For chad, who died in a car accident when we were still teens.
I fell deeper in love with music the same way most teenagers growing up in the 80’s and 90’s did, genre specific radio stations broadcasted through “ghetto blasters” and “boom boxes” occupying prime dresser-top real estate, in poster papered bedrooms. A playlist maker from the get, I stood ready at my box to simultaneously press record + play, a capturing of words I saw myself in, for future replay.
An era on a bridge, not in a song but between cassettes and the offspring of vinyl, “compact discs”. The first CD I personally owned was REM’s 1991 album Out of Time, the track “Losing My Religion” most played, a paradoxical and hopeful prayer that I could do exactly what the song suggested, which thankfully I eventually did.
A coming of age story, framed by shared playlists from a broad scope of genres, obtained mostly through short lived love interests. I had a type, in both music and boys, in pain.
It's the one thing they had in common, the jocks, cowboys, skate and snowboarders, hippies, wannabe’s and even criminals. A seeking of resonance and belonging, to something or someone with a shared felt sense within them.
A subconscious pursuit both needed and despised, by all of us.
Many of these boys used my body to release the tension of hormones, which was stereotypical of course, but the recognizable hunger was hard to ignore. And that’s what I was using them for, to feel less alone, and wanted, for a brief moment, though it was never enough to fill the bottomless pit.
In the tenderness of wounded-ness, I romanticized my nervous system's attempts at remediating my own pain by perpetuating it.
A few of them liked me (as much as an awkward teenage boy can), and I liked some too. Chad was the first that felt like something I might have called love. And I did call it that. I still do.
I was hypnotized by the rhythmic cadence produced by his body on a skateboard riding curved plywood in the side yard of a run down rental house near our school. The sound was soothing, an unexpected comfort for the angst within me.
It wasn’t the somatics alone, a visually eccentric face was also captivating.
And …… pain. But you knew that already didn’t you?
Chad introduced me to recorded obscurity. “Underground” music via tapes and cd’s procured at secret raves, or exchanged among loyal followers, songs never played over the radio.
He was obsessed with Green Day, prior to their 1994 Woodstock sell out that effectively traded underground fans for mainstream ones. Capitalism always leaves people behind, but prior Chad and I anthem-ed the song 1000 hours from the 1991 Smoothed out Slappy Hours album as “our song”.
When we broke up, I couldn’t feel the pain of loss like I had wanted to, Chad was the only person I knew that owned it, though I looked in every used CD store I entered for many years to come. Green Day kept their underground work where it originated for a few more decades, and in a way I respected them for it, I imagine Chad did too.
Starlit night
The moon is shining bright
You are the one that I need
Up at your window
I see a shadow
Silhouette of your grace
Here's this flower
I picked for all the hours
That you've spent with me
Let my hands flow through your hair
Moving closer
A kiss we'll share
1, 000 hours, I'll never leave
Our romance
Is a love trance
And now we'll never part
1, 000 hours
Of such a love shower
During what was probably our most awkward year of development, Chad and I logged at least 1,000 hours in or near proximity to each other. We snuck out basement and second story windows to meet under night’s blanket, wherein no rules applied. We kissed, of course, but mostly we laid on our backs staring at the night sky discussing any and all our wondering; space, time, god, and how we felt about our parents and siblings.
Until I got caught, and my parents got extreme, grounded maximum security, an ineffective at home imprisonment. I guess they didn’t realize that prison pretty much always produces recidivism. Those poster papered walls were stripped, music and television removed, books and clothing approved. Blobs of dried texture mud on the walls and ceiling became my muse, the beginnings of meditation maybe. But, nothing was more painful than the separation from him, they could have achieved that with less extremism.
Before punishment tore Chad and I apart, trauma bonded us.
It was the first thing I did when I got home that night. Right after it happened, I called Chad from the laundry room, perched on top of a counter that for some reason I presumed could hold my shaking body better than the floor ever could. Through telephone waves he held a trembling telling of sexual abuse.
Maybe it wasn’t appropriate of me to tell him, maybe the burden of this information was unfair, but he was all I felt I had, and try as I might, I knew I couldn’t have kept it inside me, not from him.
He responded in a way not even the adults could, he said it was wrong and that it wasn’t my fault. There was no contradiction nor abandonment, even as the all consuming darkness overcame me. Perhaps the benefit of mutual suffering, I knew he meant it.
Eventually the dark weather became too indicative for my mother to ignore, and I erupted upon her inquiry.
My parents reported the abuse, a complicated thing given it had been my step uncle who had done it. It was the right thing to do, but also, as the details emerged through the legal process, I knew they held me somewhat responsible for it too.
I can’t determine what damaged my psyche more, the abuse or how she saw me, words I could have only interpreted one way, she believed I had asked for it, and therefore that a child could be to blame for pervasive toxic shame.
I became more of the sin I had actually always been, a spiritual problem.
Which is why I think they informed our local Mormon bishop, a patriarchal representative of a church created and built by a pedophile with a penchant for teenage girls. I was living a parallel reality with Joseph Smith’s victims, though I wouldn’t know that for years to come, had I then I might have thrown a stronger resistance.
Most mormons are not aware of the brainwashing, that’s the point of it. Nor do they see how damaging and dangerous the nuanced patriarchal blame of sexual sin is. For everyone within it, but especially for young developing minds, particularly the feminine kind. I’m compassionate about the learned ignorance, theirs and mine, and also believe we must start talking about it.
Industrial carpeted floors and walls is where I learned that any sexual misconduct, even a thought, was going to be some girls fault. What she wore, how she walked, what she said.
Might as well be me.
And inside my bishop's office, it was made clear that I had something to repent for, even in a kind attempt at ecclesiastical duty.
This too was abuse, excused by religious traditions and revered by my own family. Even more expansively upheld by a broader community.
Very little has changed about those religious traditions in the 30 years since. On any given Sunday, there’s a teenage girl encased by industrial carpet staring at a picture of an old white man, or worse Jesus, as she experiences emotional, religious, and psychological abuse masquerading as salvation.
She is why I am writing this.
Children can’t know who they are without reflective mirroring from their caregivers and community, the nervous system relies on this information to develop identity.
There were many reflections in the aftermath of the abuse, centered on a theme, I was the cause of bad things.
…………….
A few decades later, I became acquainted with an assistant coach of a high school team my son was participating in, from the get I could smell his predatory tendency. It wasn’t long before my son also picked up on those vibes, and even found himself with social media evidence of it. We took our concerns to the people we felt had the power and authority to be preventative, only to be dismissed in favor of ignorance. These were not adults willing or skilled enough to do something about it.
Only a year later the community felt the acute pain of what I knew was coming, the stain of headlines across our local facebook pages.
This coach had abused his niece, a student at the school and manager for the team. It was her mother that found evidence enough to do something.
I felt for a while like I had done some time traveling.
She is why I am writing this.
………………
And even a few years since then, this same story perpetually grows with an alarming momentum that makes this type of experience stereotypical, a normal statistic, just another ‘me too’ moment.
It would seem no amount of pain will change how American communities deal with sexual abuse, we still nurture and perpetuate the toxic shame that produces it.
I believe my parents, and certainly my uncle, and most if not all the members of my family were grown in perpetuated shame, and they grew me in the same. I know that in some respects they absolutely did the best they could given their own realities.
And, I continually hold the dissonance of true contradiction, in many instances they couldn’t have been doing the best they could with it.
Today, the little girl in me still gets hijacked by a belief that something bad is going to happen and that it will most certainly be her fault, because it always has been.
A daily battle with a beast often called anxiety.
Shame isn’t the only remnant from this childhood experience with sexual abuse, Chad is here too, a flicker of light in a perpetual storm, a comforting rhythm stored in the memories of organs.