The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes From a Life

by Robert Goolrick

  But I told my grandmother, and she listened, and then she said, “Don’t ever tell this story to anybody else. If you tell this story to anybody else, something terrible will happen. Something terrible will happen to our family.” And then she had a lot to do.

  MY FATHER DROVE my aunt to the church. He walked her down the aisle in a white jacket and gave her away. He gave her away because her own father was dying. My mother stood beside her sister in a rose dress and hat and looked serene.

  I’m told that, on the way to the church, my father stopped the car and got out and threw up on the side of the road. My mother always said he had a hangover.

  The rest is just a life, just the story of a life deformed. The rest is just a life in which nothing else, no other moment, really matters.

  I don’t know if it ever happened again. I think it did. I don’t know if it ever happened to my brother or sister, but I don’t think so.

  I think it was just an accident. I think it was just bad luck. But afterward, my mother and father and my grandmother and I were locked forever in a secret, each knowing, each silent. I don’t know how they felt. I don’t know how something couldn’t have been broken that was whole, how something that was lovely could ever have been lovely again.

  It happened to me on a September night when my parents were drunk, and I never forget it. Every time I looked at my father, I could feel his hands on my nipples and his fingers down my throat.

  I went on. I pretended to be a child. I knew I was pretending to be who I was; I was constructing a good-humored fiction so that I might appear to be the way other children seemed to be: polite, winsome, and funny. I didn’t feel like I was any of these things. I felt I was copying the smiling face, that I was an imitation. I was a faker, and a fake.

  She knew. She had seen it. He knew. He had done it. My grandmother knew. It had been a full stop in the music of a happy day. And I knew and I could talk and I could tell. And so they were afraid of me, and took their revenge later in extraordinary scenes of hatred. I don’t think they ever knew that I had told my grandmother, on the day of my aunt’s wedding.

  How did we go on?

  I know I wanted my parents to like me. I wanted them not to be afraid of me. I know I wanted us all to be safe, and we all knew we weren’t. We knew we were lying all the time.

  I am told my father screamed at me in public. I am told he called me a pig. I am told he screamed that I ruined everything nice. I am told that their friends begged them to buy me a bicycle like my brother’s, even offered to lend them the money. My brother had one. My sister had one. I don’t remember any of these things.

  I knew, I always knew, that one day I would find somebody I loved enough to tell this story to, and years later I did, one cold morning, lying in bed naked in Philadelphia while his wife was away at work, I knew I had found somebody I loved with all my heart, and I told him the story. I told every detail.

  In the telling, I thought, would be the expiation; but it didn’t make one bit of difference. It didn’t make one goddamned bit of difference.

  When I was twenty-two, when I was in love with my first real girlfriend, I made an appointment with a doctor I’d never been to. I told him I was convinced I had a sexually transmitted disease, that I might have given it to others. He asked me what symptoms I had, and I said none. He looked at me oddly, he looked at my penis, he held it in his hand and looked at it, and I was afraid for him, touching it, I was sure he would see it, that there would be visible proof of some raging infection, but he said nothing. He gave me a blood test, a Wasserman, and called two days later to tell me that all the results were normal. I was perfectly healthy. Of course. He must have thought I was insane.

  And it didn’t make one bit of difference, not one goddamned bit of difference.

  A drunken bed in the white-hot dark of a September night with my grandfather after whom I was called dying three doors away. My father, my mother, and me. My father fucking me in the night. My mother watching. It’s a sad story for everybody.

  I live alone now. I have lived alone for twenty-five years. No one touches me, there are no lips to kiss. Once a doctor asked me if I snored and I had to say I didn’t know. I was at that moment humiliated by the whole history of my life.

  EVERYTHING IS DARK NOW. Something terrible will happen.

  My mother was beautiful, my father handsome. He had such charming hands, my father.

  Such charming hands.

  The End of the World as We Know It

  It wasn’t even what happened. That was bad enough. It was what happened after. That was worse.

  My mother was sitting with her friend Sunshine, who wasn’t a nurse or anything but who worked in a hospital, and I was still very young, in kindergarten probably, at my little private school run by the woman whose son was a lunatic, at least only half a day of school, and I was home and they were sitting there having coffee or maybe early drinks, while Sunshine complained about her husband the drunk, and I came into the room and said, “There’s blood when I go to the bathroom.”

  My mother made me take down my pants and show Sunshine. My mother said, “She works in a hospital. It’s probably just something you ate.” With my pants down around my ankles, showing Sunshine my rear end, Sunshine pulling my cheeks apart for a closer look, my little hole, bloody. Something I ate.

  I started first grade and after a few weeks my mother asked me if there were any girls I liked in my class. We were standing in the kitchen. I said sure, and named a few. Then I said there were some boys I liked, too, and I named a couple.

  My mother turned on me and said vehemently, “Just make sure you like the girls better than the boys!” What could she have meant, except that she knew, she had been there and she had seen?

  I was a little whore. I was a whore and I fucked grown men, I let grown men fuck me. What else could she have meant?

  She called me Robbietydabobity the big fat hen. It was her term of endearment for me. Hen. I never understood, when I thought of it later, how she had come up with that, what she meant by it.

  When I was ten, I watched a friend of my brother’s masturbate, sitting on the edge of one of the ancient rock pools, down where the creek runs into the river. He pulled down his bathing suit, he made his penis hard and big—it was the first time I’d ever seen a penis except my own—and then he masturbated until white come shot all over his brown stomach. He told us the word for it.

  I was electrified, at the size of his penis, at the pleasure it gave him, at the expressions on the faces of the three other boys who were watching. He was not embarrassed. He was teaching us the way to a grownup pleasure, and he took pride in his ability to demonstrate. He had a lean, smooth brown body, and there was stiff brown hair on his head and under his arms and around his penis.

  It was high summer, late afternoon. The heat and the light just sat on you; not a breath, as my grandmother used to say, making a particular gesture with her hand as though slowly batting away a fly, not a breath. The back-to-school cicadas were singing in the limp willows.

  I sat and watched while the other boys practiced what they had learned. I saw the looks on their faces. I was too little, I was ten, a child in a grownup world.

  Watching my brother’s friend, I wanted to know what it would be like to be so handsome, to live in such a beautiful fourteen-year-old body, pure and untouched by time, by sadness or disappointment, untouched, and to be able to give myself such an infinite pleasure.

  Once, in Rome, I had my hair cut and bought a maroon knit shirt and one of those bags called borsa Italian men carry, thinking it would make me dark and romantic like the Italians. I thought, I’d rather be blind and a beggar than be an ugly man in Rome.

  My father never talked about sex. We never saw him naked. My mother would come in and go to the bathroom while we were in the bathtub; we never watched, but we heard her, pulling down her girdle, the quick shush, the sharp smell, peeing, the straightening of the garters that were attached to the girdle to
hold up her stockings, straightening her dress, checking her hair, her lipstick, casual. But not my father. He peed out the back door, in the dark, even in the winter. We knew nothing about sex, except what we learned reading the dirty parts of Lady Chatterly’s Lover in secret.

  My father had the longest testicles I’ve ever seen. When he came out of the bath, they hung down below his boxer shorts. We never, ever saw our parents naked. My mother used to say there was nothing disgusting about the human body, but we were never naked.

  So watching the brazen, unashamed behavior of my brother’s friend was magical. The next morning, lying in my summer bed, with my thumb and forefinger, I pulled on my penis for half an hour, my bare, bald, tiny child’s penis, until I felt the rush of pleasure, and found my eyes squeezing shut the way my brother’s friend’s had.

  I was tired of being a child. I was tired of pretending to be innocent, of pretending to be funny and winsome and smart and endearing.

  Somebody once told me that I was the only child she had ever known who always turned the conversation away from myself, to ask how others were, what they’d been doing, complimenting them on some part of the way they looked. It was because I didn’t want to talk about myself. It was because I had no self to talk about, because I didn’t want to be asked any questions, out of fear that any question would lead to the question and the answer would be yes and everything would be ruined and something terrible would begin to happen.

  I didn’t want to be a child, to stand in that relation to the world in which I was continually vulnerable to attack, no matter how much I pretended to be fine. No matter how much I said it before I changed the topic. I didn’t want to be winning. I didn’t want to look the way I looked. The way I looked was so different from the way I felt, from what I knew to be inside me. I had the soul of Mahler and the body of Mozart. I didn’t want to be me.

  I wanted stiff wavy hair and stomach muscles and a long lean torso. I wanted to be a boy who was strong and untouched and able to give myself pleasure, and to dream of the day when the prize and the flowered cock would be mine, like in Lady Chat-terly. I didn’t have a good body until I was in my late thirties, after I got out of the mental hospital, and even then it seemed less beautiful, less prone to pleasure than the body of my brother’s friend by the river, his hand around his dick, his eyes dark with sensation.

  So I would think of my brother’s friend and his pleasure, and the thought gave me pleasure, and I would masturbate in bed, terrified of being caught. I didn’t know what would happen if I got caught, but I liked the secrecy of it, the fact that it had to do only with me and what gave me this thrill of pleasure, this sense, for a moment, of no longer being a child.

  It was the only moment I wasn’t faking. It was the only moment I didn’t have to be something for somebody else. It was the moment I could have any body I imagined. I stopped thinking. It was the quiet, intense moment in which I could see, with absolute clarity, without thought, the handsome body of my brother’s friend, leaning back on one muscled arm, the water spilling over his hand, the come shooting over his brown stomach, his tan line, his bathing suit floating in the water, his nipples erect and dark. I could feel the awe on the older boys’ faces as they learned the mystery; they could see the mystery in the rush of blood to his cheeks, the high red pulse of his cheekbones.

  Afterward, my father never touched me, unless he shook my hand. Except once, later. He never held me or kissed me or tousled my hair. He never took my hand as we walked up the steep steps to the church where he stood against a stained glass window and sang in his high sweet tenor voice the ancient hymns of the Episcopal Church, holding the hymnbook in his long hands, his summer seersucker perfectly wrinkled, his face a masterpiece of calm, no matter how hungover he was. And he must have been. He could hold his liquor, then, but there was season after season when they all drank too much. It was what they did.

  One day, when I was masturbating, I noticed a small deposit of something white beneath the thin skin. For days, I hoped it would go away. I squeezed and squeezed it, trying to make it disappear. It didn’t.

  I knew, finally, that I was going to die, that something had happened in that bed with my father eight years before that would kill me. And I knew that I could kill others. I knew that whatever disease I had gave my touch the power to make others sicken and die. It was sex. The terror of sex. It came to me all of a sudden.

  The white spot on my penis broke up into many similar, smaller ones. Sometimes I would squeeze and a tiny amount of white wax, like a worm, would come out. Sometimes I would squeeze so hard and uselessly and repeatedly that a boil would develop, a boil that eventually erupted in blood and pus. Disease made tangible, blood in my fingers. And I began to come.

  I dreamed I reached into my pants and pulled out my testicles. They were white and mottled. They were pitted like a sponge.

  I dreamed I took a spoon and dug long white worms out of my knees. I dreamed these things again and again. They terrified me until I felt nauseated.

  And still, I would masturbate six or seven or eight times a day, in any room of the house, at any moment when I knew I would be alone. And most times, the masturbation would be followed by a sharp searing pain, a pain that made my penis feel as though it were on fire, as though a hot wire had been inserted down through the middle, a pain that was so intense it would make sweat come out all over my forehead. Sometimes, if I could make my penis hard again right away, it would pass in ten minutes. At other times, it would last half an hour or more. Sometimes I was late for dinner, lying sick with sweat and pain on the bathroom floor.

  It was part of my disease; it was a symptom of the thing that was killing me, this sexual thing that had come into my body through my father’s touch. It was in the pain. It was in the white spots, small hard clots that dotted my penis. It was in my mother’s accusation when I was five. It was in the way I had faked a childhood.

  But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t stop. I was both victim and victimizer. I was possessed. My greatest pleasure, my one private pleasure, was also death.

  At first, I was terrified of dying. Then I found that all I wanted was death, to end it, to keep myself from spreading the infectious toxins that ran in my veins. It was a poison that would find its way through me into the body, the bloodstream of any other living person. I was thirteen years old, and all I thought about was death. I believed my touch could kill, that every touch put another person in danger.

  Of course, there is a certain gladness in being young. There is an exhilaration in watching your body change, in leaving the helplessness of childhood behind. There is the pleasure of friendships that have nothing to do with your parents, the brilliance of even the earliest ideas about the world, about the mind, the art of conversation, and none of this was lost on me, even though I did not turn lean and strong, I did not turn beautiful; I was instead skinny and awkward with bad posture and a weak chin.

  I once asked my mother when my face had changed, how I had come to look so sad. We were sitting in front of the liquor store, waiting for my father.

  She looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You decided,” she said. “You decided to be sad.” I was twelve.

  My hair did not bristle with stiffness, the way a man’s hair should. It was a nondescript brown, not deep, not rich, not romantic. It was straight and fine, and lay against my head like a girl’s. Everybody said I had a brilliant mind, and this, I suppose was to compensate me for the indelible pain and the homely face and weak body.

  But it didn’t. I knew what a man was; I knew I wanted to be one. And I knew I wanted to die because of the pain and the infection and because my body would never in any way resemble the body I wanted for myself. I had seen it once, down by the river. I wanted it to be mine forever. Instead, there was only an adoration of a self I was never going to be, and a loathing for the self I was.

  I couldn’t stand the casual touch of strangers or the affectionate touch of friends, the arm across the shoulder, the pat on th
e back. My father and his friends used to put their arms across each other’s shoulders, when they were being photographed. It was terrible. I was afraid for them, for the strangers and the friends, and every touch was the touch of my father in the dark.

  I didn’t like my face. I didn’t like my voice. I didn’t like being the kid in gym class who couldn’t climb to the top of the rope.

  In swimming, when we swam naked on Saturday mornings at the Military Institute, under the instruction of cadets who lifted weights and had shoulders and stomach muscles and arms and thighs and the slim waists of boys, I was mortified. I would never be one of them, with sharply handsome cadet faces and crisp lines where the sideburns were shaved razor-sharp.

  The lights from the high windows glittered on the infinite tiny waves of boys splashing, the deep turquoise aquatic dream of water, so clean and cold, the men and the boys swam without embarrassment and called, their shouts echoing in the high steel-raftered ceiling into which the platform we jumped off of rose fifteen feet, and I jumped with them, unafraid, I did these things and I was not afraid. In the showers, I turned away in shame. In the whole Athenian dream of what it was to be men together and strong and handsome, I was the one thing that did not belong. I was the one thing that would never belong anywhere.

  I imagined there was a button buried in my thigh. I imagined a button I could push and cease to be, cease to be in such a way that I would never have been at all. There would be no funeral, no gravestone, no memory of me. I imagined a thousand times pushing this button and the world and its wonders and its joys and its compassion would vanish into invisibility.

  I didn’t want people’s grief and tears. I didn’t want to be missed. I wanted to have never been on the beautiful round whirling extravagantly peopled planet.

  I broke my arm, falling off a horse named Thunder, going over a two-foot jump. There was a cast up to my shoulder. My father decided he was going to bathe me, and he made me undress while my brother watched and made me sit naked on the edge of the bathtub, while he rubbed soap over my body, under my arms, lifting my cast, hurting my arm, rubbing soap over my penis, while my eyes stared at the porcelain of the tub and I didn’t move a muscle. Then he rinsed me off with a wet washrag, and toweled me dry. It was the last, the only other time he touched me.