Earliest Days.
A dysfunctional childhood, yeah, that's what they call it now, but when I was growing up we just accepted it as reality. Yup, I'm the product of a broken home. Parents got divorced when I was very small and, as was the custom back then, I was given to my mother to raise. Since she had to work, I was shipped out for long-term day care at other people's homes. Recollections of this early part of my life are very fuzzy. I have at most, short pieces of memories broken into snippets which are then folded in upon themselves. I recall being raised in the company of girls, rather like slightly older sisters who delighted in dressing me up as though I were some form of animated and yet easily controlled doll. I also recall spending summers on a farm in the Midwest, slow and warm, kind of a peaceful comfort. Sundays were spent in the company of those would today be unjustifiably and disparaging called "Holy Rollers." The strength of their faith was a miracle in itself, having an effect on me that lasts to this day. Every Sunday seemed to have been a church social. Golly, the food was good! I wish I could remember other details of this era as well as I do the fine texture, the mouth-watering juiciness of the Southern fried chicken, the snap of fresh corn-on-the-cob and the sweetness of an ice-cold glass of not-diluted-enough Kool-Aid.
I witnessed an endless procession of stepfathers, each more distant and less caring than the last, and no contact with my real father, a non-person whom my mother demonized on every occasion. Rather like the bogeyman, he was held out as a terror who would fly into drunken rages, pummeling everyone and everything in sight. Any failing on my part was sufficient cause to bring a fresh reminder of what would happen to me if I had to be sent "back to him," yet I was told at such times that I was "just like him." I had no idea of what this meant as I really had no recollection of him and did not even know how I could contact him.
As I was being readied to enter first grade, the stepfather du jour came up with the "brilliant" idea that a military school would straighten me out and get me out of the house. So I was suited up and shipped off for months at a time. When I saw The Lord of the Flies, many years later, I sat stunned into silence and immobility at the end of the film. Few of the viewers could ever comprehend that the terror, the predation and seemingly mindless brutality meted out in the film was but a pale shadow of what boys contained behind the walls of a military school could inflict upon their younger charges. Control was the operative word, although it was made reasonable by being labeled military discipline. It was the control that a hardened prison lifer exerts over new convicts, far more vicious than the guards are permitted. As we have seen in recent times, even senior Army officers and non-commissioned officers can become predatory, manipulative and subjugating of their charges. Imagine putting this power into the hands of ten and twelve year old boys. Were that I could change my powers of recollection, increasing the clarity of my earliest days and totally erasing the memories of my school days in uniform a scant few years later...
Perhaps it was the overt and easy homosexuality of the older boys, though officially discouraged, which so negatively colored my perception of gays to this day. There was no consent; it simply was not an issue. The older boys were in control and would decide on a daily basis the form of punishment appropriate to instill in the younger boys what they considered good and what they deemed bad. If the decisions had not been so completely arbitrary, the excuses for punishment not so petty, or the justification not so meaningless, the overwhelming pain of the correction would not have seemed so bad. The fact that the punishment was intermixed at times with (homo)sexuality had a very powerful effect on my life. You may have gotten the impression that I do not consider this portion of my life to have been the "funnest" time...
Last Update: 12/28/2003
Web Author: Taffy@Cheerful.Com
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