How to Build a Broken Boy – 1: Hard to Swallow
This is part 1 in an ongoing series exploring how sexual abuse structured my life.
Before you dive in, be aware, this is deeply personal, extremely raw and contains experiences and language that may be offensive, triggering or repulsive. Please proceed with caution if you decide to go on this journey with me.
Not looking to 'blame' anyone in these essays, just confront what happened. I am trying to understand and own who I am and why my thinking is the way it is.
Names have been changed, otherwise, this is a recounting of real events. I can still see the summer in my grandmother's back yard.
Read Part 1 – Hard to Swallow
Read Part2 – Woman Zero
Read Part 3 – Playing Hot Dog
Read Part 4 – Lady 2.0
Read Part 5 – Trailer Park Incest
Read Part 6 – Table Turning
Honesty Level 99
Sex has shaped my life. For better or worse. As long as I can recall, I’ve spent every day either wanting it, denying it, fantasizing about it, enjoying it, or feeling guilty about it. I don't know if my life-long struggle with sex is a result of what happened to me as a youth, or biology. Probably both. But I pray most men and women don't struggle with the libido I do.
I am middle-aged now. The weirdest years, it seems, were from 5 to 13.
My first memory that I associate with sex, involved my father. Not in an overtly sexual way. Just intimacy and acknowledgement.
Awakening
I must have been a toddler. The recollection is very fuzzy. But he was taking a shower in our newly remodeled bathroom of the first home we had. A home that later burned to the ground.
My parents purchased their first home, a fixer-upper for $13,000 and were going through it room by room to make into their dream-home. They had painted the bathroom white with deep purple accents. The trim, outlets and doors were all purple and the ceiling was gridded and had large purple polka dots.
My memory is of being in the shower with him and I recall feeling very happy. The water is warm and splashing and hitting me like a heavy rain when I look up and notice his flaccid penis.
It is the first time I believe I recognized that my mother and father were different physically. It occurred to me that I was a tiny version of him, different than my mother and sisters. An awakening sort of—that a boy and a girl are not the same. By this age I definitely had one younger sister, maybe both of them. If both, I would be five.
This is a guess. I don’t think I was that old yet—more likely I was 2 or 3.
I’m sure it’s very normal for parents to do this sort of thing, just as young siblings will bathe together. But it always stuck with me. As I said, it was not really sexual at all, but it was significant for some reason.
Innocence
Some time later, in 1977, I had my first experience with being molested. At least the first I can recall. I was at my grandmothers. She lived a blocks from the home I rent now. I see her old house any time I turn left instead of right.
I don't often turn left.
On that day in the late 70's, it was a hot summer day and I had been out playing in the yard. The cicadas were hard at it in the tall Johnson grass that grew in the alley. I was chasing a horny toad who just wanted to be left alone to bake in the sun and eat the red ants. I was fascinated with the horned lizards because they looked like tiny dinosaurs. Small and ancient.
At the chain link fence that separates the yards, Keith appears. He is the son of the family next door. An only child of 12 or 13. He is twice my height and has that short helmet hairdo that was popular in the 70’s. Bright ginger red and a face of freckles.
“Whatcha’ doin’ kid?” He asks me, partially obscured by the towels and sheets hanging from the pale green orbiting clothesline my grandmother loved.
“Nuthin’, I’m tryin’ t’catch this lizard. But he’s too fast.” I tell him, disappointed.
“Hold on, you gotta box him in.” Keith hikes a leg over the fence and leaps into the yard in one bound.
He finds two sticks in the bramble of bushes along the fence line and instructs, “okay you block him from getting away on your side and chase him to me.”
It is a good strategy and in moments the little delicate creature is in Keith’s hands.
“See,” he says smiling, “with two people it’s easy. Here, ya wanna hold it?”
It is warm and textured in my little palm. It’s back is all points and bumps, but the belly is so tender and has a very subtle texture. Its abdomen is rapidly expanding and contracting and the head darts left and right as it seeks an opportunity for escape.
As I stroke its back, I feel my had suddenly grow warm and wet and liquid starts to drip out of my palm.
Keith laughs, “Haw haw! You got peed on!!”
The distraction works and the tiny monster comes to life! Legs a flash, it dives to the ground and with the speed of thought disappears into the grasses. The cicadas never falter in their song.
“Come on,” Keith said encouragingly you can wash it off at my house. I got a new G.I. Joe I can show you.”
This is a very exciting opportunity. I don’t have any G.I.Joes. But the commercials make me want one very badly. They have ‘kung-fu’ grip!!
His house impresses me. Roughly the same floor plan as grandmothers but no worn carpet or beat up, chipped and stained furniture, nor clutter everywhere. I wash my hands with soap and water in the bathroom where they have paper towels, not hand towels (very posh in my book) and then Keith shows me his bedroom.
It is a wonderland. Filled to the brim with every toy I’d ever seen in the sears catalog at Christmastime. Action figures, play sets, vehicles, erector sets, legos, Lincoln logs, Star Wars, Steve Austin, Land of the Lost. I was mesmerized.
I came to learn later that this is what only children could expect with two working parents. Total lack of supervision and showers of gifts to make up for spending no time with them.
Lost
We played for a few minutes with the new toy and a few others on his bed when he got very serious.
“You want to see something really cool?” He asks.
Of course I do. What else is there? Another room of wonders? Maybe food is involved. I nod my head eagerly.
“Okay, but this one, you have to keep secret. This is going to just be with you and me. Okay?” His pitch is kind but conspiratorial.
“Oh, yeah!” I exclaim.
After closing the bedroom door, Keith undoes his belt, unbuttons and unzips his bell bottoms, hooks a thumb on the white briefs he is wearing and present me with his engorged penis.
“You see this? Would you like yours to look like this?” He asks.
I am confused and terrified. This is such a foreign experience I can’t process it. The door makes me feel trapped. I am cornered between the bed and the wall, a nightstand behind me. Between the door and my innocence, he is standing over me with what my memory features as a log-sized penis.
I froze.
“Uh, yeah. Sure—I guess.” I am aware of my tiny floppy bit of flesh that I use to pee. But it’s never occurred to me that it will ever become this unwieldy thing! I am now the horny toad. Head darting, looking for a way out. Peeing as a defense mechanism never occurs to me. Nothing does. My mind is full fright.
“So for you to get like this, you have to put this in your mouth and hold it there.” Keith directs me.
He presses his excitement against my lips, but I don’t want to do this. I turn my head and feel it drag across my cheek and press into my ear.
“Come on kid,” you’ll like it, it won’t hurt, I promise.” He pleads. And manages to press the thing into my mouth.
Looking down at me he has this weird grin on his face. It makes me scowl to write about it.
Keith gets carried away and presses too hard and I begin to choke. In a panic I start to push away and in the process, bite down on the end of his penis.
“Ow! You little shit! You’re not supposed to do that!” And slaps me. “Dammit! That hurt you little punk!”
He cradles the injury with one hand and pressed me to the bed with the other.
“I was TRYING to be nice, but you want to be a little fucker! Then I’ll show you what a fuck feels like!”
Keith rolls me over and yanks me to bend me over his little twin bed and tugs my shorts and underwear down. I can’t see what’s happening but I feel the pressure from his legs against my buttocks. He is rubbing against me and it feels all wet and gross.
There is a sharp pain in my butt and it feels like have to poop. And Keith is pressing and pressing and I hate this and I start to sob. His hand is pressing my back and face into the mattress. I plead for him to stop. Please stop. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean too. It was an accident.
It hurts. I—I start to sob.
I am gone.
It goes on for what feels like hours. I’m sure it was only 30 seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
I hear Keith grunt and groan and the pressure stops. He takes his hand off of me and I can move. But I don’t. I just lay there in tears.
“Oh, don’t be a big baby. You’ll be fine.” Keith sits on the bed, his energy spent.
The lizards sees his opportunity.
Reentry
“Didyouhearthat?!” I spit out, head darting mimic the toad. “I think I hear my grandmother calling me.” Suddenly more embarrassed than scared.
I clamber for my shorts and pull them up. Keith seems lethargic and disinterested in who is calling whom. So I hurry over to the door and as in dart out say “sorry! She’s calling, I have to go.”
And I burst from the house into then warm embrace of summer and cicadas and safety. I crash through my grandmothers back door and find her in the kitchen. She is happy and making rice crispy treats.
I never said a single word about the rape until now. I told my wife once I had a neighbor molested me, no adults, no counselors.
No.
Body.
This is the first time I’ve acknowledged what really happened.
For years I felt dirty and filthy and wrong about it. Even when I understood I was the victim. The feelings persisted. And so I buried them.
That grave is full of horrible things.
And since then, I have come to realize this will shift my understanding of sex for a lifetime. Even now, I know and understand sex intellectually, but emotionally it is still something dirty and secret. This creates an untenable duality in me: to want something so frequently with such desperation, and yet feel terrible for that.
I never saw Keith again after that. I made sure of it. If I ever got the sense he was around, I wasn’t. That was 48 years ago.
I understand now what a bold move it was to do that to a young child. How many others did he want to show his toy collection to in the years to come?
I hope none.
Because if he did, my silence feels complicit.
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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