The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “Let’s see how poorly Mr. ‘Gay-dicks’ did on his French exam today, shall we?” Or else the other boys crowded ’round me during recess like crows around a carcass, chanting “Gay-dicks…Gay-dicks…Gay-dicks,” as if my name were the worst thing I could be.

  None of that stopped Tommy, my best and only friend at school, and me from expressing all our private yearnings in secret gestures and coded language. Amongst teachers and schoolmates, we talked openly about being “Final Chapters,” or else we hung our hands over the edges of desks and tables to say, without uttering one word across crowded rooms, that we were “hands at the edge of a table”: limp wristed. Neither of us was the least bit interested in each other “that way,” which made everything so much simpler. The fact of our Final Chapter-ness was like a mathematical equation, and as long as no one, particularly our parents, ever found out about it, everything would be fine.

  And then there was a dark force that took hold of my senses, which I kept concealed even from Tommy.

  I skipped out of school.

  I bussed downtown.

  I walked through crowded shopping malls for hours, back and forth from one public washroom to another like a zombie, down into the guts of that parkade. If I had sex and then held a man and told him I love you, my words always reminded me of the fat man who’d said he loved me too, and I knew I’d never have to see any of these other men again so it didn’t matter what I said. Some of them scrawled their names and numbers on a piece of paper, and as I walked away, I’d see their faces, hopeful that I’d call them one day soon.

  I would smile—always the polite Catholic boy—and tell them that I would, then throw their number away as soon as they were out of sight. Sex with men had nothing to do with who I was in my real life, I told myself. Sex with men was something that I did, but it was not who I was. And always, when I got on the bus to return home, sex with men was part of another world that I left downtown where it belonged.

  I learned to hitchhike when I saw a boy my age stick out his thumb and a car pull over. Days later I followed suit, and sure enough, a car pulled over for me. The man inside asked me how far I was going. “All the way,” I told him. Halfway home he rubbed his hand over my leg. Within the month, I was hitchhiking home every day, picked up by a different man two or three times my age. Sometimes I bussed downtown, where I was more likely to get picked, just so I could hitchhike home. Often I asked them why they liked to “do it with guys.” Mostly, we never talked at all.

  Maintaining the contradiction that my life had become grew increasingly difficult. Fear of discovery was always imminent. After one dinner at home, I told my parents that I thought I was a “Final Chapter.” They just stared at me, as if I’d spoken a foreign language. And, in a sense, I had. But having said that much, codified as it were, released the pressure to tell them all, to tear the mask completely off the actor, then live to regret it.

  Some weekends I slept over at Tommy’s house, a sprawling estate high atop the British Properties in West Vancouver. As an only child, Tommy could do as he pleased, and his parents hardly noticed. We lay out by his pool, listened to ABBA, held séances with black candles after his parents had gone to bed, and read excerpts aloud from The Shining until, freaked, we’d have to talk about I Love Lucy, giggling, just to calm down.

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  After school one afternoon, when I was sixteen, I dashed into my bedroom, reached beneath my top mattress for one of the Honchos and Blueboys that I’d been stealing from a downtown magazine store for years. Instead of the pornos, I found only a Bible, and inside its cover, addressed to me, a note: Read this instead.

  I panicked, fearing my worst nightmare had come true: my parents had discovered my secret. I grabbed my coat and ran down the stairs to the basement door, but before I could leave my brother, Pisti, called out to me from behind.

  “Did you find the Bible?”

  I thought of all his Playboys stacked four feet high in our bedroom, all of which he occasionally bragged about to our parents, and my fear shifted to anger, then betrayal.

  “Stay out of my life!” I screamed, and slammed the door behind me.

  Several weeks later Pisti again confronted me. He had been following me for months, he said: he knew that I’d been having sex with men downtown. He threatened to tell our parents unless I confessed everything to Father Raphael, our parish priest. Receive absolution. Repent. Change my ways.

  I fell to my knees and begged him to reconsider.

  Then his story changed.

  “I never followed you, but I had a hunch,” he said. “Now that I know the truth, you need to confess everything to Father Raphael, or else.”

  A week later I confessed my sin to Father Raphael.

  He “forgave” me.

  “It’s just a phase of life,” he said in the confessional. The slotted screen obscured my face, but still I feared he’d know me from my voice. “It’s completely natural for boys your age.”

  For two weeks I was elated, believing that God would save me from my sins.

  But my desires only deepened.

  Every night I prayed for God to take me in my sleep, and every morning I awoke to feel my body, alive and heavy with despair. Why was I sentenced to a life of sin? Why did God hate me so? How was it even possible that I was “becoming” as my name, pronounced “Gay-dicks,” implied, while my two older brothers, by every indication, weren’t? If my name had been like flesh, I would’ve burnt it from my bones, and said to everyone, to all my Tormentors, Look, see, I am not the name you call me.

  But I was. I was everything they named me, and more. My name was like marrow, built into my bones. There was nowhere I could go to escape my insides.

  Nearly every weekend, by the early 1980s, Tommy and I danced for hours at the Gandydancer, a lone, unmarked gay dance club in an otherwise derelict part of town filled with abandoned warehouses built on rail platforms with cantilevered canopies. We’d drive around town in his father’s steel blue Park Avenue model automobile, singing along to tapes of our favorite songs—Midge Ure’s “If I Was” or Wham!’s “Careless Whisper”—stopping at Doll & Penny’s café in the city’s West End gay district near English Bay beach for a 2 a.m. drag show while munching on baskets of fries with mayonnaise.

  All the dancing and drag in the world, however, couldn’t stop the clouds of despair from darkening my mind. Through the fog of my depression, I could hear my parents and my siblings ask me what was wrong. But at nineteen years old, lying face up on my bed, nearly catatonic, there were secrets from my past and fears about my future that I could not share with anyone.

  4

  I HAD SEEN THE movie Fame, with Irene Cara, in theaters every weekend for four months in 1980. It was all about young kids in the High School of Performing Arts in New York City who had big problems with ambition, competition, betrayal, and even homosexuality. So when the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, a college for acting training from which Robert Redford, among others, had graduated, held auditions in Vancouver in 1983, I jumped at the chance and made an appointment.

  Sammy’s monologue from William Inge’s play Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the same as Montgomery’s in the opening of Fame, was my audition piece.

  “I always worry that maybe people aren’t going to like me…”

  Two months later I was accepted as a first-year student, and, to my parents’ unremitting disapproval, took a Greyhound bus in January 1984 to Pasadena, California. Best of all, my new home would be more than 1,200 miles away from all the sex that I had wanted to escape, but had found no way to avoid.

  Acting, as a means of hiding from what I didn’t want to see, had come naturally to me in my private life, but the formal creative discipline of acting as a means of facing deeper truths within oneself in order to transmute them outward to an audience was another matter entirely. Still, my creative juices overflowed: tap dance, jazz, and ballet; singing songs from musicals like A Chorus Line, Fiddler on the Roof, and Company; m
ethod acting and rehearsing scenes from plays by Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets.

  Friendships were forged, a sense of camaraderie established. Within months, I even had a girlfriend—another student at the Academy. Cecilia, an Armenian from Los Angeles, had rented the apartment next door to me in our two-floor walk-up with a peanut-shaped outdoor pool, three miles from campus. When we started sleeping together, nightly, in my apartment, I worried that she might somehow discover all the gay porno magazines that I kept stashed beneath my top mattress. When she broached the subject, after months of heavy kissing and even the occasional dabbling into oral sex, that we should “go all the way,” I told her that I didn’t think she was “ready.”

  Like any skilled actor, I could play the part of boyfriend to girlfriend, but the role I was playing was not me. When I arrived home one night with a hickey, she thought for sure I’d been with another woman and begged me to tell her the truth. I could not tell her that it was true I’d had sex, but it’d been with a man, in a video arcade. Porno theaters and late-night trysts in cars with men twice or three times my age: the secret life I’d left behind had followed me to Hollywood, land of make-believe and shattered dreams.

  After one year at the Academy, I returned to my home in Vancouver and moved back into my parents’ house. Second-year’s studies were by invitation only, and so I waited for their letter. The Academy’s director, Bryn Morgan, wrote and said that he thought I needed to live in the world for a while, instead of a theater.

  “Life is what you need to experience,” he wrote, “not a character.” I was not invited back.

  I was devastated.

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  One night after dinner, as I was washing the dishes, my mother handed me a document.

  “It’s about some of my experiences in the camps,” she said. “Hopefully this will help clarify things.” Then she closed the door and left me alone. I sat down and started to read, beginning with the opening phrase, “For your eyes only.”

  Sometime before the end of the war, in late October 1944, all ethnic Germans living in the former Yugoslavia were branded as fascists and stripped of their civic rights, declared enemies of the people, and interned in concentration camps. At the train station, as she was about to be deported along with hundreds of others to a forced labor camp in Siberia, my mother, twenty years old, slipped beneath the tracks of the cattle car and escaped back to her hometown of Modosch. Captured by the OZNA, the Serbian secret police, days later, she was jailed in one of the most notorious death camps in Petrovgrad, known for having nightly “killing parties.” Runnels had been dug in the earth, and every night a dozen prisoners would be led outside and horsewhipped till their blood flowed through the channels below, like veins in the earth, to a large pit at one end of the camp. From inside the barracks, huddled together with all the women, my mother listened as the prisoners’ flesh was ripped from their bones. One month later, she stopped menstruating. Two years later, she attempted to escape, but was caught near the Romanian border and returned to the death camp.

  The next morning, she was ordered to report to the commandant’s office, where she sat waiting most of the day. Late at night a car drove up and the commandant, whom she had come to know as her tormentor, got out and led her into one of the offices.

  The moment they entered, he slapped her across her face.

  “Why did you try and escape from my prison?” he asked, towering above her.

  “I am not going to starve to death in your—” she began, before he struck the other side of her face, sending her crashing to her knees.

  He waited until she’d picked herself back up, then asked again, “Why did you try and escape from my prison?”

  “I am not going to starve to death in your camp.”

  She awoke later, alone, slumped on the floor, bruised and too weak to move.

  My mother spent her twenty-second birthday in solitary confinement, where she wrote poetry, or prayers, as she preferred to think of them. Each morning she laid out the theme in her mind: on All Soul’s Day, a prayer to her recently deceased mother, asking for her guidance; on her own birthday, a prayer for the deliverance of her soul to God, should she die in the camp. All day, every day, she’d work on her prayer in her mind, replacing one word for another, until she knew it was ready to be scratched, with her only hairpin, into the chalked walls of her cell. Some were no more than ten words; others were longer than ten lines. She wrote in German, and in Serbian; she wrote for the ones who would come after her. One prayer for each day she was imprisoned. This, she wrote, is what kept her sane.

  After a month in solitary, my mother was transported to the labor camp in Kikinda, and six weeks later to the concentration camp in Molidorf. As a form of torture and to prevent further attempted escapes, her tormentor jailed her in a bunker filled with waist-high water. There was one window inside the cell, and so she pulled herself up out of the water and onto its large, brick windowsill, where she remained, perched, knees bent, dripping wet, chilled. When her tormentor found her there, hours later, he demanded that she get down off the sill and stand in the water. She refused. He waded through the water and pointed his rifle at her head.

  “Get down or else I’ll shoot.”

  “Then shoot me,” she replied, grasping the window’s iron bars.

  He left.

  The next morning she was transported once again by train back to her hometown, whose former town store had since been appropriated by the OZNA and made into their new headquarters. All entrances to the building were now boarded up, with the police quartered in beds that filled the large kitchen and the servant’s room next to a pantry, where she was jailed. Rats and mice had eaten away at the loosened floorboards, and every night she heard them below, squeaking and scurrying in all directions.

  Sometimes, in the darkness, she recalled her home life before they’d all been dispossessed. Violin lessons on Wednesdays. Waking to the fragrance of lilacs growing outside her bedroom window. Espalier grapes trailing up the sides of their home, some so large and juicy her mother had called them “goat tits” because each was more like a meal. Fresh eggs from their backyard chickens. Oozing cherries from her Oma’s garden. Her father’s vineyards, the smell of his pipe, a mixture of hickory and cocoa. Men gathering in their home from all around the village to talk and drink a glass of homemade brandy. Sausages and spec hanging upstairs in the attic and her mother’s speise lined with jars of peach and plum jam, apricot for special occasions. Palacsintas with sweet cottage cheese filling on Sundays and honey bread for lunch.

  In her memory there was much of everything and everything was warm and sunny. She could hear her parents’ laughter, lulling her to sleep. They loved her. Hunger was not something she had ever known. Ending her life was not something she had ever contemplated. God was still with her.

  Midway through her story she stated, tangentially but categorically, that she had not been raped. It was a statement that seemed almost to come out of nowhere, to answer an unasked question. But then she shifted topics again and went on to describe a visit, four weeks later, with her hometown priest, who was being jailed in another part of the same camp. The moment he saw her he broke down in tears. He spoke to her of destiny, of freedom, of a world beyond her confinement. Only if she firmly believed, he told her, would it all come to pass, would she be able to escape.

  “Forget if you can,” he cautioned, clasping her hands in his. “But above all else, above all else, you must learn to forgive. Hate destroys the hater, never the hated. Grievances buried will one day surface. And with renewed vengeance.”

  Before the prison guards returned her to the pantry, where she was jailed for five more months, the priest told her he would pray for her freedom.

  She believed he had.

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  With no clear direction in my life, at twenty years old, I enrolled at Vancouver Community College. Acting had not turned out well, so I registered in creative writing.

  When I
told my parents I wanted to move out on my own, my father exploded.

  “What will you do for money? If you think we’re going to support you…”

  I found a basement suite on the east side of town whose owners discounted the rent to $300 per month because I was a student. An actor’s agency in town signed me on and sent me out for auditions. My school newspaper published some of my poetry. Inspired by the character of Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I wrote my first one-act play, an absurdist black comedy called Killing Maggie Cat. Then I read an ad at a local theater that said a television station was interested in filming short plays, so I sent them mine. Weeks later, the producer called and said she liked my play, and then she connected me with two local student actors.

  By day, I was a starving actor and creative writing student, working part-time as a waiter, directing my play for television, and attending cattle calls for commercials and bit parts in TV and film. But by night, every night, like the bulimic facing a plate of food, I bicycled to a downtown parking lot by the ocean where I knew men cruised—“the fruit loop,” as it was commonly known—and I didn’t go home until I was full.

  Four years earlier, I had called the crisis center helpline in a fit of desperation about my attraction for men, panicked at the thought that my only solution in life would be to kill myself. Then I volunteered to work there myself, and within minutes of meeting Pearl, another volunteer, discovered our shared passion for the confessional poets, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, probably because we had both been keeping secrets.

  “I cut myself,” she told me that first night over tea. She was dressed in a black bohemian skirt with too many colorful bracelets on her wrists to count.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “It releases the pressure inside.”

  “What sort of pressure?”

  “There’s a disconnect between the way I feel and how I act, like a road inside that spreads in two and never meets. Cutting myself is the only way I’ve found that brings them back together, reconnects the two, if only for a moment.”