After the service, the celebrant introduced me as one of the bereaved and treated me like a human being, which surprised me. My father had died without forgiving me. I had been disinherited, of course, and I was aware that my brother blamed me for his death. I was surprised at civility from anyone, let alone kindness and respect.
The second service, at Greyhaven, was presided over by my uncle Paul. We passed the French bread and chocolate around the circle, celebrating my father’s life with the things he liked to eat.
Everyone was invited to talk about him, one by one, but both my mother and I were silenced by Paul‘s booming voice: “We are to remember only the good!”
Short list, that. Everyone talked about how brilliant he was. My uncle Don noted that my father had the gift of making people feel special. We do not need to notice what a poison pill that was in the seduction of his young victims. Gifted young people want above all to talk to intelligent people who will understand them; my father used this to notch his proverbial bedpost.
Professor Nathan Hellerstein, a friend of my father’s, told me that Patrick had had my father cremated. He and my brother scattered his ashes in Mendocino County, not wanting me there. I was heartbroken over his death, and hurt even more that now there was no place I could go to visit him. Maybe that seems ridiculous, but it is how I felt.
My friend Jean told me that some awful things had happened to my father while he was incarcerated. The other inmates hung a sign on his wheelchair saying “Chester the Molester” and beat him savagely. The next year, an ambulance driver told me he had transported my father, and had beaten him up in the ambulance for what he had done to kids. Walter had been placed in the general population even though the judge knew what the other prisoners would do to a child predator. She also told me that my father had forgiven me at the end, over my brother Patrick’s nearly hysterical objections.
I asked to be made co-executor of my father’s will. The court granted my request, puzzled that I had been disinherited, and viewed me and my brother as equals in the eyes of the law.
I asked for only three things. I asked for two books: The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas and The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, which my father and I had further annotated when I played Alice In Wonderland. I also asked for my strobe harp tuner, which I had left it at his house by mistake when I moved out. He had refused to give my tuner back to me while he was still alive.
I gladly signed off on the rest of the estate. I had no interest in my father’s money. Patrick got half and Kenny got the other half. I doubt that any amount of money could ever compensate Kenny for what he had gone through, but I was glad he had something and I was not about to interfere.
I had to finish college after the funeral. I had taken eleven units of incompletes, and I had to take twenty-two units to graduate. I auditioned for both Yum Yum and Katisha in the opera production, and I was told that although I had done the strongest audition for either role of the whole process, they were not going to cast me because I had been the star of the last show, and someone else needed to have a turn.
I thought that was fair enough. Besides, I had a project due: I had to produce an opera myself. I chose The Impresario by Mozart, and I sang a huffy, hysterical diva: Madame Goldentrill. The part is known for outrageously high notes: several high Fs (F above high C). I loved producing the show, and I certainly did a lot of opera production after I left college.
I didn’t get along with my harp teacher at Redlands. Her philosophy was that the harp was to be used to uplift, never to entertain, and I was already a very busy professional harpist. When I did concerts, I was a silly, fun, talkative performer, and my audiences loved me. My harp teacher called me a “cheap showman.” I told her no, I was a very expensive showman, but it hurt. She declined to let me perform at her house-classes where her beginners were performing, saying “I know what you can do.” I even sent her all my surplus harp jobs, since I had more work than I knew what to do with. She was displeased, and told me I should not market myself so much and I should leave my success up to God and not try so hard. After that, I decided to not continue studying with her. My audiences loved me, and I had such fun performing: I was not about to change my style of performance.
I determined that a harp degree would not magically make me into a harpist: I already was a harpist, and the piece of paper would only be paper. Nobody who has hired me to perform or teach harp has ever given a fig whether I had a harp degree. They only cared that I could play, or that I could make them play better and that I could make their hands quit hurting. On the other hand, the vocal degree was something I needed to help me stand out among the zillions of other voice teachers, and the material I was learning would only make me a better singer.
I had to return some months later to sing my senior recital. I chose Poulenc’s Les Fiancailles Pour Rire (Laughable Betrothals) and dedicated one song to my father. I did not expect anyone to understand. It was enough that I understood, since I was only singing it for him.
Je ne peut plus rien dire, ni rien faire pour lui.
Il est mort de sa belle, il est mort de sa mort belle
Dehors, sous l’arbre de la Loi.
En plein silence, en plein paysage, dans l’herbe
Il est mort inapercu, en criant son passage
En appelent, en m’appelent
Mais comme j’etait loin de lui E que sa voix ne portait plus
Il est mort seul dans les bois Sous son arbre d’enfance
Et je ne peut plus rien dire. Ni rien faire pour lui
I cannot say anything, nor do anything for him.
He died quietly, he died his beautiful death
Outside, under the tree of the Law.
In total silence, in open country, in the grass.
He died unnoticed, crying out as he died.
Calling out, calling for me
But because I was far from him and his voice no longer carried
He died alone in the woods, beneath the tree of his infancy
And I cannot say anything more, nor do anything for him.
—Dans l’herbe (In the grass) Les Fiancailles pour rire,
Francis Poulenc, lyrics by Louise de Vilmorin
Chapter 37: The House of the Rising Sun (1994)
There is a house down in New Orleans they call the rising sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor girl and me, oh God, I’m one
—Eric Burdon, The House of the Rising Sun
Mother gave me a lavish graduation present. She bought me a house in the El Sobrante Hills, and I was expected to come back to Northern CA after graduation. She also bought my brother a house, a huge duplex, across the street from the Goldfish Bowl. I kept the picture of my new house on the refrigerator, and looked at it every day. I had a massive amount of work to do, between the incompletes and my classes, and I wrote and went to class all day, every day. I graduated, scheduling my senior recital after my graduation. I moved into the new house, and began setting up auditions with opera companies.
Then Lisa dropped a bomb on me: She presented me with an amortization table, asking me to give her $2500.00 per month for the house. She ignored the fact that Mother had bought the house for me as a graduation present, and insisted that Mother could not do any such thing. I had to get her a huge pile of money and fast.
I ended up doing something I never thought in my whole life that I would do. I went to work as a dominatrix, in a place I will call “The House of the Rising Sun.” It was fast, it was reliable, and it was disgusting. “Dominatrix” is interchangeable with “dominant,” “dom,” or “mistress.” Many of us who worked as doms also had to “switch” or work as “subs,” or “submissives.” Dominants and submissives collectively practice what is known as BDSM, or Bondage & Discipline and Sado-Masochism. The BDSM community is often called “The Scene.”
In my job, I met adult babies who wanted to wear diapers, people who wanted to be spanked, or dress up in women’s clothing, and many other
things that I will not discuss. We did not offer sex or allow any intimate contact at all. This was specifically for people who were turned on by pain or humiliation, and we provided only the pain and the humiliation.
It was probably the strangest few months of my life.
Any place where people practice BDSM can be called a “dungeon” with the lighthearted, mostly joking idea that people will be chained to cold stone walls and subjected to the sort of medieval imagery found in Robin Hood movies. Some people will even fix up their houses to reflect some portion of this, but the House was far more suburban, at least when I was there. Our rooms looked like normal rooms, but with eyebolts for shackles at odd points on the bed, boxes full of “toys” which ranged from feather dusters to…well, I would like to say entire chickens, but that would not be entirely accurate.
We had a lot of rules meant to establish our physical safety. The most important rule for anyone involved in BDSM is to have and agree on a safe-word. A safe-word is a code word which means “STOP.” Some people use “Yellow” for “SLOW DOWN” and “Red” for “STOP.”
Many people in powerful professions and positions of leadership would end up sexually submissive. Judges, doctors, policemen, presidents of major corporations were among the typical submissives we would see in our work. On the job, they would make literal life-and-death decisions. In their fantasy lives, they finally didn’t have to be in charge.
As one might imagine, there was a great deal of pathology, not only in the beaters but in the beatees. Some were harmless and hardwired for bondage, but had no drive to escalate anything to a pathological level. Others were criminal, terrifying, and we might expect to see a few of them on Forensic Files or Law and Order one day. Naturally, the submissives, whether clients or professionals, would have a history of heinous abuse of one sort or another. Every single professional dom or sub I ever met had been sexually abused. Every single one.
A lot of funny business went on at the House. If a man came to the House and tied up a submissive, then raped her, he might be barred from the House, or merely barred from seeing the girl he had assaulted. The policy was to never call the police for anything, and this was the eventual cause of my departure. I was aware of a few incidents which caused a lot of harm but nothing was done. It is unthinkable to tolerate crimes so that a place of business can be protected.
Most of the professional doms and subs working at the House were “lifestylers,” people who personally enjoyed BSDM and practiced it in their own private lives. Men who were happy to be “houseboys,” would hang around the house, doing housework for the privilege of being near the dominant mistresses. Usually a lifestyler would begin as a client, and then gradually become more and more involved in The Scene through making friends with a dom or two. I made friends with the lifestylers who hung around the House and they eventually invited me to “play parties.” A “play party” is a party where people get together to talk, hang out, and chain each other up. People do not usually have sex at play parties, partly because it is almost universally the rule, and partly because sex is not really the point of BDSM. Going to play parties might give someone the idea that lifestylers never had sex at all, even though I am certain they did. I appreciated the small nod to modesty, though.
As a lifestyler, I was a wash. I played the role of the dominatrix, but not especially well. I found the whole thing very difficult to take seriously, and I found nothing about being in charge even remotely erotic. It was simply a normal part of my life which reflected the lack of good leaders in my family.
I made friends with other lifestylers, and learned a lot about how people get twisted the way they do. I met a very nice man and dated him for some time. I learned a lot about how people would get started in kink. Everyone remembered their triggering episode. Almost invariably, the first time that bondage, or shoes, or spanking became eroticized for them, they were children.
One man who spent a lot of time around the House was the sub of one of the leading dominatrixes there. She routinely beat him and subjected him to terrible humiliations, even demonstrating this to neophytes. He told me privately that he was accustomed to tolerating a lot of pain. His father had thrown him through the wall on more than one occasion, and given him multiple broken bones. He confided in me that he was not really interested in BDSM at all, but didn’t want to upset the woman he was dating. He ended up marrying someone outside The Scene, or what we would call a “vanilla” woman. Was he denying his true nature? I doubt it. He simply went in another direction, and I admire his insight.
One place that lifestylers would meet and “play,” aside from “play parties” was Bondage-A-Go-Go at the Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco. This was an event on Wednesday nights, roped off from the rest of the venue, and we would come in costume, wearing leather, fishnets, and a host of other odd things. We would put on exhibitions of whipping, bondage and so forth.
One thing I witnessed, not once but many times, was a girl who came to Bondage-A-Go-Go, probably ninety pounds dripping wet. She chose to be tied up and whipped to blood and bruises not once but repeatedly by a seven-foot-tall transvestite. The master of the “dungeon” eventually threw her out, because he was afraid that she would die. She had been whipped unconscious more than once, and naturally there were judgments about her mental state. Nobody had the slightest concern about the whipper, though, just the whippee. Why was she the crazy one? She consented. They both consented.
She could have died.
What did her “consent” to being beaten unconscious mean? Is this merely a “preference” that we should “respect” and “celebrate?” If she died, would we be expected to “celebrate” that as well? Must her desire for this practice be regarded as more important than her life? The parallels to anorexia and any other life-threatening lifestyle are obvious.
It occurred to me that consent does not work as an arbiter of morality. Consent does not take about three hundred things into account, and it cannot.
A notion I call the “Doctrine of Consent” is common to all nontraditional sexual communities which I have personally encountered. The Doctrine of Consent claims that anything you want to do to another person is just fine, provided everyone consents.
This is, as one might imagine, an idea which dovetails with the “Witches Rede:” “An it harm none, do as ye will.” It sure sounds good, doesn’t it? So much better than all those rigid rules found in religion which only exist to limit people’s sexual expression, right?
The good part of BDSM relationships is the focus on negotiation and bringing hidden relationship dynamics into the open. The bad part of BDSM relationships is that the “doctrine of consent” is a bunch of hooey, and relationships based on it can be both pathological and dangerous.
Here is the trouble: Consent is a funny thing. Although most decent human beings will acknowledge that children cannot legally consent to sex, many adults give consent under less than free circumstances.
The fact is that many people, myself included, cannot set appropriate limits—especially with people who have committed prior bad acts. If we have a history of enduring violation of one sort or another, our “no” might be broken. This is not only common to abuse victims, but other adults.
In many group or “open” relationships, the man wants another woman. His original partner is manipulated into accepting that her jealousy is “immature.” She consents, because her husband has tacitly let her know that he will reject her unless she lets him have sex with another woman whether she is brought into it or not. Does her consent mean she genuinely wants this to happen, or that she simply does not have a choice?
Her approval from her partner is now contingent on her going along with his “open-mindedness.”
What about the BDSM relationship where one person wants something and the other person is not sure? To what degree is there consent, and to what degree are people going along with manipulation, pressure, and even tacit emotional coercion? The threat of abandonment is a powerful
thing.
Arguably, my father’s victim Gregg could have legally given consent to my father raping him once he turned 18, and he only withdrew his consent and repudiated him when he was 23. Was every single episode of sexual abuse coerced, or only the ones before the day Gregg turned 18? Or had Gregg merely become so accustomed to tolerating rape that he did not see any other options for himself?
Eventually I realized that my anger and other people’s desire to be hurt did not make it ok for me to strike them. It did not matter how much they wanted pain. Their consent could not make my actions acceptable. We don’t hit people. I don’t hit people. It is wrong.
The end of my participation with BDSM was when I realized that the “doctrine of consent” was baloney. The fact that someone gives me permission to hit them does not make it OK for me to do so.
I found it nearly impossible to take anything about the dynamics of BDSM seriously. When I thought of dominant women and submissive men, I imagined a roomful of little boys desperately trying to please their mothers, and a roomful of damaged women treating their sons disgracefully. When I thought of dominant men and submissive women, I saw insecure, violent men whose ordinary dominance in their outside relationships was not enough to make them happy.
If we are to regard BDSM as healthy or normal, and acting out these fantasies would help us to understand ourselves, then the next chapter should be healing of some sort. I didn’t see healing taking place.
If we view BDSM as psychodrama, meant to reenact a psychological trauma with the goal of mastering it, we might expect growth, insight, increased personal understanding and personal transformation. Instead, what we see is what amounts to a repetition compulsion being turned into a personal ritual, where a trauma one might not even remember fully is eroticized. In such a ritual, the trauma is not integrated, the injury is not understood, the psychological genesis of the trauma is not rejected, but rather reenacted. Instead of discovering that a beating made you eroticize violence, or hot water, or shackles, and then deciding to walk away from the things which had been done to us, we simply were meant to accept that we would be aroused through bad acts, and allow this arousal to dominate our lives as though no other arousal would ever mean anything.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 35
