do? What will he say? What will I do? Who will believe me? How do I explain why I was with him? How do I explain all of the meetings I’ve had with him for months? Who can I speak to who will understand? How do I make this go away? Why am I responding? Why is my body responding? Why can’t I stop responding? Why can’t I say anything? Why can’t I stop him? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
It all happened in utter silence. There was a radio on, no doubt to muffle sounds, but I could no longer hear a thing. All I could hear was the blood pumping through my temples, pounding in my ears, the sensation of being removed from the world around me and locked in my own space. At least, that’s how I remember it. Or maybe that memory came from the hundreds, if not thousands, of nightmares I’ve had ever since. What I know with absolute certainty is that I couldn’t hear a thing.
He rubbed my legs. He fondled me. He masturbated me. He exposed himself. He rubbed himself on my face and inserted his penis in my mouth. He returned his focus to my feet. He masturbated and ejaculated over my feet and shins.
I did nothing. Well, I guess that’s not completely true, as I did respond in a small way, with a kick, but it was, at most, a halfhearted one, more a straightening of a leg than anything else, something you do when you’re pretending to wake up with a jolt rather than hit somebody deliberately. Whatever you’d call what I did, it certainly did not prevent him from accomplishing whatever goals he had set out to achieve.
He groaned. He turned away, turned his back to me, and walked away, leaving me by myself for several minutes. And when it was over, once he had finished with my body—well, how could I make sense of what had just happened? How could I explain that I didn’t attack him, that I didn’t lash out and stand up to him and stop him right then and there? And today, how can I reconcile what I wish I had done back then to avoid this, to stop it, with what I didn’t do then?
I covered myself back up as quickly as I could. But I didn’t run. I didn’t know what to do. I sat there until he came back in. And then we talked. Rather, he talked, I listened. He talked for a long time. He calmed me. He comforted me.
“You’re progressing so well. You have so much talent, your legs are so strong, you have limitless potential. You know, people like us have to support each other. We’re not like others. They would never understand who we are. They don’t see things the way we do. I know you’re a bit lost right now, but I understand you. I see who you are and what you can be. People like us have to look out for each other. We have to support each other. But people like us, working together, can make anything happen.”
That expression again: “people like us.”
Graham had just shown me he was different. Now, with those words, he was telling me. Maybe he had been telling me all along and I just hadn’t understood. I thought “people like us” had referred to the talented jock as geek, geek as jock. Now, with what had just happened, I was pretty sure he was telling me that I was gay.
And then he confirmed it: “If our secret ever gets out, everyone will think you’re gay. Nobody will want you on their team or in their program. It would be the end of everything for you because nobody wants to deal with people like us.”
I don’t know if he meant it as a threat. I mean, of course he did. But back then I saw it as something he feared would happen to me if “the secret” ever got out, something he didn’t want to happen to me because it would cause me pain and suffering and he was there to look out for me.
The things a goalie doesn’t see when he’s screened.
I should have run away from him forever. I didn’t. I could have stopped him right there. I didn’t. If I had stopped him, nothing would ever have happened to Sheldon, to Todd, to Theo, to all of his other victims who came after me. Except that I didn’t. I didn’t stop him from anything, and that is my shame. I’m not ashamed of what happened to me. My shame is that I didn’t stop him and that others after me had to suffer as a result. Their suffering is all my fault. I could have prevented it all.
Instead of running, I felt sorry for him. Oh, I was full of rage and fear, but at the same time he had somehow made himself come across as a victim in all of this, presenting his homosexuality as something that caused him pain. He showed a vulnerability and needed support. I felt sorry for him. I actually felt sorry for him.
I walked home, a zombie detached from the world around me. I cried like I’d never cried before in my life. It was a long walk, a route I usually jogged at a leisurely pace, but I couldn’t breathe properly. It was very cool outside, that I remember, but that’s about all. I couldn’t feel anything. I was off in my own world, far removed from this one. Lights were blurry, and once again I couldn’t really hear anything. Was I in shock? Probably. I cried in solitude during my walk home. There is so much that I don’t remember, that I don’t want to remember, that I have actively tried to forget over all of these years. But there is also so much I will never, ever be able to forget.
When I got home it must have been late, but there were several lights still on.
“Where were you?”
“Out.”
It was the normal reply of a normal teenager. I, the supposed golden child, had never had a curfew. I had my own room in the basement all by myself, and I could pretty much come and go as I pleased, often without anybody even noticing that I was away. With that one word I went down the stairs, taking the twelve quick steps down to the low-ceilinged basement I had to duck to enter, and stumbled into my dark bedroom with the one small window up at ground level, the room that flooded whenever it rained.
Alone in my own home, I had no one to turn to, and I certainly wasn’t about to start talking to anybody about what had just happened anyway. I was supposed to be perfect, and what had just happened was not perfect. I had no perspective that night, no ability to take a step back and process what had happened, what was happening. I was caught up in the middle of something I did not understand, something so horrible that it was beyond anything I could remotely consider. Who do you turn to when the only person you have to turn to is the person who has just done something horrific to you?
His words haunted me: “People like us have to stick together.” I thought I knew him, that I had understood him. I hadn’t. Who was he?
More importantly, who was I?
That’s a question we all ponder at some point in an attempt to find the meaning of life. But that night it was just something that kept echoing in my head as I lay in bed unable to sleep, quietly crying through the night until the darkness was broken by the early morning light straining to make its way through our back windows and downstairs into my room, the only place where I would ever again feel safe.
Even though Graham’s homosexuality was something I couldn’t really understand, it didn’t scare me. The way he had constructed things, positioning himself as a lonely and misunderstood victim, made me sympathetic toward him. In fact, it made me think he was even better than the rest. He, a lonely man, an outcast in society (remember, this was nearly four decades ago), was still engaged in the most manly of Canadian sports and at a level where he was seen as more progressive, more intelligent, simply superior to others. I liked his story and its appeal of an underdog triumphing against all odds over the know-nothing Neanderthals. His story got to me at both an emotional and an intellectual level.
The reality, of course, was that he was no underdog. He was just a sociopath, a serial sexual offender. He was the powerful one. I was his victim and the true underdog. But I couldn’t see that, for he had groomed me to see the world his way.
Graham had been very clever. After physically assaulting me, he didn’t come
