I don’t know what happened, not really. My memories reveal, as if through curtains slightly opened, only a blurred something outside a greasy window that I can’t make out, or even ascribe a shape to. But something was, is, there, something dark and menacing and fixed on me.
The common symptoms of childhood sexual abuse are many, and I have ‘em all: Addictions. Mysterious pains. Difficulty with intimacy. Compulsive sexual behaviors. A black vortex of anger and unplaced shame. An unquenchable need for outside affirmation. A primal fear of men. Terror, numbness and dysmorphia have defined my relationship with my body since I was a kid. Large swaths of my memory are completely blank. An overwhelming sense of urgency infects every moment—due to my surely impending death—so that I approach everything I do desperately, clawingly, rushing into some unknown, yet never-arriving end.
The shimmering dream of physical death is always close by: never admitted, never pursued directly, but always admired with a slit-eyed smile, a willing accomplice that could be called upon at any time, if needed. I sometimes imagine my arms chopped off, my face pulped with a hammer, my entire broken body fed into a meat grinder, to be atomized and, finally, obliterated.
I know others are afflicted with worse—much worse—and I’m sure many will recognize this hellish description.
I don’t want to talk about myself, not exactly, but I hope this reaches them. I want to talk about the feeling of not knowing, of never knowing, and the crushing emptiness that accompanies my total lack of understanding of why, exactly, I feel the way I’ve always felt, why I’ve done the things I’ve done.
My first memory, equal parts clear and blurred, is of my young parents in an awful fight. Screaming, moaning. No physical violence, but bad enough that I ran to them, small, shouting for them to stop, and they turned their screams on me. Years later, my parents separated, and the battered duplex that housed our modest apartment was demolished. I spent much of the years that followed alone, shuttling between my two worlds—my mom’s, my dad’s—dreaming. They loved me so, I know, and cared for me well, but there were certain gaps. Like the men that my mother brought home, sad and damaged and dangerous men who may or may not have done the things that I don’t remember.
When I was about twelve, one day at school a good friend approached me holding a pile of torn-up paper he had found in the class recycling bin. I saw my name scribbled on one of the scraps. Together, we sat down at a table to reassemble the document. It was a list our teacher had made of kids who, he believed, had problems.
“Marc is an emotional mess,” his note about me read. “He cries constantly in class without reason.” I brought the torn assessment home to show my parents. Later, I sat in the stairwell of the school, listening as my mother exploded with fury at the teacher until he finally stormed out of the meeting. At the time, I was glad my parents stood up for me. But maybe that teacher was onto something.
Some people who are sexually abused as children become asexual or terrified of physical intimacy. Others become hypersexual, the result of the overcharging and disturbing of their delicate constitution. I was the latter type.
Throughout my childhood, I always knew something was deeply wrong with me, but I couldn’t articulate it—other than through expressions of deviance that generated wariness from kids my own age and worry from the adults around me.
Why, I would ask myself later, did I try constantly to interfere with every one of my friends, male and female, as I grew up? Why was every single situation, every interaction, charged with a sick Eros that I couldn’t explain, only express?
I was never violent or intimidating, just relentlessly pressuring, a warped and compulsive seductor. Even talking about it makes me want to die. It didn’t take long for me to learn that I needed to hide what was happening inside me, and so I did.
By the time I was in high school, I was leading a double life. During the day I would hang out with my friends, be with my girlfriend, fulfill my duties at home. But on the side—this was before the internet—I would respond to coded messages in the back pages of newspapers, seeking out what I needed.
Paradoxically, considering my fear of men, I would end up in scary places, with strange men, doing strange things: a dank, curtained studio, rich with the sickly scent of massage oil, looking through a catalog of dozens of photos of wayward ones, like me. An apartment where a wide-eyed man, stunned to have caught a stray fly in his web, carefully measured my proportions using Christmas ribbon, among other things. In a room with a naked soldier taking care of himself as he looked at me, snorting poppers as he did. When I tried to approach him he waved me away; too dangerous, he said. I couldn’t tell if he meant the danger of going to jail or the danger of what he might do to me; probably both, I reasoned. In all these encounters I remained passive, interested, vacant.
Maybe I’m just gay, I thought, or bi. I tried to meet men in normal ways, even going on dates, but the end result was always the same: me, gagging and retching, scrubbing myself raw with shame after some intimate encounter. Being with women made me feel good, satisfied, healthy. The smell of men made me sick, the thought of kissing one turned my stomach.
So why was I pursuing them?
Many years later, I would learn that it’s common for traumatized individuals to reenact their experiences as a way of processing repressed memories. But at the time, I merely recognized with some disappointment that I wasn’t gay, just wired wrong—deeply programmed with some depraved logic, written in invisible ink that I hadn’t been able to reveal.
Without an answer, and increasingly desperate in my wanderings, I turned to street prostitution. It wasn’t sex work so much as it was existential archaeology, or a perverted form of Russian roulette.
Most of the time, the men I let pick me up were shy, lonely souls who wanted nothing more than a moment of release, if not connection. They were grateful to me for my services, and I felt useful. But when I left them and returned to the world, alone, I would be overwhelmed with disgust. With the money I’d earned I would eat junk food, get drunk, do coke. Wander the streets by myself, looking for trouble until I found it.
One night I was picked up off the street at night by a twisted-looking man in a rusty sedan. We drove to the empty parking lot of the local skating rink and, when I wouldn’t do what he insisted I do, he yelled at me, reached over, shoved his hand down my pants and stuck his finger in me, hard. I squirmed out the door as he cursed me, and I ran to the dark train tracks as he pulled away with a squeal of his tires, both of us on our shadowed paths, strangers in the night.
The last time I went out to meet an arranged john, I had a funny feeling. I was to be picked up by a man in a minivan, the phone message had said, at a certain corner. But when I got there, I was overcome with fear, and I hid behind a bush across the street. When the van pulled up I was it was driven by a clean-cut, middle aged man, wearing a red sweater and a blank expression. In terror, I ran away and never looked back. A powerful instinct told me that if I had gotten in that van, I might not have seen the sun rise.
Finally, in my twenties, I decided something needed to change. I’d been living on the margins of society for years, on welfare, barely eating, sleeping on a bare mattress with a winter jacket for a blanket. Despite my squalid living conditions, I’d had many lovers, mostly female, with the occasional indiscretion to satisfy my warped urges.
I decided to not have sex with anyone for a year, to try and discover what was happening inside me, to find out who I really was. A new calm flowed over me as I pursued celibacy: in the span of a few months I quit hard drugs, stopped drinking alcohol, kicked cigarettes. I even found a job as a clerk at a retail store, where I felt strangely safe and comfortable. I ate well and wolfed down vitamins, wrote poetry, took long walks in the woods. I decided to try therapy.
Maybe a professional can figure out what’s wrong with me.
I arrived for my first session feeling relatively normal. I met a moon-faced woman who seemed kind enough; we sat in a quiet, dimly-lit room, and we started to talk. She asked me questions. I began to fidget.
Within minutes I was howling and weeping. I exploded at her in anger for asking the most simple questions; she navigated the tempest calmly. I reeled between raw fury and total helplessness, some creature uncorked from a long-buried cask. When I left the room an hour later, I was sure that I needed to become ashes as quickly as possible. But I held it together; I attended three more sessions, each one following the same pattern, my self-esteem withering further each time until I felt like a husk of the man I’d once been. After the last session I went back to my small room, found a thumbtack, and pressed it into my arm until a drop of claret beaded on the surface of my skin—my first-ever act of absolute self-harm, all my other activities notwithstanding. I caught myself then, and as I carefully cleaned the wound, I decided to stop going to therapy. But something had been dug up, and it would not be put away so easily.
A few days later, at work, the escalator brought me to the home furnishings department, where I didn’t usually work. There was a showroom filled with beds—kings and queens, lushy blanketed, cozy with pillows and warm lighting. No one else was around. My mind hummed and my spirit froze as a caught sight of a faux bedroom with a large bed, the walls painted a reddish-purple. I stood there, staring at the scene. The red walls. I knew that color, had seen it before. Hadn’t I? And then I remembered. My grandparent’s house. Their bedroom. A large bed. Red walls.
My grandfather had been a career soldier, with combat tours in Europe and Korea. When I was small, we spent a lot of time at his and my grandmother’s house. Mostly, I remember him watching hockey and smoking; he could smoke three packs of cigarettes during a single game. I also remember making the mistake of taking a sip of his ‘orange juice’, which caused me to gasp, as it was at least three-quarters vodka. There’s a photo of me, about two years old, sitting on his lap, him with a wide grin.
“Oh, did your grandpa ever love you,” my mom told me once. “He would play with you for hours.”
I’d never thought about my grandfather as the possible hidden presence in my life until that day at the store, when I saw those walls and that bed and I remembered my grandparent’s bedroom. He died when I was nine, and he rarely crossed my mind; I hadn’t thought about that room for decades.
Had I spent more time in that room than I remembered? Maybe. Perhaps I was making up stories, or perhaps it was a clue. And then, a few days after seeing the bed and the walls and spending a lot of time walking alone, I remembered something else.
My grandfather was dying. Multiple organ failure, the toxic brew inside him too much for flesh to bear. I was nine, my parents freshly split, and we were trying to get to the hospital to see him before he died.
When we got to the hospital, my parents quickly discussed and agreed I shouldn’t see him; it would be too disturbing for a child. But as they went in to visit a last time, I snuck to the door, and stole a look inside.
My grandpa was in bed, connected to an unfathomable number of machines, tubes running in and out of his body. I could barely make out his features through the mask, but his face was purple, and I could see he was preparing to leave this world. I stared at him. And in that moment, we made eye contact. He looked at me and as he did, I saw something that surprised and confused me: an expression of sadness, and—as I now believe—deep regret.
He held my gaze and I could feel what he was saying to me, though I couldn’t understand why: with his eyes, he was saying, I’m so sorry.
I felt it then, but I never knew why he looked at me that way, and I didn’t bother wondering. Over the years, my memory of the moment faded. But after I saw the bed, and the walls, I remembered the look.
In the years that followed my time of celibacy and reflection, I was fortunate: I fell in love, real love, the love of a wonderful woman who knows my past and my ghosts and accepts me for who I am without judgment. She understands that I have clues, but no answers; a guess, but no proof. I never will, and maybe that’s all right.
You need to know I’m not this person, I’m not the name that writes this story. Because part of me exists forever in a gray fog with no direction out, I have to tell this story from that place, where nothing is certain and everything is up for interpretation. I also speak with another’s voice because I have children who need a healthy and caring father, who found a deep light of love within and all around him, and not a shattered, haunted trick who can’t outrun his sordid deeds and his blank memory.
In time, I’ve come to embrace a word that only ever held abstract meaning for me, but that I now must identify with. I am a survivor.
