Preston
I have memories that don't fit the narrative of my life. The particular memories I'm speaking of here are, among other things, of being at the cafeteria at Preston with my father. I mentioned this to him years later and he denied vehemently ever taking me with him to Preston, which was a reformatory/prison for boys where he worked as a teacher, in the mid 1950's. But I remember vividly being there.
I also remember vividly the shock and undeniable veracity of other memories as they surfaced, one a bathroom, a bathtub which was near chest height to me, and a man in the bathtub and an erect penis coming out of him. This memory is unfixed geographically and chronologically, but it's vivid.
Later, in the first grade, when I was 6 or 7, I drew a rocket ship that was thick and straight up with a big blunt top on it and curls of dark exploding all around the bottom of it, it was clear and well-drawn and the teacher got made at me for drawing it. And for years, until I was 17 and a senior in high school, I hated art class. She humiliated me, but then, because of that, I never forgot it.
I have a memory of being in a restaurant with a man who is/is not my father, there were bread-sticks in a cut glass bowl. I later asked my father about this, in a general way, and he said that during the time period in which I remember this there had been no contact between us. He left the family, my mother and I, in 1955. But I remember clearly having been at a restaurant during that period with a man who was/was not my father, and the bread-sticks, eating a bread-stick in a way that caused the man to rebuke me. There was something wrong with my eating the bread-stick. And there was just the two of us.
I have memories of being in a car with a man when I was in Fresno, driving in the country, I was living at a boarding school/seminary, when I was 14, it was a serious conversation, but I have no idea who that man might have been or what the substance of the conversation was, there is no context for it in the life I had then, of a pre-seminarian in downtown Fresno, I don't know who that was or why he was there, only that it relates to these things.
There was a man, in Ione, who told me his name was "Joe Crossman". He was wearing a suit. He came to visit me while my mother and I were still living in Ione, after my father had left the family. We only lived there for a couple of years. I was probably 5 or possibly 6 years old.
"Joe Crossman" gave me a book, The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. He told me some things that I don't remember but his name and the book he gave me I remember, because I had that book through my whole childhood. I can dimly remember telling this to someone who was interrogating or questioning me, in a critical moment, and being scorned for my answer, which was truthful. And the question that came immediately to me of course, that if it hadn't been like that, then how did I get the book, was met with scorn as well. But to a child like I was a book like that was as important as a pet or a school-friend, it was not a trivial thing.
And my mother hadn't given it to me, and my father hadn't given it to me, and there wasn't anyone else who could have. I asked my mother who "Joe Crossman" was, and she had no recollection of anyone with that name. Later I asked my father about it and he insisted he'd never known anyone by that name, certainly no one well enough that he would visit me and give me a book.
I remember being in a room with exposed framing, angled like an attic, with board flooring, in Ione, there were men in a group, and another boy, possibly more than one there too; the man I remember most clearly was tall and thin and scowling. There was what I remembered for most of my childhood as a rabbit. And someone cut open its belly and it was screaming and there was a horrible stink in the room. I also remember telling this memory to someone, possibly on more than one occasion, and becoming terrified while I told it. Later I realized, or concluded, that it wasn't a rabbit, it couldn't have been, there was no reason to skin a rabbit in an attic room that held any kind of sense.
This memory is from the period of time I lived in Ione, California, first with my mother and father then with my mother after my father left the family.
After my father died I had a conversation with his younger brother and he told me that my father had been sexually molested when he was an altar boy, that my father had told his father, who was railroad Irish, working class, this would have been in around 1925, and his father had gone to the monsignor and complained. My uncle was unclear about what exactly took place next but the outcome was my grandfather moved the family to another part of town, either Rochester or Syracuse New York I'm not sure which.
Combining these elements into a counter-narrative leads me to a very frightening place. But it seems also to contain the only light available.
The intellectual elaboration I'd like to add is this, that it was a time when cross-indexing was rudimentary in even the most serious agencies. That the populations of prisons were virtually invisible, prisoner advocacy groups were invisible as well, and child-prisoners, coming from the poor and already invisible, were doubly so.
It isn't at all inconceivable that there would have been a trade in young boys for sexual purposes, and other more arcane reasons, operating in and around reformatories and other institutions for children. A lucrative trade given its forbidden, and highly illegal nature.
And in those days, the mid 50's, it was a subject so taboo there would have been, as there was until quite recently, an insurmountable wall of silence around the subject. Where would those boys go to tell someone?
A lucrative trade in young boys. If I were looking for evidence of that, I'd look wherever there were populations of discarded children, I'd look for whatever procurement processes there were to be active around places where there were surplus populations of children. Where they came and went, shipped in and out virtually unmonitored. Where questioning authority was punished severely. Where a climate of constant fear already existed and the credibility of the children themselves was non-existent.
This is not the first time I've been through this. A kind of awakening and telling, or re-awakening and re-telling. I don't know what happened the other times. Once, I know, I was hypnotized, at my request, by a woman in what I believe was Marin County, California, in 1978; the results of that were unavailable to me as a text I could carry, there was some anxiety on the part of the hypnotist afterward, she was nervous as we parted, though I came away from the experience feeling more calm than I had in an undrugged state in years.
I know that for most of my adult life I've had a deep and abiding fear of dull-witted vicious people, and a burning hatred of smug ignorance. That this hatred and fear were tangential to the main narrative of my life, real, intense, but entirely secondary, and that that narrative itself, the main one, is overlain by a less accurate but more accessible one that has its origin, not in the real events of my history but in the biases and desires, and fears, of other, very present but mainly invisible to me interested parties, may be easier to understand after reading this.
There's more.
posted by Juke at 12:13 AM [edit]