Not until the door was shut and we were seated across from each other did Mackenzie turn on the mini-cassette recorder. When he did, I heard what sounded like a panting animal. Seconds later a voice, my own, pierced through us both.
“PETERRRR, I’MMMM GOING TO KILLLL YOOOUUU…”
I glanced back at Mackenzie’s door, half expecting his secretary to come rushing in to see who or what was screaming. Mackenzie pushed the small recorder an inch closer in my direction, as if to distance himself from the voice, like an exorcism in full swing. I heard a thumping in the background and knew that I’d moved to the batting station. The pounding added a heartbeat to the session, a rhythmical stabbing that echoed my screams.
“I don’t feel safe in this house,” my voice continued, breathless. “I don’t feel safe with you…”
“Be specific, Peter,” I heard Yvette interject. “Why are you so scared? Answer in your father’s voice again. Tell Peter what you’re going to do to him.”
I took her advice and replied as my father.
“You don’t feel safe around me? I’m not going to do anything to you, Peter, I’m not going to do anything to you—except maybe rip your fucking throat out!” The sound of me banging the punching bag with the baseball bat continued again over my screams. “FUCKING PETER, O-PEN THE DOOOORRRR. I’M YOUR FATHER, I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT TO YOUR BODY BECAUSE YOUR BODY BELONGS TO ME! AS LONG AS YOU LIVE IN MY HOUSE YOUR BODY BELONGS TO ME, YOUR BODY IS MINE, SO GIVE ME MY BODY! GIVE IT TO ME!”
“Switch back!” Yvette called out. “Tell him how you feel!”
“This isn’t your body,” I replied, the cadence to my voice having shifted back to “me” again. “This is my body. It’s on me, isn’t it? How can it be your body when it’s on me? If this was your body it would be on you, but it’s on me…”
Mackenzie hit the “off” button mid-voice, popped the tape out of its holder, and replaced it with another.
On this one my voice was fiendish and raspy, howling profanities as if through a throat full of vomit, sounded more like a demon than a man. I winced when I heard me say that I wanted to murder my mother for making me stick my hand up her “cunt.” I wanted Mackenzie to turn the tape off. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I said or felt “back then.”
“You think I can’t kill you? You think I can’t STAB STAB STAB this knife into your bloody rotten corpse when you’re not looking? When you’re asleep at night?”
Never before had Mackenzie expressed emotion in front of me, but when he finally turned the tape off and leaned back in his chair, he appeared shaken. He asked me to explain my sessions, the process of primal. We’d talked about that many times before, beginning when I first met him in 1999, but I explained it all again.
“Tell me something,” he asked. “After you finished a session like this…would Alfonzo calm you down…make some effort to bring you back to reality? What happened once you finished screaming?”
I explained, as I had many times before, that the intensity of these sessions was the norm in primal, not the exception. Typically, once a patient, any patient, finished their turn, they’d just sit up on the mattress in the middle of the room, take a moment to wipe the sweat from their face or to dry their tears. Then they’d crawl back to their spot around the circle, and we’d wait until the next person voluntarily ripped open their guts and bled like a wounded animal. We were like a crowd gathered ’round a car wreck: intermittently fascinated, yet terrified.
“But what did Alfonzo say to you after you finished your turn?”
“Not much. Sometimes he’d go off on long, philosophical rants about how his therapy was the best therapy in the world. For the most part he never said a word.”
That Alfonzo never reframed my “memories,” brought me back to the here-and-now after regressing on the mat, was clearly upsetting to Mackenzie.
“I want you to listen to something,” he said, replacing the previous tape with yet another. On this one my breathing was labored, as if I’d just ran a marathon. I could only imagine that I’d just finished a session at the batting station.
“There is no such thing as homosexuality,” my voice, rhythmic and assured as a metronome, declared. Mackenzie started fidgeting with his pack of cigarettes. “Homosexuals, what society calls homosexuals, they’re all just sacrificial children. Only Dr. Alfonzo understands this. Only Dr. Alfonzo can help me reclaim my true identity— my innate heterosexuality. Without Dr. Alfonzo’s help, I’m as good as dead. My life is over. I might as well stop living because that’s what it would feel like to have sex again with another man. The thought of it makes me sick to my stomach. Like I want to puke, like I want to shit every last man who ever fucked me out of—”
Mackenzie’s hand jerked up, almost involuntarily, and slammed the tape machine off. He took a deep breath, like he was readying himself to blow up a balloon, and released it in one long, nervous giggle. “I listened to your tapes last night,” he said.
“What did you think?”
“I think defense is going to want to know why you said what you said, that’s what I think. Frankly, I wondered the same thing.”
Mackenzie waited for my response. I didn’t know where to start.
“Understanding those sessions has taken me a long time—why I said what I said.”
“And…?”
Explaining the process of primal, like directions on a road map, to someone was one thing; trying to explain any man’s heart of darkness was another matter entirely.
“At the time of these sessions, I was taking more than five different psychiatric medications…lying on a mattress in the middle of a dark room, regressed…convinced that sexual abuse had created my homosexuality…”
“What about your mother? You said she made you stick your hand up her—”
“I don’t remember that ever happening.”
“But you said it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I said lots of things that weren’t true. Or that were true but not necessarily in the way I said them.”
Mackenzie looked unconvinced.
“People say lots of things when they’re regressed. It doesn’t mean they’re factually true. The stories I could tell you about some of the things I’ve heard people say while in primal: parents wanting to kill their children, children wanting to kill their parents. Unfortunately, all the things I said about gays, that they were all just hurt children, they were taken at face value. Probably because it validated Alfonzo’s beliefs. My self-hatred fed off his prejudice. We fed off each other. Besides, everyone in therapy is a hurt child. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be in therapy.”
“Do you still believe what you said about sex? About hating gay sex?”
“For a long time, in my life…sex with men reminded me of the man who abused me as a child. I couldn’t separate the pleasure from the pain.”
“But that’s not what you said.”
“There was this woman in one of my groups, she had been sexually abused as a child. The night before a primal, she’d have sex with two or three guys, then come to the office and lie on the mattress, and the hatred toward those men that came out of her—it was palpable. Alfonzo never told her that the sexual abuse had caused her attraction for men.”
“What about when you said you wanted to be straight?”
“Who in their right mind in this culture wouldn’t want to be straight? Or at least grow up thinking they should be straight? But Alfonzo was supposed to know better. He was supposed to help me accept myself. He was supposed to lead me out of my self-hatred, not reinforce it. That was his job.”
Mackenzie took another steady, deep breath. “Alfonzo is a wacko,” he said on his exhale, shaking his head. “I’m not trying to make light of the situation. But I find this whole case so extremely…distressing.”
“So do I,” I echoed. “So do I…”
|||||||||||
After our meeting, I stopped at Doll & Penny’s café
near my apartment to read Dr. Bennington and Dr. Reimer’s psychiatric evaluations, both of which Mackenzie had handed me on my way out of his office. The café had been Tommy’s and my favorite late-night “hot spot” in the early- to mid-1980s. Now near closure, the restaurant was rundown and nearly empty. I took a seat at the back, behind a life-sized mannequin of Liza Minnelli from Cabaret and began to read.
In both their reports, Bennington and Reimer agreed about my mental faculties: I was, in their words, “clear-minded, logical, and goal-directed,” according to Reiner, and “generally candid and open in [my] demeanor,” according to Bennington.
Retrospectively diagnosing me was another matter entirely. Reimer stated that he could see no sufficient current or historical evidence to support a diagnosis of any major mental illness, such as a personality disorder, and attributed my anxiety, unhappiness, and depressive symptoms to the difficulty I’d experienced adjusting to my sexual orientation, as well as to the unhealthy interactions I’d had with my family throughout my coming-out process.
As might be expected, Bennington qualified me as a “wounded human being”—a redundancy in qualifiers, it seemed to me—while quoting extensively from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). All of my panic, despair, and chronic feelings of emptiness were pathological in nature, he wrote, and any anger toward both the therapy and the therapist—my “fall from grace”—was clearly symptomatic of my borderline personality disorder in which, as he wrote, “disillusionment with caregivers could be a feature.” That I had also expressed “intense anger” and “negative views” about both my parents—that I had experienced a great deal of distress at their lack of acceptance of my homosexuality—seemed to further support Bennington’s diagnosis of a personality disorder.
Alfonzo had never treated my homosexuality, Bennington continued, but my “unwanted homosexual urges,” all of which, he wrote, was consistent within “conventional” psychiatry’s then-position that homosexuality was still considered “a problem to be addressed when it caused distress to an individual.”
His inverted logic took me days to decipher.
In sum, it was true that the DSM-IV, as well as the World Health Organizations’ own diagnostic manual, the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10), no longer viewed homosexuality as a “mental illness”; however, in the DSM, a “persistent and marked distress about sexual orientation” was now cause for treatment; and in the ICD, the anxiety and depression that individuals might suffer as a result of uncertainty about their sexual orientation, or even the wish and efforts to try to change their sexual orientation, was reason for psychiatric intervention.
In other words, as long as “the homosexual,” who the psychiatric community had for decades said was “perverted,” “mentally ill,” and “pathological,” and whose cure could come only from reclaiming his innate heterosexuality, was not disturbed by and/or did not wish to change his homosexuality, he was no longer considered to have a mental illness, although treating him for a mental illness that comprised his uncertainty about, or his wish and efforts to try to change, his sexual orientation, was now wholly justifiable.
No sooner had I immersed myself in the reports than a young, effeminate waiter wearing purple eyeliner and a feather in his platinum hair interrupted to take my order.
“Just a chamomile,” I said, imagining the box of “Gender Identity Disorder” that the young man would have surely been trapped inside had he fallen into the hands of Bennington or Alfonzo.
Glancing around, I noticed a bearded couple sitting across from me near the back of the café. One of the men ran his fingers along the underside of the other’s hairy arm, toward the inside of his lover’s open hand. Their fingers clasped, the joining of parts, palm against palm. Then he whispered something in his partner’s ear, and together they smiled, as couples in love so often do.
Both doctors agreed on what medications Alfonzo had prescribed, as well as their dosages. Bennington wrote that Alfonzo’s use of ketamine—“to enhance the positive emotional experiences of the bonding (reattachment) process”—was safe and justifiable.
Reimer, on the other hand, wrote that its use was completely outside accepted standards of psychiatric practice at the time in Canada, and was therefore unconventional and inappropriate in the extreme. He noted that ketamine, though normally used as an anesthetic agent (most commonly for horses), was also a drug of abuse that could have serious side effects, including dissociation, hallucinations, respiratory depression, and addiction. It was sometimes used as a club drug, he wrote, and had been reported to have effects similar to the street drugs LSD and PCP. He further noted that Alfonzo’s so-called “consent for utilization of medication” documents were virtually devoid of clinical content.
Reimer found the dosages of the other medications used by Alfonzo to be extreme. Elavil, he explained, was most typically prescribed in the dosage range of 75 to 150 milligrams daily, and dosages above 150 milligrams were uncommon. Only in unusual cases would one approach the conventional maximum dosage of 300 milligrams daily, and only the most extreme and inconceivable circumstance would provoke dosages anywhere near 500 milligrams. The medications’ side effects would have been extremely uncomfortable, he wrote, causing unnecessary suffering. Comprehending and incorporating insights or other learning experiences while in a state of such medication toxicity would have been impossible, causing memory and cognitive impairments and ultimately undermining the psychotherapy’s effectiveness.
Unsurprisingly, Bennington never once drew any correlation between my history of sexual abuse and the sexual acting out by clarifying that such abuse often results in periods of promiscuity, dissociation, and compartmentalization, regardless of one’s sexual orientation. Rather, my “increasingly promiscuous manner,” as exhibited throughout my teens, seemed to him to be synonymous with homosexuality. Any unhappiness I may have experienced around my homosexuality, therefore, regardless of the reasons for that unhappiness, had apparently given Alfonzo carte blanche to help “correct” me.
While Bennington reaffirmed Alfonzo’s contention that my homosexuality had never been treated as a disease, he also stated that Anafranil, one of the many medications Alfonzo had used to “deaden” my libido, had been an appropriate form of treatment in my “obsessive ruminations about sexuality”; similarly, my “sexual deviance” had warranted a treatment of aversive stimuli, such as Alfonzo’s prescription of having me carry around and sniff from a bottle of feces. Bennington stated:
“Whilst this treatment, at first glance, seems unusual, there is a form of treatment for sexual deviance that involves the use of aversive stimuli. The use of electric shock is perhaps the best known, but aversive smells have been used, and it would be seen here as appropriate.”
At no point whatsoever did Bennington clarify what my “sexual deviance” was.
Conversely, Dr. Reimer viewed the “feces in a bottle” as “almost too bizarre to be worthy of comment,” but stated, for the record, that it was not an effective therapeutic technique and that it would have amounted to “a degrading, demeaning, and counter-therapeutic strategy.”
“Smelling one’s feces,” he wrote, would “more likely create confusion and distress in a patient than achieve a therapeutic goal.”
Any therapy aimed at altering my sexual orientation would have only deepened and intensified the homophobic psychopathology that I’d already exhibited upon entering Alfonzo’s therapy, Reimer clarified, rather than helping me to overcome it. The effects of such “unethical, unconscionable, and severely harmful” therapy would have included prolonged and unnecessary distress, instead of leading to a healthy self-acceptance and sexual lifestyle. Alfonzo’s therapeutic techniques could not be justified, Reimer concluded, and involved a problematic mixture of positive and negative effects, not to mention diverting enormous time and energy, which could have been directed to accomplishments in other areas of my life, such as buildi
ng friendships, love relationships, career advancements, or self-acceptance.
In their conclusions, Bennington had little to add about the reasons why I might have stayed in the therapy, except to say that my current self-acceptance pointed unquestionably to the success in Alfonzo’s treatment. Reimer, on the other hand, stated that a “complex interaction” between my psychological vulnerabilities and symptoms and the approach taken by Alfonzo were only some of the reasons why I might have remained in such a therapy “voluntarily.” I could only translate this to mean that Alfonzo had been a perfect manifestation not only of my own self-hatred, but also of my father: controlling, unpredictably explosive, and homophobic. I stayed because Alfonzo was not unfamiliar.
When I looked up from my reading, the waiter told me they were closing for the day. I was alone inside the café; the couple had left. I collected my papers, stuffed them back inside my shoulder pack, then walked through the crowds of late-night partygoers, home.
24
ON DECEMBER 16, 2001, the day before my discovery examination, Mackenzie asked that I meet him in his office.
“We need to talk,” he said as I entered his office.
“Okay.”
“Defense could potentially ask you anything about yourself tomorrow. They want to find out what makes you vulnerable. They want to know what makes you defensive.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to be surprised. I need to know the worst possible thing that they could ask you. I want to be prepared.”
This was not a difficult question. I told him about the boy I used to babysit, when I was twelve years old. The one I almost molested.
“So you didn’t actually go through with it.”
“No. I guess not. But I almost did. I tried—”
“But you didn’t,” McKenzie interrupted. “You didn’t do it.”
The Inheritance of Shame Page 27
