Posted by:
GayLayAle
(
)
Date: January 21, 2011 06:02PM
During those days, I prayed a lot. I studied the Book of Mormon. I looked for some kind of answer to why all this was happening to my family. I don’t think I ever expected an answer, but the emotional weight of everything that was going on, literally forced me to my knees in prayer because I didn’t know what else to do. I was always taught that God only gives people challenges in their life that they are able to handle, but my faith began to waver in the height of everything that was happening. But that didn’t stop me from believing that God would hold me up and make me strong. My grades in school were suffering. I couldn’t concentrate on homework, and my time in class was spent worrying about what was going on at home.
When the anxiety attacks kept getting worse, my mom’s doctor referred her to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, in true form, prescribed a bevy of medications for her. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, not much was known about panic/anxiety/depression disorder, much less about the drugs typically used to treat them, but those drugs were thrown around like candy, and not much attention was paid to the combinations and dosages.
The medications began to take their toll. Her psychiatrist was constantly switching her from this to that to any and every antidepressant/anti-anxiety medication that was available. Zoloft, Depacote, Paxil, Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and dozens of other things I can’t even remember. My mom never abused her medication; she only took the prescribed doses at the prescribed intervals. Alas, none of these medications worked. The anxiety spiked, the depression increased, and her asthma started raging out of control. Things began to get so bad and so dark. My parents continued yelling and screaming at each other. My little brother would come to my room and sit with me and cry. So many nights we just sat holding each other and crying, listening to the screaming and crying coming from my parents’ room.
During this time, the family, sans Mom, still attended church regularly. My dad held his callings and did everything he was supposed to do. I think church was a big escape for him, which at the time he really needed. Any escape at all. He didn’t know what to do. Anything he said to my mom turned into an argument. He was working later and later, and when he came home, he avoided my mom as much as possible. He had begun to look like an old man. The worry lines on his face were becoming deeper, and his health began to deteriorate. He was exhausted all the time, and by that point, my parents were sleeping in separate rooms; mainly because my mom was so sick, he couldn’t get the sleep he needed.
I want to break here and explain that my parents always deeply loved each other. I don’t know of many marriages that could withstand all the trauma my parents’ did and still remain intact. There were periods of calm interspersed throughout these rocky times. During these moments, my parents got along great. They laughed and talked and genuinely enjoyed each others’ company. My dad just didn’t know how to cope with the stress of my mom’s illness. None of us did. It was like a huge black cloud hanging in the air all the time.
As I grew into adolescence, I realized more and more how different I was. As I began puberty, and should have been noticing girls, I started noticing boys. To be perfectly frank, I never really paid much attention to it. It wasn’t this big epiphany I had like “Oh. My. God. Becky. I. Like. Boys. That. Is. So Wrong.” No, it just kind of was what it was. By the time eighth grade rolled around and I was about fourteen, I understood a lot better what ‘gay’ meant. I realized I had little to no interest in girls, and the time I spent fantasizing during the times I masturbated, I found myself thinking about other guys in my school, wondering what their penises looked like, and how it would feel to touch them and have them touch mine. Again, at the time, it just wasn’t a big deal to me. ‘Gay’ wasn’t something that was talked about a whole lot, at least not in the concrete sense. At fourteen, I really didn’t grasp the actual concept of sex. Sure, I knew what it was, I had gone through the whole birds and bees talk with my folks and I heard kids at school talk about it a lot, but sex as a reality didn’t impact me much. Even though I began masturbating when I was about eleven years old, it never occurred to me that it was bad. Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew it felt good to do it. The guilt never really hit me and I got lucky that the whole “do you masturbate” question never was directly asked in my priesthood interviews. Sure, the, “are you morally clean” thing got asked, but for all I knew, that only was referring to having sex with an actual person. I passed the sacrament with no guilt. I studied my scriptures. I believed in everything the Mormon Church taught me. At thirteen, I was made president of the Deacon’s Quorum. My spiritual self seemed to be the only part of me that was wholly intact. I liked going to church. I liked feeling like I was close to Heavenly Father. I think at that point, it was the only thing I felt like I had left to hold onto.
Thinking back, I kind of kick myself for not keeping a journal. I started probably ten of them, but as with a lot of things in my life, I started, but never finished or kept it going. It would be really fascinating for me to go back through and actually read the thoughts I was having at that point in my life. The details and timelines of all this have become a bit blurred. That whole period in my life felt like one ongoing nightmare, so I’m finding it a bit difficult to keep all this stuff in chronological order.
As a complete and utter aside, and because I suffer from a bit of ADD, I want to talk a bit about memory. Memory, all alone in the moonlight. Memory is a funny thing. Every moment of every day as long as we live, our brains are bombarded with sensory stimuli -- unless you're Helen Keller and have been shot up with some weird Amazonian numbing agent, in which case there would be no stimuli, mainly because you're Helen Keller and you'd already be dead, so it'd be a moot point anyway.
Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches. Head, shoulders, knees 'n' toes, knees 'n' toes, knees 'n' toes, head, shoulders, knees 'n' toes, eyes, ears, mouth and nose. For the average homo sapien, our brains process and immediately discard most of the external stimuli we are exposed to day in and day out. The big exception to this rule would obviously be the blessed few who have the gift of a photographic memory; although I can't honestly say whether that would be a blessing or a huge annoyance. I don't think I'd want to remember a lot of the things I see. For instance, just the other morning, some random homeless man in a wheelchair came rolling over out of nowhere to the smoking area outside the office where I work (keep in mind, I don't work in a downtown urban-type area. It's an office park with nothing else really in the immediate vicinity) and began sifting through the ashtray and scouring the ground for cigarette butts that had one or two drags left on them, and stuffing them in his socks. I don't want to remember things like that. It's horrifically sad, and quite frankly, more than a little creepy. Of course, thinking about it further, I may want to keep that one in the Files so I have something to talk about at future awkward dinner parties I'm sure I'll be invited to at Lindsay Lohan's house when she gets out of rehab.
But, at the end of the day, whether fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not one of these Sainted Mind Photographers myself, so I constantly marvel at the small, minute, seemingly insignificant and wildly random details my brain seems to hold onto for some utterly bizarre reason; things I'm not really exposed to repeatedly in daily life. Why, for instance, do I remember the lyrics to a song I heard only once and hated, but for the life of me, can't remember the exact color and shade of my mother's eyes? I saw them nearly every single day of my life for over twenty years, and to this day, I don't think I could pick them out of an eyeball lineup. Especially if it was one of those high-pressure lineups in the dim room with the one-way glass, where you're the white trash hooker from Rhode Island named Sheila who was the only witness to a heinous contact lens incident, sitting there with your ratty bleach-blonde hair and dark roots wearing bright magenta lipstick and matching eyeliner you got at the Pick 'n' Save that you knew were a bad idea but went real well with the shoes you stole from that bitch that calls herself Couch Cushion who works the 7-11 parking lot one street over and is constantly stealing your Johns because she swallows and you don't but you know you're way classier and give better head than she does plus you practice safe sex by doing backdoor because the last thing you want is to get pregnant again so soon. So you're sitting there in the police station and you've got the whole I'm Coming Down From a Ten Day Meth and Heroin Bender twitches and you're smacking on a flavorless piece of Big Red gum that keeps sticking to the partial dentures your pimp had to pay for because your last John punched you for accidentally using teeth when you were giving him the five-dollar Mississippi Tongue Twister that happened to be the weekly special you were running at the time, and the butch female cop who's wearing too much Acqua di Gio for Men aftershave and whose breath smells like canned green beans, M&M's and Camel Menthol cigarettes has her mouth right next to your ear, which is kind of a turnon, even though you're not really into bumping uglies with another girl again, plus she's grinding her teeth and threatening to tell your pimp that you've been skimming trick money off the top for the past twelve years to pay for your out of control canned cat food addiction if you don't hurry the fuck up and point out the eyeballs she KNOWS you saw that night, but no matter how hard you try you can't point them out because there are five sets of disembodied eyeballs staring at you through the glass, and your memory isn't that great since you tripped over a stray cat in the alley where you sometimes give quickie discount half 'n' halfs and hit your head on the edge of the dumpster that your best friend lives in, so Officer Butchie loses her cool and starts hollering and throwing the used Kleenex at you that she keeps handy for the chronic post-nasal drip she developed from snorting too much blow off the toilet seats in the bathroom at the police academy. Or something. So, just like our friend Sheila the Hooker from Rhode Island, I'm not all that great under pressure, especially if I have a butch female police officer with a hardcore coke habit screaming and throwing Kleenex at me.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. Early adolescence. So, from the time I was maybe eleven or twelve, I had a best friend. His name is Josh. I use him in the present tense because he is still a part of my life. He grew up just four houses away from me, was a year older and we were interested in a lot of the same things. Josh and I spent almost every day together. After school, on the weekends; we even took Josh along on family vacations with us sometimes. He was like a member of the family. By the time I was fourteen, and realizing that I might be *gasp!* gay…I felt like he was the only person in the whole world I trusted enough to tell. I sat him down one Friday evening when he was sleeping over, and told him the things I was feeling. He sat calmly and listened to me and told me he was my friend no matter what. We left it at that. Things didn’t change between us at all; we went along as we always had.
The more I came to terms with being gay, and the more I understood what it meant, the more the guilt started to set in. I attended all the Priesthood Sessions of General Conference with my dad and little brother, and each time, either the prophet or one of the GA’s would bring up how evil it was to be homosexual. I would sit there in abject terror for my soul, knowing this was a part of me that I needed to squash. I needed to stop masturbating and thinking about guys in a sexual way. I needed to pray harder, and study the scriptures more, build my testimony and turn my life around. Above all, I could never, ever tell anyone else.
The first real sexual encounter I had with another guy happened when I was about 15. At that time, my parents had purchased a computer and before long, we were ONLINE! I logged in hours on America Online. I spent a lot of times in the M4M (male for male) chat rooms, and found myself beginning to talk sexually with other guys. So much for turning my life around, eh? The more I tried to suppress the feelings I had, the more they pushed themselves up. I came up with an online “character” for myself. According to my online profile, I was 16, Latino, ripped with muscles and a huge penis. I found naked pictures that looked like my description online and posted them to my profiles. I talked with hundreds and hundreds of guys, mostly older, and always I found an excuse not to meet them.
Over time, I got braver and braver about revealing things about myself online. I made more accurate descriptions of myself, and posted my real age. I took down the fake pictures, but didn’t replace them with any real ones of myself. I began wandering into the local gay chat rooms. As a tender fifteen-year-old, I got a lot of attention from the older guys. They would hit me up with things like, “oooh, jailbait” or, “do your parents know you’re in here” followed by flirting, followed by cybersex, followed by invitations to meet. Rarely did anyone under the age of eighteen contact me. Most of these guys were in their late twenties to early thirties.
Of course, the last thing I wanted to have happen was to meet someone and have the word get out that I was gay. One afternoon, my parents and I had a fight. I have absolutely no recollection what the fight was about, but I do remember being really angry with them, and I wanted to act out. The only way I knew how to do it was to enter my secret online world. That day, a thirty-five-year-old guy named Chase began to talk with me in the Utah M4M chat room. Chase was in town on business from Canada and was staying at a motel off I-15 in Midvale. We chatted for awhile and he eventually asked to meet me. This was it. I was going for it. I told him to meet me at a nearby mall. I convinced my sister to drop me off at the mall to meet some “friends from school” and hang out. She dropped me off, and I hurried to the other side of the mall where I told Chase to pick me up. After standing outside ZCMI for about ten minutes, Chase pulled up. I was terrified.
Chase didn’t look anything like his description. He looked to be in his mid-forties, was probably close to fifty pounds overweight and was smoking a cigarette. I didn’t know what to do. Like a total idiot, I got in the car with him. The thing I remember most about Chase is he had an Aussie accent. I was too nervous to ask him many questions, but as he drove toward his motel, he started rubbing my leg. I vividly recall the smell of his aftershave or cologne. I probably won’t forget that smell until the day I die.
He tried to make small talk with me the entire way, but I was too scared and shy to talk back. We reached the motel and I followed him to his room. Within seconds, he grabbed me and began kissing me. Sad as this is, this is the first time I had ever kissed anyone. I was pretty grossed out. He started taking his clothes off and taking my clothes off and before I knew what the hell was happening, I was performing oral sex on him.
Keep in mind; this is the very first time I had done anything like this with anyone. I was really disgusted. Here I was, not even sixteen years old, in a motel room with a complete stranger who was probably three times my age, doing things that made me sick to my stomach. He was really overweight and this was the very first time I had ever seen an uncircumcised penis. It horrified me (though that horror has since left the building). A lot of what happened that night I have blocked out, but I do remember being down there doing what I was doing and him farting right in the middle of it. I remember gagging and trying not to throw up and all the while trying to make sure he knew I WASN’T gagging and choking back vomit.
After being there about a half hour, he finished. I didn’t. I asked him to take me back to the mall so my sister could pick me up. We didn’t speak on the drive back. I got out of his car and he drove off. That was the last time I saw or spoke to him.
Words cannot describe how awful I felt. I ran back inside the mall, went straight to the bathroom into a stall and began to cry. What had I done? I was unclean. I had a huge, heavy stone sitting in the pit of my stomach and there was nothing I could do about it. I stayed in the bathroom for probably close to a half hour, then dried my eyes and went to a payphone to call my sister to come get me.
I was sitting on a bench outside the mall when my sister pulled up. I got in the car and immediately she could tell something was wrong. I told her I had just gotten in an argument with one of my friends and that I was okay. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I tossed and turned and tried to scrub my brain; praying silently that I could erase what had happened, and most of all that God would forgive me. I knew I had done something gravely serious, and knew it would come with equally serious consequences.
For the next two weeks, I fastidiously stayed away from the computer and did my best not to think about what I had done. I spent every evening in my room reading the scriptures and praying that Heavenly Father would make it all better and forgive me. After nearly a month, I felt pretty much back to normal, and continued on with my life, but for probably the next year, I could still smell Chase’s acrid cologne in my nostrils.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2011 06:05PM by GayLayAle.