Sleep: A Love Letter (by Peg)

I must have the lowest threshold of boredom in the Western world. Here I am with an unprecedented, frighteningly unpredictable future of unclaimed time in which I could follow my every whim and passion, provided it doesn’t cost anything and I stay unemployed. I should be renovating my house single-handedly; I should be taking my dogs one by one to their checkups and then training them to bring my slippers and pipe; I should be writing (the Great American Novel); I should be cooking (the Great American Dinner Party), I should be walking (the great Southern American botany field trip). Instead, I lie happily captive to sleep’s morphine dream, rising gently toward wakefulness, then willing myself back down into the feather-soft gray, for hours and hours after the customary eight have passed.

Yes, I know, I should make myself do something. I am surprisingly single-minded in the care and feeding of that which inspires me, but no such inspiration presently beckons. Yes, the garden needs tending--but I don’t care. The house needs cleaning, the kitchen needs renovating, the bathroom is disgusting, the laundry is mounting, and my shoes are piled in a heap, the heap being in my closet only to avert nasty and embarrassing stumbles--but I don’t care.

I must sound spoiled, but I’m not, haven’t been. It’s not that I feel a sense of entitlement; it’s just that I feel the paws of a heavily snoring sloth around my neck and the ache of my body bent forward to carry her inert weight. “Sloth,” I say, as we approach, reluctantly, the borderline of wakefulness, “Sloth, isn’t there something we should be doing?”

“Plenty of things,” says Sloth. “But almost nothing we want to do.” And with that, she gives her adorable little sloth snort and cuddles up against me, lulling me once again into the gentle rolling ocean of unconsciousness.

“To sleep, perchance to dream!” Shut up, Hamlet. You don’t know sleep like I do, like Ophelia does. You imagine your manly tumult will survive the River Lethe, that your passions are strong enough not only to inform your deeds here on earth but to continue as a source of reproach in the hereafter. Hamlet, Hamlet, our sins are twin, we do not act but react; when we read it is all “words, words, words,” we expect some powerful external event (the appearance of your father’s ghost, my transcendence into some joyous creative state) to change us; we refuse to acknowledge that unless and until we choose otherwise we are but narcissistic human pinballs, not the creators but the victims of our destinies.

At least Ophelia and I understand the true dynamics of your supposed quandary. One does not choose sleep as a means to avoid some painful situation or condition of being. One chooses sleep as an end in itself. Sometimes I think my happiest moments are those when, my natural buoyancy surging me toward the skin of consciousness, I gasp a panicked newborn’s breath and then realize, as my middle-aged sensibilities set in, that I need not awake—not then--for some arbitrary but officially sanctioned reason (day off, weekend, vacation, serial unemployment). In the anarchic hedonism of that moment, that moment when, with grateful relief, I pull my pillows around me and rabbit-chase my legs across the foot of the bed just for the sheer sensual delight of the feel of the sheets against my bare legs, as I thrash to my left side, pulling the comforter over me in a tidal surge of warmth and smell of loving sleeping dog, I feel a sense of synchronicity with my immediate environment that I know nowhere else. So little is demanded of one when one sleeps, yet sleep is perfectly acceptable--unlike drinking to excess or opium-taking or even artificial means of prolonging wakefulness.

It is said and written that great achievers have little need for sleep. I understand the passion that sneers at pausing. I have felt it, and have willed alertness into the danger zone in service to it. When free of such compulsion and released from schedules imposed, I would not trade and will not apologize for succumbing to my drug of choice. Dreamt or dreamless, slumber seduces and soothes like nothing else. When I sleep, my demons are beside but not inside me. They crawl out, make nests, circling like dogs do, and leave me alone until I brush my teeth. They snore and snuggle.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…don’t wake her. She’s happy in there. Goodnight, Moon.

Greeting the Feminine Within (Jim)

Meeting The Feminine 12/24/2005

I have a theory that the sex drive that draws you to another, that unfolds as relational, is like the spiritual oneness aspect, both of which are primarily feminine in nature. I’ve met the feminine in myself.

I remember a drastic climatic change, from North to South, in consciousness, as Ty entered me. Clenched, I could keep him out, indefinitely. He could not enter me unless I let him in. It was such a barrier breaking, to allow that which is outside of yourself within. Spit’s fine in your mouth, as is piss and bile within, but once outside of you, it’s no longer part of you, and thus vile.
To unclench required a change of consciousness, from separateness to oneness, where the two become one. I had literally to first transform him into a part of me, before I could assimilate him. If I tried to force it clenched, he’d tear me apart. I could want it, embrace it, relax my guard, let go, draw him in, surrendering and embracing all that was him, or endure it untransformed and vile. I transformed inside and outside into the same.

That climatic change from North to South, from masculine perspective to feminine, from warrior, rebel, pillaging and recklessly sowing seed or provider hunting, harvesting and staying, projecting strength from far afield, to nurturer of the nest, promoting a foundational strength from within, was like night and day, or even more like space and earth. I had always been a star, a fire, but earth and sea were utterly different than I. A sun is unapproachable, projecting great energy for life from afar, but the earth is literally with their offspring, their very ground. It was so different to be with other, in this, so revolutionary, of a way. I understood an inside out, womb’s perspective of the world and of life, that was so alien and yet oh so wondrous. Other wasn’t vile to be kept out but to be joined. I hadn’t stopped being a man though. It was still there, the old was right there alongside the new outlook, allowing me to appreciate both all the more. Drawing another physically within me, had opened a similar space in my awareness, that like a revelation, felt more like a remembering of a long forgotten, submerged truth, than a new discovery.

They say a baby does not know that what is outside of them is not part of them. That is why when the mother and child play peekaboo, at first the child cries each time she vanishes, for the baby has lost a part of themself. It’s a trust building game, that she will not ever go away, never to return. Maybe babies had it right though, maybe we are all a part of one another, not seperate. We’ve just forgotten what we knew instinctively from birth.

When I’d cum, I’d snap right back into the masculine separateness perspective, where it’s all about me and my pleasure in ejaculating, where it’s intolerable to have him within again. The few times I’ve entered him, he’s cum almost instantly. So I don’t think he’s grasped the parallel mind fuck, of a reality change. He’s never let go and then stayed around the nine months for the afterbirth and new life beyond, yet.

I had been the bottom in anal sex, only once before meeting Ty, during a one night stand. It happened, the only time it could of, at that time, before I came out. It happened in one of those terrible, black, black, periods of emptiness, I always had when I’d come back from home. Home was all love that I was outside of and couldn’t partake in. So I’d return to my home always, so abjectly alone, needing to be with someone, so desperately, that sometimes it’d force a window open, where moments before there had only been the Great Wall of China, stretching up and off endlessly into the horizon. Crawling through just such a window, on just such a night, I sat next to a guy at a gay bar, and not saying a word, I put my hand on his leg. He turned and looked at me, and I slid my hand up into his groin. In case he didn’t already have my number, after that, I gave it to him. He called.

The reality change was so gradual and subtle and elusive that time, that it barely registered consciously. Maybe it was because I wasn’t in love with him and it remained all about my pleasure. He took me though, where he’d been a thousand times before with others, I’m sure, transforming himself for me into something that was a part of me during the hours and hours of foreplay, where he made his world my world, his childhood, his brothers and sisters, his family, his room, his life, mine, and mine his. I belonged. I belonged. I belonged, in his space and he in mine. Never having had anal sex it was nothing I had anticipated, but it felt so natural. I certainly could have fallen in love with him, if he’d wanted to know all that we’d create as us, down the road, but he didn’t want that. So all we have is that wondrous, blessed, holy, magical, Brokeback Mountain summer, in a night, together.

In the movie, Brokeback Mountain, Alma (Ennis Del Mar’s wife) portrays the strong feminine perspective wondrously, as does Jack Twist. They are nest builders. Jack dreams of the cattle ranch together with Ennis, that Ennis equates as their demise, most assuredly their end. Alma and Ennis also contrast the two differing perspectives when Alma says, ‘Ennis please, no more damn lonely ranches for us.’ And Ennis replies, ‘You could make it beautiful and homey here too if only you wanted to.’ She replies, ‘You don’t want it so lonely for your girls, like it was for you, do you? You don’t want to be so all alone, do you?’ He concedes, slides his hand into her wet gap, till she shudders, then rolls her over, and does quickly what she hates.

Ennis as a worker with livestock, gets too that his and Alma’s bedroom full of the smell of old blood, milk and baby shit, and of the sounds of squalling, sucking and groans, are all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance. He gets that but not Jack’s need to be together, until his death, when he opens the closet, and hugging his shirt inside Jack’s, cries ‘Jack, I swear...’. What’s he promising here? I think he’s made a space and took Jack within, assimilating him for always, never to be seperate again. Love conquered death, it’s eternal connection outlasts it. Ennis gets this, death is not their end, Jack continues within, and it transforms Ennis. He no longer had to be alone, no longer had to go on the roundup, and miss his girls wedding. He’s not so different, he belongs. I’ve taken my deceased father and my grandparents within me, to stay.

My father’s reality change came radically upon him, like Scrooge after the third angel, when he first was diagnosed with cancer 13 years ago. The Trust department was not for profits and investments, after that, but the caretaker of the community and staff. It was a friend of the widow, an advocate of the sick, and of the downcast, needing a last chance. It was the guardian of the town’s, counties, countries future, of their dreams, hopes, plans. His children and wife weren’t like so many other possessions outside him, any longer, that he took such good care of, that shoes from college looked new. He brought us within, as beloved parts of himself, then.

So it’s just a theory, take it for what it’s worth to you, but that I very much believe in, that all that binds us, gay or straight, sexual or spiritual, are all derivatives and blessed expressions of the one and same energy of oneness.

Automaton (Jim)

Automaton 12/23/2005

I was collapsing in on myself, after my fathers death and the final break off with Ty. I was getting very anxious, having a hard time doing the simplest things. I couldn’t face the world, but this time I couldn’t simply hide away from it either. The world would not go away that easily this time, till I was ready to come back. I had clients, and a job that I’d have to call each day to make my excuse, and three days away would require a note from a doctor. Besides I’d be called here at the house.

This had happened once before, when it finally sank in that it was over with Bobby, the artist I’d been with when I first came to Atlanta. When nothing I could do would change that, it hit bedrock. I had pulled away from Bobby first, about a year before the end. It had happened when I went home, that all my romantic feelings evaporated, no matter that I’d brought him with me, for the very purpose of bridging that very disconnect. I actually got sick, supposably from food poisoning from a sealed apple juice drink, so that I threw up beginning about an hour from home, every half hour, for three days. He flew back after two days. After that, the distance and emptiness between us grew and grew.

In the end I had known he was seeing some guy from his gym. So it was mutual that we’d separate. But a month after that, I knew I’d pushed him away, not intentionally, but had just the same. It wasn’t a far push though, given his inherent detachment though. But now I knew I loved him absolutely and would do anything to get him back. Anything!

I wasn’t confusing him with perfection, though. In fact, he was a lousy lover. He’d resent his way into it, do it quickly, and then refuse to touch or talk afterwards. And I loved his art but it’d consume him. For three weeks or a month, he’d paint on it night and day. Nothing else existed when it had a hold of him. And when it was done, and beautiful, and moving, and perfect, he’d start another. He was a quiet, insular guy. He could be an asshole too. He’d told my Mom seeing Illinois in winter, was to see death, an utterly depressing place, where even the firs turned rust brown. It looked to him like the day after a nuclear holocaust, devoid of life. So true but how callous.

But after he was away a month, the spell of going home was finally broken, and my feelings were back. I wept. I really, really loved him, faults and all. How could those feelings have been lost at home?

I’ve always had the ability to turn completely cold, where my feelings were gone, where I could erase my Dad, so that he no longer could touch me, where he no longer existed. In computers detachment was handy. In a crisis I was an automaton, unhampered by care, urgency, regret or fear. The sheer opposite of collapsed in on myself, where emotions and feeling had devastated me, and laid me to waste, where I couldn’t go on. Untouchable, I was unassailable.

So there were advantages to being an automaton. I was efficient, things ran as they should, money was plentiful. Circumstances, consequences, hopes, disappointments, were so irrelevant they were forgotten. In fact each night I did a complete reset of the hard-drive within me, back to the pristine way it had come from the factory originally. All the wear on me from the day, where anyone or anything had gotten in, was erased. I slept like a happy Australian. No concerns, mate. It might make me sick going back home, to be snapped back into the way I’d learned to survive where a person could not, but snap back I did anyhow. And my life was instantly back on track, reset, regardless of how I wanted it, or felt. Hell, that was the beauty of it, I no longer felt or willed.

Maybe some of Bobby’s detachment in his art and as a lover came from home too. I’d first gone to his place, years before, for Christmas. We’d come in in the middle of the night, about 2 AM. It was snowing and cold, on their ranch, about an hour south of Nashville. Bobby jumped down out of the big farm Silverado, he’d bought from his father. It fit some past him and yet didn’t fit a suave interior architect in Atlanta. Looking out my door then I saw a part Rottweiler, part St. Bernard, Cujo, with a head the size of a bear. I hauled Bobby’s ass back in the truck until he’d told Cujo three times that I was not to be eaten.

Cujo never took his eyes off me the whole three days we were there. The first day he would stay between two and four feet from me, staring unflinchingly at me at all times. Day two, he’d stay in the same room, perhaps slightly aside of me. Day three he’d be in earshot of me. I was on a short leash.

When we came in that first night, Bobby had tucked me in his old bed, and giving me a kiss and Cujo a pat, he then slipped down the hall, in the dark, to sleep on a bench in the laundry room. As I got up to pee, feeling my way to my door and out into the hall, a big set of arms suddenly embraced me, and lips kissed me on the neck, saying ‘Welcome home son.’

Three days later, as we left, I said to Bobby, ‘I’ve never been more confused in my life.’ One moment your father clearly likes me, where he’s proudly showing me his race-horses, and the next I’m sure he’s going to kill me outright. What was going on with him, I asked? Bobby said, ‘I did amazingly well.’ I was the first guy friend he’d had to the ranch since he was 12, that his father hadn’t physically thrown off. I’m sure I had deeply confused the poor old guy, since I was in deep, deep hiding, even from myself. Lucky for me, since he was just the type to literally have killed me, had he known.

So with my burning desire, I had managed to get invited to Bobby’s home again for Christmas. On the way back, I told him that I new now my deep love for him and that I would do whatever it took to make it work. I wasn’t prepared for the ‘No’, that he couldn’t just go back. The possibility of that answer had never even occurred to me.

So I went home and for three days, shut the shades, didn’t eat or sleep, just cried. Then I came back out, not sure how to go on, but took the steps out the door none-the-less, to go on.

As I had said, it was different with Ty. It was more like how it had ended with Scott, where I simply couldn’t carry the burden of keeping them together any longer. Even though I loath authority figures, I sure can be one. I dream of someone taking care of me but attract the exact opposite. Fate has a wry sense of humor.
It’s no accident that I called Ty today, while my two best friends are away with their families for Christmas. I told him I thought about what he’d said, that he knew we couldn’t have a relationship anymore but he’d sure hate to lose me out of his life completely. I’d hate that too, so I called to say so.

It wasn’t enough that my family had forgiven him, my friends must too. He invited me then to spend Christmas Eve with him and his roomie. When I declined the mistletoe, spirits and romantic setup, he knew I feared seeing him, and was emboldened. He demanded I take him to work for making him late. Everything was back to right where we had left off for him, with no reflection nor change. Fifteen minutes later he called to let me know he had my number now. He’s as manipulative as ever!

With no where to escape the world, as I unraveled from Ty, I’d called Grady. The ambulance drivers drove me all over town, refusing to take me to Grady, arguing I didn’t need it. I sat then on the 13th floor for hours of observation, on a chair, till I was again dismissed. I returned and was escorted out by security. On the street I threw myself into a parked truck, ending up with nothing worse than a bad knot on my head. Then I wandered down the street a block, with paranoia setting in. I imagined the world ending somehow because of me, and that the all nations and the public were watching me on highest alert. Returning to the lobby, I peed on myself. Finally I returned to the 13th floor again, and was told to wait in a room to be admitted. I didn’t want that either. A doctor came out to take me in. I refused. So they reluctantly arrested me, charging me with criminal trespass. I imagined my parents saw me taken to jail, on national TV, as a disgraced terrorist. I stayed in jail three days, refusing to leave the first day because I was unwilling to be out there yet. That first night there I asked for solitary confinement, and imagined I heard the bombs falling outside, the beginning of the end. Jail provided just the escape and containment I had needed, though, and I’d avoided a diagnosis that would have followed me forever.

I think I unravel so because I finally experience love, like a genie in a bottle for three thousand years, finally out, and about to be stuffed back away again. My word means something. I begged Ronny, my friend not to take the vows of chastity as a priest, without meaning it. He crossed his fingers. When I told my parents I’d never love a man like I’d loved Mickie, I didn’t cum with another one till Ty, some twenty-five years later. And when desire was released then it was the start of a new life, not a continuation of the old. I really meant to be with Bocko, Mickie, Scott, Bobby and Ty forever. I just couldn’t. These memoirs though are beginning to reconnect all the fragments, and bridge the chasm between this life and that former one.

Isn’t my spiritual life imprisoned in a similar bottle, just waiting for the right rub, to release it?

The Aftermath? (Peggy)

Gentlemen: This has been an immensely rewarding experience on so many levels, and I really don't want it to end completely. Of course we can continue blogging, but the real heart of the thing is the gathering. Would anyone be interested in continuing on our own? How about a monthly meeting on the first Tuesday (or whatever)? I gladly volunteer to hostess, though you should know I have three dogs and a huge aversion to housework. I'm in Candler Park, so I should be about the same distance as Cliff's for most of you. Feedback, please... (Oh, and most importantly, I will miss y'all. You're quite the collection of all the personal qualities that intrigue, delight and challenge me. It's been a privilege. Also, thank you all for making me feel welcome and included despite the gender gap. I bet a group of straight men wouldn't/couldn't have been 1/100th as open as you were with me. Hell, I wouldn't have signed up if it was me and a group of straight men. Ugh.)

Slate Article on Lolita, re: Author/Narrator (Peg)

Here's the URL for the article I mentioned. The Author/Narrator stuff doesn't come up until pretty far in, so be patient. Would love to hear, especially from Brad and Jim, whether y'all feel it's relevant to the questions raised last night.

http://www.slate.com/id/2132708/

Through His Webcam... (Todd)

I am reposting the article from the NYTimes on Justin Berry, the webcam boy.

I found this story resonanted a lot with me. Parts of my story are embedded in his. I did come of age in the online world, though mine certainly has a happier present - but I had so many of the same experiences, including flying around the country, as a teenager, to meet other men. If I was only smart enough to have gotten paid.

The other angle of this is why has this journalist become so engaged and leading in this kid's life. What the fuck has happened to the NY Times? Is there no 'journalism' left?


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19kids.ready.html?8bl


December 19, 2005
Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World
By KURT EICHENWALD
The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.

Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.

Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.

"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"

Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.

So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.

The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money.

"We've been aware of the use of the Webcam and its potential use by exploiters," said Ernest E. Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private group. "But this is a variation on a theme that we haven't seen. It's unbelievable."

Minors who run these sites find their anonymity amusing, joking that their customers may be the only adults who know of their activities. It is, in the words of one teenage site operator, the "Webcam Matrix," a reference to the movie in which a computerized world exists without the knowledge of most of humanity.

In this virtual universe, adults hunt for minors on legitimate sites used by Webcam owners who post contact information in hopes of attracting friends. If children respond to messages, adults spend time "grooming" them - with praise, attention and gifts - before seeking to persuade them to film themselves pornographically.

The lure is the prospect of easy money. Many teenagers solicit "donations," request gifts through sites like Amazon.com or negotiate payments, while a smaller number charge monthly fees. But there are other beneficiaries, including businesses, some witting and some unwitting, that provide services to the sites like Web hosting and payment processing.

Not all victims profit, with some children ending up as pornographic commodities inadvertently, even unknowingly. Adolescents have appeared naked on their Webcams as a joke, or as presents for boyfriends or girlfriends, only to have their images posted on for-pay pornography sites. One Web site proclaims that it features 140,000 images of "adolescents in cute panties exposing themselves on their teen Webcams."

Entry into this side of cyberspace is simplicity itself. Webcams cost as little as $20, and the number of them being used has mushroomed to 15 million, according to IDC, an industry consulting group. At the same time, instant messaging programs have become ubiquitous, and high-speed connections, allowing for rapid image transmission, are common.

The scale of Webcam child pornography is unknown, because it is new and extremely secretive. One online portal that advertises for-pay Webcam sites, many of them pornographic, lists at least 585 sites created by teenagers, internal site records show. At one computer bulletin board for adults attracted to adolescents, a review of postings over the course of a week revealed Webcam image postings of at least 98 minors.

The Times inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation. In June, The Times located Justin Berry, then 18. In interviews, Justin revealed the existence of a group of more than 1,500 men who paid for his online images, as well as evidence that other identifiable children as young as 13 were being actively exploited.

In a series of meetings, The Times persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department. Arrests and indictments of adults he identified as pornography producers and traffickers began in September. Investigators are also focusing on businesses, including credit card processors that have aided illegal sites. Anyone who has created, distributed, marketed, possessed or paid to view such pornography is open to a criminal charge.

"The fact that we are getting so many potential targets, people who knowingly bought into a child pornographic Web site, could lead to hundreds of other subjects and potentially save hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet," said Monique Winkis, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is working the case.

Law enforcement officials also said that, with the cooperation of Justin, they had obtained a rare guide into this secluded online world whose story illuminates the exploitation that takes place there.

"I didn't want these people to hurt any more kids," Justin said recently of his decision to become a federal witness. "I didn't want anyone else to live the life I lived."

A High-Tech Transformation

Not long ago, the distribution of child pornography in America was a smallish trade, relegated to back rooms and corners where even the proprietors of X-rated bookstores refused to loiter.

By the mid-1980's, however, technology had transformed the business, with pedophiles going online to communicate anonymously and post images through rudimentary bulletin board systems. As Internet use boomed in the 1990's, these adults honed their computer skills, finding advanced ways to meet online and swap illegal photos; images once hard to obtain were suddenly available with the click of a mouse.

As the decade drew to a close, according to experts and records of online conversations, these adults began openly fantasizing of the day they would be able to reach out to children directly, through instant messaging and live video, to obtain the pornography they desired.

Their dream was realized with the Web camera, which transformed online pornography the way the automobile changed transportation. At first, the cameras, some priced at more than $100, offered little more than grainy snapshots, "refreshed" a few times per minute. But it was not long before easy-to-use $20 Webcams could transmit high-quality continuous color video across the globe instantly.

By 2000, things had worked out exactly the way the pedophiles hoped. Webcams were the rage among computer-savvy minors, creating a bountiful selection of potential targets.

Among them was Justin Berry. That year, he was a gangly 13-year-old with saucer eyes and brown hair that he often dyed blond. He lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister in Bakersfield, Calif., a midsize city about 90 miles north of Los Angeles. Already he was so adept at the computer that he had registered his own small Web site development business, which he ran from the desk where he did his schoolwork.

So Justin was fascinated when a friend showed off the free Webcam he had received for joining Earthlink, an Internet service provider. The device was simple and elegant. As Justin remembers it, he quickly signed up, too, eager for his own Webcam.

"I didn't really have a lot of friends," he recalled, "and I thought having a Webcam might help me make some new ones online, maybe even meet some girls my age."

As soon as Justin hooked the camera to his bedroom computer and loaded the software, his picture was automatically posted on spotlife.com, an Internet directory of Webcam users, along with his contact information. Then he waited to hear from other teenagers.

No one Justin's age ever contacted him from that listing. But within minutes he heard from his first online predator. That man was soon followed by another, then another.

Justin remembers his earliest communications with these men as nonthreatening, pleasant encounters. There were some oddities - men who pretended to be teenage girls, only to slip up and reveal the truth later - but Justin enjoyed his online community.

His new friends were generous. One explained how to put together a "wish list" on Amazon.com, where Justin could ask for anything, including computer equipment, toys, music CD's or movies. Anyone who knew his wish-list name - Justin Camboy - could buy him a gift. Amazon delivered the presents without revealing his address to the buyers.

The men also filled an emotional void in Justin's life. His relationship with his father, Knute Berry, was troubled. His parents divorced when he was young; afterward, police records show, there were instances of reported abuse. On one occasion Mr. Berry was arrested and charged with slamming Justin's head into a wall, causing an injury that required seven staples in his scalp. Although Justin testified against him, Mr. Berry said the injury was an accident and was acquitted. He declined to comment in a telephone interview.

The emotional turmoil left Justin longing for paternal affection, family members said. And the adult males he met online offered just that. "They complimented me all the time," Justin said. "They told me I was smart, they told me I was handsome."

In that, experts said, the eighth-grade boy's experience reflected the standard methods used by predatory adults to insinuate themselves into the lives of minors they meet online.

"In these cases, there are problems in their own lives that make them predisposed to" manipulation by adults, Lawrence Likar, a former F.B.I. supervisor, said of children persuaded to pose for pornography. "The predators know that and are able to tap into these problems and offer what appear to be solutions."

Justin's mother, Karen Page, said she sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Her son seemed to be just a boy talented with computers who enjoyed speaking to friends online. The Webcam, as she saw it, was just another device that would improve her son's computer skills, and maybe even help him on his Web site development business.

"Everything I ever heard was that children should be exposed to computers and given every opportunity to learn from them," Ms. Page said in an interview.

She never guessed that one of her son's first lessons after turning on his Webcam was that adults would eagerly pay him just to disrobe a little.

The Instant Audience

It was as if the news shot around the Web. By appearing on camera bare-chested, Justin sent an important message: here was a boy who would do things for money.

Gradually the requests became bolder, the cash offers larger: More than $100 for Justin to pose in his underwear. Even more if the boxers came down. The latest request was always just slightly beyond the last, so that each new step never struck him as considerably different. How could adults be so organized at manipulating young people with Webcams?

Unknown to Justin, they honed their persuasive skills by discussing strategy online, sharing advice on how to induce their young targets to go further at each stage.

Moreover, these adults are often people adept at manipulating teenagers. In its investigation, The Times obtained the names and credit card information for the 1,500 people who paid Justin to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. A majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.

Not long ago, adults sexually attracted to children were largely isolated from one another. But the Internet has created a virtual community where they can readily communicate and reinforce their feelings, experts said. Indeed, the messages they send among themselves provide not only self-justification, but also often blame minors with Webcam sites for offering temptation.

"These kids are the ones being manipulative," wrote an adult who called himself Upandc in a posting this year to a bulletin board for adults attracted to children.

Or, as an adult who called himself DLW wrote: "Did a sexual predator MAKE them make a site? No. Did they decide to do it for themselves? Yes."

Tempting as it may be for some in society to hold the adolescent Webcam operators responsible, experts in the field say that is misguided, because it fails to recognize the control that adults exercise over highly impressionable minors.

"The world will want to blame the kids, but the reality is, they are victims here," said Mr. Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

But there is no doubt that the minors cash in on their own exploitation. With Justin, for example, the road to cyberporn stardom was paved with cool new equipment. When his growing legion of fans complained about the quality of his Webcam, he put top-rated cameras and computer gear on his Amazon wish list, and his fans rushed to buy him all of it.

A $35 Asante four-port hub, which allowed for the use of multiple cameras, was bought by someone calling himself Wesley Taylor, Amazon receipts show. For $45, a fan nicknamed tuckertheboy bought a Viking memory upgrade to speed up Justin's broadcast. And then there were cameras - a $60 color Webcam by Hawking Technologies from banjo000; a $60 Intel Deluxe USB camera from boyking12; and a $150 Hewlett-Packard camera from eplayernine.

Justin's desk became a high-tech playhouse. To avoid suspicions, he hid the Webcams behind his desk until nighttime. Whenever his mother asked about his new technology and money, Justin told her they were fruits of his Web site development business. In a way, it was true; with one fan's help, he had by then opened his own pornographic Web site, called justinscam.com.

His mother saw little evidence of a boy in trouble. Justin's grades stayed good - mostly A's and B's, although his school attendance declined as he faked illness to spend time with his Webcam.

As he grew familiar with the online underground, Justin learned he was not alone in the business. Other teenagers were doing the same things, taking advantage of an Internet infrastructure of support that was perfectly suited to illicit business.

As a result, while it helped to have Justin's computer skills, even minors who fumbled with technology could operate successful pornography businesses. Yahoo, America Online and MSN were starting to offer free instant message services that contained embedded ability to transmit video, with no expertise required. The programs were offered online, without parental controls. No telltale credit card numbers or other identifying information was necessary. In minutes, any adolescent could have a video and text system up and running, without anyone knowing, a fact that concerns some law enforcement officials.

There were also credit card processing services that handled payments without requiring tax identification numbers. There were companies that helped stream live video onto the Internet - including one in Indiana that offered the service at no charge if the company president could watch free. And there were sites - portals, in the Web vernacular - that took paid advertising from teenage Webcam addresses and allowed fans to vote for their favorites.

Teenagers, hungry for praise, compete for rankings on the portals as desperately as contestants on TV reality shows, offering special performances in exchange for votes. "Everyone please vote me a 10 on my cam site," a girl nicknamed Thunderrockracin told her subscribers in 2002, "and I will have a live sleep cam!"

In other words, she would let members watch her sleep if they boosted her up the rankings.

Fearing the Fans

Justin began to feel he belonged to something important, a broad community of teenagers with their own businesses. Some he knew by their real names, others by the screen names they used for their sites - Strider, Stoner, Kitty, Calvin, Emily, Seth and so on. But collectively, they were known by a name now commonplace in this Internet subculture:

They call themselves "camwhores."

Justin chatted with the boys online, and sometimes persuaded the girls to masturbate on camera while he did the same. Often, he heard himself compared to Riotboyy, another young-looking teenager whose site had experienced as many as 6,400 hits in a single week.

In conversations with Justin, other minors with for-pay sites admitted to being scared of certain fans. Some adults wrote things like "It wants to possess you." They had special wardrobe requests for the adolescents: in jeans with a belt, without a belt, with a lacy bra, showing legs, showing feet, wearing boxers with an erection, and others.

One 16-year-old who called himself hot boyy 23 finally found the entreaties too much. "Hey guys," he wrote when he shut down his site, "I'm sorry, there are just too many freaks out there for me. I need to live a more normal life, too. I might be back someday and I might not. I'm sorry I had to ruin all the fun."

It was not only the minors operating Webcam sites for pay who faced frightening adults. Earlier this year, a teenage girl in Alabama posed seminude on her Webcam in a sexually charged conversation with someone she thought was another teenage girl. But her new confidant, it turned out, was an adult named Julio Bardales from Napa, Calif., law enforcement officials said. And when the girl stopped complying, she received an e-mail message from Mr. Bardales containing a montage of her images. Across them was a threat in red letters that the images would be revealed unless she showed a frontal nude shot over the Webcam. Mr. Bardales was subsequently arrested. The police said he possessed images of more under-age girls on Webcams, including other montages with the same threat.

Justin says that he did not fully understand the dangers his fans posed, and before he turned 14, he was first lured from the relative safety of his home. A man he met online hosted Justin's Web site from Ann Arbor, Mich., and invited him there to attend a computer camp. Justin's mother allowed him to go, thinking the camp sounded worthwhile.

Another time, the man enticed Justin to Michigan by promising to arrange for him to have sex with a girl. Both times, Justin said, the man molested him. Transcripts of their subsequent conversations online support the accusations, and a video viewed by The Times shows that the man, who appears for a short time in the recording, also taped pornography of Justin.

From then on, Justin's personality took on a harder edge, evident in the numerous instant messages he made available to The Times. He became an aggressive negotiator of prices for his performances. Emboldened by a growing contempt for his audience, he would sometimes leave their questions unanswered for hours, just to prove to himself that they would wait for him.

"These people had no lives," Justin said. "They would never get mad."

Unnerved by menacing messages from a fan of his first site, Justin opened a new one called jfwy.com, an online acronym that loosely translates into "just messing with you." This time, following an idea suggested by one of his fans, he charged subscribers $45 a month. In addition, he could command large individual payments for private shows, sometimes $300 for an hourlong performance.

"What's in the hour?" inquired a subscriber named Gran0Stan in one typical exchange in 2002. "What do you do?"

"I'll do everything, if you know what I mean," Justin replied.

Gran0Stan was eager to watch, and said the price was fine. "When?" he asked.

"Tonight," Justin said. "After my mom goes to sleep."

As his obsession with the business grew, Justin became a ferocious competitor. When another under-age site operator called Strider ranked higher on a popular portal, Justin sent him anonymous e-mail messages, threatening to pass along images from Strider's site to the boy's father. The site disappeared.

"I was vicious," Justin said. "But I guess I really did Strider a favor. Looking back, I wish someone had done that to me."

By then, fans had begun offering Justin cash to meet. Gilo Tunno, a former Intel employee, gave him thousands of dollars to visit him in a Las Vegas hotel, according to financial records and other documents. There, Justin said, Mr. Tunno began a series of molestings. At least one assault was videotaped and the recording e-mailed to Justin, who has since turned it over to the F.B.I.

Mr. Tunno played another critical role in Justin's business, the records show. When he was 15, Justin worried that his mother might discover what he was doing. So he asked Mr. Tunno to sign an apartment lease for him and pay rent. Justin promised to raise money to pay a share. "I'll whore," he explained in a message to Mr. Tunno.

Mr. Tunno agreed, signing a lease for $410 a month for an apartment just down the street from Justin's house. From then on, Justin would tell his mother he was visiting friends, then head to the apartment for his next performance. Mr. Tunno, who remains under investigation in the case, is serving an eight-year federal sentence on an unrelated sexual abuse charge involving a child and could not be reached for comment.

The rental symbolized a problem that Justin had not foreseen: his adult fans would do almost anything to ensure that his performances continued. At its worst, they would stand between him and the people in his offline life whom they saw as a threat to his Webcam appearances.

For example, when a girlfriend of Justin's tried to convince him to shut down his site in December 2002, a customer heaped scorn on her.

"She actually gets mad at you for buying her things with the money you make from the cam?" messaged the customer, a man using the nickname Angelaa. "Just try and remember, Justin, that she may not love you, but most of us in your chat room, your friends, love you very much."

A Life Falls Apart

In early 2003, Justin's offline life began to unravel. A former classmate found pornographic videos on the Internet from Justin's Web site, made copies and handed them out around town, including to students at his school. Justin was taunted and beaten.

Feeling embarrassed and unable to continue at school, Justin begged his mother to allow him to be home-schooled through an online program. Knowing he was having trouble with classmates, but in the dark about the reasons why, she agreed.

Then, in February, came another traumatic event. Justin had begun speaking with his father, hoping to repair their relationship. But that month, Mr. Berry, who had been charged with insurance fraud related to massage clinics he ran, disappeared without a word.

Despairing, Justin turned to his online fans. "My dad left. I guess he doesn't love me," he wrote. "Why did I let him back in my life? Let me die, just let me die."

His father did not disappear for long. Soon, Mr. Berry called his son from Mazatlán, Mexico; Justin begged to join him, and his father agreed.

In Mexico, Justin freely spent his cash, leading his father to ask where the money had come from. Justin said that he confessed the details of his lucrative Webcam business, and that the reunion soon became a collaboration. Justin created a new Web site, calling it mexicofriends, his most ambitious ever. It featured Justin having live sex with prostitutes. During some of Justin's sexual encounters, a traffic tracker on his site showed hundreds watching. It rapidly became a wildly popular Webcam pornography site, making Justin one of the Internet's most sought after under-age pornography stars.

For this site, Justin, then 16, used a pricing model favored by legitimate businesses. For standard subscribers, the cost was $35, billed monthly. But discounts were available for three-month, six-month and annual memberships. Justin used the cash to support a growing cocaine and marijuana habit.

Money from the business, Justin said, was shared with his father, an accusation supported by transcripts of their later instant message conversations. In exchange, Justin told prosecutors and The Times, his father helped procure prostitutes. One video obtained by the F.B.I. shows Mr. Berry sitting with Justin as the camera is turned on, then making the bed before a prostitute arrives to engage in intercourse with his teenage son. Asked about Justin's accusations, Mr. Berry said, "Obviously, I am not going to comment on anything."

In the fall of 2003, Justin's life took a new turn when a subscriber named Greg Mitchel, a 36-year-old fast food restaurant manager from Dublin, Va., struck up an online friendship with the boy and soon asked to visit him. Seeing a chance to generate cash, Justin agreed.

Mr. Mitchel arrived that October, and while in Mexico, molested Justin for what would be the first of many times, according to transcripts of their conversations and other evidence. Mr. Mitchel, who is in jail awaiting trial on six child pornography charges stemming from this case, could not be reached for comment.

Over the following year, Justin tried repeatedly to break free of this life. He roamed the United States. He contemplated suicide. For a time he sought solace in a return to his boyhood Christianity. At one point he dismantled his site, loading it instead with Biblical teachings - and taking delight in knowing the surprise his subscribers would experience when they logged on to watch him have sex.

But his drug craving, and the need for money to satisfy it, was always there. Soon, Mr. Mitchel beckoned, urging Justin to return to pornography and offering to be his business partner. With Mr. Mitchel, records and interviews show, Justin created a new Web site, justinsfriends.com, featuring performances by him and other boys he helped recruit. But as videos featuring other minors appeared on his site, Justin felt torn, knowing that these adolescents were on the path that had hurt him so badly.

Justin was now 18, a legal adult. He had crossed the line from under-age victim to adult perpetrator.

A Look Behind the Secrecy

In June, Justin began communicating online with someone who had never messaged him before. The conversations involved many questions, and Justin feared his new contact might be an F.B.I. agent. Still, when a meeting was suggested, Justin agreed. He says part of him hoped he would be arrested, putting an end to the life he was leading.

They met in Los Angeles, and Justin learned that the man was this reporter, who wanted to discuss the world of Webcam pornography with him. After some hesitation, Justin agreed. At one point, asked what he wanted to accomplish in his life, Justin pondered for a moment and replied that he wanted to make his mother and grandmother proud of him.

The next day, Justin began showing the inner workings of his online world. Using a laptop computer, he signed on to the Internet and was quickly bombarded with messages from men urging him to turn on his Webcam and strip.

One man described, without prompting, what he remembered seeing of Justin's genitals during a show. Another asked Justin to recount the furthest distance he had ever ejaculated. Still another offered an unsolicited description of the sexual acts he would perform on Justin if they met.

"This guy is really a pervert," Justin said. "He kind of scares me."

As the sexual pleadings continued, Justin's hands trembled. His pale face dampened with perspiration. For a moment he tried to seem tough, but the protective facade did not last. He turned off the computer without a final word to his online audience.

In the days that followed, Justin agreed in discussions with this reporter to abandon the drugs and his pornography business. He cut himself off from his illicit life. He destroyed his cellphone, stopped using his online screen name and fled to a part of the country where no one would find him.

As he sobered up, Justin disclosed more of what he knew about the Webcam world; within a week, he revealed the names and locations of children who were being actively molested or exploited by adults with Webcam sites. After confirming his revelations, The Times urged him to give his information to prosecutors, and he agreed.

Justin contacted Steven M. Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and partner with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington. Mr. Ryan had learned of Justin's story during an interview with The Times about a related legal question, and offered to represent him.

On July 14, Mr. Ryan contacted the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department, informing prosecutors that he had a client with evidence that could implicate potentially hundreds of people. By then, Mr. Ryan had learned that some of Justin's old associates, disturbed by his disappearance, were hunting for him and had begun removing records from the Internet. Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors of the dangers to Justin and the potential destruction of evidence. Two weeks passed with little response.

Finally, in late July, Justin met in Washington with the F.B.I. and prosecutors. He identified children who he believed were in the hands of adult predators. He listed the marketers, credit card processors and others who supported Webcam child pornography. He also described the voluminous documentary evidence he had retained on his hard drives: financial information, conversation transcripts with his members, and other records. But that evidence would not be turned over, Mr. Ryan said, until Justin received immunity.

The meeting ended, followed by weeks of silence. Word came back that prosecutors were wrestling with Justin's dual role as a victim and a perpetrator. Justin told associates that he was willing to plead guilty if the government would save the children he had identified; Mr. Ryan dissuaded him.

By September, almost 50 days had passed since the first contact with the government, with no visible progress. Frustrated, Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors that he would have to go elsewhere, and contacted the California attorney general.

That proved unnecessary. Prodded by the F.B.I. and others in the Justice Department, on Sept. 7, prosecutors informed Mr. Ryan that his client would be granted immunity. A little more than four weeks after his 19th birthday, Justin became a federal witness.

A Final Online Confrontation

Five days later, on the third floor of a lakeside house in Dublin, Va., Greg Mitchel - Justin's 38-year-old business partner on his pornography Web site - rested on his bed as he chatted online with others in his illicit business.

Ever since Justin's disappearance weeks before, things had been tense for Mr. Mitchel. Some in the business already suspected that Justin might be talking to law enforcement. One associate had already declared to Mr. Mitchel that, if Justin was revealing their secrets, he would kill the boy.

But this night, Sept. 12, the news on Mr. Mitchel's computer screen was particularly disquieting. An associate in Tennessee sent word that the F.B.I. had just raided a Los Angeles computer server used by an affiliated Webcam site. Then, to Mr. Mitchel's surprise, Justin himself appeared online under a new screen name and sent a greeting.

Mr. Mitchel pleaded with Justin to come out of hiding, inviting the teenager on an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas with him and a 15-year-old boy also involved in Webcam pornography. But Justin demurred.

"You act like you're in witness protection," Mr. Mitchel typed. "Are you?"

"Haha," Justin replied. Did Mr. Mitchel think he would be on the Internet if he was a federal witness? he asked. Justin changed the subject, later asking the whereabouts of others who lived with Mr. Mitchel, including two adolescents; Mr. Mitchel replied that everyone was home that night.

In a location in the Southwest, Justin glanced from his computer screen to a speakerphone. On the line was a team of F.B.I. agents who at that moment were pulling several cars into Mr. Mitchel's driveway, preparing to arrest him.

"The kids are in the house!" Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents.

As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.

"Do you even remember how many times you stuck your hand down my pants?" he typed.

Mr. Mitchel responded that many bad things had happened, but he wanted to regain Justin's trust.

"You molested me," Justin replied. "Don't apologize for what you can't admit."

There was no response. "Peekaboo?" Justin typed.

On the screen, a message appeared that Mr. Mitchel had signed off. The arrest was over.

Justin thrust his hands into the air. "Yes!" he shouted.

In the weeks since the first arrest, F.B.I. agents and prosecutors have focused on numerous other potential defendants. For example, Tim Richards, identified by Justin as a marketer and principal of justinsfriends.com, was arrested in Nashville last month and arraigned on child pornography charges. According to law enforcement officials, Mr. Richards was stopped in a moving van in his driveway, accompanied by a young teenage boy featured by Mr. Richards on his own Webcam site. Mr. Richards has pleaded not guilty.

Hundreds of thousands of computer files, including e-mail containing a vast array of illegal images sent among adults, have been seized from around the country. Information about Justin's members has been downloaded by the F.B.I. from Neova.net, the company that processed the credit cards; Neova and its owner, Aaron Brown, are targets of the investigation, according to court records and government officials. And Justin has begun assisting agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who hope to use his evidence to bring new charges against an imprisoned child rapist.

Justin himself has found a measure of control over his life. He revealed the details of his secret life to his family, telling them of all the times in the past that he had lied to them. He has sought counseling, kept off drugs, resumed his connection with his church and plans to attend college beginning in January.

In recent weeks, Justin returned to his mother's home in California, fearing that - once his story was public - he might not be able to do so easily. On their final day together, Justin's mother drove him to the airport. Hugging him as they said goodbye, she said that the son she once knew had finally returned.

Then, as tears welled in her eyes, Justin's mother told him that she and his grandmother were proud of him.

Dream (Jim)

Crash (Dream) 12/14/2005

My brother Tom and I awake, in our old Carlyle bedroom, in the morning. Because the air was very, very dry, Tom opens the windows a crack. We only have two windows in actuality, but here there’s six windows. As he’s opening them, I notice water coming in. We both look out the window then and are surprised to see the lane and fields alongside my Grandparents farm house, outside our room here. We are even more surprised to see giant ocean waves coming at us across the fields and slamming into our parents house, so hard that it shudders, with spray shooting up over the top of the house. We look at each other with concern, wondering how long the house can take it. Will it ever dry out?

Obsession (Jim)

Prelude to Sex 12/19/2005

He had a strange room. I was snooping around now that he had gone into the bathroom to shave. He shaved his genitals and anus everyday while he showered. At first I thought that really different but then I got to like the absolute nakedness of it. It was like you could get that much closer. This way I could watch his balls pulse, throb, roll and constrict. They were like brown chestnuts, beautiful.

You wouldn’t want to roll out of this bed. It’s be a long drop. He had three mattresses and a spring under me. As I laid their in the center of it, naked, I started to notice a few mirrors focused right on me. I counted them now. There was 16 mirrors, from every angle in the room zeroing right in on me. Whoa! And what is that over by the wall? I jumped out of bed. It looked like a wooden room divider on two small legs, with a hole in the center of it. What a strange thing, wonder what it’s here for? God, it’s a glory hole!

He’s got a lot pictures of himself in here too, and everyone is so different. Black, blond, white, long, afro, and no hair, and him in suits, leather, levis and nothing at all. The rooms dimly lit by several candles, with great deep blues music playing low. I sip my wine.

The dressers are covered in scarfs and fabrics, and trinkets and jewelry. There’s a joint. I gotta peek in a drawer. It’s full of thongs. Another’s full of sex toys. Everything has its place. The bathroom doors opening. I jump back in bed, anxiously waiting for him.

Ohhhh, he looks so hot, dripping naked, and he smells so good! Climb up here, NOW, baby....

Sexy Jewish Men (Jim)

Sexy Jewish Men 12/19/2005

I’m driving home from Lowe’s, and one guy, in a landscape crew, cleaning up a yard, has a yarmulke on. He’s not particularly attractive but not unattractive either, just average, yet he turns my head. I even stare in the rear view mirror till he’s completely out of sight. The other day it happened too as I drive down Briarcliff. I’m rushing somewhere, impatient for the light, and then I see the Jewish guy walk by reading, I assume his prayers. It transports me. I’m suddenly in a prayerful place myself, appreciating things. Imagine, saying his prayers right out in public. I muse that I’ll read the Bible, from cover to cover, this year.

That’s what it is, you know, I find their, wear it on your cuff, spirituality alluring. I know of no other people identified solely by their spirituality. I use to think they were strange because they were so different. But they give purpose to being different, so they aren’t lost in the crowd, so their not contaminated, where they forget who they are. A young gay guy in my CODA group recently converted to conservative Judaism, just for their strong sense of community, tradition and direction. They are the chosen, a people that set themselves aside for God. Cool! I like that. Don’t you too?

I’m suddenly fascinated by all their intricacies, the bushy sideburns, the beards, the strange foods, the traditions, Etc., Etc., Etc... Different for a reason. Isn’t that s e x y ?

What’s happening to me?

Reflections (Jim)

Right Now 12/15/2005

Right now reminds me to a great extent of my life after college. Working at Rockwell International, a job I hated to survive, is like Lowe’s. Only now I don’t know if Lowe’s will ever go away. At Rockwell they said I could afford to be the rebel but they had to be sheep because eventually management would get me if I stayed, as they must. But my rebellion is not with work and authority now as it was then. Perhaps I’m meant to be a tentmaker, like apostle Paul, or a carpenter, like Jesus, while I do my real life’s work outside of how I make my living, like most people do.

Now also reminds me of then in that I’m coming out of a great disillusionment. I admit I have a little bit of the Danny Thomas syndrome, where if God makes me great, I promise I’ll build him a great shrine (St. Jude’s). But at 49 I accept that my heyday, to be noticed, is past, and that my contributions will be modest. But unlike then, they will be mine now. Work will never consume me again, as it eventually did.

At 40, facing suicide, I knew what I had to do, to live. I had to find a way to give back. So if it’s not in how I make a living then in some other way. If licensure doesn’t let me do the work I must do, then outside that path too. How doesn’t matter. Versus back then, after college, I had to find a way to fit in. Back then it was survival. Now it is about my meaning, about who I am.

What was it that I needed to survive anyhow, that had run out at 40, that I’ve sought all my life? It is to belong. It’s the basis for everything I do or have ever done. It’s not why I must now give back though. I have to give back to life because it’s something I now feel part of.

Yet strangely enough, I still live so distant and detached, like it’s my nature now. Atlanta feels painfully far from family now, but it is home too. It’s my siblings children I most fear. My namesake, my gay Uncle Jim, is just the same way as me here. He too felt deeply estranged from his father. I live quite vicariously. If it wasn’t for friends, I’d do nothing but work.

My father changed over night into a deeply compassionate, sensitive man, when facing cancer for the first time 13 long years ago. He remained unnatural and awkward with it, but didn’t care from then on. He stayed deeply connected and expressive of it from then on. To let myself belong fully would be to deeply let go.

Varieties of Religious Experience (Jim)

On Ecstacy, Rude Awakenings and the Varieties of Religious Experience 12/19/2005

The Zen have a saying ‘Good Day; Bad Day; Same Day.’ Which is similar to the La Kota saying that goes like this... ‘We see that God comes into the world with two faces. One is the face of joy and one is the face of sorrow. It’s the same face.’ That’s the way I see God.

In the sermon today, the clergy candidate wanted to see an angel. Maybe then he’d know for sure exactly what he was to do. Of course, the first word out of an angels mouth in the Bible, is ‘Be Not Afraid’. So they’re not fat little smiling cherubs. They’re fierce and lay some pretty heavy burdens on you, when they appear. You have good reason to be afraid if one knocks at your door. No matter how clear the messenger, a day or two later, you’re questioning whether it was real or not anyhow. Was that real?

In ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’, William James describes two type of conversions. Type one is extremely rare, like apostle Paul’s conversion, where they are struck by a bolt of lightening, and are different from that day forth. My visions and ecstacy and demon experiences, I believe, belong to this category. I had it and miss it but I don’t think I any longer really want it again. The experiences are absolute. The mountains are high and the chasms are oh so deep. The second type of conversion, the more common one, is more me now, where one eeks a step forward in trust, and then retreats back a little. Perhaps I’m okay now with this slower, less dramatic, less sure, seeking. Maybe wishing for an angel is not such a good idea.

God's Will (Jim)

I have often believed that my mystic experiences and dreams or deep in prayer when an answer comes to me, are ultimate truth, “God’s will” speaking almost directly to me. I have to wonder about that assumption now though. It is clearly a powerful avenue for me to confront something that overwhelms me on the literal plane, and it does come up with solutions way beyond myself, but is it God’s will for me, I wonder? Embarking on the path that led to the demon experience, I do not believe was God’s will, or was it, it sure seemed so at the time. But surely it was God who answered my fervent prayers, rescuing me from hell of the demon experience and grounding me in myself again. But that left me a shattered shell of myself, unable to make any decision, or care for myself. That was a “Will” I’ve feared for the rest of my life. And the two Reiki experiences, though wonderfully empowering and healing, felt like the touch of a very different god than Christianity’s. Shamanic spirituality and it’s oh so earthly visions likewise feel very different. I experience an underworld, middle world and upper world in Reiki and Shamanism that work in unison, where evil or good, man or animal, flesh or spirit, alive or dead, are nonissues, coexisting, rather than being exclusionary polar opposites. So even my sense of and experience of God varies.

Another vision, that at the time I took as God’s acceptance of my sexuality, but that I now am less sure of its meaning, is the vision of the 60 foot phallus on the alter, that arose as I tried to hold onto my sense of desire while in worship in church. Had desire, turned to lust, become a false god in me that I now worshiped more so than God? That’s the question the vision confronted me with. How dare I bring depravity into the house of God. Was my desire depravity in God’s eyes? As lust, desire was dangerously out-of-control in me then. Lust would lead me to relish the power in knowing I had it in me to rape someone, though I did not do so. And it would be a stronger basis than love, beneath my relationship with Ty, though both were powerfully present. So was the vision, since it vanished when I thought I felt God’s acceptance of it on his alter, acceptance of my desire, or was it a rejection of desire gone berserk? It was probably both. That’s the thing about God’s will, it seems to be able to be in two contradictory positions at once.
So as you can see, I’m not sure how or when or if my Higher Power is speaking to me, ever. The visionary plane is not solely heavenly. Nor is God solely heavenly it seems now. Nor is his will clear, or one-sided, it’s more of a countradiction I think. Often I see one-side of God’s will for me, and not the balancing opposite-part, I fear. God’s will is very complex and beyond me I think, so I don’t know how I’ll know it, or how to stay in touch with it. I know it can be dangerous for me to convince myself that I am living in God’s will.

A Limited Letting Go (Jim)

I move into deep relationship with God, only by doing exactly that, by moving into deep moment to moment relationship with God. I know how to do that but fear it. I think I do it a bit differently than most. Eastern meditation sees letting go of your will in meditation as a letting go of attachments, which they do by creating a space of nothingness. I create a similar space but not for it’s own sake. When I do that I know of no way to describe it except to say that I turn my back on my will. The reason I step out of the drivers seat, turn my back on my will, is to allow God’s will to come in. Problem is I don’t know what will come in, I’ve been mistaken or deceived before. So I tend to look over my shoulder, always distrusting any will but my own. It’s like the feeling I have with Ty that I could never trust him again.

Jeff - Gushing

Jeff Week 8

Throughout my early childhood, I was the beautiful one. My mother gushed over me constantly. I was her beautiful baby boy. Many of my mother’s friends as well as other family members gushed too...”look at his pretty eyes”, “he has such beautiful blond hair”, “such a pretty smile”, “his skin is so beautiful”, “and he’s such a charmer”, etc. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Honestly I heard it over and over and over again. I became very accustomed to hearing it and I’m sure, expected to hear it, wanted to hear it, needed to hear it. If it was a slow day and I wasn’t getting “the” attention, I found a way to divert attention to me. Was I addicted to the attention? Of course I was.

One year (during elementary school), I looked sort of feminine in my school picture. I remember my mother saying, “You would have been a pretty girl.”…others agreed with her. I can also remember my mother saying, “stop being so prissy” or “you’re being such a pansy.”

I have an older brother and sister. My sister was noticed a lot because she was the only girl in the family. But my brother was a humble child and was left behind. He tended to fade into the background and maintain a low profile. I remember feeling sorry for him, thinking that no one ever noticed him. I even felt bad because people noticed me and thought I was beautiful but didn’t pay him the same compliments. Today, my brother is the most successful in our family.

Naturally as I got older, the gushing slowed down. It began to slow down when I entered junior high school. I was in the middle of puberty and becoming a young man so I guess it just wasn’t appropriate any longer. As the compliments became more infrequent, my perception of myself began to change. Had I lost my appeal? Was I no longer beautiful? Puberty presented a lot of changes. My hair darkened. My face broke out….pimples. Stray hairs sprouted on my face but for some reason I was embarrassed to start shaving…dark hair growing on my body and legs, more embarrassment. Pimples on my back. Then I had to get glasses…I became a “four eyes” like my brother had when he was in first grade.

By the time high school came around, I realized that I could change my appearance and maybe get attention again…visits to the dermatologist, hair salon, eye doctor, etc. Blond hair again, curls, waves. Contact lenses helped. Wardrobe was easy…I could buy nice clothing that would be noticed. I was voted “Best Dressed” in high school. That was an achievement…graduating with honors didn’t matter to me.

Mom had breast implants while I was in high school.

I became a model when I was seventeen. Mom encouraged me to try it. She said things like, “you’re tall, slender and can wear anything”, “you have great hair and bone structure”, “you carry yourself well”. It sounded good to me…people might think I’m beautiful again. My first show was a bridal show at The Hilton in Tampa. The place was packed with soon to be brides and their mothers. I had five changes…and I loved wearing the tuxedos. That show went really well for me…the coordinators liked me so I was able to continue doing shows for them until I was done with high school. Mom came to that first show. She sat in the back row. She left immediately after it was over. She never came to another show. I was a faggot model.

When I started college…WHEW…the pressure was off. No one knew me at UF except for a few others from my high school. Since I left for college the day I graduated from college, I literally went from “Best Dressed” to unshaven, long, frizzy perm haired, flip flop wearing college bum overnight. The change in my appearance was drastic but liberating. Freedom…it was nice but not long lasting. I needed to keep up, to be noticed again.

Mom had her nose and eyes done while I was in college.

I think it was 1984 when I went to see the plastic surgeon for the first time. I wanted to see what he could do with my nose. He said that he could make my nose narrower and more contoured. And, he said that he would fix my “flaring” nostrils. Fabulous. Mom paid for it. I hated my nose for at least a year after that…”fixing” my nose didn’t make a difference…it got me some attention but…my life didn’t change. Post rhinoplasty was a let down.

Braces came next. I remember telling the orthodontist, “let’s make this quick”. Eleven months later, I had “straight” teeth. The change was minor.

Throughout college, I was a makeup artist…beauty, beauty, beauty. I also modeled for a few years…look at me…attention, attention, attention.

After college, my only improvements to my appearance involved exercise and diet. For several years during my early 30’s, I got up at 3:30AM, Monday through Friday to do sit ups. By 5AM, I was in the car headed for the gym. I made my workouts as grueling and punishing as possible…because it was during my early 30’s that my body began to change. I couldn’t be fat…my dad was fat.

Mom had her breast implants removed and had breast reduction surgery.

By the time I was 35, my hair started to fall out. I was not happy about that at all. To make matters worse, something was going wrong with my skin. “What’s that on your face?” My face was red, rough, scaly and clogged. “What’s that on your face?” Several dermatologists and all kinds of lotions and creams and ointments later, I was diagnosed with rosacea. Then a couple years later, I developed eczema…all on my face. Lovely.

In 1999, vision correction.

My rosacea and eczema continued to be a constant struggle. My face was freakishly red, scaly and peeling most of the time. People commented that I glowed red or asked how I had gotten such a sunburn in the middle of winter. The embarrassment was unbearable. I couldn’t talk about it…I wasn’t able to say that I had rosacea. I stopped going out…staying home was so much easier than the questions. “What’s that on your face?”..I heard that question in my head constantly. I felt so unattractive…it was painful. Was it payback for all of the attention for all those years? Did I deserve it?

Accutane…such a pleasant drug. But it helped.

In 2001, I turned 40. NOT GOOD. But, I discovered lasers. So, I began to have my face lasered. And, they could remove hair with lasers too. Yippee, maybe the laser could help my face and remove the hair that had sprouted on my back and shoulders. Also in 2001, I decided that I couldn't be bald and have this ugly, red, scaly face so I got my first hair transplant…1760 tiny little holes in the top of my head. It was a banner year.

Another hair transplant in 2002. I really don’t like the term “hair transplant” so now I affectionately refer to it as “having my hair moved”… 1730 tiny little holes in the top of my head. More back lasering with a different doctor, face lasering still with the original doctor. I had the “bruising” laser that year. Too bad it wasn’t Halloween because I would have had the best make up…my face was purple from my neck up. I didn’t leave my house for thirteen days.

Face lasering continued in 2003, same doctor. I think I finally got over turning 40.

I had more hair moved in 2004…1500 tiny little holes in the top of my head. More lasering for hair removal on my back, yet another new laser place.

A little more than five weeks ago, I had more hair moved…only 850 tiny little holes in the top of my head…what a disappointment. More lasering for hair removal on my back, same laser place. And since I’m such a good customer, they gave me a special price on face lasering…I started that two months ago.

Throughout the years, I have used countless products to improve my appearance. My rosacea is under control…the lasers helped. My eczema continues to live on my face…like a parasite that can’t be controlled. “What’s that on your face?”…I still hear it. Diets, diets, diets…can’t be fat.

Why? For what? For the attention? To be beautiful? What? Does it matter? When will the gushing begin?

I know I’ll never get there. I know I’m fighting a losing battle. I know, I know, I know. But it’s been a life long pursuit…like I’ve been trained or have trained myself to pursue anything and everything that might help. Help what? Feed the addiction? How to stop? The attention stopped a long time ago. Stop the pursuit…just be.

UGH…This has been painful to write.

Jeff - What's That on Your Face

Jeff
Week 8

“What’s that on your face?” “Go brush your teeth.” “Get a haircut, you’re starting to look like a girl.” “You need to shave every morning.”

“You have a spot on your shirt, now it’s ruined.” “You can’t wear that, there’s a hole in it.” “Polish your shoes.” “Where are you going looking like that?”

“Sit up straight.” “Stand up straight.” “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“What are you whining about?” “Quit you’re crying.” “Stop your bellyaching.” “Stop being such a Mama’s boy, are you a Mama’s boy?” “You’re just a titty baby, a Mama’s boy.” “Stop acting like such a pansy.”

“Maybe next time you’ll make all As.” “At least act like you know what you’re doing.”


He didn’t start to pay attention until around the time of junior high school. “What’s that on your face”, he snapped. It didn’t matter if it was a pimple or a cookie crumb or a smudge, it wasn’t acceptable. “Get in there and clean yourself up.” A cookie crumb or a smudge was easy to take care of, but how could I wipe away a pimple? I knew that he would continue to criticize me about the pimple or would tease me about the smell of the Clearasil that I would use to try to cover it up. “And while you’re in there, do me a favor and shave…you look like hell.” When it was a pimple on my face, I was so embarrassed and ashamed and felt like it was my fault…maybe I had eaten too much candy. He always said that candy was bad for me. I would do whatever I could to hide the blemishes on my face. Of course he never had pimples, or so he said.

Not that his personal appearance was so great. His beard was usually rough and shaggy, as was his hair…think Saddam Hussein when they pulled him out from under that rock. His clothing was rarely fresh, in fact, many times stained and/or torn. He received clothing for Christmas but refused to wear anything new until his current wardrobe was sufficiently worn out. He always smelled of beer or alcohol or chewing tobacco. And, he was fat…something I can never be because of him although I am currently the heaviest I have ever been in my life. He wasn’t just chubby…he had a big, beer gut hanging over his underwear, fatness…all bloated and disproportionate. Him sleeping on the couch in his underwear, snoring, mouth open, taking up space…I can see it so well. His truck was filled with empty beer cans, a couple of them always clanking to the ground when you opened the door. And it smelled of stale beer, like a Bourbon Street bar at about 9AM. His shop and boats were always a mess and also smelled. His chewing tobacco habit was disgusting.

“Do as I say, not as I do”, he always told me. His criticisms and judgements flowed so freely and naturally. I’m guessing that he thought he was doing his job, as if his purpose was to improve me by tearing me down. “What’s that on your face?” It always appeared to me that he was above any judgement even though I could see that he was far from perfect. And I know that he felt that laws and rules did not apply to him because he always did things his way. Breaking the law was not uncommon.

As a small child, really for as long as I can remember, I hated him. I always wished that he would leave one day and never come back. I’m ok with these thoughts now because if I were presented with this situation today, I would place the responsibility on the adult (when a very young child has such feelings). However, as many children might, I thought it was my fault and that I was a bad child for hoping that he would go away.

Why didn’t I like him? He scared me. Why was I afraid of him? He was loud and gruff and abrupt. Why was I so uncomfortable with him? He was mean. Why didn’t I like to be alone with him? He was too scary. Did he ever hug me? I don’t think so. Was he jealous of me? Probably. Who was he? I don’t know.

I guess he thought that his job with me didn’t begin until after I was out of elementary school. Before that, I don’t remember much attention from him at all which was fine with me. In fact, I avoided him. Then, all of the sudden, he became engaged and got involved…and he expected and demanded perfection. Perfection in how I looked, dressed, behaved, spoke. I had to present myself appropriately, say all of the right things at the right times, look the part. If I wasn’t what he thought I should be, he let me know it in his negative and sarcastic way. I dreaded seeing him and hearing the sound of his voice. His tone was filled with disdain. Every day was judgement day. “What’s that on your face?” Schoolwork had to be the best…a B was not acceptable.

He continued to berate me for as long as I lived with him. He had been winning for so many years…as a toddler and during my early childhood, he scared me and ignored me. As a preteen and early teen, he expected and demanded and criticized. His verbal beatings were short and concise but so penetrating and long lasting. “What’s that on your face?” But the year I turned sixteen, I began to push back. Finally, I stood up to him. At first, I was tentative. But over time, I became more and more brave…me, in his face, screaming at him. If he criticized me, I criticized him. Anything that he stood for, I was against. When he lectured me or demanded something of me, I laughed at him. For some reason, he took it…he never pushed me, hit me or became physical in any way. But our mutual hatred for each other was clear.

I had learned from a master. “What’s that on your face?” I learned to level him as he had leveled me so many times. I still hated him and wished that he would go away. And I stopped feeling bad about that.

Today, my Dad is one of those old men who screams, “Get out of my yard”, to the neighborhood kids. I rarely speak to him and see him even less. When I do talk to him on the phone, all I can think about is how I can hurry up and end the call. “What’s that on your face?” It’s interesting, he’s soft and quiet and even likeable now. I guess that a long time ago, we both gave up…we agreed to disagree? But I’ll never give him a chance. I don’t really hate him any more…I’m indifferent, or I maybe I just like to think that. Does he matter to me? No. Do I care if I see him? No.

The last time we spoke, I told him that I was going to send him a clock for his birthday that gets a signal from a satellite so it never loses time and never has to be set. The perfect clock for a not so perfect man. I never bought the clock or sent his birthday card, which is still in the bottom of a drawer somewhere…his birthday was in July. Maybe I’ll send it with his Christmas gift…which will be more clothes he will probably store away until just the right time to finally wear them. “What’s that on your face?” I’m sure he thinks it when he sees the redness of my skin from my rosacea or when he sees my eczema that has lived on my face for many years now. “What’s that on your face?” He never says it any more. He doesn’t have to say it. I still hear it though…I hear it all the time.

Manipulative Martyr Fam Syndrome, 1 and 2 RAY

The Manipulative Martyr Family Syndrome, Parts 1 & 2 (Ray)

--Or, as I like to call it, Adolf Hitler meets the perfect Eva Braun and has kids.

My father, as far as I know, never drove any Jews into a gas oven, nor did he ever grow one of those pathetic little mustaches, and yet he could have been, in his own small-scale, family way, quite the Hitler protg. He absolutely breathed fire at us three kids (older sister, younger brother, and me) so unpredictably that one could reasonably conclude he did it just for fun. Were he now a couple of decades younger he'd make a perfect subject for a reality TV series since he has one of the most sine qua non qualifications for such: The ability to go to pieces over nothing.

I must admit I don't know much about Eva Braun except that she was Hitler's mistress, but I submit she must have had a good deal of the masochist/martyr in her because-well, because she was Hitler's mistress! How much proof do we need?

Here I must parenthetically insert what will look at first like a shameless attempt to blow my own intellectual horn: All the IQ tests I've ever taken, at widely spaced intervals of my life, have indicated I am pretty damned smart. But here's the inquisitorial pin that deflates the balloon of my transiently swelled head: If I'm so damned smart, how come it took me nearly 50 years to figure out how my poisonous family dynamics worked? For what I'm about to describe should have been obvious to any observer, but I guess that's the problem. I was not an objective observer of the whirling vortex but one of the entrapped "vorts," so to speak.

Basically, my family's dynamics worked like this. My father was a mean, insensitive, creep who controlled his family by terrifying them with continual fits of rage. My mother was a martyr, long suffering and secretly proud of it. She married a ogre of a human being whom no one falling into even the loosest definition of sanity could have mistaken as loving, or sensitive, or kind, or attentive, or even very smart. Why? So that she could feel persecuted.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Hesse had one trait in common. They longed for their kids to shut the hell up and not trouble them over such trivialities as feelings. Such things as loneliness, anxiety, excessive shyness, learning difficulties, or being raped in a bathroom were no concern of theirs. And yet, since they were Catholic (and even worse: Converts to Catholicism), their consciences wouldn't let them simply announce in so many words, "I don't give a damn about how you feel," it was necessary to devise a system whereby the nettlesome issue of some brat coming to them about feelings would never arise in the first place. And I must admit the system that they developed was, especially since it sprang from minds proudly and adamantly anti-intellectual, pure genius.

Its genius lay in both simplicity and effectiveness.

My mother, the Eva Braun stand-in, was the nervous type, and that is a grand understatement. She was nervous, and she worried constantly about practically everything. I suspect that, had the wondrous day ever come when she could think of nothing that required worrying about, she would have worried that some urgent, awful possibility of a catastrophe had been forgotten, and that when the indefinite but inevitable catastrophe actually did occur, it would have failed to receive its just and due amount of worrying beforehand, and she would have, in addition to the torment of the catastrophe itself, the added hell to be paid for being derelict in meeting her worry quota.

Had she been a character in a comic strip ("Eva on the Brink," or some such), her thought balloon in this situation might have read: "Why, oh why did I not see that coming? I could have been wringing my hands over it for days."

My mother was also a world-champion cigarette smoker. She had started at age 15, probably because of high school peer pressure, or, I suppose, in an effort to look cool, although the idea of my mother exhibiting any degree of "cool" is inconceivable to me, since constant anxiety is by definition the direct opposite of cool. Or maybe she did it to calm her anxiety, in which case that little plan definitely backfired in later life, because it became one of her most dependable sources of anxiety. She worried about getting lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, et cetera. I believe at the height of her smoking she was puffing more than two packs a day. To be sure, the more she smoked the more she enjoyed it, but of course the more she smoked the more she worried, too.

Sometimes she actually worried to the point of attempting to quit smoking, but not often, because every time she did brave out existence for as little as a few hours without a cigarette her nervousness would reach the absolute volcanic boil-over point. I hated cigarettes, and I especially hated what they were bound to do to my mother eventually, but after a day of bitch-on-parade, nicotine-less mom, I was silently begging God, or whoever called the shots up there, to stick a cigarette in her mouth so she'd shut up for a while. I never had to beg for long.

So here was this walking, wheezing land mine of a worry-obsessed woman trapped in the same bunker with Hitler's raging spiritual twin. My father's rage had to have a target, and it didn't dare aim at the land mine, because, unfulfilling as their precariously balanced partnership was, it was all either one of them had. Had it exploded, neither would have had any role in life at all. So Daddy's rage focused on the three kids: My older sister Helen; younger brother J.J., or raging Adolf, Jr.; and pathologically detached me, the poster boy for middle-child syndrome.

As worry was to Momma Eva, so was rage to Daddy Adolf. Anger was his thing; it gave him a purpose in life. Given how rotten the world was, and how everybody seemed to be getting a fair shake out of life but him, there was seldom a lack of things to get pissed off about, but even he couldn't make his seething hostility audible to every son of a bitch on Earth that deserved it, so the three relatively innocent little pigs inhabiting the same cage as he became the privileged audience. A lot of adult children of inadequate fathers lament the fact that he was never "there" in any way, physically absent as well as emotionally. I, on the other hand, was most grateful when he wasn't "there," in any sense of the word.

I have done by my conscious and unconscious best to forget as many of Poppa Adolf's screaming sessions as I could, but I remember parts of a fairly typical one. It occurred on a Sunday afternoon. I believe I was in junior high at the time. J.J. and Helen were arguing across the table, as often happened, about some utterly trivial thing. I think J.J. had started griping about Helen monopolizing the telephone. (This occurred in that primitive era during the 1960s when an entire family would share the same phone line. Some lucky families, as we did, had one or more extensions, but only one line.) I was doing my usual mentally-leaving-the-room thing, so I can't remember what they said, but I snapped back to attention when voices suddenly became much louder. J.J., in mini-Adolf mode, was screaming something back at my father. I don't know what the subject was, but clearly the bone of contention was no longer Helen's sadistic overuse of a public utility. My mother, never one for subtlety, burst into tears, sobbing hysterically. Standing, she histrionically threw herself on the dining table, her head in her arms, crying, "Stop, stop!" or some such line.

My father put his hands on my mother's shoulders and roared his loudest, employing an impressive number of decibels. "Shut up, you kids! You're going to kill your mother!"

When my father went into one of his tirades I, not having an overt death wish, never, ever, ever uttered so much as a word in protest-audibly. Inwardly, however, where that mental weakling couldn't begin to approach, it was a different story. To this particular invective I remember thinking: "She's doing a pretty good job of that herself. Can't we kill you instead?"

But back in the real world, Adolf wannabe's order was obeyed. Everybody shut the hell up, all right. Nobody said so much as a single word, friendly, hostile, indifferent or otherwise, for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. This was not an atypical day, especially for Sunday, when our happy family would be confined in the same place for a maximum number of hours.

And social critics stupidly wonder why so many family members turn to the magically soothing, calming power of TV when instead they could have such a blissful time talking to each other! Seems like a no-brainer to me.

This was my father's excuse for not dealing with any of his children emotionally. All he had to do was snarl, "Don't upset your mother." And it became our mother's convenient excuse, too. Got a problem? We didn't dare express it, or we'd upset our mother. Got a headache? Don't whine; it'll upset your mother. So depressed you could die? Keep it to yourself ; don't upset your mother. Happy for once, against all odds? Better keep it to yourself, or your mother will think you're up to something that could bring on calamity and make her worry--more. Lonely? Oh, please. What do you expect from life?

Just get sexually assaulted? In shock? On the verge of literally losing your mind? Don't you dare mention that, of all things! For God's sake, keep it to yourself. Don't upset your mother.

Depression, problems, injuries, hurts of any sort were not parts of our lives to be helped or guided through and dealt with; they were awful weapons we were trotting out, insensitively and deliberately, with which to hurt her. "How can you do this to me?" She might as well have had the question embroidered on the pillows we slept on. Everything-every damned thing-was all about her.

If I were to draw a picture of my family's emotional life, it would probably be of a little, stingy, airless, and utterly empty room.

In childhood and beyond, I used to wonder why our family was so-and here it was hard to find the right word. Distant? No, not strong enough. Hateful? Except for Daddy, too strong. We weren't allowed to feel anything enough to actively hate each other. I finally settled on antiseptic. Except for Poppa Adolf's rage, always hairpin-ready to go off, nobody felt much of anything about anybody. Helen actually liked me, but she was eight years older and, after I started school, we weren't really part of each other's lives. J.J. felt complete contempt for me, but that was mostly because I was a sports-challenged, effeminate sissy, to him a lousy example of an older brother. (Contempt was the utterly normal and expected reaction to such a blatant sissy-code for queer--in the U.S. at that time, and nobody would call such a reaction abnormal even today.) I was literally afraid of J.J. and my father, but that was nothing. After that thing occurred in the grade school bathroom I was afraid of pretty much everybody and everything.