my children, like we did with Candyland and Cootie when they were wee ones.
They were the only good things in my life, and then they were gone forever. My soul broke with my heart, leaving me grieving to this day, feeling guilty, as if I failed them, and missing them more every day. I keep expecting the phone to ring, then picking up and hearing, “Hi dad,” and it never happens. The emptiest I’ve ever felt.
My one salvation is my God, what’s left of my family, and 3 very special friends, Maggie, Jane and Kevin. They love unconditionally and constantly. They know my madness and they support me with kindness and understanding. They insist I’m not mad, just broken. And they genuinely want me to be happy.
There’s still the danger, though, of testing my patience. Even I don’t know my limits. Last night as I wrote “The Return of the American Asshole”, I pondered this scary subject.
Dan, the man who would remember me as “calm, cool and collected”, was right. He saw me broken down to my rock-bottom self. I’d hit hard, with 3 botched suicide attempts and possibly some brain damage from pulmonary arrest.
Three heart attacks. Mini strokes including impaired speech. Deep psychological trauma. Children who preceeded me to death. How much was one man supposed to take? I felt like Job.
But though I did question God, I never gave up my faith. And so I lived by my code. Honor, loyalty and love. Protect, defend, forgive. Simple as that, as Jesus taught and I learned, through personal agony…decades of it.
Abuse. Psychological, physical, sexual. They turned me into a monster. A monster I had to control. A monster nobody knew was hidden inside me.
And now that monster roars from within, challenging that control, threatening to break loose and feed its anger again on those I fear. The monster thinks it can protect me, avenge me, but I know that it will only destroy me.
Beware the fury of a patient man, for if you fail, his soul will finish dying when his terrible wrath is unleashed. That wrath will consume all that stands within striking distance of the monster’s awful fangs and claws.
Attempt no contact. Leave me alone, Jennifer. I’m only two steps away from hell. Don’t push me any closer. I’m begging you.
My brain is full of nightmares. That’s true. It is also a constant truth that I have emotions like anger or rage, and it’s clinically sick.
As in fucked up.
If, among my childhood traits, there is one thing that I managed to salvage, it is that I was polite, courteous and very sensitive: I cried at not just my own pain, but also that of others.
When I looked back at pictures of when I was a child I saw bright eyes and a beautiful smile. I remember losing both. I tore up and threw away every picture I had.
They turned me into a monster, out for revenge. I turned into an avenging asshole. I caused unknown amounts of money in property damage, said horrible things to innocent people, ran from the bullies, sabotaged close relationships, isolated myself, became more bitter than I could bear, and was totally lost.
The world did not believe children like me existed. They did not care of things they knew nothing of. I grew more sick every day.
Sometimes, by age 14 I took everything out on people I knew. I’d write hard-core porn with them in it. They did things that I saw, in my twisted mind, as humiliating to them. So far as I know, none involved in those stories ever read or heard about them. But I’m not a hundred percent on that.
I was good at it, too. Long before reading Penthouse Forum, I wrote better stuff.
It was revenge, all of it. For being ridiculed, marginalized or insulted, and ultimately ignored. And those stories…got more evil as time went on. They weren’t sadistic, there was never violence, I couldn’t go that far. And I have always hated violence against women.
Unhealthy outlets are usually the result of severe abuse. A child’s normal development stops, replaced by horrors.
By the time my parents were arrested, though, it was not about revenge. Oh, I had planned my revenge: I was going to buy a shotgun at Bart’s Sporting Goods on Ritchie Highway and shoot my parents with 00 buckshot. It was all mapped out. I had only to get in my car and go.
Fate, or God, intervened. A nephew living in their house was being abused. I passed on the message that my sister only had a certain time to move out, then bad things would happen. She didn’t. Bad things did follow.
But I’m proud that I wasn’t acting on rage and revenge, but for a child’s welfare. My siblings who testified with me boosted my courage. It wasn’t about me. It was about justice and a child who deserved better than what we had gone through.
In the decades since, I’ve struggled with worsening mental health. I nearly ended my own life 3 times. I became more racist and was violent to the point where if someone spat while looking at, or just after seeing me, I wanted to kill them: You think I’m scum? You won’t when you’re dead, motherfucker.
Today, I’ve had it. I’m sick of being sick. There’s no cure for any of my conditions. I’m slowly dying. I don’t care much.
But I have found things that I do care about.
I try to stay away from the news. I’m limited and cannot handle that mess. I try to keep busy. And I have decided not to bring more pain into a world that’s just had enough of it.
God blessed me. I used to think of my survival as a curse, but that was never true. I was blessed with experience others had but could not voice. Maybe, I thought, I could help. Offer support and kindness. Perhaps insight. Hope.
I have no wish to harm. I’ve returned to courtesy and friendliness, but with much more experience than way back when I was having my innocence taken by evil people.
I do not see myself as noble, honorable or even worthy of living, I stand alone except for family, none of whom have time for me or are in their own health crises. I know I’m loved and that’s enough. God’s love was always there with us, and still is. That’s why I’ve chosen a gentle path.
I still cuss and lose my temper over those taking advantage of the poor; over the press telling us how stupid we all are; of abuse.
I don’t need meditation or zen stuff. I’ve made my choice.
I challenge you to do the same. Start with a random, out-of-the-blue sharing of kind words. Gentle encouragement. Praise when it’s deserved, but never flattery; that’s shallow. Loan someone ten bucks and don’t expect to get it back. It spreads. You’ll even see it, if you’re lucky.
And remember: one kind word can save a life, where an unkind word may end it. Life is delicate and we must remember that, if we truly hope to fight the evil that makes so many just give up. You can change the world. Yes, I do mean you.
And I know how hard it is to smile. Don’t worry. If you’re sincere, others will always know that.
I’m a realist. I have no lofty thoughts and I caution you not to, either. This life can tear you up. I am sorry for that. But do you or I have any right to make that worse?
Looking back at the pain and chaos I caused and knowing why I did it hurts. My age back then, my mental health, and all other things considered, I regret so much. I hurt people I loved. Or hated. I never felt justified. For a few moments, maybe. But smothered in guilt and shame, I longed to be clean. Feeling as if you were born already soiled, knowing you had some good qualities, is difficult to reconcile. How can you process a thing like that? I fear no one can know. We just do the best we can.
And the question I’ve asked bears the same answer: none of us has the right to make the world a worse place than it is.
Choose what’s right. You’ll know what to do. I have faith in you.
By 1964 I was already terrified of my father. No child should be scared of his father, much less terrified of him. But I was.
And until I was aware that he had died, I remained so. That’s at least 43 years.
But if I was that afraid of him before I testified against him in an Annapolis courtroom, then seeing him get walked off to prison in leg irons and a belly chain didn’t help, and in fact made it worse. I knew he’d killed before. Now I feared his revenge from behind bars, and in fact often convinced myself that he would escape and come for me.
Unreasonable, you might say, but across this country and around the world, people of all kinds suffer the same fear. And it doesn’t matter what age or gender you are; that kind of fear is hardly unreasonable at all. People die that way.
Let me make it simple.
For at least ten years I was sexually abused (including rape) by both parents. It had nothing to do with “teaching” me, which is what they both called it. Rape and abuse are always motivated by control. The need to dominate and control every second of a child’s life in order to gain the feeling of satisfaction through power is it. Period.
The sole driving force in many violent crimes and all sex crimes is a feeling of having no or little power, and filling the burning need for it.
Beyond that, no one can possibly explain why it happens. Children may be attractive sexually to any perp, but no sex crime is ever about attraction. And even if that becomes part of the pedophile’s psyche, it’s a defined sexual deviance, but always it remains the nature of the crime and the targeted victim: weak, unable to fight, the lack of adult physical features and the high from hurting an innocent.
Over an extended period, the trauma of the very first attack is compounded exponentially. The damage becomes far worse than any human is capable of recovering from. The victim has learned crude coping behavior that is never sufficient but which can get him or her through the worst of it. These mechanisms go on to become behavioral problems because they get used to get through all crisis events. There is no known damage to the perpetrator except that, over time, rationalization and the ease of continuing to abuse is made him unable to use restraint. The sociopath becomes even more immune to guilt; never even considering the harm they have caused. In the case of abusive parents, they go on to expect their victims to display academic excellence and other unrealistic accomplishments. When the child fails to live up to these demands, the child is typically tortured. Physical beatings, revocation of privileges and withholding meals may be involved, among other things. The trauma is reinforced and added to.
One coping method children can display is the obvious attempt on many levels to please their parents, and to adopt their social, religious and political views. The child learns to conform. It’s basically risk reduction, and this is purely survival at its most pitiful and desperate level.
Since the views the parents have are themselves either ethically wrong, biased ot hateful based on their self-image of inadequacy, the behavior of the child leads to serious problems in school, social circles and more. It becomes dangerous.
If the parents are bigots or racists, the child invariably reflects that in inappropriate settings with words or actions.
Into adulthood, the child has learned and will be unable to break his or her dependent behavior and not sever ties to parents. Holidays become occasions where victims are belittled and treated lovingly at the same time. It is a no-win situation and it causes more trauma. For instance, visiting for Christmas with a frowned-upon spouse (they always are) is a tense running of the gauntlet that both the original victim and his or her spouse is actually traumatized by. These are not happy, festive gatherings; it is just more of an opportunity to abuse, mostly verbally or through the giving of trivial, demeaning gifts. More damage for the parents to inflict. And they love every second of it, every hurt look on the victims’ faces. More power.
In my case, all off this actually happened.
The sexual abuse, including sodomy and rape continued unimpeded until I was 16-years-old. The mental abuse, which included verbal abuse of the harshest kind, continued until I filed charges with the police at the age of 28. After the trial and sentencing, I never saw them again. They’ve both since passed away, leaving various levels of damage behind in their children. Yes, they got us all.
The nagging question for me has been, why do some of my siblings prosper, while I have been the most hurt and severely crippled?
The short answer is, there’s no way to know.
All I can say is that I was a very sensitive, imaginative and very kind kid at one time. What they didn’t take away from me, they damaged. But CPTSD did far worse.
The descriptions I’ve read so far indicate that it is exactly what I have.
I’m not just mistrstful of others; I’ve actually believed that they would stab me in the back. There was no reason for such a belief so I thought that I was paranoid. It’s not paranoia. It’s a symptom of CPTSD that I now deem incurable. It used to be called running, what I did. Draw a line, you get this close, no closer. Every time I dared cross the line, it ended badly, with hurt feelings and confusion that I had caused. But coming to the conclusion that I was meant to die alone took 50 years. Still, I was socially and extremely sexually dysfunctional. Even a casual relationship was impossible for me to handle. Everything was scary, dangerous and caused my fight/flight response to kick in, which was aberrant. There was no danger. No one to fight. So I just fled. Self protection at its worst.
Other problems continue. The nightmares grow worse and worse despite an increase in prazosin dosage. As I wonder how much more I can take, I am constantly triggered, and flashbacks happen every single day, more than once in a day. Triggers are everywhere because the abuse took place during my formative years when I was experiencing new things, learning new things, becoming more aware. Even pictures of the past that remind me of things I liked trigger me. Things I liked I spent so little time with, and those times were always interrupted by harrowing beatings and sexual abuse. Of all the times I had sex during my marriage and with girlfriends before that, I believe my mother still has the record for most times a woman copulated me. It’s disgusting and I’ve had a hard time accepting that probability. Yet it’s valid.
That is a hell of a thing to have to write.
Tomorrow I will conclude this three-part study. For now, I’ve had enough.
Repost of a 2019 article that I never want forgotten when I’m gone. It is a difficult read, but please do it for me. Please read the linked articles as well, and know that if I die tonight, I’ll go knowing that it wasn’t all in vain, wasn’t useless and that maybe my life really mattered, if only for one brief moment when outrage gave me courage. And that maybe you could use whatever you find here to help others in pain.
This article also sheds light on why I hurt so much for women and children, why The Face In The Window will ever haunt me, from now to my meeting with God. We’re here for such a short time, some of us very short, and everything we do matters. Help others. Be encouraging and unfailingly gentle. Love freely, let compassion fill your heart. It opens you to pain, but the reward is far greater. If you can manage it, you’ll see.
This is one of my oldest posts, and one of the few oldies to still get hits on my Stat page. I hope others have been helped by it. I hope the change in me between then and now is visible, and encouraging. I’m not cured. There’s no such thing, but I have shed some of my bitterness as I’ve looked for God and a faith I thought lost forever. Thank you for caring, sharing and giving me a few moments of your life. You are loved.
WARNING: This article contains material of a disturbing nature and contains mature subject matter. It contains triggers for victims of abuse. Read with care.
OBITUARY
Accidentally, while hunting clues for a cold case murder, I ran across my father’s obituary. I didn’t want to see it.
Nice, isn’t it? Except I never heard once that he was a lawyer. In fact, there’s evidence that he never made it past 7th grade. He did work for B.F. Moffitt, who was successful in legal work with or against the then-feared Interstate Commerce Commission. Moffitt, by all accounts, was an honorable man. Ralph Smith wasn’t. And this obituary boils my blood.
It says, very simply, that he was a lawyer, later owned Comet Fast Freight in Glen Burnie, and he died at age 75 in Salisbury MD in 2002 after a lengthy illness. Fucking vanilla shit. It doesn’t mention that he was one of the worst sex offenders in state history. Not a word.
A decade earlier the same paper said something very different.
Following are several articles from after the trial. Read them, and I’ll tell you something really fucked up.
Jay Apperson was a fine writer and reporter. I knew he was the only spectator in the courtroom during the three-day trial of my parents. We later did things I don’t believe he understood, and that’s what you should expect from a story so horrible; how can he be blamed? But a month after the verdict, when the sentencing hearing came up, reporters from printed media, TV and Radio were there. I particularly remember watching CBS reporter Bruce Morton later on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Mr. Morton was obviously unable to keep a bit of emotion out of his voice. When both Ralph and Betty Smith drew about 99 years apiece for their crimes, the state dropped the remaining cases brought against them for crimes against the rest of my siblings, who I won’t name. It wasn’t fair; they’d taken the time and invested emotionally in writing their police statements and being interviewed first by Detective Jill Klinger of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, then by Assistant State’s Attorney Cynthia Ferris. They got no closure.
But then, neither did I. The trial and my time on the stand was traumatic. And it forced me to feel emotions and speak out loud the unspeakable. It opened up every wound I’d buried. And to this day, those wounds bleed.
As for the 99-year sentences, that was a joke. The judge ordered the terms to be served concurrently; therefore the charges with the most time, 15 years, would be served. They would be eligible for parole in considerably less than that. But they didn’t get their first hearings past the Department of Parole and Probation. Betty Smith served ten years in Jessup Women’s Correctional Facility while Ralph Smith “Esquire” served around eleven. He was in ECI, Eastern Correctional Institution in Queen Anne, after which he wound up in Salisbury, most likely in a halfway house. He died there or in a hospital.
He left behind a shattered family, and all have had their personal struggles. Not being one to compare one person’s pain with that of another, I’ve learned to keep a perspective: all victims of rape, sexual assault, incest and child abuse are, by medical, anecdotal and empiric evidence, walkingwounded. I have seen the evidence for myself. It fucks people up.
NEW YORK
One of my biggest regrets is going to New York and appearing on Phil Donahue’s show. Afterward, I thought it took some of the credibility away from our case. I know Jay Apperson thought so. While there, we were approached by Spectacor Films and offered money for the rights to make a film about us. It was a mistake I was too young and too damaged to understand (Spectacor’s portfolio consisted of feculent films like Amityville 3 or 4). When Mr. Apperson reported it, I thought we’d fucked up. We looked like greedy attention seekers. We were not. We hoped to help other people to stand up to their own abusers. I hoped also to show people in my past why I had been so weird, that it wasn’t my fault. That I was just a messed up kid.
I was happy that I abandoned the book. I was happy the movie contract expired without so much as a draft-script written. When the project was pitched, not a single sponsor would touch it. Too horrible, they said.
Decades later, no one remembers anything of us. We didn’t change a goddamn thing. How I’d dreamed we could. How bitter I was that the world moved on without me. As I grew ever more sick, I went through a divorce. I tried to kill myself. I went through jobs. Then my children died. My whole fucking life was a waste. As if I never mattered, never should have existed. God damn it.
I need no longer speak to my sister. She’s a goddamn Neocon saint whose relationship with the Lord is historic, unprecedented since the death of St. Paul ofTarsus. Piss on her. She judged me and told her friends lies about me. That’s a mistake; I heard about it and now I pretty much think of her as more fucking mental than I am. I didn’t deserve that bullshit. That bridge is burned forever now.
But I feel sorry for her. She’s missed the whole point. Forgotten it. Forgotten her own fucking words to the press. How we could finally be a family.
I don’t like the whitewashed obituary. The man didn’t deserve it.
You see from the articles that the case of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith was a big deal. The grand jury said the reports read “like a horror story” and the State’s Attorneys office was cited as saying it was the worst case of child abuse they’d seen. The Honorable Judge Raymond Thieme, after it was over, was said to have entered his office, thrown his robe on the floor and stormed from the building. The source said she had never seen him do such a thing.
Sometimes, I think back on that. Even he needed closure, and probably wished he could forget the shit he had to hear.
Ralph Smith had moments when I looked in his eyes. He would take his glasses off, rub his eyes, and for just a second or two, I saw into the soul of a human being trapped in a diseased body. Did I see regret?
No.
Was it guilt?
No.
It was a broken heart.
Then the devil got into him again and the man was gone, replaced by a monster.
And he did not deserve that vanilla obituary.
“VINDICTIVENESS”
Defense attorney Thomas Morrow told reporters: “Even if the charges are true, I can’t understand that level of vindictiveness.”
Holy shit. What a crude thing to say. What a stupid thing to say.
Well it wasn’t vindictiveness at all. Perhaps some desire for vindication was there. But that’s not what started it. I started it.
I was motivated at first because a sister, long lost, called me out of the blue one day. She was in such obvious pain that I knew she couldn’t keep it inside anymore. Some of what happened to her happened to me at the same time. We were made by my parents to watch 8mm porn films, then do things together, and then we split up; my father and my sister alone in another room, my mother taking me into another. We both saw, did and knew things we both had to do, see or otherwise. When she called, she told me about the things I hadn’t witnessed. Things our father had done to her that were so evil, so horrible that I can’t describe even one of them here. As I listened, my heart was aching. Things people should never have to imagine, much less endure, were vividly pictured in my mind. Before the long call ended, I was full of rage. Goddamn it, they had to pay.
I had an immediate plan. I was going to go to Bart’s Sporting Goods on Ritchie Highway, buy a shotgun, drive to Pasadena, kick the door to their house of pain and evil open, and fill my parents with double aught buckshot. But I happened to spot a copy of the Gazette lying on the coffee table and I picked it up and read it. There had to be a reason I was so motivated. Because there was a story about kids from my neighborhood who grew up with us. They had gone through the same type of abuse. They waited until the youngest turned 18 years of age, then went to the police. Their father was arrested, tried and convicted.
I remembered those kids. One very little girl, the youngest as far as I know, a little girl whose face should have been lit up by an innocent smile, showing up at the bus stop with red, swollen, watery eyes. Tears flowing. Her body held in a position I knew caused by physical pain. I can’t get it out of my head; I’d known something was wrong. When I learned why she’d been like that, I regretted that with my own experience, I didn’t see it for what it was. I will always be sorry I didn’t know, couldn’t help, and they were right down the street all those years.
Maybe I didn’t have to commit murder and throw my life away in an act of revenge. Maybe, this family I’d known so little about had done something we could do. As if there was a hand guiding me to read that paper.
SAVING A NEPHEW
A few of us talked. My youngest brother, still living at home, dropped a bomb on me one day: a sister who had gotten divorced and had a toddler son had moved back home. If being a parent is hard, being a single one is really difficult. But that’s no excuse for what my brother told me she did.
It seemed that when the boy cried and wouldn’t go to sleep at night, she would get our father to beat him with his belt.
Goddamn, it’s hard to write this. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish it never happened. But it did.
Suddenly the imperative was to get the boy away from that. It wasn’t about payback. Justice. Revenge. The kid had to be saved before he was so traumatized that he became one of us.
I contacted the boy’s father, living in North Carolina at the time. I told him our story. What was happening to his son. And I said she had two weeks to get him the hell out of there, or something very bad was going to happen. According to my brother, the asshole did call her, but she convinced him that I was quote “full of shit”.
She had thrown down a gauntlet. When my youngest brother turned 18, he moved out. We went to the police and made statements, and that is why and how it all began. I have no remorse; once sentenced, my parents lost the house. They went to prison. The boy was as safe as we could make him. But I’ve never forgotten that my oldest sister was still a monster, and I’ve worried over the years that my nephew never got out of it unharmed.
AFTER
In 2015, I was outside smoking. A warm summer night. A neighbor had a window open. His daughter was screaming and her father yelled, “I’m your father and I can beat you whenever I want.”
Very uncharacteristically, shaking with rage, I finished my cigarette. I went inside and took two Ativan to calm down. I should have called the police. I didn’t.
The knocking on his door pissed him off. He’d been nice to me, always saying hello and smiling. But now I knew what he was. He was my father. Different shell, same demon.
He stepped out onto the porch. I leaned to whisper in his ear.
“I heard you. I know what you just did. The next time I hear it, I will kill you. She’s worth it. I’ll go to jail, but you’ll be sitting on Satan’s lap, you piece of shit.”
He turned. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I looked right into his eyes. He knew I meant it.
It was a mistake. He moved his family out. I couldn’t help her; I’d probably made it worse.
I have the hope that he was so scared that he sought help. Or he changed.
I believe the hope to be unrealistic.
In the end I wonder what I’ve ever accomplished that was good. It all seems so useless, so futile.
The monsters don’t change.
They can’t. Ralph Smith died a monster. And everyone forgot what he really was. He got a lie for an obituary.
The world forgets.
And I…am an asshole.
Post-Update, Father’s Day, 2022.
The final verdict is in; Ralph Smith never practiced law.
He never finished college. When he was working for the motor truck association, he was a fucking clerk, typing tariffs and doing billing.
I have a cousin named Bonnie, and another named Terri, on Ancestry. Both are hostile toward me and one is responsible for making his ancestry profile make Superman seem like a milquetoast compared to my father. The motive: they’re from the south. Family can be serial killers, but they’d conceal it if they could. I’ve blocked all updates and emails from the site, and I’m never going back. Because fuck the Smith family. Inbred shit beyond the ability to accept truth or to tell it.
Warning: language and subject matter for adults. Trigger warning.
It just doesn’t stop. I’ll be outside smoking and if I’m not careful to be observant, to stay alert,
it’s 1967 or 1970 or 1972. I mean, I’m really there, back in that cursed House of Pain in Pasadena. I don’t know, it just happens. The reality is crystal clear, I’m back there, reliving nightmares that actually played out in real life.
It could be a particular lashing with a thin leather belt; my mother atop me, moving up and down with no expression, like a robot; my sexual desire for girls my age because I had been “trained and indoctrinated” for sexuality while other guys in 3rd grade thought of nothing but toys, baseball and TV.
Going back hard always makes me sick. If I can’t pull myself out of it, I’m going to spend days recovering. And recovering is just the word I use; it’s really nothing of the sort.
Why does PTSD remain so powerful all these years later?
What I mean is, why me?
And the technical answer is, trauma changes the brain. The damage even shows up on MRI scans. But the other answer to this question is, nothing is fair.
I never imagined that I would live this long. God knows that I didn’t want to. I courted Death for decades. Almost 5 of them. Too much of a “pussy” to kill myself and just hard-headed enough to live through heart attacks, open heart surgery, strokes, 35 or more traffic accidents, having a .357 held to my temple and refusing to surrender, 3 bouts of covid-19, industrial accidents, being shot at with a Machine gun, falls, being knocked out and thrown down stairs, and, I’m sure, more.
When I finally got round to suicide, 3 times in two months, I screwed even that up. Failed romances? Shit. Girls laughed at me, called me names, gossipped. By the time my one and only marriage was over, I knew I was going to be alone until death. It was not all my fault, but I certainly screwed up my fair share. Then, the two people who mattered most, my children, died.
It’s been a real shit show and I’m sick of it.
But I ain’t quitting.
I have faith that God has a reason for interfering in my death. He’ll send for me in his own good time.
I hope that someone like me has read my posts, and in so doing, learned enough that they have sought help and intend to keep fighting the unfairness of life.
If you are reading this and you have been troubled and afraid, or know someone else who has, I want to reassure you that there’s hope. That maybe you will never heal, but bits of sunlight will come to you, that your life, horrible though it may be or has been, is still precious and of a value nobody can put a price on, and that your experience can help others. You have a story to tell, and people need to hear it. So many survivors think that they are alone; yet there are more of us than can ever truly be known.
PTSD is often a disabling mental illness and it can cause a lot of bad things to happen. Do whatever you need to in order to stabilize the symptoms. Familiarize yourself with the different effects of it, seek out competent proffesionals for treatment and remember, there will be days when you won’t even want to get out of bed. That’s okay. I worked 30 years until one day it became unbearable. In that time I had so many jobs I’d be hard put-upon to remember them all.
The bad days, with treatment and faith, will always give way to better ones. Until we draw our final breath, God can be called on to forgive us. There’s no better reason for hope.
If you, or anyone you know is suicidal, please call the suicide hotline at 988, text SMS to 988, or go to the website and chat.
Once the thought of suicide enters someone’s mind, they’re a third of the to doing it. The next part is making a plan, and the last is the act itself. Sometimes it is done on impulse and all that’s needed is time to think. People dying by their own hands often regret it afterwards. Sometimes they pull through. Sometimes they don’t. Take time to catch your breath and calm down. You are worthy of that. Believe it.
Hold up. Let me explain. I’ve written about “her” before. I don’t like the post because it took too long for me to get to the point and then I barely touched it. But the “her” I refer to is not a real person. She comes to me in nightmares so disgusting, terrifying and drawn-out that I never forget a single one. Friday or Saturday night was the worst.
I’ve been sleeping at night for about two weeks now. That’s very unusual. But it’s been okay. Then I was awake for over 40 hours because the pain in my spine was too intense. I couldn’t walk, stand, sit or lie down for long because it hurt, and I always had to move, shift or whatever.
When the time came to go to sleep, when exhaustion took me down, I slept nearly around the clock. I got out of bed after 16:00 and was only awake until 02:00. That’s all it takes. A period of long sleep, restful and restorative, followed by sleeping again within 12 hours. That’s when She comes.
But–
She is not merely a dream figure. Not a real person, either. I’ve long since concluded that demons, or, if you will, evil spirits, can get into our dreams where they are much more free to torment us. In dreams we are defenseless. We do not use our senses of sight and sound. Our brains remain active, but our bodies are shut down. So if God can give people messages through dreams, then certainly, so can the Evil One. But his message is madness, relentless torture and terror.
The demon in my worst nightmares is always a woman and she is always different in appearance. Last night, like most, she was a petite brunette who tapped into my need for female companionship and my loneliness. It began, as always, with her in charge, but this time kissing me passionately. I was immediately revolted and pulled away. I knew that it was Her.
I’ve never seen the house I was in before, and I believe it to have been She who put me in it. Sometomes our minds cooperate by partially rebuilding places we’ve been or seen. She did the rest. I guess, after she left, it filled in more, but was never complete.
She arrived at the door and knocked but I would not let her in. She got in anyway. Sweet, acting innocent and more desperate romantically than ever, she tried to touch me. I backed away, got a sword and ran her through. Twice. She vanished, only to show up at the door again. This time I let her in so I could use the sword again. She laughed at me, “you can’t kill me.”
When She was gone, I found myself living with my father, the most evil man I’ve ever known, even to this day. He gave me a handgun. It was a small caliber revolver that held five rounds. I shot her with it without any effect except for her leaving again. My older brother took me to his garage workshop and quickly assembled a .357 magnum. The same kind my father held to my head in real life. Back then I wish I’d demanded that he shoot me.
The magnum did not work either. I shot her six times in the center of mass and she laughed at me. Somehow she came back with help. Another woman, posing as her mother. Two demons in one dream. People, I’ve long suspected, die during such harrowing nightmares: we often hear of fatal strokes and heart attacks in sleep and say, “At least he or she died in peace.” How arrogant are we, making such a conclusion like that? Because, of course, we cannot know. What if they were tormented in a nightmare so terrifying that a cardiac event was triggered?
Demons are not amusing. They’re nothing to underestimate. They hate us, they’re jealous of us and they have one mission: bring us down, hurt us, get us to renounce God, blame him for our pain. Our losses. Our loneliness. To turn us away from the light.
In movies and books and paranormal TV shows, they’re portrayed in an over-the-top fashion. In the real world they come in where we’re vulnerable, like cat burglars, quiet, unassuming at times. They know how to do it. They know what we like, what we don’t like. If working one side doesn’t get them in, they just change their approach. If they can’t get you to give in to your vices, or to dark emotions such as hate, lust, anger and sadness, then they will try something more direct. And resistance only gains more testing. They use every trick in the book. To them, there are no boundaries and faith itself is their lone enemy, their sole target. They will attack it relentlessly.
I believe that is why She keeps at me. She appears as a beautiful woman, with lust and false love. Of all the women I have loved, most never knew, even if they suspected. My condition, unknown to me in its true nature, kept me insecure and unfit for romantic relationships. I was certainly afraid of rejection and, sometimes, even had to consider just how much I really loved them. If I found that I did actually love a woman, I was objective; I was not the right man for her. I respected her.
Out of loneliness and guilt and bitterness at not being loved and feeling “dirty” because I had been/was being raped by my own parents, I guess She was born. Sorrow, anger, hate directed at myself were things I believe Satan knew about very well. And if anything, he’s good at using such things as weapons.
I do not remember how the dream ended. That part was lost as I was coming awake. But I know it ended in stalemate as usual. And She has returned.
Last night She appeared as an ex-girlfriend. The “mother” from the last dream was with her. They were making me relive the dark days which ended my second attempt at fleeing my father.
They kicked me out on the street. Then wherever I was living vanished. I was looking for things I owned to put in my car. They mocked me in disgusting ways. Then my car disappeared along with both of them; her mother had it towed away. I was somehow told where to look for my car and it was not a safe or easy trip. Drawn out, full of choices on this street or that. Once again into a labyrinth.
The dream ended with me paying men in a shop a few dollars to get the car back. They were Muslim men who felt pity for me. They offered food and drink, tried to calm me down. Never got the car back but the significance of those kind men were ultimately the end of the dream. The car did not matter; the kindness and respect shown by the men did. God knows us all as His children. No one is loved more than another, and all people of real faith serve Him. They kept me busy, looking on this lot and that, looking for my car. They were protecting me. She was not going to get past them. Perhaps they were angels.
She will return. I’m on a drug that’s known to help PTSD nightmares. She is immune to it. But my faith is stronger every time I am granted the miracle of waking up and living another day. I went back to Twitter to get quick news updates, especially about the criminal invasion of Ukraine. How I pray for those poor, yet courageous men and women, protecting civilians and dying in the attempt. They have exceeded all the world’s best hopes. The evil they have faced with honor is unspeakable evil.
On Twitter, a site I once called toxic, I had my faith in people restored. I’ve never felt that I mattered, not to strangers. Now I do. You know my fight for them. You know my desire to help is an honest one. I won’t post a link here; it’s on a previous blog already. It’s easy to find in my archives. But for now, this post is about renewed faith. There are wonderful people in this world. Amazing people who want to help save us from extinction and offer up great strategies. There are compassionate people who you’d never think would offer help. There’s love. There is still decency and true faith. And I’m grateful to be able to see that.
Evil will be with us to the death. How you think of this post is up to you; it’s here to offer you something to think about. What I know is that racial and religious bigotry keeps half the world out of our lives. I’ve worked with Muslims and I’ll never forget them. They were so good to me. On Twitter, I left comments on Joel Osteen and Franklin Graham’ posts: “Go and sell all that you have, give the money to the poor, then take up your cross and follow Christ. Then, I will listen to you. The eye of a needle, sir.”
I was not being harsh. There’s no hatred or enmity. But our jobs as Christians is to keep loving and supporting one another as Yeshua did. He left us an example to live by. Tall orders, but ones that must be adhered to. Will we sin anyway?
Yes. But if our hearts feel true repentance, we escape the furnace. We escape our personal demons.
That is what Easter is all about, is it not?
If you have strange dreams, recurrent ones in which you are tormented by an enemy who comes to you like a lover, only to leave you in a shambles, you’re not alone. Just leave a like or a comment. I’ll pray for the demon to let you go. We have each other, and Yaweh has our backs, always.
Please enjoy the rest of your holidays. And may God bless!
This post is dedicated to Abba, the Holy Father, to His Son, with gratitude and humble praise.
It is dedicated to the suffering, the poor, the haunted.
It is dedicated to all the women I’ve loved in my life, especially those who never knew, and didn’t know how much it hurt me to love them from a distance.
It is for Margaret, Jane and Kevin, and my friends, wherever they may be. Last but not least, for Jerry, his wife and his family, without whom, this post would have been impossible to end with hope. He allowed the Spirit to work through him to open my eyes. I couldn’t be more grateful for his help. And to Jack Flacco: thanks for all that you do.
Amen.
Goodbye my loves. I’ve always wanted the best for you.
This is the one thing I never wanted to write about.
It’s a horrible thing.
I’ve written about nightmares before. They are something everyone suffers, yet certain conditions and even medications can make them worse. Certainly a history of abuse, physical, mental and sexual will cause PTSD, a condition known for the symptom of nightmares.
There are times, often strung together in days-long ordeals, when my dreams, already twisted to a distressing degree, are different. As in, worse than usual. The other day I had to endure everything about my son’s death again, only under different conditions and far worse since his overdose scene was built up by the interference of a woman. She taunted me, “you can’t save him, you gave him to me” and got to him, weakening every attempt both he and I made to stop what I, of course, knew was coming.
And so he died, but she would not let me go. She never just lets me go. Until my sleep is interrupted or on the rare day I actually seem to awaken by myself and feel like I’ve gotten enough sleep. The day before, I had seen my maternal step-grandmother.
She passed away under suspicious circumstances so long ago that I can’t even pin down a decade. There was some kind of family conflict when my mother went to her wake. My mother was not comfortable around her family. She rarely spoke to them and until I joined Ancestry I had no idea what that came from. I had an uncle I never knew was an uncle, but as a kid, I remember seeing him on the farm (a former plantation) near Burlington, North Carolina.
That place, she inherited after my grandfather passed away. It was dedicated to tobacco growing but I assume some kind of crop rotation must have been employed. Once off the freeway, probably a federal highway, there were rural roads to negotiate and and then a huge old mailbox signaled the time to turn left onto the driveway.
It was actually a dirt road. A long one which apparently no longer exists. The antebellum mansion stood white with dark trim, three stories of a horror movie set just waiting for a script and film crew. No haunted house in any film I’ve ever seen could touch it; while the parlor and kitchen were charming, everything else was a perversion of architecture and interior decoration. These rooms were perpetually dark, with old paintings on the wall of landscapes and English fox hunts that all had in common the garish and terrifying element of being too big, too dark and out of time. They would seem ordinary in 1850, but I looked at them and swear that no museum should ever display such cursed works.
I found out on Ancestry that it was my grandfather’s either by marriage or some other arrangement, and he had spent a lot of time in Kentucky, especially with my birth grandmother, his first or second wife. This is the connection my mother had with Daniel Boone, who was my sixth great uncle. But it must be told, that as a child, my mother lived a hard life. It is clear that her father was a hardcore alcoholic and, by interpretation of the few stories she told and the continuous drinking, her father had been quite abusive. While he married three times and two wives died mysterious premature deaths, I have found no documentation that he was ever questioned or in any way detained, it’s very easy to assume the worst. He represents to me the classic model of a cruel man, one familiar with the fact that drink, hard labor and married life never mixed well.
Having survived him, his third wife remained alone in that house for the rest of her life. All of the ingredients for a twisted novel were there; all anyone needed were the secrets that family held. Secrets so dark that I had never liked visiting her or that house.
By appearing to me in a dream, or by being conjured for the dream by my mind or by an external power, she looked young, thinner, restored and smiling. She said nothing. Her hair was dyed straw and red, and that wasn’t her or my mother’s natural color. It couldn’t have been either one of them.
I awoke with the impression that she was in Heaven, had come to signal my life’s end was near, and when the time came, she’d be there to welcome me.
Holy shit. I spend too much time with Death. I need to stop. Join Death’s Anonymous or something.
It’s a lie, a trick. A false comfort. Because I don’t believe she’s in Heaven. She never said anything religious, never went to church. And she was cruel. A hoarder. A prisoner in a mansion that should have been destroyed by artillery fire during the Civil War. Alone in an obscenity, she only ventured forth to shop the five-and-dime store in town or to purchase groceries. She could never have bought clothes; I never once saw her in anything but her black dress, and I believe she made it herself. Her size couldn’t be found in the backwater towns of the 1960s.
Not understanding obesity because my parents never taught us the value of kindness or seeing people’s physical appearances as a mere shell to hold, often, the most beautiful of souls, I remarked one day to a friend while she was visiting us, “My other grandmother isn’t as fat as this one.”
Through the open window, she heard me. She was, according to my mother, wounded.
I guess so!
Well, she didn’t pass up a chance to get back at me. She’d come up before the holidays while she was still able. She would show me catalogs with the most wonderful toys, and have me pick something out. I never got anything but a crisp, new, two dollar bill. Fucking cruel and done for the sake of being cruel.
***
Talking to my friend Margaret one night, it came to me why I had chosen the story of the 9 tail fox as the antagonist in my Halloween story, “The Last Soldier of Bravo Four”. The real point of the story was to point out that our veterans of war are humiliated. Then forgotten.
But at its core lay the timeless fear that men have toward women. A fear ageless, destructive and driving many men throughout history to control and dominate women. We all know this fear in one form or another; to cover it up, we do things that are deceitful, cruel, condescending and deadly.
If I continue with the story of my mother’s father, I must say, he was an abuser of women, a powerful influence on my mother during formative years, and whatever good she had in her heart when I was small, it was gone by the time I was in junior high school.
She never balked at being told by my father that they were going to “teach” us kids about sex. After 1970 when her body could no longer tolerate pregnancy, a tubal ligation signaled that my course in the studies of sex would graduate to the final stage; intercourse. She did not do this with any sign of emotion or desire: she was as if a mannequin had mounted me every time. She never seemed to have an orgasm or even breathe rapidly. It was pure, cold, evil. I had to fantasize about movie stars, nude models I’d seen in Playboy issues that my friends and I passed around, because I couldn’t stand the sight of her. But if I didn’t get an erection, my father would beat me, and I’ve certainly described what his floggings did to me.
***
Men already have an archaic, even primal fear of women. I have seen that this fear causes hatred. I dislike the word “misogyny” as a weasel word. Fuck, it’s time to be honest: the fear engenders a deep hatred. The hatred should be called out for what it causes: terrorism with women as the targets.
Watch a horror movie. Binge on them between doses of Valium. Pick them from any era. Hell. Choose from them all. You know what you’ll see? A graduation through the years of women characters becoming the antagonists as opposed to victims. The hag witch. Cannibals. Zombies. Evil queens. Demons, carnivorous aliens, serial killers. Man-haters.
Art, in paintings, literature and every other genre have actually always shown women in a way they should never have been depicted. Even the famous portraits of English Queens are far from complimentary, the various artists seeming to have used light and dark in every wrong way there is. Trouble is, art is influential to perception and even a biographer can’t be immune to it. See too much darkness, and your writing takes that on. Life imitates art, but the reverse is also true. Novels, paintings, photography, motion pictures.
Perhaps no novel ever explored the fear of women quite like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. At the center of the the narrative is a woman. Of course, she is not a woman, and we’re never shown what the creature looks like in its natural form, and that’s brilliant. One victim, dying, kept repeating the words “Bee orchid”, a terrifying thought because no one can make sense of it (there is a real plant called a bee orchid but the dying man in the story was in shock and we know he wasn’t referring to any plant). We know only that it emits glowing green light visible under her hotel room door. But she keeps appearing, always as a woman or a little girl. Always with names used to intentionally frighten the story’s heroes, who, it turns out, aren’t heroic at all.
Her initials are always the same, first name beginning with the letter A, last name with an M. Alma Mobley, Anna Mostyn, Ann-Veronica Moore, Amy Monkton. But once, she appeared in the 1920s as actress Eva Galli.
Ghost Story remains the scariest book I have ever read, and my first time, it fucked with my head. I saw Fenny Bate. I had a friend who just started seeing a girl with the initials A.M.
Weird things happened. I thought I saw a former schoolmate whom I was later told was deceased. And things have never been the same.
Using Straub’s characters in my Halloween story, I found, made part of it scary. Because there really is a widespread myth in Asian folklore of the 9 tail fox, which can appear as a beautiful woman which will seduce and kill men. And in looking around the world for mythical creatures that could fit in a Vietnam War setting, I found that every culture extant has more than its share of dangerous monsters in the form of women.
Hell. Even the Patterson-Gimlin film of a Sasquatch crossing a dry gulch shows a female creature with human-like breasts which seem to sway as it walks (a nice touch, attempting realism, but I’ve never believed it was real, not 100 percent)..
And going back to Genesis, it was Eve who first listened to and then caved to temptation. While the story is suspect on its own, it, too, portrayed the woman as the cause of man being expelled from paradise. Nobody stops to think that Adam didn’t refuse her coaxing; it would seem that a story without a woman as the villain is not to be taken seriously.
I’ve watched things change. A mother in the 60s wore pleated skirts and was a housewife. But by the middle of the decade, younger women and girls in high school were wearing blue jeans and miniskirts. They were villainized in public, in editorials and churches, as men came to the conclusion that the end was nigh.
By the late 60s, women fought the male establishment with protests and bra burning. This absolutely terrified the average white Christian man. Authors like Hal Lindsey stepped up their writing about the certain imminent arrival of the antichrist.
It would have been ridiculous except for the fact that writers and evangelists gave unintended lease for hate crimes against women. And any time religion crosses a line of influence, extending too far into mixed cultures, bad things happen. Zealousness forms its ugly tentacles around everyday life. You know, mass hysteria, for lack of a better term, often begins with a paranoid or zealot, whether religious or not.
Women became more liberal with clothing, and drew fire for it. By 1976 I’d go to lunch while working through summer break and the shitheads I worked with would see a woman with revealing summer clothes and say, invariably, “No wonder there’s rape in this world.”
They were so stupid that sometimes I’d tell them to “shut the fuck up”, and I was serious. I didn’t want to hear that ever again. Halter tops, short blue jeans cut off and frayed and faded, belly exposed. Hell, I liked it. I never assumed a nip slip was a show put on for me, I never wanted to rape or even ask any one of them for a date; I simply saw beauty and poise, and a confidence like that was extremely helpful to me. I needed to see women in a way that was alien to me considering what I was put through by four sisters, an abusive mother and a cruel step grandmother. I had to be open to the real world, because somewhere in my mind I was aware that what I was going through was absolutely wrong, and I was aware of how I was being influenced.
My family was, it turns out, so dysfunctional that I’m in awe that we survived, that some have had extended relationships and loving, understanding partners, raised families and gone through hard times to emerge determined to make the best of the lives they had to lead first.
However. My older sister? She got mean, and I mean cold as ice mean. She’d do anything my father said while giving every sign that she was the one sibling not sexually abused. She was often funny, but mocked anyone and everyone, showing an inner disrespect for others’ feelings. She targeted everyone whenever her mood shifted to ultra mean. And so, a humiliation rivaling that which I received at my parents’ hands was constantly challenging my temper and the progressive views I had on the human condition.
Raised by ultra conservatives who fucked their children, I should not even be here now; the double standards alone should have driven me quite mad. And, for a time, I kind of was. I became an anarchist and a rebel. I’d already shat all over the purity of the Boy Scouts of America. Never earned a single merit badge and detested the thought of getting one. I pulled capers at summer camp, didn’t bathe, hated sleeping in tents, and in general did everything I could to show how much I hated being a scout.
The rebellion of course was one against authority. Anyone of leadership responsibility was a substitute for my father; a surrogate for my hatred, anger and sometimes, tremendous fear. It was safer to lash out at others. I guess, without kowing it, I found it cathartic.
In 1979, I fled home and stayed in Tampa for a while. My half brother was there. He helped temporarily set up an apartment, a studio, at the Bayshore Royal Apartments. I had a sofa and a used TV. It was difficult to do laundry, and I immediately began to degenerate. I drank as heavily as I could afford to, earning a bad reputation in what was then a prestigious building.
And then my father got my sister and a friend from college to come “visit” me. The friend’s father was cool and I liked him. But my sister didn’t meet me downstairs in the lobby. She knocked on my door. She took one look and curled her lip in her trademark display of disgust. The friend’s dad took us to dinner and Sea World. For the first time in many years my sister was nice to me. For the first time in months, I was at peace. The night was over way too soon.
Before they left, I begged her not to tell our parents what a sorry state she had found me in. I begged her. To know that I couldn’t make it on my own would be to give them power they didn’t deserve.
My time in Florida was always going to be temporary, but she would only agree not to tell them what I had turned into if I agreed to move back home. Once more, I was humiliated and defeated. Of course, she told them everything. She may as well have taken pictures.
It reminded me of a lyric in an old song. “Please don’t tell them how (my situation) you found me, don’t tell them how you found me, give me a break, give me a break.”
She told them. She had always told them everything. Brainwashed, bitter bitch, Ithought. You’re gonna end up badly.
Given all of this, and more, I should have grown to be a woman-hating bastard. Indeed, my anger made me mouthy, sarcastic and mean. But I tried never to aim it at women. The times I had, I was marked by scars. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t what I wanted. Guilt and shame are the signs of good souls compromised by a hard life.
***
On the surface, it seems as if I should be a woman-hater. I’m not. I may look at nude models, but I’m not motivated by objectification of them. It goes deeper than that. Perhaps it’s a latent attraction my Christian upbringing suppressed while living a double life. It could be too that I am just plain traumatized but don’t want to be promiscuous. I never liked it when I was. I really don’t know. I wish I did.
With that all written out, to my utter embarrassment, I cannot escape the dreadful subject of Her. She who haunts my dreams.
She is a problem. A big one, and I’ve no defense with which to stave off the merciless torment she brings to my sleep. Forcing me to run, wander through shopping malls or streets from Hell, threatening and taunting me, sometimes posing as an attractive lover, she makes me invent new places or visit places I’ve lived or worked in. Always, when I awaken, I know that she was there. No other person in any dream has had the quality of being real. I temper this insight with the knowledge that I’m equally held prisoner by mental illness, compromising mood and analytical processes. Fear becomes unreasonably prominent, and it interferes with rationality; hysterical fear makes a person sick enough to suffer additional trauma, even when psychosis is not an element of one’s illness.
Doctors do not believe, as a rule, in the supernatural. They send you to a therapist who is no more able than you are to interpret your condition or its symptoms. In time, they can help you, but they’re mere guides; you have to make the journey to the truth. I’ve only told one person that I seem to have made the dream woman worse.
I’m writing a novel, and with many great characters I honestly think are excellent and plot twists worthy of Christian fantasy, sci-fi and horror, I believe it will sell. I’m going to break it into a trilogy, meaning it will be easier to read and that a publisher should be quick to make an offer. It’s the kind of story I’d buy after reading a brief back cover teaser. And I want HBO or Netflix; it’s meant to be a miniseries and the lead was intended for Johnny Depp. He wouldn’t even have to act. It’s perfect for him. Test readers liked it. All I need is inside help publishing it.
At the center of the first and second acts is a character of female gender but not a supernatural one. She comes from my interpretation of a legend, but engaged my own fear of women and failed relationships. Writing this character was meant to be a science fiction and myth combination and I hoped it would help me with my submerged, remaining fears. It did not.
But I have to tell you one last thing. It’s important.
While men are primordially afraid of and intimidated by women, it is women who are far more afraid of men.
Will they be passed over for promotion? Pawed at on the subway? Raped on a first date or by an estranged husband? Or die at the hands of an abusive boyfriend or husband? There are too many who live in fear. Too many suffering bigotry, threats, sexual advances they do not want, comments that follow them, echoing endlessly, random street violence and more.
The night. How peaceful it can be. Depending on where you are, of course. I feel great sympathy for anyone whose night is spent in fear of crime or any other danger.
Having awakened a little past midnight, I ate a sandwich and had a can of Coke. It wasn’t long though, before I became so drowsy that I was nodding while trying to negotiate the ocean in a video game. Next thing, I was in the supermarket we used when I was a kid. But the people who work now at my local store were there. And they were giving me shit at every turn. I was doing everything wrong and finally had words with a woman who works there, except it wasn’t really that woman. It was Her. And she called the police, who sent a cruiser which, as dreams have it, was there instantly. I was questioned, then let go. But I couldn’t find my blue Mazda anywhere. Late at night, not many cars were parked in the first place. Instead I found my older car, a clunker. Why was this here? An old, big family size sedan in tan or beige. A 60s model, an eyesore. I got in, thinking my (ex) wife had come to get the Mazda and left this piece of crap for me.
Then, in the dream, I went to sleep and woke up in the backseat of a similar car with two menacing men up front. I hastily apologized and made my exit. I canvassed the lot trying to find my car, and it wasn’t there. But then it was. Someone stopped me on the way out. A woman in some sort of stressed condition asked me for help. She held a white plastic cylinder with two places on top for connections to something. She wanted me to put it into an enclosed receptacle in the store’s heating and air system. I hesitated. I knew it was Her in a different body. She always does that.
She got me to do it so my fingerprints would be on the plastic. She was setting me up. She had no need of fear in leaving her fingerprints, as she’s got none of her own, always showing up in a different body. It was some type of poison, I knew, and anyone in the store would get sick. And investigators would find my prints, track me down and arrest me.
Next I found myself back in my old car, driving toward Mountain Road and Pasadena, where I grew up. I was married but living with my parents? Huh?
But I somehow got off the road and onto Maryland route 100, but immediately crashed through a barrier. I jammed my feet on the brake pedal but the overpass ended in midair, and my car fell down. There was concrete and rebar everywhere. I knew I was about to die.
I wondered if I should pray before I hit the road below. Too late.
Somehow I landed alive, the car on its wheels. “I’m alive!” I screamed, then tried to start the car. Of course it wouldn’t start. But then I realized it was still in gear. I shifted it into Park and it turned over, the engine catching finally, and I resumed driving, totally an emotional wreck. By the time I turned onto North Shore Road, it was very dark and I couldn’t see to drive. I switched my high beams on but an oncoming car made me turn them down. Then I had to stop because a woman (Her again, different body) had somehow lost her groceries, they being scattered across the road. I had to help her, aware in some way by now who she really was and when I had finished, I found myself back on the supermarket parking lot, again looking for my car, again failing to find it. The sequence began again, slightly different this time, with a father and son I’d seen there earlier back again, trying to tell me something in a taunting way. And then, I was back inside the store, trying to leave, but the exit was blocked by rows of empty shopping carts, and I had to move one line of them to get out. When I had done so with great effort, a guy wheeled another long line of carts back into the space. I ended up trapped. I often end up trapped, but this seemingly prolonged torture has me feeling sick. I’m exhausted. I’m depressed to a point I rarely reach. I feel as if I never slept at all, but really went through it all.
So: what to make of it?
The real question is, should I try to get anything out of it at all? Is there some point, a reason for such dreadful nightmares?
Some things to consider:
•I’m on psychotropic and somatic medicines, and they affect brain activity. However, it does not account for Her being in nightmares for decades before drug therapy.
•Diet, rather poor in my case, as I’m on a low, fixed income. Again, this fails to explain the decades of her being in my nightmares.
•The woman, Her, could be demonic. When a demon gets attached to a human, nothing good will happen. They don’t just haunt your dreams, either. They can get inside your head, blunt dreams and aspirations, keep you down, bring misfortune and ill health, impart its own negative thoughts, ruin you. I’ve heard too many stories and known too many people so affected not to believe this.
•Her existence is a product of the betrayal I felt as my mother became not a mommy but a cold and mean tormentor.
•PTSD, a mind injured beyond all hope of any normalcy til the day I die.
•Her continuing presence could be a product of fears, all accumulated through every decade of my life: abandonment, feeling lost, trapped.
Except that the anguish and terror at Her hands is far different from my average bad dreams. She imprisons and tortures me in ways I find worthy of a Stephen King novel.
Like all victim-survivors of severe abuse, I don’t get to know the answers to the questions I need answered.
We are, in the end, alone with our nightmares, trapped while they invade our minds, and even if you are blessed to be able to wake up beside someone you love, and even if you feel like talking about it, you must endure the terrors of sleep by yourself.
It has taken me 4 nights to write this post. Along the way, I’ve suffered terrible nightmares. For me, writing usually helps. This post has not. I didn’t even want to write it. That’s the problem with being an American Asshole. You just do stuff that don’t make no sense.
Warning: This post contains graphic language and situations including sex, drug abuse, child abuse and violence. I urge discretion.
WINTER
That winter, like the one before it, was bitter in the mid-Atlantic. The one that followed wouldn’t be any better.
I drove a 1971 Mercury Montego. I got it in lousy shape as it was one of my father’s company cars. The paint was blue but looked white until I had to prove it by holding a sheet of paper or a buffing cloth up to it. The vinyl top was dark blue. I spent the summer of ’77 polishing, washing and pin striping it. I used Raindance polish until the paint gleamed. For an ugly model, mine looked nice.
A blue 1971 Mercury Montego like mine but not not as pretty.
On a bitter night after I had been invited to a party by my ex-girlfriend, I anxiously went. It was at her friend Julia’s house, and I was to follow my ex and some upperclassman. I don’t remember where we met up as she was coming from Millersville and I from North Shore in Pasadena. It was probably on Maryland Route 2, Ritchie Highway. It went from the Baltimore City line through Glen Burnie, Pasadena, Severna Park and Arnold, toward Annapolis.
What nobody knew was that I was a user and I took seconal, known on the street as “reds”, and I did it because they calmed me down, and on an empty stomach made me sleepy or left me moving in slow motion. My connection was a dealer in a neighborhood where all the pretty homes and manicured lawns denied any possibility of such things going on. I didn’t know what seconal was for, but my guy knew me, was older by a few years and seemed rather wise. He picked the reds because he thought grass wasn’t enough and I’d get caught anyway, whereas a small film bottle or two of capsules were easy to stash and left no odor.
This was my first party. I can’t count that awful night in a Benfield park when I was so cold, scared and anxiety filled that I really wouldn’t go to someone’s place for a small gathering, and hell no for a party.
It was threatening snow. Back then we had no internet or smartphones. I got the weather from WCAO pop radio; the car had a standard AM only radio. I learned to love the top 40 singles along with that station’s mix of oldies from Sinatra to Bill Haley. Rod Stewart always had a single on the charts, so I listened and hey, good stuff, you know?
The weather forecast was for snow. I was not keen driving in it, but on reds, there were times I could have done lots of things that would otherwise be impossible. I followed them through Severna Park, heading somewhere in Annapolis. Actually it turned out to be Eastport, across Spa Creek from the old town section.
Once inside, Julie showed us down to a finished basement where, like a teen with conservative parents, she had sodas and snacks and a nice turntable spinning Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart and David Bowie. Going inside…wow. I’d skipped supper. Popped a red, driven impaired and stepped out into frigid, moist air with a raw wind, and that wasn’t really too pleasant. My head spun, but I kept it together until we got inside. Julie was in one of my classes but I’d never taken notice of her. Not on my radar at all.
She was blonde, with Barbie doll hair, thin build, and yet during this party, I began noticing something uncomfortable. At first my ex hovered near me and I was still on a bashful footing, so I didn’t mind. She had asked me to come because it was neutral ground, and I didn’t get what that meant. I thought she and Gary were dating. They were not, but they were good friends, and much, much later I realized it. Gary was a great guy, and I wasn’t so jealous because he liked me and no matter how dark my mood was at school, the gallows humor and sarcasm I’d spit out made him laugh. This was a private and elite school, a prep school, and a lot of people I knew were shocked by some of my twisted comments and evil humor. He would often laugh out loud, a genuine laugh, the kind that knots your stomach, and I secretly admired that and appreciated it. Somehow, there were moments when he made my hell a bit easier to take. I wasn’t well liked anyway. Nobody knew I was a head and I wasn’t a jock. I wasn’t anything at all. If someone said “good morning” my response was often “fuck off” or a middle finger. Where did they get off, greeting me after two years of ignoring me? Fuck them.
The worst was when the painted girls sucked up when trying for homecoming queen. Girls who looked right through me suddenly said “hi” and smiled at me. Fake faces. Fake words. Fake smiles. I hated them.
THE CODE OF SILENCE
My ex had shown me nothing but affection the year before and yet couldn’t understand me. I was insecure, and didn’t want to be. I forced her away without intending to.
I wanted to be like everyone else. Worse, I didn’t understand why I felt the things I did and that meant my impulsive behavior and depression couldn’t be countered or compensated for. I’d turned clingy, and no woman of any age and most men can’t handle that. It wears them down and soon they’re bound to skip on you. That’s what my ex had done. I agreed to go to the party because part of me wanted to show her I wasn’t weak like she thought. She’d noticed other things than my insecurities and fear of doing new things. Even if I did think she was dating Gary, I had to go. I’m not really sure if I was positive enough to think I could win her back, and I’m sure I didn’t really intend to. But I had to go.
My dealer was more like a suburban garden shed doctor than the guys in the city. I’d heard about them and my father had used that to manipulate a fear of drugs in me. But I found Dealer by accident. And for a long time I was scared of him. He was older, built for action, and I thought he had a gang. He may have, because back then in suburban and peaceful Pasadena, closer to the upper income neighborhoods, if a teen wanted to go into business, he needed an answer for any challenge. He also needed backup protection from big suppliers who would try to take over the distribution he got, and they wanted him to sell H and PCP, and he refused. He once warned me that he had ears all over the place, and that if he ever heard of me using shit like psychedelics or smack, he’d never help me again. He spoke very little. He didn’t get personal but he had rules. Heavy shit brought heavy attention from the law, but that seemed to coincide with the desire not to lose a customer to what he sold.
He could get you all the grass you wanted, good stuff, too. But in large quantities, he had to know certain things, and if you lied to him, which he warned me up front never to do, he’d send you packing and God help you if you tried approaching him again.
One rule was that you could only call him from a pay phone. If he couldn’t hear the sounds of a mall or highway in the background, he would hang up. Then, and this happened to me, you had a certain amount of time to get to a noisier position and call. Ground rules.
I never saw him or met him in the same place. He would assign you a place and time. If you didn’t show up in a certain time, he’d be gone. It was clever in a time when dealers were getting people killed. Getting busted, doing time or flipping on a distributor to keep out of prison.
Dealer had to meet you on a friend’s or customer’s word of honor that you were for real. Our first meeting was like me seeing a doctor. Oh, he would be okay if you wanted to buzz, get stoned or party with friends. That’s what he did. And he could get anything. He knew what everything was, what it did to a customer and how much money he could reasonably charge without pissing anyone off, and for that reason, I knew he had access to a nurse or doctor, like his mother or father, and he could read up on things.
He asked me, “What’s your deal?” And that meant what was going on in your life. Was I depressed, suicidal, a jagoff? Was I legit? That was what he did. Based on whatever he thought, he’d recommend something and name a price. For example I was insecure and a coward and he saw that. He heard that in my voice. He asked specific questions like was I nervous a lot. In physical pain. If my sleep was off. Any weird shit going on. And that’s when we ran into the Code of Silence.
I was still being abused, although in 1976 I was allowed to “opt out” of the sexual abuse. But I was lost even so; most of the damage was done. I answered that “I can’t tell you” when he asked certain questions. At first he got kind of mad, but he stayed patient enough. “You’re at home?” Meaning with parents.
It was dark. Always, a dark place. I rarely met him after that because he used drops, after I left cash in another drop then called him. But it began to sink in. His face, there in the dark, surrounded by woods and some distant houses, revealed something I never knew the meaning of until years later. I think he guessed it. No, that’s not exactly it. I think he knew. He knew the deal: trouble at home. I was pretty beat up on the inside. Later he learned to tell it in my voice in just a “hey, it’s me” on the phone. He knew my voice, my name, my mood. He knew I had a past and present I couldn’t talk about. He obviously had me followed and asked around about me.
The Code of Silence refers not to some Mafia rule of the Sicilian Omerta, but the one all victims of domestic and sexual abuse are threatened to observe. You tell anyone, and you’ll pay for it.
“I’ll kill you.”
“I’ll kill your family.”
“I’ll send you to Crownsville (insert the name of your nearest mental institution here)”.
And so on.
I had not told my ex. Nobody knew. Dealer knew the nature of my hell. He recommended reds and a few other things for “emergencies”. He told me how to take them and what would be too much. “You ever OD on me, and I hear it, you and I are through. I deal, I ain’t no killer. You die, good luck in Hell.”
Holy shit, I thought later. Dealer had scruples, even religious ones. I can’t remember the street names of the other tablets and capsules I got, but he always asked at intervals how I was doing and what’s happening in my life. By January of ’78, he knew where I worked and lived and even what school I went to. I heard a name once. A bodyguard slipped and said it. I looked in a George Fox yearbook from 1975, the last year I went. Going by upperclassmen and the name, I thought I found him. He would have been familiar to my sister, who was a gossip and knew everyone. I asked if she knew him one night and she gave me this weird look. She never said anything except “Stay away from him” and to this day I wonder about it. Did I really have the right guy? Yearbook pictures in teenage years are deceptive. I wasn’t sure. I’d changed a lot in 3 years. And I don’t know if he was the Dealer, or exactly what way she’d known or heard of him. Then again, I never knew if that one sister out of all the others (4 in all) was ever abused. I never did, but I was of the mind that with her mean Scorpio nature likely with Gemini rising, maybe she’d been abused to some extent but quickly shown resistance and defiance that scared our father. I likened her to the queen of the hive. She got away with anything she wanted.
Dealer came to know everything a dealer could know or figure out. From summer, 1977 on. He became invested and I knew it. But I never did break the Code of Silence. That would come later.
JULIE
The party was okay. I requested a song and my ex told Julie to play it. It was a song I liked, but I didn’t know what Julie was going to take from it, and never thought about that. I was drugged and it was an impulse. But she knew my ex and I had long since broken up. So I think she may have inferred something from the song.
It was on the radio so much that I’d gotten to like the bittersweet lyrics. Julie knew them well. You’ll see what I mean.
Written by Cat Stevens with lead guitar by Joe Walsh, no one ever covered this song with more emotion than Stewart. I don’t know for certain that Julie took it to mean I was still messed up over my ex, who had come with someone else, but that maybe I liked her. But that it meant something to me was obvious.
Someone said the snow was getting worse and Gary, whose car was not built for slippery roads (I think it was a Pinto), wanted to leave. Not remembering how the hell we got there, I had to follow them, so the night was over. On the way back up Ritchie Highway I had to pull over and throw up. The soda, the reds and the fear of the snow because I hadn’t had snow tires put on yet, were all too much for me. I just wanted to go home and sleep. I realized I’d mixed drugs. I wasn’t even fit to drive on a summer day.
Monday morning at school, I walked the plowed asphalt and crunchy snow from the student parking lot through the arch of the century-old building, and waiting at the door of that building which was called “the Great Hall” but was likened to Frankenstein’s castle by someone I knew, Julie opened the door, waved and said, “Hey Mike!”
She had me come up the steps and she said that she really liked me and had asked her father if she could go out with me. I was shocked and wondered if I’d said anything to her, and if she’d taken that song to be for her, but it didn’t matter. My heart was falling already. This beautiful girl wanted me? Hell, I couldn’t remember much more about the party than I just wrote. Except that I was sick and had to work on Sunday. I don’t remember actually working.
I spent a week feeling so good I didn’t need to take anything. Shit, I even had a liking for instant coffee at night. Homework was out of the question. If I did it, which I hardly ever took seriously, and in Algebra wrote numbers at random anyway, I can’t say. All I know is I felt happy. Happier than I had been in a very long time, and in my house, any joy was short-lived as my father slapped it out of us as quickly as he spotted it. Being in a good mood made him suspicious. But that week, I was in a place I never wanted to leave. She told me that her father had to meet me first and then he would give her his answer. That was set for the following Saturday night. I was getting seriously nervous by quitting time on Saturday, but I showered and dressed and took two reds. That was a big mistake. They’d kick in before I arrived and I thought it was okay. But it wasn’t okay. Her dad sat me down at his kitchen table and in a friendly manner asked questions. It was very traditional and I was a wreck but I respected him. I really started getting sleepy. But I was zoning out more by the second and that was wrong. It didn’t work like that. Well, mostly not, and I did everything wrong. I saw a rough chunk of red crystal as a decoration on a lower shelf of an island counter, picked it up, and it was beautiful. Rough cut but polished. I put it to my eye and looked through it. That should have been it right there. He should have thought anything except what he did: “Hey, I never thought of that.” And he looked through it too. How he couldn’t tell I was drugged (“on something”) I’ll never know, but he liked me. He found me respectful and amusing.
Outside it was snowing again. I had parallel parked out front. He heard my wheels spinning uselessly and came out to help. I felt bad about that but on Monday, Julie was waiting inside the Great Hall and came out to tell me her dad liked me and said we could go out. Here was another week of heaven, but this time the infatuation had me sleepless.
My heart pounded. It ached. I dreamed while lying awake. I worried and I called Dealer. Somehow, he knew who I was seeing and where she lived, and that scared me. He could tell and he said he needed to see me before we could do business. This one time he met me in a public area. The parking lot of Gino’s on Mountain Road. He said, “Fuck, kid, you look like shit. What the hell you doing to yourself? You’re gonna call down heat on me lookin like this. You better get yer shit together!” He asked me about the girl. I said I think I’m in love and he says love ain’t supposed to make you sick, asshole. He had just the thing, though, and he gave me a couple of samples. A one time deal on something he said he’d never offer me again. He said, “Now go home and get in the sack and if you gotta stay home tomorrow and sleep, do it. Don’t you never let me catch you lookin this shitty again.”
I don’t remember if I stayed home the next day. I slept like a baby and I don’t know for how long. It’s possible I did miss a day and don’t remember. But that was the best drug high and then drop I had until I got a mixture of morphine and valium. That was heavy. The universe made perfect sense for two hours. The comedown was gentle, slow. I knew why people liked the needle. That didn’t come from my dealer; he never mentioned it. He wasn’t everywhere.
Dating Julie is a haze. I remember the night I told her I loved her. She said, “The crazy thing is, I think I’m starting to love you too.” It was snowing and as we made out, this obscure song was playing. It only fit because I only heard the words I wanted to.
Then came sex. In the car. Parked in the darkest corner of a parking lot where nobody ever parked. It got heavy and it happened fast.
PSYCHO
Want to know what happens when a 17-year-old high school junior has PTSD, a drug abuse problem, a beautiful girl, is getting laid, and should be enjoying life?
Well I’ll tell you.
Bad things happen and it’s like a cartoon snowball rolling down a mountain. It gets faster and more dangerous with each hundredth of a second.
Insecurities about our relationship, about myself, began to haunt me. You know what that’s like? It’s like you’re gonna die. Your whole world is gonna end any minute. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It never even crossed my mind that I was right or wrong. It was always in my mind that I was different. That I had something wrong with me. And the more I felt for Julie the less secure I was.
I began to badger her over it. She was a bit bothered at first but it got old and I could tell. It was going south.
SPRING
In the same month I was grounded, Julie was grounded and my dealer wouldn’t answer my calls. He had a guy screening them. I went through agony withdrawing. I was dependent. My insides shook. On weekends I had to clean the offices at my father’s warehouse. It was an all day job. Not because I was slow or withdrawing but I was never dismissed until it was fucking dark.
Unknown to me, because Julie and I had broken curfew one night, her father had called mine. Julie had a decent guy for a father. I didn’t. The night we were late, he called looking for his daughter. My father hated him or his children being called out. Getting any negative attention. Appearances were everything to him, always is to a monster who leads a double life. Control and dominance are integral to child abuse. I got home that night, the lights were out, and usually that meant everyone was sleeping. Not this night.
My father was behind the front door, in the dark. As soon as I closed it my head exploded. I was knocked loopy and had moved a few feet to the top of the stairs leading down to the den and my room. He clocked me again, knocking me unconscious. I don’t remember how I got up the steps, or him knocking me out again and back down the stairs. One of my sisters told me later that she was up, saw it, and was yelling to dad that he was killing me. And then I got grounded.
I already hated my life. I hated myself way more after that night than ever before. And I hated everyone in the world for what was being, what had already been done, to me. Hate and anger filled my soul, my head, and every cell in my body.
Well. My older sister, the one who I thought knew about Dealer, was away at her first year of college. I hated her, too. But for Spring Break, we went and picked her up and went to Myrtle Beach. It seemed pretty far from Buis Creek to me, but I didn’t know fuck all what was going on. I was miserable. I didn’t fucking care about any of them. I hated them. My insides crawled and twisted. I had spent one afternoon throwing up. I was dizzy but had a constant headache and I shook like a leaf all the time. Sometimes so badly that everyone saw it. Good thing my parents knew jack shit about withdrawal. They never knew –suspected, but never knew –that I was hardcore. Thinking back now, I abused the reds to the point where I was lucky to have lived through the use and the withdrawal. Either could have killed me.
THE COP
After a miserable rainy week in South Carolina, or was it just a weekend? I went one morning, a saturday, to work. My father reminded me to call Master Alarm Company and tell them I was going to open up. There were no keypads back then. I was so sick I forgot to call. Next thing I knew, Anne Arundel County police officers were running into the building with shotguns or with police specials drawn. I told them what happened with my heart pounding in terror, but one of them was an asshole. He threatened to arrest me for a false alarm next time. And that was the beginning of something I should never have been put through.
I knew his name because another officer who knew my father later told me. He made no bones about telling me everyone hated the guy. Al knew who I was talking about because this cop had the first Ford with a big light bar across the roof; the rest of the cruisers were bigger, Pontiacs with a single blue dome light on the roof. Truckers called them “bubble gum machines”. The cop was known as a dick who would not hesitate to write tickets to old ladies who couldn’t afford repair orders. In fact, I saw him doing that on Crain Highway. I had a focus for my hate. It was him.
Then he began to show up in my rearview mirror. He’d come out of nowhere like some fucking demon and ride my bumper to intimidate me and probably to get me to make a mistake so he could write a ticket or handcuff me. I didn’t know how he was in so many different beats all the time. How did he explain that to superiors? I’d see him in northern Glen Burnie, Southdale, Pasadena, Lake Shore, Riviera Beach, Millersville (police department headquarters was there), Severna Park and everywhere in between. My nerves were wrecked.
I only got to see Dealer once after that. He’d heard I had the fuzz on my ass and told me never to look for or call him again. It was some cold shit so I hated him, too. Another name on the hate list. I actually never ratted on him even though I considered it. My anger, insecurities and anxiety just kept swelling up in my heart and in my head. He didn’t know how close I had already come to dying from his reds. One night I couldn’t breathe. It was terrifying and I got up and forced myself to go for a walk. All I knew was that I had to get my heart rate up or I was a goner. It was dark and nobody was out. No cars passed me. I walked Dutch Ship Road down to Edgewater and then did it again, never realizing I was so fucked up that I was walking kind of like you see on Walking Dead, or Sean Of The Dead, but like a drunk zombie. Yeah, a guy I knew saw me. Where he saw me isn’t clear but he said he laughed his ass off. I otherwise probably wouldn’t remember it. I do know he thought I was drunk because he saw me puking in the middle of the road.
Julie put up with me the best she could, but when it came time for the junior prom, I could not and would not go. I was drug free, and that wasn’t any good for me. I was back to panic attacks and sleepless nights and I was permanently depressed and exhausted. I was too scared to go. Crowds, a tux, oh hell no.
Besides, one night I almost told her about the cop. But I stopped short because he had never followed me when she (or anyone else) was with me. Evidently he was senior enough to be daylight shift, the dickhead. But I knew she would tell her father, and if he did anything, anything at all, I knew I alone would pay for it. If he told my father, well, my old man would have gone through his cop friend, and I knew where that would lead.
So I changed my mind and made it a stalker who drove a green import. I acted up and I acted out. I was scared enough to need to get it off my chest but too scared to tell the truth. Her father knew there was no green import, but by the time came for the prom and I refused to go, I knew it was over. He hated me, and she did, too. She had to have felt betrayed and insulted. The school year ended with my teachers all ganging together and complaining about me to the headmaster. I wound up in his office way too many times and he started calling my mother, who immediately called my father at work, daily. And no matter how high the tuition was, the truth was that they decided some students were not worth the trouble. One administrator said I was the worst student the school ever had. I had six credits. I wouldn’t graduate until I was thirty, she said. The headmaster, a shithead who liked touching female students, concurred. He was Navy reserve, but he was a douche. I heard the news from my father after the last day of school: neither I nor my sister would be enrolled for the following year. I said, “Dad, that’s not fair. Lisa ain’t done anything wrong! She’s a model student.” He said, “Michael, you’re too dumb even to go to public school. Lisa will, but you won’t. You’re going to drop out and come to work for me full time.” He told me I was retarded, stupid, called me everything in the book. I believed him.
I wouldn’t know until the following summer that my father knew things I never thought anyone knew. Julie and I had been seen having sex on campus. Holy shit.
SUMMER
The summer began with me working at a satellite warehouse my father owned. One day, an overhead door was off the rollers on two panels. My oldest brother and a truck driver stayed late to fix it and therefore, I had to stay. My brother handed me something that came to the house in the mail that day. My mother had taken it to the main office, given it to my father, and he had my brother bring it to me when he came in the late afternoon that day. It was July 4th, 1978. The item was a postcard from Ocean City, New Jersey. Fuckin Jersey shore. It was a “Dear John” letter on a fucking postcard. I deserved it and I knew it but couldn’t face it. My heart was broken. I wanted to die but was too cowardly for suicide. I just suffered. Acted out. Used only when a driver was able to give me a few pills.
I had behaved like a fool. I was embarrassed, felt guilty for hurting Julie, and yet hated and loved her at the same time. It hurt. Always, with no relief. I was running on empty. I listened to that song a lot. But Clapton had this song charting earlier and it was getting typical overplay on AM radio and it haunted me to death.
Even the fuckin radio was my enemy, a tormentor I hated but couldn’t turn off. That song reminded me of a party we had gone to.
So many times I wanted to die. If not for my best friend, I would not be here. Eventually I’d have done something like hang myself. So we caroused a bit (Heineken) and cruised, but mostly we talked. I was smoking by my 18th birthday but had to hide it from may father. He knew better. When he got mad enough, he’d have his reckoning. He always did.
I didn’t try to contact Julie again. It was the most mature thing I’d ever done for her.
The heartache wouldn’t stop. She’d left a hole in me. A terrible thing I couldn’t patch up or medicate. Dealer was a no go. I sure wanted his doctoring, though. Some pill to raise me up out of this mess I had in my heart.
FAll
School started. My sister went to Chesapeake and I kept putting on a work uniform at 6 every morning. 15 hour days weren’t unusual.
One night I was supposed to go with my friend for pizza. It was really early but because of the time chage, very dark. I got to my car and didn’t have my keys. I had to go back to my room. So I went downstairs through the den and into my room.
I knew my keys were on my desk straight ahead across the room. It was very dark but I didn’t need to see to get them so I left the light off. Halfway across the room I stopped dead. Frozen with the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. The air felt weird, as if it were charged with something.
It was pure evil. Like what I felt years earlier when I was in an upstairs room and that tiny shadow was on the walls by the ceiling. Only this was much worse. Far more powerful. I remained still. I couldn’t have moved if I had the runs; I’d have made a mess.
Everything was quiet. Deathly quiet in a house full of people. I was not aware of time passing. I just stood there.
When the energy around me seemed to vanish, from behind me and to the right of the door, from inside my closet, I heard my father say, “Yeah, I’m in here.”
What the fuck!
All these years, I’ve thought that night I sensed my father’s true self. But what I felt was something around me. He wasn’t alone. A younger sister later told me she saw a shadow, much bigger than the one I had seen all those years ago. Maybe that’s what I felt. The demon who urged him to give in to his sick tendencies. He’d raised us with his fucked-up “wisdom” and twisted “insight” about Old Testament laws. He never lived by them. He fucked up our heads, and perhaps I got the worst of it because I’m in an ongoing treatment and rehabilitation program and the rest of my siblings still have spouses, and children, and only one gets counseling, or was, last time I talked to her.
But a real Christian doesn’t beat and rape his children. Real Christians get help or find some way to resist. Besides, he wasn’t penitent and my mother was even worse. Losing your cherry to your own mother fucks your head up for life.
I never forgot that night. I never will unless I go into dementia. And I wonder: did I really sense demon, or man?
He was in the closet looking for hidden drugs and Playboy magazines. He fucked his own daughters but hated porn. He would always find it and trash it, but rape and incest? Those were backed up by scripture. He was a fucking animal.
WINTER
The year’s end I don’t remember. On December 7, I wrecked the car. Rear-ended someone on mountain road and my father was merciless. I don’t remember Christmas. I don’t remember much of anything except the constant pain I felt over Julie. I bottomed out. I just bottomed out.
EPILOGUE
It’s only one year out of the sixty I’ve lived, yet so traumatic and so painful. Yeah. Even now. I knew this day would come, when I had to write about this whole year. I dreaded it but now that it’s done, I’m going to be okay. This story was necessary to show you how indecent I was, the result of ongoing violence and abuse. To tell you what happened when my life was so hard to live, the dysfunctional relationship I had, what it did to me and what I can only guess it did to Julie.
I had to include every ingredient, my job, drug abuse, the rogue police officer, my intense fears and inability to go to the prom, my deceit, the failure to be brave enough to tell the truth, what my teachers thought of me and how that unfairly affected my sister, and that it was no small miracle that I survived that year.
Today, reds are impossible to get on the street without big dollars. Most dealers never even heard of them. There’s plenty of stepped-on coke, skunk weed, crack, crank, fentanyl, scramble, percocet, benzos and a few others. Fentanyl (street name “fetie”) is instant death, or a visit to intensive care, and a ticket to an NDE. If you survive, you’re not going to be the same. Heroin is major league trouble. You’ll never find anything pure. You dont know what’s mixed in, or if it will kill you. ODs are still common.
If you’re on a drug or drugs, my suggestion is to stop. You can’t just do it yourself, though; you could die. You need help, detox, and that requires things most aren’t willing to go through.
As for the cop, he fucked with me straight through to 1980. I got back together with my first ex, and told her. She accused me of lying. I couldn’t win. I was always a fuckin loser.
But my best friend. He believed me. Want to know what he told me? Because he knew the guys this happened to.
The guys were horsing around on the parking lot of the White Coffee Pot Jr. on Ritchie Highway one night, but someone called it in as a fight. Guess who the first cop on the scene was. Oh, yeah, and he roughed the teens up, seriously beating one of them.
That boy’s father was a man with a rep, the kind you wanted as a friend, or else went out of your way to avoid. They called him “Big Joe.”
Well, Big Joe wasn’t the kind of man who could see his son in the hospital and not do anything about it. He called in a massive order, about a two hundred dollar tab, to Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. When he got there, he refused to pay. The manager threatened to call the police and Big Joe encouraged him to go ahead. He further told the manager to request a certain officer and promised the guy that this particular cop would definitely see to it that justice was done. The manager did so. When the officer arrived, Big Joe proceeded to hand him a beating the man would never forget. He left before backup came but it wasn’t clear whether they ever arrested him. I dont know. But in a way, justice was served.
When the cop got back to work, a few years went by and one day I read about him in the paper. He had been disciplined for sexual harassment and was riding a desk. Yes, there are bad cops. There always were. But most I’ve ever met were eager to help and didn’t like injustice.
I was messed up. But Julie? She…was the love of my life. Lee Ann never left my heart but I was never involved with her. I have loved every single woman I was ever with. There was never anyone I wasn’t serious about. Julie keeps a secret place in my heart. I’m grateful I knew her.
AFTERWORD
You have to measure this story against yourself, and if you’ve survived sexual abuse, physical abuse, or sexual assault, domestic abuse of any kind, then perhaps you see something of yourself in this story. PTSD has different symptoms and no two victims are the same. If you’re in a situation or just got out of one, you’ll need help. My treatment includes drug and other therapy. That’s a good mix once you get the right meds dialed in. Talk therapy is hard work. You relive everything, and the next day you may feel exhausted. But the truth is, you’ve had a part of yourself torn away and replaced with an insidious and crippling affliction. You do not deserve to live that kind of life. I survived decades with it, but those years were full of torment, nightmares, dysfunctional relationships and guilt.
Of all these, the worst is guilt. I’ve carried guilt over how I treated Julie for years. I looked for her on Facebook. I just wanted to apologize. Same with my other exes.
But I had to come to grips with one sad, ultimate truth.
I did the best I could.
And none of it was my fault. I was hurt. I didn’t know about PTSD or the price of drug use.
I didn’t know.
Do you? Do you feel guilt from something that wasn’t your fault? Because you need to see that you were a victim, damaged by heinous acts, and that guilt is a toxin.
Science likes to play with our heads. You know that, right? It tells its students shitty things that they then must pass on to us, the little people. The uneducated, unsophisticated, the workers who have no time or will to do their kind of legwork. So we do weird things in turn, mocking everything they say and dismissing it all out of hand.
Memories, they say, are unreliable. On that single premise of something that is really far more complicated and much more deep, courts of law have believed or disbelieved, and it’s always been a problem, but now, much worse. If a witness for the state can be taken apart sufficiently to cast reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, a guilty rapist or killer goes free. Or an innocent man goes to his death because doubts as to the memories of defense witnesses have been used with great success.
One night I went somewhere with a friend. I cannot remember the year but I can place it in the autumn or winter for certain. It was 1974, or 1975. A dark night I can never fully remember or forget, nor will I dishonestly fill in the blanks. There are names I remember but will not use. It’s just because somewhere in this dissipated soul of mine, I keep finding something good that won’t let me do certain things. I won’t say I’m a good person. I just have my limits.
What prompted me to open with a few observations about memories and science is that this night haunted me for years. And, I suppose, if I’m writing about it now, the haunting continues.
All I can tell you is, a close friend in my neighborhood had a big brother. Not blood; a volunteer from some non-profit organization called Big Brothers. The volunteers were given a young man who had no father in his life, paired with him on the goal of mentorship. It was a time when we had naive and altruistic idiots who worked for free to get brownie points for college education and credits.
This one cold night, I was invited by my friend to go along with him and his big brother to a weenie roast. Some place called Benfield Park. I don’t know if that was a real name. It was in Benfield, near Severna Park. If such a park existed then it’s had a name change, or, more likely, been bulldozed for the Interstate 97 freeway, or the fucking business parks that are a blight to once peaceful and green suburban hoods or forest land. Either way, no such park exists today. Have to admit that I did at least check before writing this; such a horrible night deserves to be researched, as I would hate to disappoint any sensitive fucker out there with letters behind their fucking name. That’s not a nice thing to do, and besides, I’m already ceding to their demands by admitting this night is a brief fragment of memories broken with blanks between them.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps it was autumn, not winter, because my mother would never have allowed me out without a coat if she’d known how cold it was going to be. But I had nothing but T-shirt and jeans. And in the dark, I sat on the top of a picnic table, feet on its bench. Cold and shivering, pissed because people I did not know were there, and in a situation like that, I didn’t function well. I said nothing and I did nothing. And I shivered. My teeth clattered. And I was full of fear, full of anger. I did ask to go home. I was ignored. Now, hate filled my soul. In the darkest of nights. In the bitter cold.
The truth is that even had I worn a ski parka, I’d still have wanted to go home. These people alternately ignored me or looked at me like I was some fucking idiot, and when, finally, the big brother decided it was too cold to remain there, he drove us to some house. I supposed he lived there. It was bright and warm. I was more pissed, felt like a prisoner, because that meant I wasn’t going home anytime soon. Someone popped some popcorn. They didn’t have that carcinoma-inducing microwave shit from Conagra back then, and I didn’t care for any no matter what. I wanted away from all these people I didn’t know. And I don’t remember when I finally did go home.
You can do all the Psych 101 you want, but would you mind me saving you the trouble? You take a sheltered, controlled, abused kid and without warning throw him into a situation like that, and you’ll get nothing good from it. I was too dysfunctional. Too traumatized. Too fucked up. And no matter how traumatic that night was or wasn’t, I never forgave. I never forgot. And if the story ended there, I’d really like it; I’d be happy to to leave it alone.
But none of my stories ever end well. In North Shore on the Magothy, the uppity neighborhood I grew up in, I never forgave. I never completely forgot. The back yard where I’d once played with plastic soldiers and dinosaurs and steel Tonka trucks, unaware that the fucking neighbors all let their cats out at night and I was sitting in a litter box, was landscaped, an in-the-ground pool was put in, and grass was finally grown. It was prettier, but still Hell. The neighborhood became a place of hell even outside of my yard. The bullying at school went on and on. Bullying in my neighborhood was replaced by avoidance. My friend with the big brother was the last I would ever have there.
Once my anger could no longer be contained, when calling the Mr. Softee man’s sexual habits into question no longer provided an outlet, I embarked on a mission of revenge. My favored method was property damage. Vandalism. Hit people back in their wallets. But somehow I always fucked up. I was seen. And that frustrated me more because you can guess how my father reacted. In a state of frustrated anger, it’s a bad idea to even leave your bedroom much less the fucking house. At my friend-with-the-big-brother’s house I stood and threw a rock through the plate glass patio door of a house occupied by a family I hated for no particular reason. He told on me. The neighbor came round to my house one night telling my father to fork over half a grand to pay for the door. If I had dared speak, I’d have called bullshit on the amount. I got called to the porch, my father asked if I’d done it. I said no. I blamed my friend, who of course ratted on me. That didn’t sit well with the neighbor, but my father didn’t like that fucker anyway. He was adamant. He told the guy to get off his porch and never set foot on it again. Or else.
Inside, my father did a funny thing: he failed to question me even once as to my guilt. My father never brought it up again. And he was like that, and he may have been a monster and he may have fucked me up for life, but when it came to defending me against another person, he fucking took up for me and he never left a doubt that if they persisted he was going to throw down. I’m grateful for that.
Still, the story goes on. I never saw my friend with the big brother again. But life is a real motherfucker. I did run into the big brother again.
Two years passed. He shows up at my church, and he’s my Sunday school teacher. And I grew to like him. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Soon he finished God college, became a pastor, moved away.
Stories like this, you know, can’t end there. He left his church on the Maryland Eastern Shore, came back to his old home, became the pastor of a church near Millersville, north of Severna Park, where I’d spent that night freezing in some park that no longer exists. I passed the church one time and saw his name on the sign. I stopped in to see him. He was, I imagined, an old friend.
He was a kind and decent man. But I was by then no longer a minor. I had a stormy relationship with a girl I used for sex and affection, because I didn’t know what to do. I was lonelier than most. More terrified, more haunted than most. I didn’t want to be alone. Somehow, she loved me. She wanted me to be better. She really cared. One day we were in my car and a song that was still hot came on.
“Listen to this. It’s you,” she said.
“You see the world through your cynical eyes,
You’re a troubled young man I can tell You’ve got it all in the palm of your hand But your hand’s wet with sweat and your head needs a rest
And you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe it You’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe it
Why must you be such an angry young man When your future looks quite bright to me How can there be such a sinister plan That could hide such a lamb, such a caring young man
You’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe it You’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe it Get up, get back on your feet You’re the one they can’t beat and you know it.”
And she was right. She loved me. Enough to have watched me go through inner pain and let it out in anger. Enough to see me in the lyrics of a song by Styxx released a year earlier. We had great sex. We loved kissing and holding hands and going to movies and watching Saturday Night Live. But I don’t believe I was capable of loving her. At least, not in a healthy way. The relationship was doomed.
She asked me to seek help. If I didn’t change, she knew she couldn’t have me. I went to the pastor who used to be my friend’s big brother. I trusted him to do things that couldn’t be done.
In the end, even he grew frustrated with me. He drove me to Crownsville State Hospital so I could commit myself. It was a betrayal I never forgave. He drove away and left me. I hated him. And if the song by Styxx applied, then it was incomplete; I was worse off than that. I never saw my girlfriend again. Never saw the pastor again. I’ll never trust a pastor ever again, either, and I won’t even go to a church for a fucking wedding.
I left them behind. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was surviving but without any idea how to survive, like a blind man playing chess. It can be done with a computer these days, if the player can remember where every piece is on the board. And memory, that’s a transient and mischievous thing.
If you were shown a Fibonacci series of 50 numbers on a paper, and given seconds to see it, could you remember it one second later and repeat it? Of course you couldn’t. But a mathematics professor could, because a few remembered numbers at the beginning would tell them what comes next. They would know.
But if you go wading into the poison of the internet, memory is often discussed as infallible. The most notorious example is the Mandela effect. People swear Nelson Mandela died in prison and that they remember it clearly. But he didn’t. They remember a different spelling for the cartoon series “Looney Tunes” and swear the Berenstain Bears children’s books used to be the “Bernstein Bears”, and that some inter-dimensional event occurred which deposited us in a parallel world.
People believe strange shit, while ignoring established facts, empirical scientific data. Climate change is an imminent threat, but people still claim that it’s either a lie or a natural phenomenon. I’ll get a lot of satisfaction if I live to see waterfront property sunk like fucking Atlantis; I’ll watch the news and roll over laughing as the rich fuck themselves and realize it too late, because I’m an asshole and that’s what I’d do.
It’s amazing, though, that science questions the reliability of memories, yet those memories are often cemented forever by unlikely chains of events we couldn’t see coming even if we were especially gifted with precognition. I judiciously contemplate my memories. I do. My mission here is to let you see me as I was, as I am. To be as vulnerable and honest as can be. Hopefully you learn, and never wind up like me. Hopefully you see something in yourself that you can change. If you want help and you need it, go find it. Don’t be like me. It’s okay to ask for help. It wasn’t when I was young.
These days it’s hard to muck out what’s going on. We’re in an existential crisis as a country and a species. Lies surround us like a Dolby system. Our lives depend on many things. I’m not optimistic. I’m still cynical. Still doubtful. I see evil everywhere.
But if I can give you hope, then today I choose to say this: the death of an American legend always hits us hard. That’s because we have the amazing capacity of love and deep despair. If there can be no appreciation of the light without the darkness we all face, then I give you the shocking and heartbreaking loss of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna this past weekend. I see people mourning. Honoring him with shot clock violations, wearing his jerseys, leaving mementos at an impromptu memorial outside Staples Center. I see people from all walks of life in grief, sharing memories. Shedding tears. Heartbroken, devastated. You know, as hard as it is to even think about, people are showing us all what makes humanity better than racists and other evil people make us believe we are. There is hope. There is. As long as we can love and grieve such a loss, we can overcome any evil.
And don’t worry so much about memories; I believe that there’s a good reason for their capricious nature. We don’t remember everything wrongly, mistakenly. Some details may become obscure or muddled, but so long as we’re honest, it doesn’t matter. If you’re asked a question you can’t answer, then do not try to. We’re all just surviving. Nowadays that’s hard enough.
It was April. The fifth, to be exact. At the Eastern Correctional Institute, a medium-security prison in Westover, Maryland, the system failed and an inmate was out-processed eighteen months earlier than he should have been.
Now of course, these things happen. I can’t say how often; usually we read about a prisoner sentenced to eighteen months, yet still inside after twenty years. Prisoners released too early, however, as in the case of John Frederick Thanos, can bring trouble to the outside. In short order, the world would know that lesson all too well. John Patrick O’Donnell, clerk for the prison records, for whatever reason he had, asked his boss, Chief of Classification for the Maryland Department of Corrections, Warren R. Sparrow, about releasing prisoner John Thanos. And just like that, two men became, through sheer carelessness, responsible for turning a monster loose on the State of Maryland. He got a handgun.
You know where this is going.
It turned out that the man had some violent tendencies, so before I go any further, it has to be asked why a rapist served time at a medium-security prison at all. Rapists are treated far too lightly in Western culture, particularly in the United States. Youve heard the stories — convicted rapists sentenced to two years. Or six months, causing public outcry, and on an occasion or two, putting judges off the bench. On rare occasions, even being disbarred. Recently a judge and several politicians — Republicans — advised women to “keep their legs closed” and other vile things. The question must be answered, why this is so? Why the hell is it possible to send a rapist to light time at a prison not having maximum security? Why is America a rape culture?
And John Thanos was born to evil. It isn’t clear, decades later, what his psychological evaluation consisted of. His mother and sister would later maintain that he was so disturbed that he was incompetent to stand trial. That was immediately cast out as a defense because he was pronounced otherwise, although not without serious mental illnesses, one being borderline personality disorder. And people with that kind of learned behavior and mindset are very often highly dangerous. He had been severely abused by his father, who started out parenting by cutting the heads off animals or breaking their necks for fun in front of the little boy.
He was psychologically abused and sexually abused. His world must have been Hell on Earth. He was in trouble almost from the beginning. And the abuse, cited by his attorneys during trial, seemed to trigger him. He called them names and threw other verbal abuse at them. He was then treated as a “hostile defendant”, a term one does not hear every day. In fact, he was hostile to reporters who asked him questions from the other side of a chain-link fence as he was led from a transport vehicle to the back entrance of the courthouse. He said shocking, weird and crazy things, taunted reporters, and videotape, if I could find it, would truly disturb anyone who sees it for the first time. Thanos even taunted the judge and at one point even stated that he wanted to repeat the crimes. And those crimes…still haunt me.
Somewhere in Baltimore County, on dates I can’t pin down, he shot three people: Billy Winebrenner, Gregory Allen Taylor, and Melody Pistorio, who was only 14. Two killings took place together. Melody was working at or visiting a convenience store. Her parents later sued the DOC for prematurely releasing Thanos. Warren Sparrow got demoted.
By 1992, John Frederick Thanos was convicted and sentenced to Death by Lethal Injection. The first inmate in Maryland to be executed by that method; and the first prisoner executed since the death penalty had been reinstated. But that wasn’t exactly the whole story.
At the sentencing hearing, he rejected all efforts by his family to have his life spared. He said, “I’ve been convicted and I accept it.” And he had this to say when he had the opportunity to make a statement. “I don’t believe I could satisfy my thirst yet in this matter unless I was to be able to dig these brats’ bones up out of their graves right now and beat them into powder and urinate on them and then stir it into a murky yellowish elixir and serve it up to those loved ones,” he said, indicating the families of the victims. Those words will never die. The records all contain them, from sources such as The Washington Post clean across the Atlantic Ocean. Two years would pass. And John Frederick Thanos was put to death. I had mixed feelings about capital punishment before that case. But I thought, regarding a man who graduated from rape to shooting kids in the head — he literally walked up to them, icy cool, and raised the pistol and pulled the trigger — that the death warrant issued from the bench was fully justified. But for me, it never ended there. I never forgot him. And as it happened, later in the same month that Thanos was released from ECI, the prison gained a new inmate — my father.
If you know my story, you know this has to be awful for me. For a long time, I’ve thought ECI was a max prison. I would have thought he would be sent to Jessup, but no. If you don’t know my story, look at my archive. Then you’ll know. Because I remember John Frederick Thanos. And I know, under different circumstances….
Trigger Warning: the following contains language and themes which may invoke strong negative reactions in some individuals. Please proceed with care.
LIAR, LIAR
He could have you thinking he was the sharpest businessman south of Wall Street. He could tell you anything about any period in history. “Dissertations”, as an employee once called the talks. Of course the employee wasn’t one of his truck drivers, it was a dude with a college degree who knew that Ralph Smith did a lot of filling in the blanks. Some of his filler was clever, but most of it was straight bullshit. The truckers never knew or cared and only bided their time until they could hit the road. I got a laugh out of that. They’d be all glassy-eyed, staring at the road maps in their memory, and never hear a fucking word.
Where exactly he was born, I couldn’t say. He grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Little is generally known of him prior to his enlistment in the Navy. He claimed to have been aboard the USSBoxer after World War Two was over. While on land, as one story went, it was his job to taxi F-4U Corsairs, get the tail wheel up, line up a target downrange and off the tarmac and fire the guns so they could be properly zeroed. But once, though not a pilot, he said the plane felt so good he just kept going and took off. The operations tower supervisor got on the radio and screamed, “Smitty, you get that aircraft back down here on the double!”
He managed to land it but the story ended there. He never said how he landed it or if he was punished.
First of all, the F-4U Corsairs were difficult to fly. It wasn’t kind to first time flyers. The plane was a fighter but not a small one by any means; its long nose, inverted gullwing design with a span of 41 feet and a light stick at high speed, but a heavy one with lower speed meant that control would have been extremely difficult for anyone with zero hours of flight training in any aircraft. There was also enough engine torque to roll the plane if a propeller blade hit the ground, which was more common with the long blades used on F-4U-1 models. It grew less common when the shorter four-bladed props were added to later models, most commonly the F-4U-4, but which appeared late in the war and helped make the craft safer to fly off carriers. No matter what, all these things made for a plane that makes Ralph’s story highly improbable. Not impossible, but in the realm of the most unlikely bullshit kind of story.
What he would have found is that the Corsairs were tricky. At low speed, he’d have had a heavy stick. If he didn’t apply proper throttle, pre-stall speed would make the plane begin to roll right, in other words dipping the right wing. Again, with pre-stall speed, the craft would buffet. That’s aero-speak for shaking the shit out of you and kicking the stick out of the hand. Anyone could panic. Crashes on landing weren’t uncommon, which was one reason the Corsairs were deployed on carriers and then given to Marine squadrons ashore. Later in the war, they saw carrier action again but by then the F-6 Hellcat was the main fighter at sea. The likeliest result if he actually pulled this stunt would have been a crash.
It was also unlikely that if deployed aboard Boxer that he would have served ashore with Marines.
But Ralph Smith was never one to think anyone else could fact-check a tale. He’d put enough bullshit in and mix it well with things real pilots told him.
His “exploits” led one guy to call him “Walter Mitty” behind his back.
But bullshit is effective; and when mixed with just a little bit of friendliness and a pinch of honesty, people liked him.
MARRIAGE AND EARLY CAREER
He was married three times. First to a woman named Jenny, who nobody seems to know about. It didn’t last long, though. She departed for reasons unknown. His second marriage produced two kids but ended up with his wife leaving him and being basically traumatized for decades.
Third marriage: Betty Hutchins of Kentucky, a nurse, and six more kids. During this time he claimed to have killed his business partner by gunfire in southern Virginia or northern North Carolina for double crossing him and leaving him broke. If anyone ever investigated the man’s disappearance, I never heard about it. All the details were left out. It was a construction company and it concerned a place around “Lake Laura”, named after his first daughter.
Sometime between the Navy and this time he claimed he’d been in Hollywood and had tap danced with none other then Danny Kaye, who’s name also made it as a middle name for his first daughter. After leaving the Hollywood scene in what seems to have been a rather dodgy and fast move, and I speculate that this was a potential scandal involving whatever he did to his first wife and possibly bisexual behavior, he went back to Carolina.
After the construction business failed, he apparently worked for a while for B.F. Moffitt, then moved north to Maryland and bought a trucking company, Boyer Transportation, after working for several years at Maryland Transportation. Since there is a company of the same name elsewhere, my search returned no results on another Boyer. It could mean he ran his trucks illegally under Boyer placards and rights. That’s only the beginning of weirdness. He quickly renamed the company Comet Fast Freight, and worked from his home in Pasadena. He had to meet drivers at Frederick, Maryland for paychecks and delivery manifests. I’ll say this for him: he really worked hard. By 1972 he had leased a small warehouse in Glen Burnie, just south of Baltimore. Spacious offices made it perfect for running two businesses, Comet and Atlantic Terminals and Equipment or AT&E. He warehoused products like Coco-López, Van Houten cocoa powder and empty soda bottles for Rock Creek Beverages. He expanded to add a warehouse in Curtis Bay, which was so old and filthy that Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers, who contracted to store bags of powdered milk, pulled out. Somehow he got out of that building and into a smaller one on Penrod Court in Glen Burnie.
Between 1960 and 1970, his family grew by five more children. His income began to show in his house, but for a decade, it was furnished with used shit from wherever he could lay his hands on it. Hardwood floors eventually got carpeted in ugly blue-green and orange shaded sections.
A console TV was added. Then it went up and for years it went back and forth between color and black and white TV sets. No flat screens back then. Personally I knew he was responsible for some of the sets going up. There was no cable. Pasadena was separated from TV stations in Baltimore by miles of buildings and trees. And it took him years to add a rooftop antenna; with rabbit ears we rarely drew in a clear picture. Yet he blamed the TV for the trouble and would take the back off and go in with pliers and screwdriver to repair shit. I had to stand in front of the screen with a mirror. I hated every minute that he was home. His father was a radio and television repair expert, so that may be one reason Ralph Smith never fried himself like a chicken.
PREDATORS
I was my mother’s second child and my father’s fourth. Between 1967 and 1976 I was “taught” once a week about sex. This mostly consisted of me being taken from bed into the den, and while my father watched TV and read a newspaper, my mother would perform oral sex on me. On New Year’s Eve 1970, after the youngest of my siblings was born the previous June and she’d had her tubal ligation, Ralph and Betty Smith decided it was time for me to graduate to intercourse. I was always cautioned never to tell anyone about it. Yet they said it was biblical to obey and honor “thy father and mother, that thy days be long”, quoting one of the Ten Commandments. As it was put by him, I’d die by an act of God if I refused to submit to rape, or “sex education”.
It was never easy having Ralph Smith as my father. He used threats, torture and mind-fucking to keep us in line.
THE CHURCH YEARS
I don’t remember when they joined Lake Shore Baptist Church. Don Moore was Pastor. That’s a long time ago. With such a big family to stuff into a Mercury Marquis, we were always, always late. I hated the embarrassment that caused. To prevent it happening again, he and my mother became Sunday School teachers. Imagine that.
Hours after my regular Saturday night rape by mom, which always took place in the midnight hours, exhausted and anguished, I would be in my father’s Sunday School class and he expected me to be called on to answer questions. But I hadn’t had time to study the lesson. At home he would berate me for not being prepared.
In the summer of 1973 after school let out, I was made to work in his warehouse. All heavy and dirty work, but after his manager went home around four, I had to stay with my father until he went home. That put me eating dinner at eleven pm, showering afterward, and getting back up around six am. I hated him. And he loved to take a 13-year-old kid, his son, and berate and curse at him in front of anyone around. Sometimes, the truckers would take me aside and say they were embarrassed to have heard such shit. These were tough men. But I pulled at their hearts when they saw tears in my eyes. They’d whisper, “For what it’s worth, I really feel sorry for you.” They had suddenly seen a side of Ralph Smith that they did not like. They never knew about what he was doing at home to his daughters, what he and his wife did to their sons. Years later I talked to a few of those drivers on Facebook. Now, even knowing that my father was a demon, they reminisced fondly about working for him. What fucking dicks would act like that? I burned those bridges. It was satisfying.
Yet, to this day, others remember him fondly too. Some of our neighbors did not believe those of us kids who wrote out police reports and testified against both of our parents.
They just didn’t know him. And fuck them all, the sick bastards.
DEVIATE, THIEF, MANIPULATOR, NARCISSIST
Ralph Smith was such an extraordinary pig and narcissistic bastard that he tried to make a bargain with the church. He promised to fund a new wing if they would make him a deacon.
They refused. He’d been divorced and that disqualified him. He eventually got mad and left the church. God I was glad to be free from that fucking place. There were people there I loved very much, but I had already grown adept at burning bridges. So I gladly turned and walked away when he said I didn’t have to go anymore.
Sometime in 1974 into 1976, he came into a shitload of cash. He was scamming the IRS but that was the least of it. He also broke a law that forbade him to strip overseas containers within a 50 mile radius of the ports of Baltimore. Often it fell on me to transfer the loads onto Comet trailers, saving the company a fortune in deadhead miles, which means hauling an empty container back to the port. On his trailers, he could deliver the bonded goods and get a load back to Baltimore with few empty miles. More money.
Freight sometimes went missing altogether. This is sketchy; I know almost nothing of it, but it did happen. Once, a container of coffee went missing and that time the FBI came around. My father knew they were coming and instructed me to answer their questions: I knew nothing.
Well I didn’t. He was telling me to lie but all I had to do was tell the truth. I’d heard a comment, ambiguous and meaning nothing to me because I never knew we hauled the shit.
It got weird at the trial in 1990 when he testified that I’d sworn revenge on him for the load of coffee. That’s his testimony as to why I would report to the police years of sexual abuse. It was lame. The jury knew it. Funny thing was, if I had known anything, I’d have kept my mouth shut. I was more afraid of him than the feds. Goddamn bastard once held a loaded .357 to my head, cocked it, and warned me never to cross him or I’d die. That’s my father. That’s Ralph Smith.
ONE OF SATAN’S OWN
One late autumn afternoon, at sunset, I headed out to my car to meet a friend for pizza. I was 17. I got to the car and found I had forgotten my keys. I went back inside, down to my room. I didn’t bother turning the light on because I had a straight walk across the room to my desk, where my keys were. Halfway across the room I stopped and froze. I wasn’t alone. I sensed great evil, which I had become sensitive to. Some thing was there in the dark, and it felt like pure evil had me in its sights as if the devil in Hell himself were there.
I couldn’t move. I was terrified to the point that had I not already used the bathroom, I’d have let go my bladder.
After an eternity I heard a movement in the dark and my father stepped out of my closet and said, “Yeah, I’m in here.”
There was something extraordinary about the man. Some force that I’d never sensed until I felt him without knowing he was there. That day I believe I “saw” his true self. There’s no forgetting it.
A LEGACY OF PAIN
It surprised everyone when Ralph and Betty Smith were arrested and tried for rape, statutory rape, incest, unnatural and perverted sexual practices and child sexual abuse.
Some neighbors believed them guilty. Some did not. And I spent way too much time worrying about it.
Ralph Smith spent 11 years in the State of Maryland DOC. He lived two years after parole. He wasn’t visited by a single person. His place and cause of death and his grave site are unknown to me. Nor shall I look. I face my own mortality and I live with his legacy: pain. Horrible nightmares. PTSD. Dysfunctional in every way. Never having known two days in a row of happiness or even peace.
Because I am damned. Because I’m an asshole.
MEANT FOR MORE THAN JUST THIS?
There’s a song by Alabama Shakes. “Hold On” is the title of the excellent track. My God it’s like Brittany is me. Someone up above keeps me around. Keeps telling me to get back up. To hold on. I really didn’t think I’d make it to 22-years-old. I was 21 the day Ralph Smith held a pistol to my head and pulled the hammer back.
Somehow I’ve survived and I’ve been wondering why. What was I meant to do? I’ve survived so many times when I should have died. I’ve outlived my children. I’m a mess and my time runs short.
The best I can do is tell people to hold on. You’re here for reasons you don’t know and may never know. But you’re here. You and I, we have to tell people to stop before it’s too late. And that someone up above wants us to hold on.
If that is the true legacy of Ralph Smith, then I’m okay with it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll bare my soul. I’ll do it for other survivors. Because that’s an honorable job to have.
But Ralph Smith is surrounded by darkness, and I’ve been there. He’s adrift on his way to divine retribution. He’s already in a hell of his own making. A Twilight Zone.
Yes, I have led a life full of misery and pain beyond anything I could have imagined. Even as it all began.
Welcome. Pull up a chair, grab yourself a cup of tea, and I’ll tell you a story. I warn you now that it is disturbing and may trigger you. I advise care, and reading slowly so that if you need to, you can close this post. The last thing I want is to hurt you.
Sometime in or around 1964, I had a bedroom facing east in a brand new house in North Shore On The Magothy, a development in Pasadena, Maryland. I had the room to myself, but I was not alone. I was never alone. Something else was in there with me, something not human. And I could see it. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Kids see things. Monsters, boogeymen. Except this, my friends, was not the Boogeyman, nor was it a big monster that lived in my closet. At the time my young mind knew nothing of what it was or why it was there. It just was. It looked like it was made of a drawing. Gray lines that crossed each other to form a shape. I would liken it to the animated character that represented Dennis the Menace on the live-action TV series: A tornado wearing a traditional fireman’s helmet. But it wasn’t solid, and I never saw it in midair. It was only a few inches tall, and it was always on a wall. It hid a lot, usually in the same corner, but occasionally, it would dart across the room, seeming to stick to the ceiling as it moved. It was fast, challenging my visual acuity, but I still kept sight of it. In daylight, it looked like it had one eye. It was the height of the golden age of chrome-trimmed cars, when bumpers, mirrors, window frames and door frames were all chrome, as were some types of wheels and wheel covers. You know, hubcaps. If I was lying in bed for an afternoon nap, I would see cars going past on the road out front reflect the afternoon sun into my window and on my walls. These reflections changed as the cars moved, traveling along a wall or the ceiling. I had something to compare the shadow with, and I knew no car was causing it.
Besides, I could feel it. It was full of malice, full of evil. I could feel the hate it had, and I knew it was something living. It grew stronger with time, and my fear more than likely fed it. I’d see it, and scream for my mommy. Unfortunately, my father was always there; his office was downstairs. And he hated screaming. If he was working, that was bad enough, but he also had migraine headaches that were relentless. He called them what everyone did back then, “sick headaches.” That’s because migraines often make the sufferer vomit. He had a hair trigger temper, with or without the headache. And did I mention that he hated screaming? Because, even at age four, upsetting him meant the belt. A thin leather men’s belt made long before the 1970s and the stupid extra-wide belts worn by hippies and jetsetters alike. This belt made for an excellent whip. I had two sisters at that time. And two older half brothers. They didn’t live with us. If the three of us did something he didn’t like, he’d line us all up, get behind us and the whipping would start. It would leave blistered stripes on our backs, and these would weep with clear sweat or water, I’m not sure which. He would swing until he was literally physically spent. Our screams of pain and loud sobbing would be met with more lashes until we were reduced to sighs that kids make when trying hard not to cry.
It gets worse. That thing in my room wouldn’t go away. When I saw it, I cried for mommy, not my father. By the age of four, I was already afraid of him, and since my memory doesn’t go back much further, I can give a pretty good guess as to why. Sometimes he would try to sit me on his lap, but I would cry until he let me go. Then later, I would be yelled at for never wanting anything to do with him. Then one day he brought home a Popeye nightlight. I no longer had to sleep in the dark. You’d think that would help. But now, instead of sensing that thing on the wall in the dark and being very often frozen in terror and unable to call mommy, I could also see it. I didn’t care if I got a whipping. Several times I was able to scream, and finally the light was left on in my room. That of course did not help. One night I saw it on the wall above my closet. I called out, and both mommy and my dad came running in. By this time it had happened so often that I could tell they were taking me seriously. I believe they could sense something; this night they were visibly upset, but not at me. Lying in bed, I pointed right at the thing. “Don’t you see it?”
Mommy said something like, “What is that?“
And it jumped on her. She gave a scream, not too loud, but it was full of terror. She could feel it. She ran out of the room, trying to shake something off as if a squirrel had jumped on her.
That was the night she stopped being my mommy. She was never the same. That summer, I had my fourth birthday. Our next door neighbor baked my birthday cake. I got a pop gun and an army helmet. The gun fired a cork tied to a string, so you could put the cork back in, cock the rifle and shoot again. Outside, on a sunny July day, with no one to play with, I played soldier by myself. And just outside my father’s downstairs office, I spotted something I had never seen. Wondrous creatures, like tiny birds. They hovered around something stuck to the brick wall. Never imagining what would happen, I shot at the thing on the wall. Yellowjackets immediately set upon me, and they hurt. Stinging and burning, I screamed, cried, and ran to the kitchen door for my mommy. But before I could get treatment for my stings, I got the belt for screaming.
Everything changed. She used to defend me from my father. She used to put salve on my stripes. She used to hug me. One day she brought home an orange drink in a half pint carton, opened it and put a straw in it, and told me to go outside and drink it so my sisters wouldn’t see and get jealous. Times were hard, and she could only afford the one. I never forgot that day. I felt so special. I felt loved. Mommy was so kind, gentle, always humorous, always ready to give me a bit of attention because I was sandwiched between two sisters. I was lonely. She would draw me pictures of Batman. If I was sick, she took me to the doctor and then to Bob’s Village Drugs for my medicine. If I could handle it, she would let me have a fountain Coke at the soda fountain counter. Served in an old-fashioned Coca-Cola glass with crushed ice and a paper straw. Once in a while a small toy would find its way home with me. Well, maybe it was small, but it was priceless to me.
A year earlier, when we had almost no furniture, and no carpet yet, she would sit in a dim light with us in the living room and we would play games. But after the night that thing jumped on her, she wasn’t my mommy anymore. Never again. Anything good in her died there and then.
But the horror was only beginning. In 1966, my older sister was given a Ouija board for Christmas. She got weird shit, too. I liked my Captain Action and G.I.Joe dolls, but I always asked for things that went with them but were sold separately, like the Captain America outfit for Captain Action, and the Jeep and the Sea Sled for Joe. You know who got them? My older sister. It was like my father was torturing me even without the belt. Even so, most of my memory during this time is full of gaps. One thing, though. A year, maybe even two, after my older sister got the Ouija Board, she had two friends over. It was after school, in the fall, when it got dark early. They turned out the light. They came out screaming. My father had the worst time getting rid of that bloody thing. The two girls, I never saw them again even though one lived right down the street. She was older, so I didn’t ride the same school bus and I just never saw either one of them after that. My sister would not, even decades later, tell me what happened. She told our parents. He threw it in the trash.
Next day it was back on her closet shelf and as she was getting ready for school, she saw it and screamed. Now my tough big sister, who often bullied or pranked me into shit that wasn’t funny, to hear her scream, that was extraordinary. I ran into her room, a forbidden zone for me, and I saw the thing sitting there along with older games like Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Green Ghost, and a stack of others. Our father broke the board in half. I swear he was hysterical with terror. He stomped the glass and plastic planchette and smashed it.
After the next trash pickup, it was back. Same place, in one piece, even the box. He wound up burning them in a nice hot wood fire in the fireplace. I cannot recall whether blue or green, but the board, box and plastic melted and burned with a color I asked my father about. He had no real answer.
That was when everything in that house changed for the worse, when real evil was done. Again, you and I are here having tea together, but I warn you, this gets very dark from here onward.
There’s a belief about Ouija boards that goes like this: If you have made contact with a hostile entity with it, you must close the session by moving the planchette to “Goodbye”, and you cannot burn the board if the entity has entered your home. Some say it may still be attached to the board, and burning it releases the entity into your home, where it essentially has free run. Well, that’s exactly what happened.
Mom and dad began to take me out of my bedroom at night and into the den, in order to teach me about sex. They did some things together, but most of it was her having sex with me. I was seven-years-old.
At one point, they did something that would ultimately prove their undoing: They had me and one younger sister together doing things with them, and a few times, each other. They showed us 8mm porn reels, and moved me out of my old room into the old office downstairs, because dad had a warehouse and trucking terminal in Glen Burnie, a town between Pasadena and Baltimore. Usually, though, my night was Saturday. At the time, I had no idea that all of the kids were going through this except the older sister, who for some reason was left out. Probably because she was cold-blooded mean and had threatened to run away or call the police. But whatever, I didn’t know. As kids were added to our family, eventually four girls and two boys plus two half brothers, that house saw more child abuse than I can picture even to this day.
Years went by. Dysfunctional and afflicted, I would make friends, then lose them. I had horrible nightmares, trouble sleeping, and even though I never saw that shadow thing again, I guessed it was still in that room upstairs, or in my mother. It was the beginning of my experiences with demons, dark spirits described and fought by Jesus of Nazareth.
Every Saturday night, just hours away from Sunday School, my mother would come into my room late, after everyone else was asleep, and fondle me. I tried to pretend I was asleep. Sometimes I tried to fake being sick. She would put a hand to my forehead, say “You don’t have a temperature,” and if I still resisted, my father would come in and say, “Get your ass out here, boy.” And threaten me with the belt. How sick could you get? Threatening to beat your son for not wanting to have sex with his mother?
Oh, I know what some of you are thinking. That every adolescent dreams of having sex with his mother. Well, there are three things I’ve studied in my life. One is the paranormal. One is PTSD. The other is incest. All three still baffle me, but there are some things I’ve learned. First of all, having a sexual fantasy, no matter what it is, should never be allowed to come true. Reality is not the same. People get hurt, scarred, and victims commit suicide or crimes in the aftermath. Second, not many boys really do fantasize about having sex with their mothers; it may occur for a short time, but it’s fleeting. I always had this sick feeling in my gut that it was wrong, all wrong, and that there was a good reason for me to be sick about it, to resist the way I did. Another thing I’ve learned is that first-person porn stories, like the old “Penthouse Forum” letters, are very often about incest, but they’re bullshit. Today these types of porn live on with the internet, but much of the time, it’s written by men who have little sexual experience and less knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Many stories written as if by a woman talk about being penetrated in their cervix. Sick, but laughable; it’s almost impossible. Women who need cervical exams often have to be given pain medication, it has to be dilated by drugs, and any procedure may involve general anesthesia. Because it fucking hurts. But I digress.
Incest happens more often than I can stand to think. It usually involves rape, although sometimes even a fourth degree sex offense is so traumatic that the victim’s development arrests at the moment it is initiated. Whatever their age, their psychological, emotional maturity will stop and proceed abnormally from there. There is no cure for post traumatic stress disorder. Only time and treatment can help the most severe cases, and personally, I count every case as severe. Until the age of sixteen, I went through this. My social behavior got worse and worse. I wound up with literally no friends but tons of enemies. Any relationship I did have was dysfunctional from the beginning. My teen romances ended badly, with a girlfriend’s parents totally freaked out and pissed. By the time my father was involving himself in threesomes with my mother, I was finally able to defy him and demand it all stop. Sensing something in me he didn’t want to test, he agreed. But the damage was done.
In a community called North Shore On The Magothy, in a house no longer resembling the one I lived in, there was once a bunch of children tormented, tortured and raped. It has a new owner now; has for years. I’ve seen it on Google Street, and I don’t recognize it. But I will always know it as the House Of Pain.
Memoirs of an American Christian 