The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  When I looked up from my story I saw that Alice’s eyes were moist with tears.

  “How could she have loved me like that, and yet I felt so violated by her? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You mother was a hurt little girl, she was hurt in the concentration camp and God knows where else, and sometimes that hurt spilled out and onto you. It shouldn’t have happened, I’m sure she never stopped loving you when it did happen, she probably didn’t even know it was happening, but it happened.”

  Afterward, Alfonzo came into the room and saw us there, in bliss. I told him that I’d just felt real mommy love for the first time in my life, and that it felt like what I’d imagined great sex would feel like when the energy was open and loving and honest and safe.

  “The old introject of your mother is vanishing,” he said. “The crazy period is over. I’m sure you’ll continue working your primals, but the madness and chaos are spent.”

  Instinctively, I knew not to divulge my continued interest in men. I was “noticing women,” I said. To which Alfonzo reaffirmed that all my hard work and perseverance were truly garnering a reward.

  15

  ALFONZO MUST HAVE TOLD Claude he wanted the Styx closer to the office, “more accessible,” because Claude arrived home one day and told us we were moving again.

  And so in the summer of 1992 we packed up our meager belongings, mostly used and reclaimed furnishing, and moved from our barn in the ’burbs to a 1930s Victorian cottage on a shady, oak-lined street near the downtown core, and Alfonzo’s office and home. The house, as I discovered while bicycling to the office early the day after we moved in, was also around the corner from a large city park where, in the midst of a cluster of trees, men were known to cruise for sex.

  Yvette called late one night the same week. Alfonzo had gone into a primal, she told Claude. He wanted all of us, “his soul family,” in the office workroom. “Pronto.”

  Everyone at the Styx knew that Alfonzo had been continuing with his primals, as well as his K-enhanced nurturing sessions with Alice. We knew, but did not discuss it.

  “He’s nearing the big one,” Yvette had told us all, privately, several times, then left it at that.

  Anxious at the opportunity to witness our master working his primal pain, we jumped in Claude’s car and rushed to the office.

  We sat in a circle on the floor of the workroom, as we did for all our groups, and waited in stony silence for close to an hour. Then the door to Alfonzo’s private office creaked opened. Yvette entered and, without a word, sat next to us on the floor. Seconds later Alfonzo stumbled in: groggy, disoriented, pupils dilated. He dropped to his knees on the mattress at one end of our circle.

  “I wanted my family around me tonight,” he said with a slur, looking at each of us through watery eyes. “The only family I know…my brothers and sisters: I have no one else…no one…”

  He raised his arms to his side, like a cross, and turned his palms, and face, up toward the ceiling. “The world has become a maze of insanity since the last time I was alive. And my book, what humanity named the Bible…it has been misinterpreted by all. Distorted by everyone to serve their own agendas.”

  I glanced quickly at the others. Everyone’s eyes were fixed reverently on our leader.

  “The end of the world is upon us. This is the world’s last chance…the world’s last chance to hear my message. Don’t they know who I am? They crucified me the last time I was here. I am…I am…the Christ.”

  His arms dropped to his sides, his chin fell forward. Only then did I notice he’d been crying. Or else maybe tearing from a shot of K. Yvette stood, helped him to his feet, then back into his private office and behind closed doors. Transfixed by what we’d witnessed, as if we had slipped through time’s corridor and glimpsed a sacred secret, no one moved. Were we to leave? Was there more? Should we wait?

  Minutes later, the door creaked back open and Yvette reappeared. I heard Alfonzo mumbling, softly, in French. “You need to go home now,” she told us. “He needs his rest.”

  One by one, we filed out of the office and back into the car. All the way home: no one spoke of what we had seen. Back at the Styx, preparing for bed and in the morning: not one word passed between us. It wasn’t until that night that I spoke with Clay in our dining room, a dark wooded chamber with a beamed ceiling and built-in leaded cabinets.

  “I’m almost scared to talk about what happened,” I said, “to say it aloud.”

  “Go ahead,” Clay said.

  “Alfonzo…he’s…Christ. Isn’t he?”

  I heard my own words, which frightened me, but I believed them absolutely. After two years in the Styx, sequestered from all former friends and family, the outside world in general, without television or radio, newspapers, books, medicated to the hills with major psychotropics and regressed to a near-childlike state of submission, there were caves in my mind inside which everything, whether true or false, seemed real.

  Clay took a deep breath.

  “We’ve been chosen, Peter. You think it’s a coincidence we’re all in this house together? It’s no coincidence. We’ve been chosen to do the work of God. We’re his followers. We’re his Apostles.”

  The truth of what we’d spoken silenced me. Alfonzo was Christ, or he was a reincarnation of Christ, or a Christlike figure. He was to be followed, and obeyed. And we, his Apostles, “the chosen ones,” had been graced by his presence. That Yvette had been promiscuous could have also only meant one thing: She was Mary Magdalene.

  The following day I was back in the office with Alfonzo for a nurturing session, which began like all the rest: I rolled up my sleeve. Alfonzo injected me with K. He sat in the corner and waited for me as I lay on my back and breathed the drug into my system, and only then did I crawl over to him, across the room as if through a swamp, and nestle my body in his lap. After a spell, I managed to pry open the steel doors of my eyes, peer up at his wild brows, and his dark, muddy eyes, staring down at me.

  “Papa…you’re Christ. You’re Christ…aren’t you, Papa?”

  He rubbed my head, affectionately, and smiled.

  Before the doors of my eyes slammed shut again and everything went black, as they did each and every time Alfonzo injected me with K, I recalled thinking that his silence meant that I was right.

  |||||||||||

  Alfonzo’s dream of purchasing a retirement home, where we could all live communally, grow our own vegetables and continue our therapeutic process undisturbed, came true in 1992 when he found an enormous, two-story log house on a remote wooded property. The house required substantial renovations prior to Alfonzo’s and Yvette’s move from the city, so every weekend Styx members piled into Claude’s Plymouth, traveled to the house, pitched tents on the lawn, then hammered, sanded, and painted for days.

  “You can break now for a bowl of soup,” Yvette would call out, middays, “but then it’s back to work!”

  Alfonzo knew all about my past writing, so he asked me to help him write his life story. He imagined the book, which everyone at the Styx soon referred to as “the Bible,” would serve as a manual for psychotherapists, while documenting his life’s journey with primal therapy and the evolution of his present-day reparenting sessions with surrogate mothers.

  “Of course I’ll pay you for your time,” he told me after one of my medicated nurturing sessions, “for any work you do on my behalf.”

  I had barely recovered from the dissociative effects of the ketamine when he said the words. The prospect of such an intellectually demanding undertaking as to work with him on a book intimidated me, but Alfonzo was in charge.

  Yvette handed over the keys to Hampstead, where I began reading, or squinting through blurred vision in a strained attempt to read, hundreds of ex-patient files, all stored in his garage. My goal, he’d explained, was to locate patient reports that dealt with surrogacy and the use of ketamine, and then bring them back to him for his own perusal.

  I was in his garage, scanning one of his pe
rsonal journals written in the 1960s while he was under Janov’s care in Los Angeles, when a small, black-and-white, passport-type photo fell out and landed in my lap. It was of Alfonzo as a young man, before he’d grown his goatee. There was something eerily familiar about the photo, a darkness in his eyes that I recognized. Then it hit me: I looked remarkably like him when he was my age. The photograph could have been of me.

  For weeks, in between only his most pressing patient sessions at the office, Alfonzo barricaded himself inside his Westfalia Camper, parked facing out to sea, and then handed me a draft of his “private recollections” and asked that I streamline the facts of his life into a cogent narrative. He was, as he’d told me, “recovering memories and remembering the sequence of events” of his life, but when I read his drafts, his thoughts were confused, confusing, and nonsequential. They demanded the acuity of a highly cogent, medication-free mind to sort out and reconfigure, and I simply couldn’t understand what he had given me. And, secretly, I did not understand how Alfonzo could not have known that I didn’t have the ability to comprehend what he had given me.

  One day he passed me a handwritten note with his draft. God bless you, brother, for helping me to retrace my steps, it read. I know He is pulling hard to see this work done. So be it. There are many ways to score sanity points and sometimes it involves the apparent relinquishment of our own progress to help others.

  I could only take his note to mean that helping him with his book, at the expense of my own therapy, would make me “saner,” in effect, “correct” my “loveless mind.” Or at least that’s how he’d always interpreted A Course in Miracles.

  We started meeting at Hampstead. For hours, I listened and tried to follow as he explained what he referred to as “the three levels of error” to the human mind: the biographical and the cultural errors, correctable only through psychotherapy; and the transcendental error, correctable only through the love of God. Like a father to a son, he told me more about his childhood, living under the dictatorship of Franco, his marriage and his son, his early years with primal, his years of self-medication, and his “dark night of the soul.”

  “In all of recorded history,” he explained during one of our meetings, “only the mystics have had the same type of experience as what I went through. Like St. John of the Cross. Only his dark night was self-induced as a means of reaching spiritual enlightenment, whereas mine was a reaction to ongoing primal regressions. It’s hard to return to the world of man and play doctor after you’ve felt the love of God.”

  He stopped talking, like he’d forgotten his thought mid-sentence, lowered himself to the floor, crab-like, and looked beneath the round coffee table.

  “Where’s Fred?”

  “What?”

  “The cat,” he said, jolting upright. “Where’s Fred? He was just here. Yvette!” he called out, “Où est Fred?”

  “Il est avec moi,” she answered from the kitchen. “Don’t worry.”

  Alfonzo sighed in relief.

  “Where was I?”

  “You felt the love of God.”

  “Right. For a person, any person, to feel lovable, totally and absolutely lovable, they have to have their lovability mirrored back with perfection. Only God knows how to do that. Only God is perfect. Only God can mirror back your intrinsic lovability. Nothing but the love of God can repair the transcendental error, the first, perhaps only real error of the human mind: the illusion of separation. Everything else pales in comparison. And you either make that connection yourself, like I did, or you work with someone else who’s made it for you.”

  He looked to make sure I was listening.

  “I’m your ladder to the love of God, Peter.”

  His final words made me uneasy. I turned away.

  “You’d be dead today if it hadn’t been for me. Now it’s your time to help me. I need you. Just like you need me. This family is not going to survive unless we all pitch in and help each other. This is your time to repay me. And while we’re on the topic…I’ve been thinking about our little arrangement.”

  “Our arrangement?”

  “When I said I’d pay you for helping me write my book. I’ve decided against it.”

  “Oh.”

  “It would not be right. You’re learning from me, gaining experience as a writer, listening to me share my life. Why should I pay you for that?”

  |||||||||||

  A short time later, Alfonzo announced to all his patients that he had decided to close the three Styx houses.

  Members of my house were then called to Hampstead for a private house meeting. Alfonzo confided that after the recent complaint from Yuen’s husband, as well as Kirsten’s earlier threatening letter, he was concerned the College of Physicians and Surgeons might become aware of one of his twenty-plus patients living “in residence,” or the many more that continued rotating through the houses as intensives. He didn’t want to draw undue attention to his therapy. While patients from Styx 2 and 3 would disband and go their separate ways, he told the five of us that we would continue living together because we were “family.” Longer-term patients, who had known and visited our Styx for years, saw us as “spiritually advanced souls,” or “lifers,” so they would also continue to visit for dinners and evening meditation at a cost of seven dollars, or weekend retreats at a cost of fifty dollars.

  “However,” he said, “I want to be very clear about this. Your living together does not mean that I am involved in this house. I am not involved in your house. It is your choice to live in the Styx. Got it?”

  Though Alfonzo considered himself no longer involved in the Styx, our involvement in Alfonzo’s personal and professional life increased to that of a full-time job without the pay. In addition to the ongoing renovations to Alfonzo’s new house, Claude and Clay helped run group sessions in the city, especially during the doctor’s increased absences. While we all took turns cooking his meals, labeling all the ingredients on each Tupperware container, I was the only one to bake the fat-free cheesecakes, varying the ingredients, as directed by Alfonzo.

  “Try freshly squeezed lemon juice instead of lemon extract,” he reported back to me on the phone one night after tasting my latest cake. “And cut back on the dates, the crust is too rich. By the way, the stroganoff you made was delicious, but the meat was tough. You’d better watch that next time.”

  Since the Styx “family car” belonged to Claude, he was responsible for delivering food to Alfonzo. The rest of us took turns raking his lawn during the spring and shoveling the snow during the winter, taking out the garbage, washing dishes, and cleaning the office and bathrooms. Nightly, I edited, or tried to edit, drafts of Alfonzo’s book. And Fred, his Siamese Persian cat, became our full-time responsibility while he and Yvette vacationed, every six months, at Club Med.

  |||||||||||

  “Where are we going?” I asked the others as we loaded into Claude’s car.

  “We’re going to look at a dog,” Clay said.

  The four of us—Clay, Claude, Sebastian, and I—drove for over an hour until we reached an old, shabby country farm on one side of a dirt road. We weren’t just going to see a dog, I’d been told in the car. We were going to steal a dog, or at least scout out the dog’s property and mastermind a plan to steal it. Alfonzo had discovered the half-wolf animal “by accident” and decided he wanted it as his own. The dog’s owners were neglecting it, he’d told Claude. We’d be doing the animal a favor by bringing it back to Alfonzo in the city.

  Even from across the gravel road I could see that the animal was emaciated, its mane dull and patchy. But that didn’t stop it from jumping up against the barbed-wire fence, barking and snapping its fanged teeth as we stood at a distance.

  “We’ll have to come up with a plan,” Claude said as we climbed back in the car and returned to the city. Part of that plan meant not involving me in the final capture—I was too drugged, too confused by details, of no great help. But later the next day Sebastian did show me their black ski mask
s, wire cutters, and a large steak to be soaked overnight in a sedative provided by Alfonzo.

  The next time I saw the dog, while cleaning Hampstead two weeks later, he was caged inside a new, enormous, fenced-in kennel that Alfonzo had built in his spacious backyard. Alfonzo also wasted no time injecting the animal with ketamine and administering a nurturing session to expedite their bonding process. I could easily imagine the session, because at one time or another we had all been like that animal—drugged and lying in the arms of Alfonzo, its new owner.

  |||||||||||

  At some point Alfonzo told me that I needed a “passport.” Maybe we were in his office, after a primal; maybe we were at Hampstead, editing his book. I know we had the conversation, because I asked him what he meant by a “passport.”

  “Some way of earning a living in the outside world,” he said. “You don’t want to live off of Social Assistance forever, do you?”

  And then he said something about my need to find steady employment, move back out into the world, earn a proper wage, and think about my future, all of which left me reeling. Primal had plunged me backward into childhood, trauma. I was much too “young” to work, too medicated even to think.

  Through my anesthetized stupor, however, I did manage to find my first job since my collapse, nearly eleven months before. Each mid-afternoon I bussed to my job as a cook in a busy, uptown restaurant, armored with pills, and there was Candy—a tall, slinky, unsmiling waitress with a black bob, like a crusty Kit Kat girl from Cabaret. While Candy waited tables, glancing back at me through a painted-on face that looked like it had covered up her own, I worked the line in the pit with the blood from the beef on my whites and a mist on my mind that could no longer think, that could no longer reason, could no longer follow the breadcrumbs of conversations and orders down the paths of their meanings. Some nights all I could do was hide inside the bathroom at the back of the kitchen, door latched, crying, staring in the mirror, emotionally still back on the mattress, talking baby talk.