The World According To Anne Arky

I have so much updating to do, it isn’t even funny. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll sit down and write the end to the Mike saga. Yes, there really has been an end to it, once and for all, with a surprise ending. (No, the butler didn’t do it.) Meanwhile, I have something else important to talk about. Meanwhile, this post was actually written about two months ago and I am just now posting it because...well, because.

I honestly can’t remember if I have ever mentioned it here, and if so, to what depth, but to put it bluntly, I was sexually abused as a child. In many cases, that in itself brings the huge trauma, as it brings to mind night-time forceful visits by someone who is bigger and stronger and a damned sight meaner than you are and rape and worse result, all of which are real and for damned sure qualify as sexual abuse. The things that happened to me were not like that – there was no violence, there was no force (just molestation and some heavy coercion), and there were no middle-of-the-night visits by anyone – but they far and away still qualify as sexual abuse. They began when I was eight years old, and my brother (the primary perp) was twelve years old. Yeah, he was just a kid, but he was damned sure old enough to know better and knew that this was wrong, by anybody’s definition of right and wrong. We were both in a domestic squalor known as our family, with a lot of bad things going on and not so many good ones. I had epilepsy and my childhood was playing out like a years-long episode of the movie “Carrie” (the original with Sissie Spacek, not the remake which I haven’t seen and likely won’t see). My parents were mismanaging all of us on an intergalactic magnitude (and it wasn’t until many years later that I realized that they were doing the best they could at the time); my sister was doing her best to distance herself from all of us while still living in the same house, and doing a lot of pretending that she didn’t even know us; I was having seizures and behavioral problems resulting from same, all the while trying to survive having a bulls-eye on my ass and being the primary target for every bully in school and a few hundred other kids at any given time; and my brother was falling through the cracks and trying to keep his head above water. (My mother went to her grave convinced that the only problems in our family were caused by my epilepsy, but the dysfunctionary roles were cast years before the seizures started.) For a long time, I felt like his sexual abuse of me resulted from all of these things coming together at the same time, fueled partly by his newly-emerging adolescent hormones. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forcing me, and he was offering me some positive attention at a time when I was getting more attention than I knew what to do with, not one iota of it positive, and I greedily accepted it, having no idea what kind of can of worms I was allowing to be thrown at me. But this was before I was aware that sexual abuse is often a hand-me-down issue, and in this case, I believe very strongly that it probably is here, at least in part. I will (probably) get to that later.

I was what is known as a child prodigy, with an IQ that went almost off the charts. You know – one of those super smart kids that can read college-level in second grade and knows things most average adults don’t even know, but can’t tie their shoes or tell time. I was that kid – I didn’t learn to tell time or tie my shoes until I was in third grade, because there were all kinds of people around me who could tie my shoes or tell me what time it was, and I had important things to do and worlds to explore and conquer. So I was used to existing in a whole different orbit from the rest of the world and not knowing the most mundane things that the mere mortals around me knew, all the while knowing things they couldn’t begin to comprehend. Yeah, I know – the ego has landed – but seriously, that was the way of my world at that time.

We “played” in my brother’s bedroom, upstairs away from our parents. Our sister’s room was right next to it, but she was busy escaping from the melee in any way she could and not paying much mind to what was going on around her if she could possibly help it. We lived in this house for about a year, and when we moved to the next house, the basement was the staging area for most of these incidents. I performed my first oral sex in that basement when I was nine years old, on my brother, in exchange for which I would receive ten of his comic books. (Dammit, I don’t think I ever did get any of those comic books, the lousy bastard!) I absolutely hated it, but I liked feeling like we were “buddies”, even if we had to keep it a secret and fight like cats and dogs in front of Mother and Daddy so they wouldn’t get wise. At the next house a year later (yes, we did move every year for about four years running, and it was a bitch!), his bedroom was once again the site, and this was when he began including some of his friends.

That year, I was ten, and I discovered that what we were doing was not just some game that my brother liked to play. It was something that GUYS like, and by the way, everybody is doing this, not just me. The whole process had a name – sex – and apparently everyone else had been doing it the whole time. It was as if I had discovered that while I was out exploring my distant worlds, everyone else had known about this all along and I was just now getting it, so I decided to go independently of my brother and try to catch up with everybody else. I could get positive attention from not just my brother, but from a whole bunch of people – yippee! It didn’t help things that, in addition to becoming friends and coming under the influence of an “older” (by two years) girl, Kathy, who had recently discovered her own sexuality and its many uses (which I suspect might have also been rooted in sexual abuse, but I will never know for sure), I suddenly developed breasts along the scale of Dolly Parton, which looked really strange on my skinny little body (those were the days!), and my chest entered the room a full five minutes before the rest of me did. Talk about attention getters! Between my attention-getters, my history and Kathy’s influence (she was beautiful and heavily-sought-after by the boys, and I wanted to be just like her), at quite a rapid little clip, over about four months’ time, I logged in about a half dozen close and brief encounters to my credit.

Most girls who have been sexually abused come away from it with this same notion and become promiscuous, at least for a time, and I was no different; some of them stop that and become completely disinterested in sex, and some of them remain promiscuous to some degree for the rest of their lives, equating sex with positive attention which they inevitably mistake for love and usually chasing after it to the detriment of the structure of their lives. As a prime example, the above-mentioned Kathy has been married about five times now. I was “promiscuous” for about an 18-month period starting at age ten and ending halfway through my eleventh year. Kind of hard to say “promiscuous” and “sexually abused” and still be able to state honestly that I still managed to remain a virgin until I was 16 – still too young to be offering up my virginity, but under the circumstances, it’s a wonder I kept it past the fifth grade. (This also explains my almost yelling out in shock and horror in 9th grade sex ed class when I finally “got” it, “You mean he sticks it IN you?!”)

Soon after we moved into this new house, I met Jerry. He was the most popular boy in class, and a bit of a “bad boy” even at the tender age of 12 (he had flunked a couple of years and was that much older than the rest of us). On a snow day when everyone was home from school, he was building a snowman and I happened by just as he was turning it into a snowwoman with snow implants. Hey, he knows about this! Cool! I could warm up to this guy and have a new friend. I didn’t have many old friends, so new ones were always welcome – read embraced in a stranglehold! – and I was pretty much willing to obtain them in any manner I had at my disposal. And boy did I have a new manner at my disposal! I had been in this new school for about five months by then, and Jerry, of course, by this time knew what my social standing was – three stories below rock bottom – so he suggested that we could be “secret friends” and have some “fun” together. As we were entering into this new friendship agreement, Jerry put forth the theory that for us to be able to maintain this little arrangement, we would have to continue to be “enemies” in public and I would have to let him continue to pick on me so no one would suspect what we really had going on on the side. Sound familiar? My brother had lured me in two years earlier with the same deal, and it had worked then, so why not? Desperate as I was for friends at the time, I readily agreed, willing to sell my soul, my body or whatever just to have such a really great friend as Jerry, even if I had to give up bragging rights for it. Pretty soon, he brought along his friend Gary, who was also in our class at school. Gary was a tall, quiet boy with a shy smile and kind of goofy-looking, and he had never gone out of his way to befriend me, but to the best of my recollection, he never joined in the teasing and bullying that were part and parcel of my daily life. So he joined us for these meetings, and meanwhile, he continued not to join in the teasing, while Jerry jacked up the whole thing and teased me more when other people were around – a lot more.

Most of our “secret friendship” meetings consisted of Jerry and Gary taking turns feeling me up and then climbing on top of me and, with all parties fully clothed, humping me until they ejaculated (thank God, in their pants!). Once, when some of our peers (I can’t say friends, since they sure as shit weren’t my friends) happened by as we were leaving that day’s meeting place, Jerry saw them and came running back and said, “Uh, oh! We’re caught! Quick – pretend that I hit you and we were beating you up.” Just to make sure there was a note of authenticity in the whole charade, he knocked me in the back of my head with a tree limb he found handy. The “friends” bought it and even offered a brief show of sympathy before moving on with the rest of their day, and I went home, secure in the knowledge that I still had my secret friends. I had no idea that what this was really about wasn’t fear of our “arrangement” being found out. Mister Cool didn’t want anyone to know that we were “friends” on any level – God forbid!

Halfway through the sixth grade, after this secret friendship had been going on for about a year, just after Jerry had had his turn at me, during Gary’s turn, he kissed me on the mouth (which Jerry had never done, and Gary had never done before) and said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m not like Jerry -- I really am your friend, no matter what, and it isn’t pretend just for this.” I was quite puzzled and went home thinking about what he had done and said. I didn’t care much for the feeling up and humping part of what we were doing, so all I had gotten out of this up to now was two “secret friends”, but one of my favorite things in the world was (and remains) kissing, which I had acquired a predilection for in some of my other promiscuous encounters, so I was all silly and dreamy about Gary’s having kissed me, and thinking harder and harder about what he had said about really being my friend. Finally, after I was well on my way to having the worst reputation in town and had even bragged about some of what was going on (with Jerry, Gary, my brother and more) to some friends (and I use the term loosely), I figured it out and learned what it really means to be used. Used and abused, as it were. That was the last day. The very last day.

I began realizing that what I had been doing was shameful. Wrong. Bad. Trashy. Nice girls don’t, as they say, and I was a genuinely nice girl, so from that point on, I didn’t. Period. One “friend”, Tina, told me she had asked her mother if you could get pregnant if you “did it” with your clothes on. When her mother said, “No,” she said, “Whew!” Seeing the look on her mother’s face (I can only imagine!), she said, “Oh, I mean good – for Anne.” Lovely – I can well imagine what her mother must have thought of me forever after that.

Ironically, not to mention fortunately, a month or so later I had brain surgery, the epilepsy was cured, and so were many of the behavior problems. I didn’t turn into Nancy Cheerleader and Miss Popularity, but from then on, I had a few friends (earned the right way, by being a good friend), and I was no longer a walking target. Mostly I was just one of the kids. But I had learned the hard way that someone’s friendship was not worth having if you had to do something to earn it (something other than being a good friend and someone fun to be around). It was a damned hard lesson, but the good news is that it was a lesson I learned well and it stood me in good stead for many years. I was (and pretty much remain) the biggest goody-two-shoes in the universe – at least, not counting those who carry and thump bibles. When drugs came along and all my friends were trying them, I didn’t – not even so much as one puff off of one joint. “Everyone is doing it” ceased to have any influence on me whatsoever, and I never drank or did drugs just to be part of the crowd, or for any other reason. Never ever did drugs, and didn’t drink until I was in my mid-twenties, despite the fact that I was allowed to drink at the age of 14 if I had so chosen. From that point on, if people were going to like me, they were going to like me for me. If people were doing something and I wanted to do it, I would do it, but my motivation was never, not once, because So-and-So will like me if I go out and dye my hair green. So-and-So would have to like me blonde or otherwise. I was used to doing things by myself (after so many years without friends and doing my own thing), so anyone who wanted to join me in doing my thing was welcome to do so, but I was just as happy to do things alone.

The next school year, I had a boyfriend – a real live, go-steady, go-to-dances-and-public-places-together boyfriend – and I was head over heels in love with him. Some of my earlier exploits had been spread around town two years earlier in the upper level schools, and when one of my boyfriend’s older friends heard my name, he asked my boyfriend, “Is she the one who…?” I was absolutely mortified to have to admit that yes, I was the one who, and had to promise him faithfully that I don’t do that any more and never would again. It didn’t matter – the damage was done, and a few weeks later he broke my heart and broke up with me. (I had no idea at that age that I wasn’t a full-fledged jezebel and the villain in the piece, and therefore didn’t deserve his scorn and judgment, and that if he had heard the whole story some ten years later, he might have been more understanding and supported me and stayed with me a little longer, at least until we broke up for a better reason.)

That next summer, a year and a half after I had shut down the “friendship” business, just before we moved yet again (but this time to another town), I encountered Gary again, and we went out in his back yard and he kissed me. He didn’t try anything else, just kissed me. I’d like to think that if we had stayed in that town, he and I might actually have become friends – real friends, not secret ones – and maybe even dated for a little while, but it could be that there was too much sinister history between us. I never saw him again after that, and I never saw Jerry after that school year, either. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I ever even exchanged another single word with Jerry after it was over, despite our having continued to go to the same schools for another year and a half. But I have always had a soft spot in my heart and memory for Gary, and a deep and abiding hatred for Jerry.

For many years, I railed at Mother and Daddy for uprooting me and making me move to another town, and I still have an unnatural attachment for this town that I haven’t lived in for almost forty years, but I did finally get that in the long run, it was a good thing that we did leave town when we did. My reputation in the high school grades had been trashed by an older boy and his cousin, and I never would have been able to live it down if we had stayed there. I had a chance to start over. Unfortunately, it was in a town I hated, so my fresh start was inauspicious at best, but at least it didn’t come with a reputation that would have clung to me like stale cigarette smoke.

Jerry died yesterday. It was in the paper today. Yesterday, I was writing to a friend back in that town, and the wife of another of our friends recently died; after I mentioned that, I came to within a hair of asking her if she knew whatever had happened to Jerry, but didn’t because I remembered that she doesn’t keep up with people, even the ones that are still living in that town (as she also does). Had I mentioned it, it would have been the first time I ever asked anyone about him – ever. This morning, I opened the online paper and checked the obituaries, and there he was. If I hadn’t been sitting in a chair that had arms on it, I would have fallen on the floor for sure. I felt like someone drove a mack truck through my solar plexis. From all accounts (including the fact that I had seen something on line about him in the “concerns” section of his church bulletin), he died a slow, painful death, diabetes related, with for sure dialysis and maybe some other fun stuff like amputation and blindness. Well, you know what? It couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow!

Tina, the afore-mentioned “friend”, lived a few houses down from our house during the time I knew Jerry and Gary, and she and I were friends – when she didn’t have anyone else to play with, and when no one else would see her being friends with me. As far as I can remember, she never initiated any of the group torture to which I was subjected, but if someone else did, she joined right in there. For some reason, probably in effort to provide my own continuity to compensate for all the moving around I’ve done in my life, it’s my nature to keep in touch with people or go back and look them up. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not. In any case, I had stayed in touch with Tina off and on over the years, and after she was married with children, I was visiting her at her home while her kids were downstairs watching television. She had three children, and while the younger two were cute, the oldest one was knock-your-eyes-out gorgeous. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, she was so beautiful. She made Jon-Benet Ramsey look like a dog. Sadly, she had some physical handicaps.

As we were sitting at the kitchen table talking that day, Tina said something that just absolutely flummoxed me. She said, “Annie, the kids tease my little girl and make her life unbearable, and now I realize what we did to you. I have lied awake so many nights regretting the way I treated you and all the things I did to you back then, and wishing so much that I could take it back! I am so sorry!” Nobody had ever apologized to me before, at least not for their part in my being terrorized, and I was completely dumbstruck. I only hope that I was gracious and accepting of her apology. We are still friends – no, I mean really – so I must have said something right, but I have to admit that while my mind was still reeling over her apology, the first complete thought that went through my head was that I hoped Jerry had seven of them. Yes, I actually wished that Jerry had seven kids with handicaps or something that would cause them to be the target of every kind of personal torture children could invent.

Why did (and does) Jerry receive more of my wrath than Gary or any of the other encounters I had during those self-degrading times? Primarily, in his own way, Gary was a knight in shining armor, if not mine, by virtue of the fact that he ultimately saved me from myself. Jerry, on the other hand, was a snake oil salesman of the first order. He and I actually entered into an agreement that he would be my secret friend in exchange for some adolescent wet dream treatment, and he had no intention of being any kind of friend to me, secret or otherwise. Other boys who jumped on this particular bandwagon (as it were) offered no such agreement – our friendship was implicit, as Jerry had taught me well. Jerry had enough friends and didn’t need to bribe people to be his friend, yet despite that, he took full advantage of a lonely, desperate and yes, pathetic, young girl who was too young to know the price of “friendship”. He was the first in a fairly steady little stream of boys whose main job it was to provide enough fodder for me to endure years of guilt, humiliation, shame and self-recrimination, and he taught me everything he knew about using people; unfortunately, he only taught me how to be the usee, not the user (although the latter I wouldn’t have wanted to know anyway, but that’s beside the point). So yeah, I would have liked for him to have seven of them.

By the newspaper accounts, he had one daughter, three grandchildren and no spouse listed, although that little girl had to come from somewhere, and being as how he was a preacher’s kid (steadfastly upholding the PK stereotype for preacher’s kids everywhere), and continued living in our small town where his parents also live, I feel sure that the girl was born inside the sanctity of wedlock. Since he was what he was, I suspect there might have been a string of ex-wives along the way somewhere, but none were listed (they usually only list a current and sometimes the mother of one’s child, even if they are no longer wed) – just his current “special friend” was listed.

I briefly wondered if he sexually abused his own little darling and perhaps later on, her children. I almost rather doubt it, because what he was doing wasn’t pedophilia per se, since we were both kids at the time; just lascivious opportunism at the expense and total disregard of a young girl’s fragile feelings. I have no doubt that he continued merrily cutting a path of emotional and predatorial destruction in his wake, blithely unaware of the devastation left in his path, and unconcerned about it if he had known of it.

Yeah, I wish he’d had seven of them.