Jeff's Journal
As disconsolate as I was, I attempted some cut-to-the-bone comic levity about being brought back and penned up in my burrow without any company. I called upon imagination, inventing multiple alternative personae and worlds I could adopt. With the help of recent recollection of some literature, I must have used to read, I drew on the nonrestrictive liberties of fantasy to buffer the sadness of my solitude. I imagined I was a bowaab guarding the walled city of Tangier. And my partner had lost the key to the Kasbah Gate, so we were .... we were ....
Were what?
Prisoners.
Prison .... dungeon .... Too right, Jeff.
The quality of my weariness so great, I sank my head in my arms as I realized the futility of my lyrical imaginings.
I'd also had no more dreams of Brad.
But now and again, something I saw or heard fired off evocations of memory. Some came in images in staccato sequence, so isolated as to lend little progress to my recollection of my identity. Others were silence-laden revelations of incidents and people commingled and blurred into one another. Brad appeared often in these revelations; like a stir of echo, I'd see him, always in the finishing line of my memory race. I'd also see myself, sometimes on his knees, sometimes across. What it meant, I wasn't sure, but I knew he was a missing link among many that would help me piece together the puzzle of my identity and past life.
Pa had been a tyrant the entire week. If he wasn't spanking me for some obscure mistake I'd make, he had me locked up in my cubicle. And always, I was kept in the nude or a diaper.
"Don't think about making contact with Brad," he'd warn me every night while he restrained me to the bunk, checked I had on a fresh diaper and bolted the door after him.
I was spending a lot of time alone now. The good thing about being on my own so much was that I had all the time in the world for exercises in social analysis. It was one of these exercises that gave rise to my awareness of Pa and Dr. Stoner's business modus operandi. This voyage into awareness was aided by a chance break I had a few nights ago: Dr. Stoner had grown careless from an excessive indulgence in pot smoking.
So he had botched an attempt to stick me with a drug-filled syringe that night. I had been more than half-conscious when Pa shaved and washed my face, then did the same to my pubic hair and region. He had removed my soiled plastic diaper.
Afterward, he powdered me and made up my face before dressing me in a tiny black g-thong, not a new piece of underwear but a movie prop. Costumed for my part in his newest movie, I was led to the basement cellar. Here they restrained me with chains to a vertical beam. The cameras were ready and waiting shakily on their tripod legs. I was photographed – first in half dress and then in total undress.
That was the first part of the movie.
In the second part, I was dressed in a little boy's school uniform and then this was removed in stages till I was totally naked again. A hired actor, his head disguised in a hood, Jack-the-Ripper style, kicked me to the ground, landing me on my stomach. I turned around and barely saw the whip raised above my shoulder before I felt it land mercilessly on my buttocks. I howled and escaped to a corner of the cellar.
Pa stalked me, grabbed my arm and turned me over on my stomach. The whip was in his hand, like a venomous snake coiled to strike. Swiftly, he raised it and remounted his assault of my buttocks and thighs. I collected a barrage of appalling body lances as the filming ran its course.
I don't even want to talk about the third part.
Pa had later said we had to do this to pay the hospital bills.
And besides, he also said, I had to do what I could to sponsor my own living, now that I was physically on the road to recovery.
"But," he continued, putting away the finished video, "you did a really good job tonight. Those screams were classic. The boys are just gonna love hearing them. And that grimace of pain in your face – what a gem. I think I ought to reward you. I know – you can sleep this week without restraints. And I think you've earned the right to use the toilet, so no diapers and I'm leaving your door open."
I succumbed to tears that night as I put myself to bed. I couldn't help myself.
"I'm not," I'd cried into my singular pillow that was yellowed and filthy with the stains of my saliva and sweat. It didn't even have the protection of a pillowcase.
"I'm not an arsonist. I'm not a thief. I'm not a liar. I'm not a criminal. I'm not .... "
No one comforted me or said I was or was not any of those things. How I longed for a really loving father or uncle or older brother to give me that comfort. I ruined my bed with my tears, my piss and my blood.
Two days later, I wrenched myself from a narcoleptic sleep and depression. My tears had dried. As had the blood on my knuckles where I had bitten my skin in self-mutilation. My mattress had a pee stain.
I got up and wrapped the coarse blanket over my naked body. I sat on the bed and waited.
What now, Jeff? I asked myself.
I drew in my lower lip and bit it to stop from crying again.
"You know in your heart I'm telling you the truth." Brad's words rang in my head.
I fished out from under the mattress the five one hundred-dollar bills Brad had sneaked into my jeans pocket at the hospital. And a photo of us in front of the Black Orchid store.
"I'm not giving up on you," the voice in my cerebrum continued. "I'll find a way to bring you home. I'll find a way to prove that man's a liar and you belong with me."
But even as Brad spoke, Pa was shoving me into the back seat of his beat-up car.
Brad and my doctor had not wanted me to go back with my father. Of course, Brad and Pa had traded strident words and near fisticuffs and I had been so fearful for him.
Pa had tipped the balance of power in his favor with a lawyer sparring in his corner. However, I found Godfrey's claim to litigation experiences as dubious as Dr. Stoner's professed membership in the medical fraternity. For how could Pa afford to have a personal lawyer and doctor at once?
Just the same, Pa had won: mere welts, he and Godfrey had argued successfully, did not constitute abuse or assault, and the present uptight generation owed its pitfalls to parents who were afraid to use the rod.
And so, I was to see the last of the hospital and Brad.
I closed my eyes to shut out the images and contain my tears. Not the right time to cry. Instead, I sprang up from my bed and bolted from the barren terrain. I found Pa drunk by the coal picks.
"Where are my baby photos?" I demanded of him.
"What?" he yelled back, stupefied.
"Why are there no pictures of me as a boy? Where are my school certificates? Where's my birth certificate? Answer me, _d_a_m_n_ it!"
"You've got a _d_a_m_n_ed filthy mouth. You'd just better watch your stinking mouth or I'll take a switch to your filthy backside and wash out your mouth with soap! They got burned, all right, those papers you seem to think so important to you, a lousy two-bit criminal! Together with the house you set fire to. You remember this, don't you? Oh – how could you? Poor baby has amnesia after all."
I screeched at him. "What are you doing to me? You're my father!"
I ran out of the house, hearing his wicked laughter trailing in the still air. I flung myself onto the grass. I ate dirt. I cried and cried.
Now was the right time.
Ironically, I had wanted him to come out, pick me up and cradle me. I had wanted him to act like my father. I had wanted to believe my devotion and fidelity had not been misdirected. For some time I had projected him into that perfect television imagery of fatherhood and I didn't want to know that I had made a terrible mistake.
He did nothing.
I would have run away, run to the city, to Brad. But I knew I could get no farther than the gate. Pa would have sent any of his men after me, and I feared what he'd do to me then.
I went back into the house. But I had determined upon the only recourse I had left to save myself – run away at the first opportunity.
I waited two days before I acted. I had been searching for signs that Pa was ignoring me. I stayed out of his way, avoided outbursts that drew attention to myself, played the affable son for what it was worth. I rested a lot and exercised – I did pushups and crunches – and became a little stronger. I knew physically there was something wrong with me. It was above what the drugs were doing to me. I was dizzy, out of breath, nauseated and constipated. My stomach was plagued with aches and flatulence. But I issued no complaints for that would have drawn attention to myself.
On the third day, I found my window. I seemed to have overrun my usefulness for his movies. I had seen him with a number of new boys in his room a few times. There were always different boys at different times, vagrants who were plucked off the streets as Ryan had been, as I probably had been, too. And they were always stripped naked and put over his lap. Sometimes they were lain on the desk and examined. I spied a time one boy's genitals were being quantified and later his seminal flow metered for a movie role.
Pa was enjoying whisky while waxing obscene plaudits about the private parts of a slender pubescent boy lying stretched out on his lap. I asked him if I could go out. I told him that I wanted to watch a movie at the cinema around the corner.
I didn't have to apply any hard sell to persuade him. He only said to be sure that I came straight back home afterward.
I felt sorry for the boy on his lap, whose tight virgin anus was being tested for dexterity, but at that moment I had to place my own interest above his. The longer I tarried, the greater the prospect of my becoming a symbol of all our tragedy.
I fell into my jeans and sweats and clutching Brad's money hidden in my pocket, I left the house. I didn't notice the white Cadillac pull away from the brushes as I crossed an aqueduct to get to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
I was in a bus bound for the city when the distant chimes of church bells alerted me to the time. It was eleven o'clock. But it wasn't just the time I was alerted to. The chimes were like a knell that was signaling a portent of doom or death. Or maybe it was remembrance of a past death, I wasn't sure. I swallowed hard just as the bus pulled out of the kerb.
Gradually, ennui lulled me to sleep. But even as I dozed, the knell and the terror of death of a finely elegiac mood haunted me. A boy was crying. It was a long drawn out and piteous cry and no amount of hushing him could make him stop.
"It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It was an accident. He drowned."
I opened my eyes, suddenly, as if I was emerging from the paralysis of the awful terror.
The bus had also ground to a halt. NYU. I could see these words imprinted on a city directory near the Broadway Subway.
But who drowned?
I walked around aimlessly at first; the white Cadillac was still tailing me but I was completely oblivious. Just as the millers about me were completely oblivious of my personal cataclysm.
When I finally drew near to the university campus, I heard my name being called a few times though often drowning in the midst of a bedlam of sporadic yells and scurrying feet. I wasn't sure whether to acknowledge the well wishers for I had no recognition of them. But they seemed undeterred by my fictive distance, which I maintained to protect me from an emotional reprisal.
My aimless circumnavigation eventually led me to one of the largest buildings on the campus. I hesitated, staring at the overwhelming size of the law building before me, and wondering also at the magnitude of the task that laid ahead of me – the task of explaining to Brad why I was here.
I suddenly felt very foolish.
And I had made a self-discovery: I had little equanimity in the face of danger or challenge.
He'll be glad to see me, I persuaded myself. If I were everything that he'd told me so far, if I really meant to him what he claimed ....
I fell heavily back on the bench behind me. Everything I had mustered to get to this point was suddenly unraveling and breaking loose, rolling in an avalanche of fear, humiliation and uncertainty. I should just give up this idea and go back, I thought, sinking my head into my hands that trembled imperceptibly.
A sudden draft renewed my temerity.
And then a pair of shoes – Dockers.
I looked up. I couldn't see the face for the sun behind the head.
"Hi," came a quiet, steady voice. I knew this voice.
"Hi," I replied.
He sat beside me. How did he know I was here?
He nodded toward the white Cadillac that had pulled up and was stationed by the kerb across where we sat. He seemed to have read my mind.
"I have your house staked out," he explained. "Stephen – you remember? Blond, green eyes? He followed you home that first time and we've not let you out of our sight since. Steve heads the investigation agency of my law office. He's a lawyer, but now prefers to run the agency. He does most of the investigative work for my cases."
I nodded. After that, neither of us said anything. I was looking down most of the time, studying our shoes and figuring out what prosaic stories underlay them, all the time conscious that he was waiting for me patiently.
Finally I looked up. "Is it true, everything you've said to me?"
"Yes."
"I keep seeing these images. I can't shake them. And I can't understand them. Pa keeps saying I'll be okay. My memory will soon return. But I'm not okay. I'm making little progress, and if I did, it wasn't with his help."
He put a hand under my elbow. "Come into the office," he suggested. "It's better to talk inside."
He led me to his building. Again strangers greeted me or called me by name.
Brad turned to me and spoke very near my ear. He spoke as usual in a tender way.
"I tried to come to you. I've gone to the judge with papers. We're very close to getting you back. It's risky to come to me like this."
I had misunderstood what he meant by that. I started to say that I didn't intend to pose any risk to him or to myself; and I would probably go back to Pa. But we had drawn close to his office and the blond one, the one he called Steve, had taken my other hand, distracting me. Henceforth, they led me into a private room.
All this was too bizarre for me. I felt as if I was incredibly cast in an ancestral chronicle of several generations of a Mafia family. We all were, what with the furtiveness and sneaking around.
And interwoven into this fantastic chronicle were the very real elements of my feelings for Brad, feelings that were erotic but painful.
I was offered hot chicken soup and a sandwich. I thought it was the men's lunch – there was a picnic basket on the table amid other unmentionables that cluttered it, and it was lunch hour after all. I was famished and so, devoured the sandwich with a ravenous appetite, but the viscous soup I drank sip by sip. The food slowly revived me.
"Something happened," Brad said.
I looked up from the soup.
"He's hurt you," he continued.
I bit down on my lower lip to buy time while I thought of the ramification if I told him how Pa had bestowed upon me the responsibility of embodying the horror of what went on in his house. Perhaps if I didn't feel some love for Brad, I mightn't be so ashamed to tell him but I was falling in love with him, but it tortured me, and it wasn't something I could silence.
Brad took my face in both his hands, surprising me. He searched my mind with his compelling blue eyes, studying my expression for clues. Then he said, "Don't worry. The important thing is you're here. But you're awfully hot. I want Tristan to look you over."
Tristan. A new name. Who must he be?
He studied my clothes next – faded jeans and frayed cotton sweatshirt – and seemed dismayed.
God, it was just too awful. He was so patient and sincere that my guard collapsed. I whispered: "He's done things to me."
But that was all I could say. I had resigned to reticence and regret. No one hurried me when for the next minute, I thought about bolting out of the room. I was experiencing an amputation of innocence and morality and it bothered me what Brad must think of me.
Finally, it was Steve who prodded me to carry on.
"He injects me with drugs," I continued by and by, "and then he takes pictures."
I heard my own voice, broken and raspy. My statement was delivered slowly, haltingly. I didn't know how they were reacting. I wasn't even looking at them anymore. But before long I was blubbering about what Pa and Dr. Stoner used to subject me to: the home movies, the spanking scenes and the punishment, in the form of a severe caning sometimes, if I refused to cooperate.
"He hurt me," I exclaimed suddenly, almost in a demented rage, startling my interlocutors. "He hurts me all the time."
I rose at the same time my rage started to crest. I unzipped my fly. Brad rose from his chair as well but I stepped back, tacitly announcing that I didn't want to be interrupted. I pulled down my jeans, letting them fall to my ankles. I turned back.
See for yourself, you doubting Thomases, see the new welts of my most recent whipping still fresh on my bottom, I thought.
Of course, all that public exhibitionism, stemming from an appallingly low self-esteem and poor understanding of the men, hadn't been necessary. No one had doubted me at all.
Steve had already cast his eyes on nothing specific on the cluttered desk. Brad had approached me and calmly set himself to the task of covering me up. After that, he drew me to himself and hugged me tight.
"We believe you," he whispered kindly.
He kissed my forehead but I felt somewhat ill at ease.
More crucial, I was mortified. What had I done, embarrassing myself in front of them? I hid my face on Brad's shoulder and didn't think I could ever look up again.
"I'm sorry," I said, sotto voce, migraine softly egging me to fatigue like a persistent drizzle.
"You're in some fever," he observed. "Steve, we're going back to the house."
I let him convey me out of the building.
© 1996, JRK. 2001, JRK & BWK.