Elvyn: A Hate Story

[drewkitty]

Elvyn – A Hate Story

Warning: this story includes graphic descriptions of violence, sexual violence and child molestation including parental incest. This is because all of these things happened to the author and he feels that gives him the right to write about it.

Read at your own risk.

Legal warning: any person who attempts any legal action against me with respect to the contents of this story will be deposed. In that deposition, my attorney will ask you why you and/or your organization knew about this and failed to take reasonable action to advise the authorities, including child protective services and police. Your answer will be published publicly.

Disclaimer: for legal and publishing reasons, I am required to state that all of the below is fictional and that no living persons are portrayed and that none of these events occurred. I can confirm that no living persons are slandered.

###

My fourth memory is of a knife fight.

I was standing between my mother and father. She was screaming. There was a lot of blood. There was a knife. I can’t remember whether the knife was in her hand or his hand. I remember it was in a kitchen and there was an open drawer. I was five or six. This was in a house on Darryl Drive in West San Jose.

The nature of memory is highly plastic. The best analogy I can give, after fifty or so years of thinking about it, is borrowed from the science fiction writer Spider Robinson with some additions of my own. In his book Telempath he talks about memory having a ‘read head’ and a ‘write head’ and the write head being easier to invent than the read head.

Think instead of a needle making a wax record. If functioning normally, the needle cuts a nice even groove into the wax with the audio echoes properly recorded.

If events are extreme, the needle may be jammed down into the record. The result is that the recording is DEEPLY CUT into the record and the playback is flawed or distorted, often damaging other nearby parts of the record. As in this case.

Another response to extreme events is that the needle fails to record at all. It skips off the record entirely and nothing but blank results. BLANKNESS.

I don’t remember most of my childhood, for reasons that will become tolerably obvious.

###

My first memory is of screaming in a high chair. This was triggered by a photo I was shown, now long lost, of a child sitting in a high chair in Virginia. I was told this was a picture of my second birthday and there was a cupcake in the video.

I immediately experienced a flashback to that first memory. I was left crying and shaking and my mother – now divorced – asked me what was wrong. I could not answer.

###

“I was born covered in someone else’s blood. If necessary, I have no trouble dying the same way.”

When I first read this quote, I felt a deep emotional resonance with it that transcends mere space and time.

Now I know why.

I was conceived in an act of rape. My father was a skilled serial rapist. My childhood was punctuated by rapes. My mother was a rape survivor. I died from being raped.

I am sometimes convinced that my entire life after that point has been a fantasy my dying brain generated between the time my father’s hands closed around my throat and the final death from rape-erotic asphyxia.

###

I remember my father listening constantly to a police scanner while living in the Darryl Drive home. As an adult, I wonder who he was afraid of. My mother calling the police on him? Perhaps because she caught him doing the things to me that I remember him doing later? The FBI or the DIA, because he was selling his employer’s secrets to a hostile foreign government? Or some third reason that died with him?

###

My second memory – you are keeping count, are you not? - is of being on a plane trip from Maryland to California. It was long enough ago that airline seats still had ashtrays that were used in flight.

###

My mother fled my father, finally.

One of the last straws I think was Toys ‘R Us.

He would get so angry with her that he would take me out shopping. Walk through the Old Town and Country, long demolished, or the also perished department stores. Gottshawks, Woolworth, K-Mart. He would leave me to wander alone – at the age of five and six, mind you – while he went about mysterious business of his own for a few minutes or hours or lifetimes.

But he bought for me at Toys ‘R Us a toy truck. Not a small truck to be played with, but an expensive - $200 in 1970s dollars – battery powered riding toy.

He charged it up one afternoon and sent me out to ride it. Not on the sidewalk, but on the busy street, the aforementioned Darryl Drive.

It was fun. I drove back and forth, narrowly avoiding the much larger cars, with some screeching of brakes and honking of horns, much louder than the tinny horn on my toy.

My mother came out and started screaming for me to get out of the street.

The next day, the toy truck did not work. Someone had ripped out every wire in it.

Thank you, Mom, for saving my life. That time.

###

I remember my mom loading me up and some of my toys into the family van and driving away, longer than I had ever driven before, all the way down to Monterey.

Two very polite young men in business suits, carrying guns, knocked on the hotel room door. One of them took me down to the van and bought me a toy – a Lego toy moon lander – while the other talked to my mom. After an hour they both left.

Much later, I read in an investigative file that my father had told his facility security officer that my mother had taken me and tried to get classified information from him.

Her story was more believable than his. And I had been separated from her so that if necessary, I would have had to witness her arrest. Or – if national security demanded it – her murder.

###

After my mother and my stepfather died, many years later, I found the original divorce decree between my mother and my father among her papers.

“In light of the sustained attempts by both parties to evade their parental responsibilities, the Court has no alternative but to order joint custody…”

###

My third memory was on May 5, 1977.

I only know this because that was the premier date of the movie Star Wars. Right up until my father got me home, the entire afternoon and early evening is DEEPLY CUT into my brain.

My father stood with me in a long line for hours and hours, at the Old Town & Country. It was a movie theater. All I knew is that I really had to pee. Badly. And he didn’t care.

We made it into the theater and into a seat when I started crying because it hurt so bad. I was afraid to upset him and I was afraid to piss myself. Embarrassment had nothing to do with it for me.

I remember the boarding scene where some scary black guy – Vader – and some white armored troops – Stormtroopers – shot the shit out of some defenders. Then I saw two robots moving in a corridor.

Then my father angrily dragged me out of the theater to an empty bathroom, where he ripped down my pants and allowed me to desperately piss in a too big for me urinal. I was four years old.

Then he took me home. My mother was drunk or she wasn’t there. I don’t know which.

Memory is plastic.

What happened next was the second time he pulled down my pants that day.

He flipped me over.

BLANKNESS.

###

After my mother and father divorced, they shipped me back and forth. By bus, by train, by exchanging me like an unwanted package in Kings City. A few times by aircraft. When I turned sixteen, I had to drive myself.

My father took me to Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk on his weekends with me.

Weird things happened.

One of the weird things was being left in the men’s restroom under the log ride with my pants half down, strictly told to stay on the toilet that way with the stall unlocked.

I remember sitting there shivering, stone cold frightened. Not of anyone else. Just him.

Another weird thing was a DEEP CUT of another attempt to murder me.

There is a hanging ride, suspended cars one sits in with a rail that lowers over your head, that traverses the park.

My father took me on that ride.

Halfway to the other station, he made a determined and persistent effort to push me off, thirty feet above the concrete surface of the Boardwalk. Certain death.

I clung for dear life, wrapping myself around that metal rail and screaming for help.

The next time he tried to take me on that ride, I grabbed the stairwell rail and wailed and pissed myself. With witnesses he had no choice but to take me home.

What I resented most, however, was Santa’s Village. We drove past it on every trip to the Boardwalk, and I begged him to take me there.

He said he would sooner or later.

Then it closed. Permanently. And he said, “Oh well, guess you don’t get to go.”

###

After the divorce, my father had a little apartment near Warburton Avenue in Santa Clara. He had to sent a lot of money to my mother, who promptly drank it. Self medication.

He sent me to go around the neighborhood on my own. I made a few friends, including a little girl.

I had some toy cars. She had some Barbie and Ken dolls. I wondered, as little kids do, what a Barbie had at her groin that was smooth plastic.

As little kids do, she decided to take down her pants and show me. On her.

I saw a triangle of light fuzzy hair. I was terrified. I ran away.

When my father found out, he thought it was the funniest thing ever and laughed and laughed.

That night was my second memory of being molested by him.

He took me into the bathtub. Washed me. Obviously he must have washed me before, but he paid particular attention to my junk. And then he got undressed. Talked about my circumcision. How important it was to keep clean.

BLANKNESS.

###

There was an Atari 2600 with a few games. I played them incessantly, obsessively. I know now that I was trying to escape in the only way a small child knew how.

I read voraciously. I still do.

I don’t remember a time that I didn’t know to read.

I am told that my father was the one who taught me to read.

I have no idea.

###

In college, I had beer for the first time since that apartment near Warburton Avenue.

Budweiser does not taste bitter. This surprised me. I thought something was wrong with it, because my father drank Budweiser and he had me drink one when I was five.

Flashback.

I switched to vodka screwdrivers and rapidly became blackout drunk for the first time. The alternative was to go to the roof of the multistory dormitory of the UC San Diego building, and jump to my death.

Because I remembered all of it. The first beer. How I felt so confused and weak. How the needle embedded itself into the wax as deeply as his penis penetrated my rectum.

###

A lot of my life is disjointed snippets, which is why this story is disjointed snippets.

I remember my aunt-by-courtesy Marjorie telling me that my mother wore her velvet green dress at every opportunity in front of my father, because that was the dress she was raped in. She didn’t say that this was how I was conceived. I figured that part out, mostly from things my mother said when she was drunk and angry.

My mother and I never spoke of any of these things. Even when she was tricked when I was eight into giving me a forcible enema, by my father lying and saying I hadn’t had a bowel movement for two weeks. That was a horrific experience of its own, because I didn’t understand what she was doing or why or how come I had a powerful erection – my first. But I could dimly understand that she thought she was doing the right thing.

That was not true when I made an unguarded comment in front of my grandmother about wanting orange juice for breakfast, and my mother punished me later that morning by holding my nose and pouring a half gallon of OJ down my throat. I threw up repeatedly, inhaled and caught aspiration pneumonia, which kept me sick home from school for a week.

Abuse is relative. I can forgive her. I will never forgive him.

###

My father dated. Much later, I discovered that at least one of the women he dated had received a restraining order against him.

But my experience, over and over again, was of him introducing me to another ‘her’ and then she would not be around any more, and he would be enraged, screaming at me that it was my fault no matter how polite I had been.

I remember one of these, in a high rise building somewhere around Berkeley with a view of the San Francisco Bay.

The woman said to me, “I need to talk to your father for a minute” and had me wait in her bedroom, which had that view.

My father came and angrily collected me.

He walked me down the exterior stairwell. It had a waist high railing.

He started to pick me up.

I screamed and ran, desperately, racing down the stairwell, clinging to the door handle of the Datsun pickup truck as soon as I reached it.

“What are you afraid of?” he demanded when he caught up to me.

I did not answer. I had learned to guard words around him.

We never saw her again. I’m glad she escaped.

###

There came a time when I didn’t want to drink a beer.

His thick hands closed around my neck and squeezed.

This is it, I thought. This is how I am going to go.

I died.

That is how I learned what it is to be a murder victim.

I woke up in his bed, my ass sore and his semen dripping from it.
\
I cried and cried and cried until he threw me out of the room and locked the door.

###

Ultimately, he did find a woman stupid enough to take him in, live with him and ultimately marry him.

She was also a sadist, and a thief, and made her living defrauding the elderly. I didn’t know the term narcissist, but she was a perfect match for my father in every way.

When he first brought me into her home, he took a couple of reasonable precautions. At least in his mind.

He told her that I was a malicious liar and that I had been abused by my mother.

The first time he was alone with me in the house, he bent me over the living room table and sodomized BLANKNESS

I remember my hands tied to the angular legs with dirty socks.

There was a long deep scratch made on the other end of the table. With the metal belt button of my boy’s corduroy pants.

I got in a lot of trouble for that scratch. He told everyone I had made it deliberately, to spite him.

###

I hid for days after that. I hid in the top of a closet, sneaking out only to piss and to get water. Ultimately my new stepbrother – who would become a skilled corporate lawyer and product liability defense specialist, bragging of his prowess in defending his night vision goggle client from the grieving families of dead soldiers and pilots – found me and tried to drag me down. I kicked him in the face. He beat the shit out of me.

Much later I reconciled dates. He was an eighteen year old high school student, an adult. I was maybe nine.

###

A few months later, I was just starting to come out of my shell. There was a dog, Spook, who took a liking to a scared kid.

My father got me a cat. Which I named Striper.

He explained to me privately and in great detail what he would do to the cat if I ever told anyone what he had done to me.

I believed him.

A few months later, Striper was gone. He bragged of taking her to the vet as she yowled and fought him, to put her down. My stepmother didn’t want a cat, you see.

I was grateful she had at least escaped cleanly.

###

One of my stepsister’s boyfriends kicked my second cat – Princess – in the head. After that she was confused and in constant pain and terrified of everyone including me. In a human, you would call it a life altering head injury.

At least that was the story.

I had to keep track of the lies and never accidentally tell any truths.

My father finally caught her and put her down. But she got him in the face. She put up a GOOD fight.

You see, my stepsister was raped by him too. Somehow she and my stepmother ended up with the same venereal disease at the same time. He was the common vector.

I don’t know if he injured the cat for fun or to get at my stepsister. Maybe both. But he certainly got rid of the cat for fun.

###

I was in the master bedroom. One of my chores was to empty the trash.

My father was taking a shower. He got out. He showed me his groin.

I turned to flee and he hit me in the head over and over again.

Then he made me suck him.

I waited for BLANKNESS.

I’m still waiting, forty years later. Because I remember every moment of that irrumatio.

###

My father and stepmother traveled to visit my father’s family in Bishop. He’d had a difficult childhood which he’d told me about in detail. His fraternal sister, Evelyn, whom he had raped. The time he’d eaten a cow patty to try to impress a girl. The time a biker gang had beaten the snot out of him and he’d kept fighting anyway. How he wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house and had to sleep in an outbuilding with the dogs until he left to Fresno State to get a certificate in TV repair, and then gotten a degree in engineering and a job with a lab called Lawrence Livermore. When his older brothers had made him watch as they drowned kittens he had adopted and named, at the orders of my paternal grandfather who died before I was born.

But they wanted to repair ties, to connect with his family. I was told to be on my very best behavior, to not fuck any of this up.

So they left me with the other kids as they talked with the adults.

I remember the other kids bringing me to their uncle, who was loading shotgun shells in the garage.

“He doesn’t know how to play,” they said. It was true. I didn’t.

So he taught me to load shotgun shells and while he did, asked me questions about my father. I was too terrified to answer, of course, afraid of saying the wrong thing.

The plan had been for them to stay the night.

They left with me to a hotel.

I had done wrong again. They never wanted to see him again.

I was cold and shivering in a T-shirt in the back of the small convertible, wrapped in a thin blanket. My father wanted the top down and drove angrily. They had the heater. I did not.

I had a thought. The thought kept me warm. I smiled bitterly for hours.

After we arrived and my stepmother went inside, my father asked what I was smiling about.

I told him.

“I thought of taking the blanket and tossing it over you both on a blind curve.”

For the first time in his life, I saw him become utterly shocked.

“That would have killed us all!” he exclaimed.

“What do you think I have to live for?” I asked as I got out of the car and walked away.

###

I have many other stories of Elvyn. How he fucked up the brakes on my car so badly that the auto shop wanted to report the “previous shop” to the state for incompetence. How he tried to make me change out chlorine canisters by taking deep sniffs of them. How he tried to get me to crawl under the exposed hub of a car with the tire off while he had his hand on the jack and there was no cribbing or jack stand.

But I have one more story to tell. The last rape.

My father liked lemon drops. I wouldn’t touch beer. But somehow I never associated the beer with what he must have put in it. The slang term then, a Mickey Finn. Nowadays, being roofied.

(When I received law enforcement training in that subject, I had a prolonged and extensive flashback. As a police cadet I did not have the option of leaving the room.)

He gave me a special lemon drop to suck on when I was a senior in high school, seventeen going on seventy.

I became sleepy and woozy.

I woke up in the master bedroom waterbed, half sprawled, pants down.

“That wasn’t worth the effort,” I heard his voice say distantly from the bathroom as he cleaned himself up.

I crawled to the bathroom at the other end of the house and cleaned myself up.

But I knew what had been done to me. And I was not going to let it go this time.

I went to the high school counselor at Saratoga High School of Saratoga, CA. He locked his office and left for the day. A school steeped in heavy scandal, they did not want to hear it.

I went to Reverend Roy Strausberger of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church of Saratoga, CA. He heard my accusation. He told me I had sinned against God by bearing false witness and dishonoring my father, and that my father was the one tithing and not me.

My father looked at me very strangely after the next Sunday but said nothing.

I went to the West Valley Substation of the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office and asked the desk sergeant to take my report. He took down my name, address and information. To his credit, he asked when it had happened. Three days prior. Too late for a rape kit. Too late for toxicology. He then told me bluntly, that there was no chance that the case would be pursued in this county at this time.

This same county let Brock Turner of Stanford go for forcible rape. This same county let go an entire softball team for gang rape. So I now thank this crusty old Sergeant for not letting me start a fight I couldn’t possibly win.

In due course, my father died of emphysema and heart disease. My stepmother ordered a dumpster and threw out all of his personal effects and most of mine. I ended up on the street, and survived long enough to accept my scholarship to the UC.

But on May 5, 1977, my family became dead to me. It just took a while to die out.

My surviving Mormon distant relatives have no idea I exist.

The family records at the Laws Historical Museum outside Bishop show that my death was reported to them when I was still a teenager, by my father. Falsely as with all else in his life.

My stepmother sent me a postcard before the pandemic. She expressed that she thought of me often and hoped I would contact her.

I did not.

Her obituary does not mention me and mentions my father’s death as untimely.

I agree. He lived far too long and died all too easily, for his crimes.

I swear and affirm under penalty of perjury that every word of this story is true.