The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “What?” I asked, uncomfortable by his blinded glare. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “No. You didn’t. That’s just the problem.”

  Clay spoke up and reminded him that two of his other patients were arriving the following week for their three-week intensives. We had purchased furniture and beddings—out of our own personal savings—to furnish the spare bedroom in preparation for their arrival. We had done all of it because he asked it of us.

  “Would you like to see their room?” Clay asked.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Alfonzo said. Then he stood, and, without saying goodbye, disappeared down the stairs and out our front door.

  “What just happened?” Brent asked.

  Both he and I looked to Clay and waited for an explanation, for some insight that might explain such irrational behavior.

  “What can I say? He can get a bit crazy. It’s the therapy that’s important. I believe in his therapy.”

  At the office the next day, no one said a word about our late-night visitor. Maybe if we didn’t talk about it, we reasoned, we could all just pretend like it had never actually happened.

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  Our first two intensives arrived the following week, as scheduled. The plan, Alfonzo had told us, was for them to have access to our workroom while continuing with their daily sessions in the office. Clay, Brent, and I would be responsible for their meal planning, shopping, and cooking. We’d guide them through their evening meditation and emotionally support them during, and after, their primals in the house.

  No sooner had the intensives arrived than they were in our workroom, milking their therapeutic stay, and the three hundred dollars that we charged them. Later, we explained that all communication with family and friends would be discontinued during their three-week “retreat,” and that evenings would be focused on our communal vegan meal, followed by meditation.

  Corporate executives, mothers and fathers, students of all ages: every three weeks the routine was repeated as Bea, Bea’s half-sister, Brent, Clay, and I all welcomed two new patients with open arms and a copy of the Styx charter in hand.

  Witnessing a patient’s “primal,” especially for the first time, was always, without exception, voyeuristic. Whatever pleasantries we’d exchange outside the workroom were quickly replaced, once they were batting or lying on the mattress, with the sight of a gutted animal howling by the side of a road. Sooner or later, everyone looked and sounded the same. Everyone yearned for the same lost childhood. Everyone cried, while lying belly up on the mattress, for the love of the same absent mother. Everyone raged, while batting and screaming at the red “X” marked on the wall, against the same disapproving father. Eventually, no matter what their tax bracket, everyone bled red.

  A sixty-five-year-old divorcee told everyone she was a mother of two, even though her youngest son, a promising sculptor, had committed suicide the previous year, which was what had sent her into therapy.

  “He’ll always be my son,” she told us her first night in our candlelit living room following meditation. “His last piece was of his own hands, a bronze sculpture of his two hands reaching out for help. A week later he hung himself in his bathroom. He was calling out for help and I didn’t see him. I didn’t hear him. I wasn’t there for him. I’ll never forgive myself for that. Never.”

  A mid-thirties mother of six with fiery red hair and a spirit to match was with us only hours when she received a phone call from a friend, advising that her husband was killed while away on a business trip in New York. She called Alfonzo. He told her to go to our workroom and “work it,” to “take it back historically,” to the first time she had felt this kind of grief. After ten minutes on her back, though, she stood and left the workroom. There was no “history” to work, she said. “My husband just died. I’m a widow. I have six children. This is bullshit.”

  She left the house and, a week later, the therapy.

  One man, a wealthy businessman who said he once had worked with Donald Trump, arrived at the Styx amid the crumbling of his twenty-year marriage. No sooner had he started to unpack than we were all being called to the workroom to support Clay while he let off some steam toward his father.

  “Part of your intensive means joining us in the workroom whenever we work,” I explained to him, “regardless of whether or not you need to work. The idea is to use our sessions as a trigger for your own.”

  For someone with chronic fatigue, Clay’s rages were legendary. On this particular day, not seconds after we shut the workroom door, he grabbed the bat and began swinging it up and down against the bag, as though his life depended on its beating.

  “DIE, MOTHERFUCKER, DIE!” he roared for twenty minutes, his face turning various shades of red, his forehead’s veins popping like webs surfacing through his skin.

  I glanced at the businessman, whose face had turned its own shade of deep purple. The minute Clay had finished, and we all streamed out of the workroom, he beelined to his bedroom, repacked the few pieces of clothing that he’d unpacked, and headed back out our front door, panic-stricken, clothes still dangling from his half-opened suitcase.

  “Where are you going?” Brent and I asked him as he jumped into his lavender Porsche.

  “I can’t do what you guys are doing,” he mumbled as he sped off. Apparently, wheeling and dealing with Trump had been easy compared to Clay’s primal rages.

  Another patient, a mid-fifties man with only a crest of graying hair left on his otherwise shiny head, identified himself as Alexander Scarborough and spoke in a perfectly enunciated British accent. “My wife and I have been struggling for years,” he told Brent, Clay, and me that first night at the house.

  “In what way?” Brent asked.

  “With various…private matters. Related to…well, copulation. More precisely, the lack of any real desire, at least on my part, to engage with anyone, not only my wife mind you, but anyone at all, on that level. The fact of the matter is we have not had sexual relations in over fifteen years. She’s asked me for a divorce. I agreed to go into therapy to try and salvage what is left of our marriage. If, in fact, there is anything left to salvage. I thought Alfonzo’s unorthodox practice might help steer me away from the safety of words. Truth be told, I’ve made a career out of avoiding my feelings through language.”

  “What do you do for a living?” Clay asked.

  “I’m a psychiatrist.”

  During a phone call with Alfonzo the next night, he told the three of us, Brent, Clay, and myself, that we should “handle this one with kid gloves.”

  “Our arrangement is for him to have his sessions only at the office, with me,” Alfonzo said. “No primals at the Styx. I only want him to witness you working at the house. To wet his feet. This one is sensitive. It’s a deal breaker. Be careful. I’m relying on all of you. Do not disappoint me.”

  Some intensives were mortified by the words Clay, Brent, and I used during our primals at the house; descriptions that, with every syllable, tore flesh, spoke blood, raised bile, aborted fetuses. Many intensives ran from our workroom midstream, called Alfonzo at the office, said that they refused to sit through primals that they considered “far too graphic,” “disturbing,” “cruel.” On the phone, Alfonzo, chuckling, told us to “tone it down a bit in front of intensives. Keep the big ones for the office.” Still, there were others who relished in the explicitness of our sessions, used us as emotional triggers, fertilizer to the gardens of their own pain, took up arms at the batting station the moment we concluded and raged with all their might.

  A late-twenties socialite sent us a list of food requests a week before arriving: whole-wheat bagels, nonfat cream cheese, lactose-free skim milk, rice cakes, and organic, creamy, peanut butter.

  When we told her she’d have no contact with her family shortly after she stepped out of her black Mercedes convertible, wearing a white tennis shirt and sneakers, she went into a tailspin.

  “Dr. Alfonzo never told me I couldn’t call my husband!”
her shrill voice yelled at the three of us. “Dr. Alfonzo would have told me if I wasn’t allowed to call my husband—and what about my four children? If you think I can go three weeks without talking to my children, you have something coming to you. And of course I’ll have to leave every afternoon. I can’t be expected not to live my life simply because I’m staying here for three weeks. This isn’t supposed to be a jail, is it? Is it?”

  On the mattress, however, her metamorphosis from diva to fragile little girl was alarming. Her voice dropped two octaves, and when she slammed the bat into the punching bag, beating her overpowering father down into a pulp, a ferociousness that had not been apparent “upstairs” toppled through her slim, waiflike figure.

  In this young socialite, Clay had met his match.

  Days later, she asked that Clay, and Clay only, accompany her to the workroom.

  “I won’t require anyone else but Clay, thank you,” she instructed Brent and me, as if we were her “hired help.” And then they’d disappear, the two of them like teenage suitors, into the workroom for hours.

  Sounds of giggling could be heard in the house several nights later after everyone had gone to bed. I peeked out of my room and there, in the middle of the living room, were four bare feet sticking out from under a large woolen blanket. I recognized two as Clay’s. The other two, I soon discovered, were hers.

  “Clay?” I whispered.

  Both pairs of eyes peered out from the top edge of the blanket.

  “Oh,” Clay said. “Peter. Hi.”

  He tucked his head back beneath the blanket, and together they giggled.

  The following morning, we returned her money, with a request to leave. She did. The moment after she left, Clay walked straight to the workroom.

  “You got me again, Mommy!” he screamed, batting and staring at the red “X.” “You seduce me again and again through every woman I meet and I just want you out of me, get your stinking slimy teeth out of me, GET OUT OF ME GET OUT OF ME GET OUT OF ME!”

  Yuen was a thirty-five-year-old Chinese Canadian whose parents had immigrated to Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. After several failed suicide attempts and an episode where she’d locked herself in the bathroom of her large, two-story home, gripping a baseball bat, certain that her husband of ten years was trying to kill her, she arrived on Alfonzo’s doorstep. Following her three-week intensive, Yuen decided against returning to her husband, opting instead to become a permanent member of the Styx family, a sister to our brothers, thereby increasing our core family unit by one sibling.

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  We were nearing our first Styx Christmas, four months into our new cohabitation and just over one year from when I’d left my hometown behind, and I felt like I was marooned on a deserted island with three orphaned strangers. I missed my real family, I told Alfonzo. I had doubts about all of it, the therapy and the Styx. I wanted to go home.

  “You are home,” Alfonzo told me after a session in the office. “Think of this as an opportunity to create a new one with your siblings at the Styx. It would be unwise for you to see your parents right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’d set you back. All the progress you’ve made in therapy—it would be like undoing months of work on the mattress or at the bat. What you need is to bond with your siblings. Your new siblings. You’re at a crucial juncture. You have to trust me.”

  Because the “joyful” season triggered issues with his maniacal father and had sent him into a rage-fueled primal, Clay spent Christmas day in his bedroom.

  “If I come out of this room I’m going to kill someone,” he warned us from the other side of his locked bedroom door. “You don’t want me to come out; trust me.”

  We left him alone.

  Christmas dinner proceeded in his absence. Because meat was prohibited, Brent bought and cooked a turkey-shaped tofu loaf instead.

  “Maybe I didn’t cook it right,” Brent confessed as the three of us picked at our individual servings.

  “It tastes like sawdust,” I said.

  Outside it was snowing, and so Brent, Yuen, and I left the tofu disaster, dressed in padded layers, and ran next door to the fenced-in playground.

  “Look!” Yuen called out, giggling, falling backward and then waving her arms and legs up and down like windshield wipers in the snow.

  “I’m an angel!”

  Brent and I fell back, too, and then all three of us were orphaned angels, playing and numbing ourselves on the frozen earth.

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  Claude, another original Styx member from Quebec, visited the house several weeks after Christmas to lead us through our first official Styx meeting.

  “In order for a house like yours to succeed,” he said, “you will all need to trust each other implicitly. I suggest you do a bonding exercise.” He walked to the landing of our metal staircase, and then told us to each stand at the top step, facing into the living room, close our eyes, and fall backward down the stairs, trusting that one of our housemates, standing two steps below, would catch us.

  All the others stood at the top of the stairs, closed their eyes, trusted, and fell back into the arms of someone down below. When it was my turn I started to laugh. Such a silly exercise, I thought, and yet the fear that my trust would be betrayed caused my heart to race, my palms to sweat, and my laughter to turn hysterical. With closed eyes, my back faced to the stairs, I heard the others encouraging me, saying they would catch me, not let me fall, that I was safe. My laughter gave way to tears, and I opened my eyes.

  “I can’t,” I said to Claude, moving away from the stairs. “I can’t do it, I can’t. Please don’t tell Dr. Alfonzo, please…”

  I disappeared into my bedroom, still crying. Claude followed me in, asked me how I was. For some reason I started to tell him about my struggles with men, that I had sex with men, but that I wasn’t gay, or that I didn’t want to be gay, or that maybe I was gay but that I might have been “made gay,” and the rejection I’d experienced by my family. He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. With straight white teeth, marble blue eyes, and blond hair parted to one side, he looked like a French Canadian Boy Scout. A tingling sensation moved through my body like the first spark of hunger catching fire in my belly.

  “If you can just hang in there for a little while longer,” he said, squeezing my shoulder, “Alfonzo has big plans for you.”

  “What type of plans?” I asked, drying my tears with the back of my shirt.

  “What he’s going to do with you he’s never done with anyone else before. And when he’s finished, he’s going to write a book about you.”

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  Brent, Clay, Yuen, and I all began spending more and more time with Alfonzo and Yvette outside of our therapy: during late-night meetings at the office or in phone conversations, where we discussed the role of the Styx and the organization of the intensives. Though Alfonzo and Yvette lived as a couple in a separate house, we were told to consider ourselves one family with one goal: the evolution of our souls.

  Privately, Yvette told each of us that Alfonzo was ailing. The stress of caring for our souls, she explained, on top of maintaining a home and a functioning office, was too much for even him to bear alone. For this reason alone, she said that we needed to start cooking their meals and deliver them to their home on Hampstead Street, a forty-five-minute bus ride to a ritzy part of town where I’d heard a lot of lawyers and doctors lived.

  “We can’t run this office without your help,” she told us on the phone one night. “We’re all in this together. We’re relying on you.”

  Within weeks, Yvette provided us with lists of foods that Alfonzo liked (yams, carrots, leeks, anything with rice) or disliked (eggplant, kiwi), spices that we should include (saffron, cumin, oregano, basil, paprika, but only the Spanish kind) or altogether avoid (garlic— caused “excessive flatulence”).

  Within days, we were delivering so much food to “Hampstead” that we all just referred to the name of t
he street itself, as Morse code for the demands of Alfonzo.

  “I have to go shopping for Hampstead today,” Clay told Brent and me, on his way to the market.

  “I’m taking this lasagna over to Hampstead,” Brent said to all of us, rushing out the door.

  “Hampstead needs this split pea soup before six p.m. tonight,” I said to the others, ladling the hot soup into Tupperware containers.

  Several weeks later, Yvette called again with another update about their food. “The doctor has decided that all his food must now be fat-free. He needs to watch his weight. His blood sugar is through the roof.”

  “Fat free,” of course, did not mean “no desserts.” In fact, when Alfonzo discovered I liked to bake, he called the Styx specifically to speak with me. “I want you to figure out a fat-free recipe for cheesecake for me. But without graham wafers as the crumb bottom. Try dates.”

  “Dates?”

  “Mixed with a little oatmeal and honey. Do you know Splenda?”

  “The sweetener?”

  “Just no white sugar. I understand there’s a way of making cheesecake with fat-free yogurt. Talk to Yvette, she’ll explain how.” And then he hung up.

  If anyone at the Styx felt angry or overwhelmed by their requests, Alfonzo told us to use our feelings in the course of our therapy—“Ride the feeling on the mattress,” he’d say, “or the bat. Work the feeling in private. Take it back historically to the first time you felt this type of anger. Who bossed you around as a child? Milk the feeling for all it’s worth. This is an opportunity for growth.”

  Yvette warned us never to work the issue of our “house chores” in front of patients who weren’t “part of the family,” such as during a group session with mixed family and non-family members. Nor were we ever allowed to discuss them with Alfonzo, since he didn’t like to get involved in house logistics.

  During a session one morning before my writing class at school, I mentioned to Alfonzo that it didn’t seem fair that he expected us to cook his meals.