The House of Water - 3. Session One

From leather couches I have spoken myself to many strangers. What sounds absurd in the abstract used to be common practice before your generation, where medication is standard: over the years I spoke with many psychologists. Never once did I feel that they helped me. They seemed to operate under the assumption that one reveals more in speech than writing. This may be true for some, but not all, not me.

Of course, none of that stopped Mother from suggesting that I undergo counseling. She could tell, after my one-day stand with Other Michael, that I was up to something. I acted dodgy, suspicious. Her way of disguising punishment as responsible parenting, then, was to have me start counseling my first semester of university. There were other changes around then. If, at the end of high school, I was just starting to come out of my shell, then attending a predominantly Catholic university was an unalterable mistake. Whatever social hang-ups I had—and they were many—matured into full-blown neuroses.

So: I was hiding my nascent love-life, as well as dealing with social changes. None of this, however, was as clear to me then as it is now (or as it is in the story of that time period that I tell and retell myself), and I certainly saw no value in telling it to a stranger, a straight man, no less.

My response to counseling was to talk about what I felt the counselor wanted to hear:

“You mentioned, last time, that you were experiencing some problems with your sexuality,” said the counselor. (I cannot be expected to remember the name of such an inconsequential man.)

“Yes. Being gay is frustrating generally, and especially so at this university.”

“Understandable. The environment here is rather—homogeneous. It is difficult to be a minority here,” he said.

“Homogeneous sounds like it should mean made up of homos.”

He forced a laugh. “And that just isn’t the case, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“But you said last time that your problems were bigger than that, that you were struggling with something more than finding a date,” he said.

“It’s the whole why me? attitude. I take the nature-nurture debate personally. I’d like to believe it’s in my genes, but many of the gays, like all five of them, that I’ve ever met seem to have similar pasts as me: poor fathers and sexual abuse.”

“You experienced sexual abuse?” he asked.

“A little bit, when I was younger, like five. I never thought much of it though. Back then no one had taught me the label ‘sexual abuse’ to describe what was happening. No one even told me it was bad or wrong. My worst reaction to it back then was annoyance like oh we’re playing that game again,” I said. I did not want to follow that thread. It was a dead-end, or so I thought.

“Tell me more about it, if you don’t mind. Tell me how it happened.”

I settled into the couch. I knew I had come up with that session’s theme, and that I wouldn’t have to do much thinking for the rest of the half hour. I would only have to tell a story that felt like it happened to someone else.

“When I was younger I lived in Mentor, up through the end of first grade. My Mother was friends with our neighbors, the Batistics, and she used to take me over there to play with their older sons while she drank beer with the adults,” I said.

“Does your Mother often drink?” he asked.

“Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is she was busy laughing and talking with them in the backyard while I played in the frontyard or in the house with their sons, but usually just the younger one, Johnny. He was fourteen at the time, I think.”

“And it was he who abused you?”

I nodded. “He would let me play his Super Nintendo with him for a while. After a while, we would reach a level in Mario or some other game that we couldn’t beat, or that he pretended we couldn’t beat, and he would say we needed to put our heads together to think, so we would touch our heads together and stay like that for a while. Then he would ask if I wanted to play another game.”

The counselor shuffled knowingly. I could see him thinking: Ah yes, a textbook case, ah yes.

“I would agree, though more hesitantly after I came to learn what the game was. He would pull out his stuff and encourage me to do the same, and he would start to touch mine and I would laugh because it seemed funny. His would always be hard, and I thought that was weird, and when I would ask why his was hard, he would say that he was lucky when it was hard because it felt really good to touch. I don’t remember exactly what tactics he used, but somehow or other he’d get me to touch it some. I always felt annoyed, I remember. I wanted to go back to playing video games or playing a ball game outside. I may have known it was bad, but it’s hard to say if I haven’t made that up since.”

“What made it stop? Did you ever tell anyone?” asked the counselor.

“One day he told me to put my mouth on it. He did it to me and I laughed, and then I did it to him for a little bit, and it must have bothered me because I went home and told my Mother about it.”

“And what did she do?”

“I made her promise not to yell at him. I didn’t understand exactly how bad what he had done was, but I could tell she wasn’t pleased about it. She disappeared at his house for about fifteen minutes, then told me she had spoken to him. I asked her if she had been mean, and she said no. She said she had just had a talk with him. That’s all,” I said.

“And what happened after that?”

“She walked me over there and Johnny apologized. For some reason, I played dumb. I pretended not to know why he was apologizing, so I asked him. I remember exactly what he said. He said, ‘For everything.’”

“But no legal steps were taken?”

“No,” I said. I was eager to protect Mother’s position. “Their family was poor to begin with. She didn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with the parents. As far as they know, nothing ever happened. That family has had enough problems since then as it is. My Mother was afraid, too, of what my Father would’ve done to Johnny. He might well have killed him. So she kept it under wraps. We moved shortly after, anyway.”

“You realize, of course, that most who do it once do it again? You were probably not his only victim,” said the counselor.

“I realize that. It was a weird situation, a difficult situation,” I said.

“Same time next week?” He turned the pages of his legal pad.

“Sure thing,” I said.