The Inheritance of Shame
“In a book that celebrates and embodies the power of the medium of writing in a pure way, Gajdics uses the written word to heal from trauma, to reconcile with his parents, to unearth their own suffering in World War II, and as an unforgettable call for compassion. The passionate writing makes the book not only an intriguing read but an important one in the literary and political realms…With its stark presentation of the tangible effects of not only homophobia, but xenophobia—his mother’s time in a concentration camp, and his father’s own traumatic WWII experience—this book is appallingly appropriate in these times. This uncomfortably true account of homophobia to the extreme is raw and unforgettable.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS, May/June 2017
“In Peter Gajdics’ memoir, we’re taken into a real-life horror film of malpractice and corrupt psychotherapy, hoping at every turn of the page that our narrator escapes. A shocking, crystal-clear, unsettling book. The Inheritance of Shame is both a necessary and devastating memoir about the trauma of conversion therapy and the homophobia that persists to this day.”
—DANIEL ZOMPARELLI, author of Everything is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person
“Peter Gajdics’ multi-faceted memoir offers help for abuse survivors and those who care about them. He provides inside perspective on the many effects of childhood sexual abuse, including the way societal, religious, and familial homophobia and denial became internalized and made a young man vulnerable to a destructive ‘therapeutic’ cult. His healing speaks to the power and fortitude of the human spirit. The Inheritance of Shame is both about damage and healing. This is a work of love.”
—MIKE LEW, author of Victims No Longer: The Classic Guide for Men Recovering from Sexual Child Abuse
“The Inheritance of Shame is a necessary book for anyone wanting to understand the trauma one goes through if society has deemed them different. If shame has already been passed down to the next generation and there are perceived added differences, the shame is compounded. Cults come in many forms and unfortunately those who want to be normal sometimes become victims of these cults. The book focuses on the triumph of the human spirit and shows how everyone may be different in some ways but no one is born to be what others think they should be. At the end, be yourself and be happier is the theme of the book.”
—BEV SELLARS, author of They Called Me Number One
The Inheritance of Shame
THE INHERITANCE OF SHAME © Copyright 2017 by Peter Gajdics.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or book reviews. For information, contact the publisher at brownpaperpress.com or at the address below:
Brown Paper Press
6475 E. Pacific Coast Highway, #329
Long Beach, CA 90803
FIRST EDITION
Designed by Alban Fischer
Distributed by SCB Distributors
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959770
ISBN 978-1-941932-08-7
978-1-941932-09-4 (ebook)
Printed in the United States of America
All quotes from A Course in Miracles are from the First Edition, published in 1976. They are used with written permission from the copyright holder and publisher, the Foundation for Inner Peace, P.O. Box 598, Mill Valley, CA 94942-0598, www.acim.org.
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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.
Author’s Note
Much of what is in this book I started writing years ago, as early as 1997. I have used my personal journals, as well as tape recordings, therapy sessional reports, and my own medical records to help guide me in the reconstruction of events, interactions, and conversations. Even friends, some from whom I was estranged for years, helped me fill in a few missing pieces. Memory, however, is subjective. I have written what I believe to be true and accurate, but I would be remiss not to add that this book is based on my experience of these events. This is my story and no one else’s. Only names have been changed.
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO ALL THOSE WHOSE LIVES HAVE BEEN SACRIFICED BECAUSE OF SOMEONE ELSE’S INTOLERANCE OR PREJUDICE.
1
BY THE THIRD TIME his car had circled the block, I knew the man was interested. He pulled over and lowered the passenger-side tinted window. I walked to the curb and leaned in—the way I’d seen other young men in the neighborhood do it for months.
“Are you busy tonight?” he said.
“That depends,” I answered.
“How much do you charge?” he said.
“What do you want?”
“A blow job.”
“Fifty dollars.”
For a moment I wondered if my price was too high.
“Okay,” he said. “Get in.”
I wasn’t nervous when he said he knew where we could go. I wasn’t anything. We drove for more than thirty minutes. He offered me cigarettes, Benson & Hedges. I smoked. We didn’t talk. After several minutes I wanted to take a better look, so I glanced over. He was no one I would’ve chosen to be with.
It was late, well past midnight, when we arrived. The road inside the forest was unpaved, shrouded by trees and shrubs, guarded by a Do Not Enter sign. I wondered if he’d been there before; maybe he’d brought others before me. We stopped only when the road stopped. If it hadn’t been for the light inside the car I wouldn’t have seen a thing, not even myself. He opened the glove compartment and took out a condom. It hadn’t occurred to me to bring one. I suppose I should’ve since I was more at risk than he, but I unwrapped the plastic and waited as he unzipped his pleated slacks. The smell from his groin reminded me of rotting fish I’d found once on the beach as a child. Foul, not to be touched.
I slid the condom down over him and lowered my head. The taste of rubber, like a pencil eraser, was not something I enjoyed, but at least I knew there’d be no contamination. He moaned. I felt his hands on my head, one on either side like two clamps, pulling me up and pushing me down. There was rhythm to his needs that I obliged. I didn’t gag: the fact made me feel good. I was good. At some point his groaning increased to a growl then a high-pitched cry, and suddenly the rubber swelled.
I sat back up. The car windows were clouded with our heat, his breath. I didn’t watch him pull off the rubber, but I think he used a tissue. His car seats were real leather, after all.
“Would you like some air?”
“Sure,” I heard my voice say from far away.
He started the car, cracked my window, backed out. Then we were on the road again, beneath lights, lit.
“I know an ATM machine where I can get your money.”
For a moment I almost asked him what he meant, but then I remembered.
We drove for twenty minutes, then he pulled up at the curb. I recognized the bank as one which I too used.
“I’ll be just a minute.”
The night sky hovered. From the car I looked out over the downtown maze of skyscrapers and crisscrossing bridges and speeding cars. All had continued, without change. Life had not shattered into unmendable fragments.
He returned to the car, buckled up, pulled out his wallet that was filled with colorful credit cards, and handed me one crisp and still warm fifty-dollar bill.
I didn’t thank him.
&nb
sp; “Can I drive you home?”
“Sure.”
I told him where I lived, but lied and had him drop me two blocks from my basement suite. As I exited his car I wondered if I should thank him for the ride, but, again, decided against it.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” I heard him say when I was already outside.
He drove off.
For a moment I didn’t move. I watched. Not just him, but also me watching him. Then I walked to a nearby corner store, bought bread, milk, filtered Camels, two bananas. I unpacked the groceries when I arrived home and smoked a cigarette before brushing my teeth and climbing into bed. If I thought of anything that night as I lay waiting for sleep it was that sex with him had been no different than with all the rest, except that this time I’d made some money.
2
I WAS BORN AT the tail end of the Baby Boom generation, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, December 13, 1964. “A Sunday child,” my mother told me years later, “a special gift from God.”
When I was an adult, she told me that my father cradled me to sleep in his arms until he also drifted off, while my four older siblings—Pisti, Barbara, Frank, and Kriska—were tucked fast asleep upstairs in bed. She’d sneak out of their room in the middle of the night, a single nightlight shining down on Dad with his newborn son, both asleep and at peace in his living room sofa chair. Sometimes, still bundled in his arms, I awoke and looked up at my mother. I hardly ever cried as a child, my parents always said, and I laughed a lot.
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost made up the One Trinity, and my father, who’d been born someplace far away called Hungary, explained it all to my siblings and me when we were children.
“The Bible is God’s plan,” he told us Saturday nights after we knelt in the living room and said the Rosary as a family, “and as good, honorable Catholics, it’s our duty to live according to Scripture.”
The house my parents bought on the west side of Vancouver in the year before my birth cost either $12,000, according to my father, or $15,000, according to my mother. They took out a twenty-five-year mortgage. My father’s job at the saw factory paid him $4.85 per hour, a fact I kept to myself and knew as a child only because I peeked once at his Thursday paycheck kept hidden in my mother’s jewelry box. Our fridge was always full of food, and glass bottles of milk that the milkman brought to our back door every Friday morning. Peanut butter smudged between stacks of Ritz crackers and slices of Kraft cheese were my favorite after-school snack.
My mother baked all her own cakes, something she called “tortes,” from scratch, just like her mother and two grandmothers back home in “the old country,” not far from where my father was born, in another strange-sounding country called Yugoslavia. I never knew a time when my mother didn’t preface the fact that she was from Yugoslavia by saying she was German, which always confused me, because I couldn’t understand how she could be German if she’d been born in a country called Yugoslavia. I had been born in a country called Canada and was called Canadian. For the most part, however, I didn’t think too much about Yugoslavia, or Hungary, or even, for that matter, Canada.
Attending the 11 o’clock mass each Sunday morning was ritual, a high point to a week well lived. Saturday nights after Rosary, Pisti, Frank, and I polished our best black Hush Puppies and lined them up next to the oatmeal-colored sectional in the den for our father’s inspection. There was a “right” way to polish our shoes, and there was a “wrong” way to polish our shoes, and our father showed us the difference. Then came Sunday, the day of the Lord, scrubbed faces and combed hair, pressed gray dress pants, crisp white shirts, and clip-on bow ties for the boys, pleated skirts worn well below their knees, blouses, and tiny purses for my sisters, walking as a family three blocks to our steepled church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, or OLPH, as we called it, adjoined to our elementary school. All the kids often joked, away from the grown-ups, that OLPH really stood for “Old Lady’s Pool Hall,” but it was where the nuns in old-fashioned habits, like Sally Field in The Flying Nun, one of my favorite shows, taught us our lessons. It was where we grew up.
Girls were the ones I played with by the monkey bars or swing sets in the schoolyard during recess every day, and boys were the enemy, or at least they were not like me, even though I was also a boy. I liked hopscotch and jacks, singers like Captain & Tennille, Donny and Marie, and the Carpenters. Boys liked punching faces and playing football, hitting hardballs with baseball bats, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and AC/DC.
Boys liked guns. Once, I told a crowd of boys that I liked guns too, even though I didn’t, and then Ritchie Rogers, one of the worst of the pack, told me I was his new best friend. We laughed after school and we walked home side by side, arms around each other’s shoulders like best buds. While I liked having a new best friend who was a boy, the sudden change of events confused me. Guns were definitely not something that I liked, and if Ritchie liked me because I liked guns, then I knew he didn’t really like me at all but, rather, a me who wasn’t really me. A week later I told him I didn’t like guns after all, then Ritchie said we were no longer friends.
What I liked more than anything was cutting out paper dolls and drawing pictures with my Crayola crayons, weaving macramé, painting stained-glass windows, cutting out all the movie listings in the weekend newspaper and pasting them inside my large, hardcover scrapbook, collecting bouquets of colorful autumn leaves, and building snowmen in our backyard during winter. Even though Christmas was the Lord’s birthday, I liked Christmas because of Frosty the Snowman and A Charlie Brown Christmas, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney singing “Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep)” in White Christmas. Gingerbread men and fruitcake with marzipan icing that my mother baked. I especially liked the Douglas fir that the Christmas angel left in a bank of snow by the side of the house every year for us to find on a wintery morning.
I kissed my parents goodnight in the living room before bed every night when I was a young boy, but my father’s body was wooden and unresponsive, like my hugs were not a language he understood. Upstairs, in the sloped-ceiling attic room I shared with Pisti, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, singing “Que Sera, Sera,” as I drifted in and out, like on a swing, back and forth, opening and closing my eyes between this world and that one.
“Peterle, mein lieber Peterle,” she’d sometimes say following her song, even though I couldn’t understand her German, “was hast Du mit mir gemacht, dass ich keine Ruhe finde.” (“Peter, my dear little Peter, what have you done to me that I can find no peace.”)
I loved my mother, and even when I should’ve closed my eyes and given in to sleep, I couldn’t help but stare up at her and smile, smell the sweetness of her Chanel N°5, which I knew she used discreetly. Sometimes, as she bent back down to kiss me goodnight, I saw her breasts through her pink flannel nightie that draped wide open like the curtain in a breeze. I always tried not to look, but if I glanced and saw them dangling high above me, a bolt of terror struck through my body like a whiplash that left me breathless in her wake.
When I was six years old, my mother was the president of the Catholic Women’s League. We were all so proud of Mommy, and she was good at her job. She planned tea parties and Church bazaars and rummage sales to raise money for the parish. The white elephant table was always my favorite because I found Christmas decorations for our tree and used 45 records, like “Yesterday” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.”
I was standing in a crowd in my school basement, feet from where my mother was working behind a table during one of the bazaars, when a fat, balding man asked me to show him to the little boys’ room. I did as I was asked, and I took him down the hall, away from the crowd, and pointed to the door.
“Can you take me inside, please?” he said.
I didn’t understand why I needed to go inside, but I’d been brought up to be kind and obedient, so I walked ahead of him into the brightly lit room with five cubicles, a lineup of stained enamel urinals
and sinks and black, chain-mesh grating on the windows high up near the cobwebbed ceiling.
He walked to the last cubicle, and he turned around.
“Can you come with me inside, please?”
Now my heart was pounding, like when I ran home for lunch except my body wasn’t moving. He waited. My legs were knee-deep in mud, but I walked over. He went inside and motioned for me to follow. Saying no to adults was not ever a consideration.
In my memory the incident never ends, and I remember the months that followed.
I remembered it when my mother tucked me in at bedtime, sang me her song, and said, “I love you,” but all I heard was the fat man in the toilet stall still telling me he loved me too.
“I love you,” he’d said, his arms like bands around my back, pulling me into his fat belly, opening his pants. Then my mother was gone from my bedroom and the lights were off, except for the hallway nightlight, which cast shadows across my walls, shadows I tried not to notice because they moved, creatures, fat monsters, shape-shifters morphing all around me, closing in on me, like the fat man pushing his penis into my mouth, up and down.
Falling to sleep had always been like a borderless crossing where I was never quite sure in which country I resided. But after the incident at school, when my eyes snapped open from sleep, all I saw now was my mother’s naked body with three breasts floating next to me beside my bed.
Or else I crept down the stairs and through the house, terrified of returning to my mother’s hovering flesh still up, outside my dream, inside my room. If Pisti or my father ever found me huddled in a corner, I’d start to cry and say that I had died upstairs in bed.
“You’re not dead,” they’d say. “You’re just asleep.” And then they’d lead me back up to the nightmare in my room.
Other times I’d run screaming from my bed and through the house, arms flailing, voice ripping both my parents from bed—“I’M DYING I’M DYING I’M DYING!”—until my father held me down while my mother spooned hot beef consommé down my throat, which I’m sure was meant to calm my body, but always, in my mind, I knew that somewhere in the air there was a hole through which I could escape, return from wherever I’d arrived, if only I could find it. Later, all three of us spent, my mother returned my body to my bed, my coffin, where I felt myself dying in the arms she’d wrap around me like a warm blanket.