The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  Only weeks after I started, the head chef took me aside and said calmly: “This isn’t going to work, Peter.”

  He fired me. My relief was so instantaneous that, without stopping to think or consider, I told him, blurted out of context, all about the meds, the antidepressants and antipsychotics, the therapy and the primals, the Styx, and the doctor. He said nothing, stared at me, mouth agape.

  “Well…perhaps it is best you not be working right now. At least not here.”

  Luckily, the home-care agency that hired me next said that all of my elderly clients suffered from some sort of dementia, which also meant, to my relief, that none of them noticed my own short-term memory loss brought on by the medications. Mostly I cooked meals and cleaned homes, bathed my male clients, and reminded all of them to take their medications as I took my own, furtively, and then sat with them, often well past my shift, as they talked about their lives and their children, many of whom had abandoned them in their old age. It was January 1993, when, as I watered plants during one of my shifts, Bill Clinton, the forty-second president of the United States, delivered his inaugural speech on a TV in the background:

  Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues.

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  The pain, radiating from the middle of my lower back down my left leg and into my big toe, had started months before. I’d even seen a chiropractor several times, who’d “snapped” me back in place and sent me on my way. But as I was moving a male client in and out of his bathtub one day in late summer 1993, the streaking pain intensified, as if I’d been knocked from behind with a sledgehammer. I made my way back to the Styx, and by the next morning, I could not stand. I could barely breathe.

  The final diagnoses, once I’d been driven to a doctor and completed a battery of tests, was a ruptured disc at L-5—a “slipped disc,” as it was more commonly called. As with my breakdown at the Styx, I never returned to my homecare clients. All therapy, even visits to the office, came to an abrupt halt. Clay brought me all my prescriptions. My new physician placed me back on medical disability, the same as what Alfonzo had placed me on after my breakdown, totaling, once again, barely enough to cover rent and food. I could not stand and crawled from room to room; ate all my meals from the floor; only stood, half bent like a sideways “U,” when I had to move to my bed, get dressed, use the bathroom. For the most part, I lay on the floor in the living room of the Styx, my feet elevated on a bolster. I slept. The pinched nerve, as well as the sciatica that moved in waves of excruciating pain from leg to leg, required yet more medication, anti-inflammatories, and painkillers, this time prescribed by my physician.

  After six months of convalescence, slowly, I began rehabilitation, mostly swimming at the local pool. I walked with a cane, not yet even able to stand upright. Walking, however, was good. This time I walked by myself, around the block and home, clutching my cane, hunched like an old man. Sometimes I thought about my friend Pearl, because we’d loved the poet Anne Sexton, and I could still remember the line from one of her poems: I am standing upright but my shadow is crooked.

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  In early 1994, we received news that Ludo, the architect whose house we’d stayed in during a weekend marathon two-and-a-half years earlier, was dead. According to Clay, Ludo had bought a gun, waited until his wife and two small children, a boy and a girl, were out of the house, and shot himself in the head. We were all in shock.

  I thought of how Ludo had welcomed us into his home, high above the city. The thought that he was now dead, dead because he had chosen to not live, left me with a sullen emptiness.

  The next day I waited in Alfonzo’s private office as he filled my prescription. Though I’d not yet returned to active therapy, I had returned to see him for periodic “check-in” sessions at the office, and, of course, to pick up my prescriptions.

  “I heard about Ludo,” I said.

  Alfonzo said nothing, but continued to write.

  “Do you feel sad about his death?” I asked.

  Alfonzo turned to me. “Why would I feel sad?”

  “Well…he’s dead.”

  “So?”

  “He killed himself.”

  He stared at me.

  “You don’t feel responsible?” I asked.

  “Why would I feel responsible?”

  “Well…for his therapy. He was obviously in despair. That had to have at least contributed to his death.”

  “Ludo killed himself, and that was his decision.”

  He turned back to his desk and continued writing my prescription. “In fact,” he said, “I think that what he did took courage.”

  Courage? Alfonzo’s aloofness, his lack of caring, frightened me. For years I’d fought to stay alive, to not succumb to my own despair. How could ending one’s life take courage? Choosing to live seemed to me far more courageous, if for no other reason than to risk the certainty of pain for the possibility of love.

  “I’m placing you on a therapeutic holiday.”

  “A—what?”

  “You’ll still live in the Styx and receive medicated nurturing sessions in the office, but as of today, I’m suspending your primals indefinitely.”

  “But…why?”

  “I told you this before. You need to move back out into the world, focus on your future, figure out what you want to do with your life. You need to regain your strength. Then we’ll start you on ‘round two.’ You’re not going anywhere, Peter. You’ll be doing this therapy for the rest of your life, in one way or another. You need to pace yourself.”

  There was no discussion: a decision had been made.

  Consequently, as my medication dosages were lowered, my thoughts became more lucid and independent. A veil was being lifted from my brain. One day in spring 1994 I was out alone on the street when I noticed a man walking toward me. From twenty feet away our eyes locked. His were blue and bright, contrasting against my own, which I was sure looked dull and drugged. His lips were full and moist. I noticed his one-day’s stubble; tufts of chest hair reaching out near the top of his unbuttoned Polo shirt. When he brushed past me, the touch of his shirtsleeve and the musky odor of his cologne sent currents of excitement through the grave of my body and lingered like a ripple of sensuality long after he had disappeared around the corner.

  That night I caught the reflection of my naked body in my bedroom mirror. I had always avoided looking at myself this way, but that night I did not. I stood and stared at a sad reflection of my former self—at my body, pale and bloated from years of overmedication, and into my twenty-eight-year-old eyes: dark, sunken, unhappy. There was no heterosexual in me waiting to emerge; there was not even a homosexual from which I could escape. There was just me, my body: now more like a shell with its innards scooped out.

  When I asked a stranger, several days later on the street, for a cigarette, I knew I’d turned a corner. As the fog in my mind cleared, desires in my body intensified. I spent longer hours away from the Styx: in bookstores, searching out gay literature; in coffee shops, writing in my journal, documenting specific conversations I’d had with Alfonzo, Alice, and various members of the therapy and at the Styx.

  By late 1994, nearly five years had passed since the day Alfonzo compared my homosexuality to a chocolate addiction and said that the sex must be given up if I was to get anywhere in his therapy. While walking home one night from Alfonzo’s office, where I’d been working on his book, I didn’t go home and instead chose a path leading deep within the wooded city park and back into the world I’d denied.

  Out of the shadows the figure of a man appeared.

  “My name’s Bill,” he said, extending his hand.

  “John,” I said, extending mine.

  And then the two of us, as if on cue, stepped off the path and into a clump of trees. Without another word, we started kissing. He was carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag
, and the taste of his breath, cigarettes and liquor, mixed with the smell of his body, dried sweat and urine, reminded me of all the men I’d kissed in public toilets and in cars throughout my youth.

  There I was, again, as if I’d never left. Nothing had changed. With just one kiss, the passion I’d denied out of guilt or confessed out of shame had been rekindled. Stop, I have to stop. But then we were feeling each other’s hardness, and I was down on my knees, pulling him out of his pants, taking him in my mouth. He moaned. I closed my eyes.

  “Let me feel you,” he whispered.

  I stood and we stroked each other, faster, as our breathing quickened. When the orgasm came, it was deep and dizzying, a whirlwind of desire, like the high from a drug I’d shot deep in my veins.

  Then it was over like a downward spiral, and all I wanted was for it to be as if it had never actually been: to go back to before, before I’d met him, succumbed to my desires, turned right instead of left, turn around and never look back. He tried to kiss me, but I told him it was late and that I needed to go. He turned around, and in an instant the nighttime swallowed him whole. I tried to follow, but became disoriented, lost inside the forest with tree after tree like the bars of a cell out of which I could not find freedom.

  Twenty minutes later, I emerged, panic-stricken, and ran home, through the streets like a child who’d scraped his knee and wanted only to be comforted. Yuen was alone in the living room when I arrived. I told her what had happened, confessing the sex as if I were still that child.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know how you’ve lasted this long. I couldn’t go five years without sex, without that kind of intimacy.”

  “I guess you have to tell everyone.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  The next morning, at a secret house meeting that I was not permitted to attend, she did tell everyone. Unanimously, they decided that my acting out should result in immediate discharge from the Styx. Yvette was consulted, but she suggested I not be thrown out of the house since I was also organizing her and Alfonzo’s move. I would be given a “second chance.” More importantly, Alfonzo would not be told of my “lapse.”

  During one of our many visits to Alfonzo’s new property in preparation for his relocation, Alfonzo and I left the others to their renovations inside the house while we went for a walk with his dog, the same dog we’d stolen for him, which he’d since named Loba. Like Joshua to his Moses, I followed closely behind, through his property’s trails and up the side of a mountain. He started talking about his daily meditations, of how he’d made direct contact with God.

  “He has special plans for you,” he said, leaning heavily on his tree-branch-turned-hiking staff that he’d been whittling down for months. “God has instructed me to watch over you. Only with my loving guidance will you be shown the way. We all have crosses to bear. Some are heavier than others. Yours is particularly heavy, one that you’ll have to bear for the rest of your life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know too much, Peter: about yourself, your homosexuality, where it came from. For you to act on your homosexuality now would be like a drug addict consciously shooting up. Your only hope is to remain celibate. Only then can you go back out into the world—once you’re strong enough to resist temptation, to not act on your drug of choice.”

  He stopped along the side of the path and turned to look at me.

  “You think anyone else out there will understand you the way I do? I’m your last chance. Without my help you’d probably just get AIDS and die.”

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  The ten-ton moving truck arrived bright and early one Saturday morning to cart Alfonzo’s possessions to his and Yvette’s new home—a 5,000-square-foot, fully renovated retirement home. Everyone from the Styx—Clay, Yuen, Sebastian, and I—arrived sometime later with Claude in his Sapporo.

  All day we unpacked: rearranged sofas, organized bookshelves, hung clothes in bedroom closets, filled kitchen cupboards with food and supplies. Early before dusk, after vacuuming the hardwood floors, dusting the entire house, and cleaning the glass patio doors, Alfonzo gathered us all in his newly constructed, sound-insulated basement workroom for what I thought was a house meeting. The oblong room was twice the size of his downtown office workroom, windowless, with cream, pile carpet; a king-size, sheeted foam mattress in the middle for primals; and a brand-new punching bag and aluminum baseball bat at one end of the room to use as a “batting station.”

  For several minutes we discussed the distribution of house chores and the operation of his office: who would stay overnight at his new home and when; how his downtown office would remain functional while he lived and practiced part-time in his retirement home. Then Alfonzo knelt in the middle of the mattress and started talking about the heaviness of his cross, that he could not bear its full weight when others did not carry the weight of their own.

  He turned to look at me. “Do you have something you’d like to tell us?” he asked.

  Everyone turned to me, waiting, as if they’d all expected his question.

  “No…” I said.

  Alfonzo breathed in deeply through his nose, closed his eyes, and craned his neck back, like a wolf, about to howl at the moon. “I know what you’ve done,” he said, exhaling through his mouth with a grunt, as if already primaling on his back on the mattress. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” He opened his eyes. They were larger than before, pupils dilated. “I have ears and eyes that watch you at the Styx, I know everything you do. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.

  “Don’t lie to me, goddammit! You got fucked up the ass! Do you deny it?”

  “Well…technically, I didn’t get fucked.”

  No one laughed. No one moved, or blinked. Alfonzo’s eyes squeezed shut, the skin around them, crinkling, as he dropped on all fours. When I heard the growling, I looked toward the door because I thought a rabid dog had entered the room. The dog was Alfonzo. With his claws, he ripped the sheet off the mattress and sunk his teeth into the foam, biting and ripping it apart as if it were a slab of flesh. Then he spat it out. Over and over, he bit into the mattress and spat its pieces about the room. I glanced at the lineup of bodies leaning back against the wall. No one appeared surprised or the least bit bewildered.

  Alfonzo’s hands clawed at the floor, anchoring him—a wolf in full rage. His spine arched, and he raised himself back up to a kneeling position. His belly grew large as he filled his lungs with air, and then he let it out, all as one extended roar. His stomach, after he’d collapsed again, rose and fell with every pant.

  “Do you think for a second that this is easy for any of us?” he said, still down on the floor. He crawled to his knees and faced me. “Look at everyone. Do you know how hard we’re all working to keep this family alive? When one family member acts out, that throws the entire family off balance. If I were living with you I would have thrown you out of the Styx. Out. I would have bought you a one-way ticket back to your hometown and told you to go live with your parents for a year. Maybe that would remind you how bad it was before you met me, before you moved into the house. Maybe you need to be reminded. Maybe you need to get fucked a few hundred more times in that parkade before you understand what you’ve just thrown away. Do you have anything to say?”

  He waited for my answer. Everyone waited for my answer. I nodded no.

  Slowly, he raised himself to a standing position, and headed for the door, muttering something to Yvette in French and signaling with a wave in my direction.

  Moments later, I heard his upstairs bedroom door slam shut. The rest of us filed silently from the workroom as Yvette walked over to me.

  “You need to leave our house right now and return to the Styx tonight. I don’t think the doctor wants you in his home.”

  I turned to gather my things.

  “Tonight was for your own good,” she said. “You deserved this.”

&n
bsp; 16

  FOR MONTHS AFTER THE confrontation, Alfonzo refused to see me. He passed my prescriptions through someone at the Styx, or Yvette, who met me at the office every few weeks for a “check-in” session. During one, as we sat in the dimmed workroom, she asked me to update her on my “feelings around men.”

  “What’s the difference between how you feel now as opposed to when you started therapy? Is there change?”

  “Change?”

  “Are you doing anything destructive to yourself?”

  Acts of “self-destruction,” like piercing my skin while masturbating, had always been conflated with my “homosexuality.” Questions about one were like a barometer reading into the other.

  “I did do something, this week.” I hadn’t planned to tell her, or anyone. But now it was too late.

  “What?”

  “I pierced one of my nipples with a needle. As I masturbated.”

  “So…you stayed in your dirty diapers. Feel good?” She shook her head. Her eyes narrowed. “Jesus Christ, Peter, I have never met anyone as irresponsible. You still don’t take responsibility for your choices.”

  “Choices?”

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  “Leave?”

  “The Styx. Therapy. Only choose. Stay or leave, but make a choice.”

  “You’re saying I should leave?”

  “Go if you want to go. You’re discharged, go, live on your own, live your own life, just take responsibility for your choice.”

  The idea that I could “leave,” pack my bags and return to the “outside world,” had never been something I considered as an option. Leave and return to—what? To whom? A life that had almost killed me before the therapy? Besides, I had seen what happened when Yuen wanted to leave.