My natural abilities gave me cover. No matter what Graham was doing to me, he couldn’t take away my natural abilities. I still had enough natural talent to survive and move on to the next challenge. I still played and excelled at what is now AAA hockey, and I still excelled at school. But I had changed. From the outside it probably appeared that I was going through a phase, a natural teenage rebellion, and because I had built up so much goodwill, people respected me. They didn’t ever think to dig any deeper than asking me if anything was bothering me, if maybe something was wrong at home. Nobody ever asked a follow-up question after I brushed them off, for, in spite of it all, I was still outwardly very, very successful.
But had they looked more closely, people would have seen that I had lost interest in sports and academics. I was still succeeding in hockey and attracting interest from junior and college hockey teams, but I was no longer running or working out at home. I was letting my athletic body go soft almost as quickly as I had moved past being heavy. I was still succeeding at school and winning awards, but I was no longer completing all of my assignments. In Grade Eleven I had won the silver medal at the University of Manitoba Open Debating Championships, but now I no longer participated in debating tournaments or math championships or anything academic, other than maybe attending classes whenever I felt like it.
But these changes could be passed off as merely a little bit of rebellion. People had no idea what was really going on, that these were passive-aggressive, desperate cries for help.
In the meantime, Graham continued dangling carrots in front of me. He was always telling me what he was doing to help ensure that I’d be scouted for college hockey teams. He told me that he was behind my getting called up by the St. James Canadians, our local junior hockey team, to travel with them, even though I was underage. It was because of him that, as a sixteen-year-old, I progressed through training camp and stayed with the junior team into their season. He kept telling me about the recommendations he was supposedly making to scouts. Sure he was. But I believed everything he said to me about all of that.
A girl at school liked me, a tall, beautiful girl whose father just happened to be the assistant general manager of the New York Rangers. She tried hard to get me to go out with her. She came to my hockey games, she sat near me in class, and she got her father, who already knew much about me as a player, to invite me to the Winnipeg Arena to meet the Rangers coaching staff, team management, and goalie John Davidson when the team came to Winnipeg to play the Jets. No young hockey player in his right mind wouldn’t have succumbed to her advances, as on top of everything else she was a very nice person. But I didn’t want to bring her into my world, for I believed that she deserved far better than that.
It’s hard to be an athlete when you no longer want to be one. I had loved hockey from the very first moment I put skates on as a very young boy. Now I hated it. I stopped training outside of actual practice and games. I went from being an underage member of the St. James Junior Canadians early in the 1980–81 season to a soft, out-of-shape regular-aged Midget AAA goalie by the end of the year, no longer a dominant player in our league.
Make yourself safe. Do whatever you can to protect yourself. Make yourself unworthy of attention and affection. After all, you are unworthy of attention and affection. He controls you, he controls your body. Take back control, show him who controls your body.
The easiest way to hide from sight is to become somebody nobody wants to look at. So, make yourself into somebody nobody wants to look at. Nobody abused me when I wasn’t in shape, but Graham noticed me when I was.
I control what I put into my own body. I can make myself safe by making myself repulsive by gorging, by ceasing to be an athlete. I can control me and show him that I control me.
I can show myself that I am still in control by purging, by releasing the food from inside and taking back my body, by showing myself that deep down I still believe that I deserve to be somebody, that I deserve to be an athlete, that it’s me ruining myself and it’s me who can save myself.
Back and forth. But because of my less than perfect ability to purge all that I had binged, I continued to put on weight. I became a physical mess. I did whatever I could to take attention away from myself. I didn’t want anybody to look at me, I wanted to hide. I didn’t believe I deserved to live. But if I couldn’t kill myself because I was too afraid to try to take my own life, I could kill myself by ceasing to be the person I was. On the outside I still looked almost the same, kind of fit, but soft and not athletic. On the inside, well, nobody could see anything. There are lots of ways to kill yourself without having to die.
School became a game. I questioned the point of even reading the textbook and went into exams cold and wrote essays without reading source material, figuring anything important would be mentioned in class. I excelled at that. Then I went the other way and decided I was I probably smart enough to skip entire units of classes and teach myself and still receive a perfect score on the tests if I just read the textbook once. In an open challenge to authority, I did that in my physics class. Mr. Narayansingh caught wind of what was going on after noticing that I was repeatedly absent and thought he would teach me a lesson by setting a very difficult test. I aced it.
I ended up, not for the first time, in front of the vice-principal. The principal, who the year before had congratulated me in a long school-wide announcement over the loudspeaker for an academic-athletic award I had received, was too angry to deal with me.
“Greg, last year you were… we don’t understand why you’re now… this attitude of yours has got to… if you don’t… Greg, are you even listening to me?”
And I’m sitting there, off in a completely different world, one where the issues he’s bringing up just weren’t my biggest concern right then, lost in my own thoughts about what was going on, lost in a world more horrific than anybody could possibly understand, filled with a violent rage nobody could see:
Fuck Graham. I want him dead. I want that fat fuck dead, I want him to go to the Civic Centre and get out on the ice and stand naked in front of one of the nets, and I want everyone I know to shoot pucks at him as hard as they can, and I want them to do it over and over again until he can’t stand up anymore. And then I want them to shoot at him some more. Fuck him. Fuck him and his fucking hockey and his fucking hair and his fucking dirty khakis and his fucking Swedish hockey theories and his fucking foot massages. And then, as he’s crying in agony, begging for somebody to help him, I want him to look up, I want him to look me in the eye, and I want him to apologize. And then I want somebody to shove one of my skates down his throat and kill him. But not me. I never want to touch that motherfucker again. Never.
What could anybody ever say about what was going on inside my head other than “Say three Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer and come back next Sunday.”
I could have told the people at school about everything, but I couldn’t tell them about anything. I was silent. I nodded my head, I said I was sorry, that I would be better and more respectful going forward, and I left the office and went back to class. Of course, I then promptly skipped the next class and went to the library to read.
The darkness that I carried with me every day was real:
Why did he pick me? He must have seen I was weak. People must see me as weak. I must be some sort of joke.
Why didn’t I stop it? I must have wanted it. I deserve what I’m feeling now. I deserve to feel like his leftover garbage.
How could somebody like him control somebody like me? I’m worthless and weak. I’m not the strong, tall, intelligent, athlete people see on the outside. I’m a fraud.
I’m weak. I can’t stop it. But I can cut, I can binge and purge. I can get fat and make myself so gross he’ll stay away from me. Everyone will stay away from me.
What you see isn’t real. I’m a failure, a worthless and weak fraud, and I deserve failure, not success.
Who am I? I’m a fraud, his garbage, his enabler. I’m somebo
dy who doesn’t deserve to live.
But I am also one of the lucky ones. No matter how hard I tried to destroy myself after internalizing the abuse, I never could keep myself down. I still graduated from high school with honors while playing AAA hockey. I still retained my dream of playing college hockey. And my natural talents made that dream a possibility, despite my best efforts to make those talents disappear. I still wanted to achieve my dreams, even as I self-sabotaged by not training and not staying in shape. I was meeting with college coaches who came through Winnipeg, and I could see a possible escape in my future. But I couldn’t connect the dots in a way that allowed me to leave Graham while he still had the power to take that escape route away from me by disclosing my secret, a secret that he told me would scare away the college coaches.
Never in this perverse reality did it ever occur to me that I could simply apply to a university myself on my own merits and get in. I believed that I needed him for anything I wanted to do. He told me that he was still helping me achieve my dreams and was working with all of those coaches to get them to recruit me to their programs. He reminded me that we had to be careful, as they wouldn’t be interested if they knew the truth about us.
I now know that it was all a lie, that he was just telling me whatever he could to keep me compliant. I’ve since been told that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with my hockey success or any scouting that was done, that he had nothing to do with getting college hockey programs to approach me. But back then my reality was the reality he had created.
Still, I was not without self-awareness. I could see that I was destroying myself, but I was powerless to stop it. I also knew that I had to fight this battle on my own, that nobody else could ever know there was even a battle going on. Deep down, I knew that this was a battle I couldn’t win. Knowing that you are alone and that the real you is broken and defeated, that the successful young man the world sees is a fraud, is very difficult and lonely knowledge to live with. Although I kept trying to succeed, I also kept trying to destroy myself—day after day.
And Graham had his tricks. He would talk about others he was interested in to try to make me jealous, to make me think that maybe his attention was moving elsewhere. That’s right. At the same time as I wanted to kill myself for being involved in this mess, I craved his attention and support. He had me hating myself for being with him while at the same time working hard to please him, to keep his attention. I wanted to die because I was with him, yet he made me jealous of others who might take my place.
Jealous. I was jealous of others who might cause his attention to shift elsewhere. I was being abused, yet the more I unraveled, the more I feared that he was losing interest in me.
The self-doubt, the lack of any sense of self-worth, the self-sabotage, it all got worse and worse. I continually questioned who I was. More than wanting to hurt myself, I wanted to kill myself, but couldn’t get up the courage to actually do anything about it, so I was a failure at that too. But if I was not strong enough to kill myself, then this was the only reality in which I could operate—his reality. In my mind there were now only two options: death, or more of the same, with more of the same being a victory of sorts, an extended lease on life, however meaningless that life might have been.
It was a vicious cycle. The longer it went on, the more I hated myself for it. The more I hated myself, the easier it was for me to give up on myself and just give myself over to the abuse. Oh, I would find ways to fight back, but it was never a fight against him—it was a fight against myself. I dug into my own skin. I ripped out those toenails on those feet that he loved so much. In class, I would find myself digging my pen into my hand, blood suddenly on my books. But it had to remain a secret. I never, ever took my shirt off or showered after hockey or other sporting activities in the midst of one of my self-abuse cycles for fear of showing my self-inflicted wounds.
But I also kept picking myself up and finding a way to fight on, to try to rescue myself from myself. In my last year of high school, my grades were nothing like the top marks I had received in Grade Eleven. But they were still very good. And back then the Scholastic Achievement Test was still seen by admissions departments in U.S. universities as important in assessing academic competency and qualification. I knew that I would have to take these exams at some point, but I didn’t give them much thought and took them without doing any preparation. Weeks later, when I received the results, I discovered I had done well. Very well.
From Graham’s perspective, it must have been a very scary time. He didn’t have direct control over my daily life, only control over my dreams. He could see that my dreams would eventually take me away, away from him, and with that came the risk of exposure. His best chance of preserving our secret was to earn my goodwill by making me believe that he had delivered my dream to me, that he had given me exactly what he said he would. If only I had known what a fraud he was.
Nobody’s life is ever as good as it seems, and nobody’s is ever as bad as it seems. I went through hell with Graham, but I was also lucky to have been given some natural gifts that allowed me to make it thorough to the next stage of life in spite of everything.
We take our victories in life where we can. I’m very proud that I was named the first star in my last game with the St. James Canadians of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League, which was a 3–1 victory over the Selkirk Steelers. It’s a small achievement, but to me it was a sign that there was still somebody lurking within the nobody I had become.
I had been approached by many universities and seriously recruited by several, but in the end I formally applied to only one university. After all, I “knew” I would get in because he was helping me, right? Some of the universities that had shown interest in me had renowned hockey programs, programs that were much better than the one at the university I eventually applied to. But my focus had never been on hockey alone, so I didn’t apply to those schools. I applied to just one university, the one Graham said he had targeted for me from the start. And so, one Sunday afternoon in March 1982, I received a phone call after the admissions meetings had been held, followed a few days later by the fat envelope in the mail that confirmed you had been accepted. It was set. I would be going to Princeton.
IT WAS THE first moment since I had first spoken to Graham—in 1979—that I had felt any freedom from him. It wasn’t total freedom, for he could still interfere with my dreams of playing hockey if he revealed our secret. Still, I knew that I could have a future and that the end of our “relationship” was in sight. Graham had to prepare for a separation. In fact, he likely had already begun preparing.
Graham faced a huge risk when the relationship ended. He knew that the secret may at some time come out once I had time, space, and an opportunity to reclaim my own reality. And it was the knowledge of that risk that informed how he needed to act during the relationship and that was the reason he did certain things during the relationship. He had every incentive during the relationship to plant the seeds of doubt in others’ minds about what was happening, what had happened. He needed to prepare stories for the future, should I ever come forward. He needed cover for his actions, things to point to that would show that I was lying, was making things up. An abuser will change his habits, do different things, involve others in somewhat similar situations where nothing happened so there are others who will say that they were there and he never did anything with them.
And yet no matter how hard an abuser like Graham may try to do all of this, an abuser knows he cannot underestimate that massive risk of being caught, of being found out, because that risk can never go away. All that Graham could ever do was manage the relationship as best as he believed possible in the hope that I would never come forward.
Graham managed me through to the end, positioning himself as the man who had delivered me my dream, pushing me to acknowledge what he had done to make my life better than it would have been without him in it, making me feel in his debt for what I had achieved. There was no tearful goodby
e. There was only a parting, a moving on, an end brought about by my physical move away to Princeton University, which, at the time, I thought he had delivered to me. The last time I saw him was nothing special, and just as it had all begun so innocently and without drama, it ended abruptly without any discussion or even mutual acknowledgment that it had happened.
I think Graham knew that he had dodged a bullet with me. Although I was in so many ways perfect prey for him, I was not nearly as captive as the others who followed given that he never directly coached me and I never lived with him as did some of the others who followed. It turned out that the distance between us actually worked to his advantage, as it made me crave his attention and presence in my life, but it could have gone the other way. He hadn’t coached me and he had a different, less tangibly direct hold over me. And that again shows his genius in being able to identify me as a victim who would respond in a certain way to a certain set of circumstances.
But now I was about to be free. I didn’t understand, however, that my life as I had known it had already been destroyed. Yes, I was able to hold it together amidst the self-harm, the self-destruction, and move on to the next stage of my life. I assumed that once I was away from him everything would be fine. But physically leaving Graham turned out to be the easy part. Living with the carnage of the abuse would prove far more difficult.
I Am Nobody Page 8
