Pedophiles

“If a secret history of books could be written, and the thoughts and meanings of the writer noted down alongside his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!”

-William Makepeace Thackeray-

1811-1863

First, the clock winked 0339 hrs; then 0545 hrs when I opened one eye again.

Shit.

The pot set for 0400hrs, it will self-destruct in another fifteen minutes, the brew now being right at two hours old.

Shit!

I need a Rube Goldberg device, not involving chickens or mice or hamsters or such, which will start that fricking pot fifteen minutes before I awaken and deliver a steaming cup with cream and sugar right to the night-night stand. 

That way, I don’t have to pad my darkened way to the kitchen, to risk stepping on Jypsi’s spore, in order to kick off that fricking thing and then wait that interminable amount of brewing time; to gulp away my caffeine lust while washing dogshit off my feet Jesus-style in the bathtub.

Jeezuzzz!

These would be my secret margin notes to accompany the monographs!  But I realistically don’t think they are going to ‘excite the reader’.  Thanks for the quote anyway, William Makepeace Thackeray:  I will make another marginal note to read Vanity Fair someday.

And now, an apology from me to all my FB friends.  Winston didn’t really coerce me into posting that pathetic ‘cut and paste if you are my friend’ thing yesterday.  The Devil didn’t make me do it either.  I was simply and innocently posting in response to another friend’s plea.

Shit.

I had no idea it would raise such a squalid chorus of protest from you all.  Belay my last and all of that.  Regrets—sorry—mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  Won’t happen again, blood oath. OK?  Friends again, I hope?

  

And as long as I’m on this sack-and-ashes jag, my apologies to the estate of Ellsworth Bunker, in the fervent hope that I won’t be sued by his progenitors.

After all, I reiterate with nauseating frequency that these words are all true to the best of my recollections; although I fear that it will be all my fictional embellishments which will throw me headlong into the kimchi of litigation; and I do so dislike having to deal with lawyers.

Shit!

Now another round of groveling humbleations to all my officer-of-the-court buddies out there—Andy, Cary, Roger, Najmeh—did I leave anyone out?

Golly, this has to end.  I haven’t made this many sooo-sollies since my last Confession.  And that was at age 17.  A lotta sinning under the bridge in all those years.

Enough pathetic postulating for today?  I’m ready to move on, if you are.

To the single most story that I have dreaded telling.  Can’t avoid it any longer: today is the day.

I have so many same-sex-preference friends that I know, trust and love.  I won’t make a thousand vacuous disclaimers ; I will trust that none of you…and there I go: launching into a vacuous disclaimer.

I have always been a magnet for pedophiles and…others.

My first awareness of this came to me when I was eleven.  Christmas time in Norwich; I was waiting for my bus.  A man came beside me and struck up a conversation.  He was drunk.  He offered me an orange, which I took without any consideration.  He boarded the bus with me and followed me to a friend’s house.  He came in the house with me.  My friend’s mother made him leave.

By the time I arrived back home, my parents led me into the kitchen where a uniformed constable was sitting.  I sat down; he began an interrogation—very sensitive probing: what did the man look like?  How was he dressed?  Did he speak to me?  Did I speak back?  Did I invite him to accompany me on the bus, to my friend’s house, anywhere?

He failed to ask me if the man was drunk; and I offered no volunteer answers.  As he continued, and while he was saying something to my parents, I took out the orange and began to peel it.  The orange was black with fungus.  I wrinkled my nose and put the orange and the whole scene aside.  The man had not frightened me and made no attempt to touch me.  I could not understand why everyone was making such a bother over this man.  I promptly forgot the whole business.

The following year, my Dad was promoted to Third Air Force Headquarters at South Ruislip; and we moved to the London area.  This move heralded my love of swimming and particularly diving off the boards at Uxbridge Public Pool.

The following summer, I was at Uxbridge practically every day.  As I practiced my dives, a man began sort of coaching me in a friendly way.  I remember that he was a New Zealander and that he owned an MG TG back home, which piqued my interest—in the car, not the man.

Eventually he invited me to a day trip in London.  My parents adamantly refused (I never saw him at the pool after the refused invitation); and the man eventually returned to New Zealand.  He wrote two or three innocuous letters to me which I never answered.  He did send me a snapshot of him at the wheel of the MG, which I lost along with any remembrance of those days at Uxbridge.

At 23 years old, working as a barker at Hemisfair ’68, the promoter of the show I was working intimated that he was gay and suggested I should explore whether I was one or not.  Rather than pursue me directly, he sent me his lover, a beautiful Adonis of a man only slightly older than myself.  We had a soft drink at a food court during one of my periodic recesses from barking the show.  He explained what he was and I explained what I was not; and the seduction attempt ended with a handshake and mutual smiles. 

I was having the most heterosexual summer of my young life, firmly establishing my own virile preference. (Now, an apology to my one and only sister-in-law—but I’m almost certain you knew full well that I was plowing the Fairgrounds with my busy little rake!)

The following year was intro to my radio career, final scholastic withdrawal from college…and Viet Nam by June.

As Vietnamization progressed, and Service Craft was being slowly dismantled, Chief Rodriguez took his Freedom Flight and Scott was promoted to Chief Boatswain’s Mate to take over the old man’s command.  I was still the Skimmer Coxswain and retained the hooch; but these would be the waning days of my glory, unbeknownst to me then.

There was a lot of shifting personnel in and out of the Division.  A few weeks after his arrival, I noticed a lifer first class move into a hooch adjacent to mine.

I paid it no never-mind.  All it meant to me was that I had to stop using his adjoining rocket attack bunker (Charlie had no bombers to cause it to be a bomb shelter) as my target for knife throwing practice; and to ban my friends from using it as a latrine.

The knife throwing was a hoot, but losing the convenience of a piss ten feet away was a real loss.  Now I would have to stumble twenty yards in the black-out of my black-out and risk the chance of whizzing down the side of one of my own boats.

What I can remember of that lifer was his swarthy big mustache.  He was short and squat and not buff at all.  I never interacted with him at work, and if we ever had a neighborly chat across the way, it eludes my recollection.

About 0200 hrs one morning, sacked out and laying back fully clothed on the double bed, I awoke to a muffled thumping at the door.  Turning on the overhead light, I opened the door to find lifer Mustache standing—make that swaying—in the threshold. 

Literally in the doorway threshold. He must have been leaning with his nose to hold himself upright. Surprised by this apparition and practically nose to nose with him anyway, I instinctively backed into the room and sat on my bed.

He followed me in and sat down next to me.  Leg to leg.  I sat there momentarily stunned, before I stood up and told him I was sleeping and that he needed to go to his own hooch, this one was not his. 

In a situation like that, I think it is a natural tendency to run to the most plausible explanation.  I was choosing, at that moment, to assume he was drunk and disoriented; stumbled to my door, mistaking it for his own. 

 

As the minutes ticked silently on, that plausibility began to evaporate.  I replaced it with another.  He was too drunk to stand up.  I tried to slow down all the contingencies running freestyle through my mind.

This was escalating into a survival moment.  I was now shaking, but I went to survival mode.  Here were the things one could not do to a lifer-caste lifer:

-Don’t hit him. Do not ball your fists or raise them to a fighting stance.

-Do not touch him, whether to assist him or push him or thwart him.

-If you have digested these preliminaries, do not hold a weapon/tool/kitchen knife/any knife or sharp implement of any description in your hand(s).

-Do not argue with him, disobey a lawful order, shout, scream or even raise your voice to him.  Take no tone that threatens disagreement, insult, sarcasm or violence. 

-Don’t avoid him by turning away, losing eye contact or running

-Don’t look for sympathy or backing of any sort against him for his actions against you--from another brother lifer.

Standing at the doorway, and frantically running down this checklist, my only recourse was to keep asking him to leave in a civilized manner and tone of voice.  All the while, he just sat there.  He didn’t open his mouth, he didn’t look or leer at me, he didn’t move from where he sat like an inscrutable green toad.

I considered running down to the boathouse to enlist assistance, but I couldn’t leave him there to pass out on my bed.  In that scenario, all I could expect would be disbelief at my accusations, a nod and a wink.

“Jesus, Cork!  Do you always rat your drinking buddies out by telling everyone they tried to cornhole you in your sleep?”

With the clock and my heart slowed to a stop, after as long a pause as I could stand, Mustache finally lumbered to his feet and shuffled heavily out the door.  I shut it and wished the hasp was on the inside jamb.  Barring that, I laboriously had to china the loaded-with-two-cases Toshiba over, to barricade myself in. 

 I turned off the light and lay on my bunk, sleepless until dawn.

At 0545, I changed into a clean uniform, moved the unplugged reefer (with a lot of warm beer by now) and got to the boathouse before Scott made it in to work.

As soon as he sat at his desk, I came over from the reserve Pirate bench; and for the one and only time on duty, I placed my hands on his desk and leaned forward.  I didn’t want anyone but him to hear me.  I spoke in an undertone to report the night’s incident, feeling my anger rising as the story came rushing out.

Scott had not yet removed his hat.  He glared up at me with a growing red hue coming to his pock-marked cheeks and answered me in a clipped and equally low undertone. 

He ordered—ordered—me to disregard everything he had just heard, ordered me to never repeat a word of it to anyone and in one final command that I did clearly hear, he said, “Now go sit down and take your place, seaman!”

I returned to my seat, silent with my anger, shock…and fear…showing in my face, my body language, through most of that awful day.  The last rule of survival was now cast with a powerlessness and vulnerability that never really left me.  To recall those memories at this moment challenges all the lessons I have garnered in Recovery.  They are barely sufficient to stand the test.

Mustache mysteriously disappeared shortly after that night; probably reassigned somewhere; far enough away to become someone else’s problem.  I didn’t see him again.

My relationship with Scott was broken beyond redemption after that exchange in the boathouse. To him, I became just another non-billeted E-3 pawn on the Navy’s chessboard.  Disposable.  Dispensable. 

Discarded.

As I write this, each of my dogs has come to the Captain’s Chair, for a lift, a snuggle and a kiss on the head.  Don’t try to tell me that animals don’t sense what is going on.

The old buried burning down deep is rising to the surface.  Before it erupts in a lava explosion of accusations at the Navy, the VA, the American public; and most of all, that nameless faceless lifer trash, I will end here, to take advantage of warm wonderful sunshine, the company of the Mutt Brigade and my trashed-out backyard. 

 

I am safe and whole again.  My tiny world; and my Divine Plan…are enough.