This Sunday will be Father’s Day, and I look forward to having brunch with the two who gave me my most important and treasured title.
It is also an anniversary of sorts.
Father’s Day 1984 fell on June 17. Next Monday, it will be exactly forty years since an older man picked me up on a Monterey street corner, took me to the nearby Casa Munras motel, and initiated me into another life. For the next two and a half years, I would regularly have sex with older men, almost always for money; first on the Monterey Peninsula, then in Berkeley and Oakland. I would stop in the spring of 1987, just weeks after I suffered a severe concussion after falling down a flight of stairs on campus.
I would not tell anyone – not even a therapist – about the sex with older men until 2013. I would not discover that that concussion was in fact a serious brain injury until 2022.
Danielle, my current therapist, regards both the sex work and the concussion as foundational traumas. I can’t disagree. The evidence of the harm they did is overwhelming. One was a singular accident, the other 33 months of compulsive, self-destructive acting out. Each shaped me and changed me. The problem is that I didn’t learn about the extent of the brain damage until I was 54, and I did not allow myself to even speak aloud of the sex with men until I was 46. I spent decades telling myself a story of why I was the way I was while leaving out two absolutely essential episodes.
Imagine putting on Hamlet, and cutting all the scenes that refer to the death of the title character’s father. Try explaining Romeo and Juliet, while neglecting to explain that Capulets and Montagues do not get along. Do a production of Long Day’s Journey into Night but take out the alcoholism. If you absolutely had to do these things, you could, but you’d be hard-pressed to explain why all the characters are upset. In a way, I suspect that’s what I was doing for decades, trying to understand my impulsiveness and addictiveness without being able to acknowledge two very key precipitating events.
I have seen the scans of my damaged brain. I have read the literature about sexual abuse, and I have, with some ambivalence, accepted that I was incapable of giving meaningful consent to much older men when I was a boy of barely seventeen. I take those two pieces of information and I filter them through a culture that is utterly obsessed with trauma. I wonder if even now, my decision to center the sex work and the brain injury as central to my story is in part just an acquiescence to current trends.
I’m old enough to have been in therapy in the late 1980s, when everyone and their pet kangaroo was convinced that mental illness was a function of suppressed memory. Get people to remember early childhood sexual abuse, perhaps under hypnosis, and voila! You will have found the root cause of their depression and pain. Recovered memory therapy turned out to be a whole lot of quackery, but during a period that roughly overlapped the George HW Bush Administration, it dominated an entire field.
Later, in the mid-1990s, we had the golden age of personality disorder diagnoses. Soon, everyone and their pet cockatiel had Borderline Personality Disorder. I got that same diagnosis. There was much wringing of hands about how manipulative and untreatable we BPDs were.
I have been in certain religious circles where my compulsions and cognitive troubles are attributed to some form of demonic oppression. (For those of you not up on your Spiritual Warfare, “possession” refers to those rare instances where a person’s entire identity is under the complete control of a dark spirit. “Oppression” means the demons are not yet fully sovereign over your thoughts and actions, but they are malign and omnipresent influences.) I’ve never been subjected to a Catholic exorcism, but I have been the subject of various “cleansings,” “healings,” and “spiritual interventions” from Pentecostals, the Kabbalah Centre, and – once, in a story I really need to tell -- a white witch. Each group told me, somberly , that the other groups’ attempted exorcisms were as likely to insert as to extricate those pesky demons. Sigh.
In her new book Consent, the writer Jill Ciment tells the story of meeting her husband, the artist Arnold Mesches. Their relationship began when she was 17 and he 47. Ciment is no fool. She knows her readers will see those numbers – 17 and 47 – and come to a particular conclusion. She knows that conclusion will, in part, be a function of the Zeitgeist in which those readers read. The review in Slate notes
At times, Ciment—a formidably assured writer—struggles to find the language to characterize Mesches. “Do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution,” she asks, as a “Casanova, silver fox?” Or in the language of the ’90s, when she wrote Half a Life—the era of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, when “men who preyed on younger women were called letches, cradle-robbers, dogs”? Or with the heightened moral rhetoric of our time, post-#MeToo, as a “sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power”?
Ciment is smart enough to know that we see the past through the lenses the culture tells us to wear. We live in an era especially hostile to power imbalances and age-disparate romances. We live in an era dismissive of the idea that young people can have agency, and Ciment is so attuned to that dismissiveness that in this new book, she tells a very different story than she did in the 1990s, when she first wrote an account of falling in love with Mesches:
In Half a Life, written when she was in her 40s, Ciment describes how, on last day of Mesches’ class, she finally made her move, kissing him after the other students had left and asking him to sleep with her, a request he rejected. In Consent, a product of her 60s, she makes a crucial change to this story. Mesches, she insists, kissed her first. She doesn’t explain why she wrote otherwise back in the 1990s. (Emphasis in the original).
I’m a ghostwriter. I’m in the memoir business. You want to write two separate autobiographies, decades apart, telling the same story from different perspectives? I think that’s a great idea. (Call me.) After all, we change our views as we age. Just ask Leonard Nimoy, whose first memoir, in 1975, was called I am Not Spock. Twenty years later, older and more accepting of his most famous role, he issued a follow-up: I am Spock. In Nimoy’s case, it wasn’t that the culture had changed, it was that he had softened, matured, and reflected.
(Like Ciment, Nimoy wrote his first memoir in his forties and his second in his sixties. A lot of emotional growth happens in that span. On the other hand, there was no massive reappraisal of Star Trek between 1975 and 1995; a beloved television series spawned movies and new shows, but what was loved only grew more so.)
I don’t know if Jill Ciment kissed the late Arnold Mesches first. Only she knows, and perhaps after all these years, she’s forgotten. When we tell our foundational stories, and we listen to how those stories are received, we shape our narratives according to the responses we get. Even the most honest of us are prone to massaging the stories of our past to fit the particular demands of the moment. For Ciment, writing in an era that believes that teens cannot give consent to older men, she is saying what she must. Perhaps it is true. Perhaps it is just… necessary.
It is absolutely true that forty years ago this Monday, a sailor who said his name was Mike took me into a motel room and had sex with me. It is absolutely true that I was barely a month past my 17th birthday. It is absolutely true that on February 2, 1987, I fell down a flight of stairs in Dwinelle Hall on the Cal campus and suffered a severe concussion. It is absolutely true that you can see the marks of that injury on my gray matter even now. Those are all facts.
It is also the fact that here in the 2020s, we are trained to attribute all suffering to traumas ancestral or personal. We compose narratives and tell stories that reinforce rather than confound our trendy, socially constructed assumptions about consent, sexuality, and even the workings of the human brain. I know that what happened on June 17, 1984, and February 2, 1987, changed me. Exactly how, though, is as much a function of story as it is of objective fact. I’m still working that out, and as Jill Ciment’s conflicting memoirs indicate, I am not alone.
I remember your essay where you first described that concussion and it was incredibly pervaded by this huge sense of relief — ‘finally I have an external cause to blame for the ways I fucked up my life’! I definitely got the sense that there was some strongly motivated reasoning there.
But maybe you’re generally just too hard on yourself. I mean, I’ve been reading you since you were trying to make a career as Mr Male Feminist and I get that your peccadilloes made it totally irresistible for other people and apparently for yourself most of all to judge you in the most intense possible manner. But what if you’re a garden variety sort of fucked up philanderer, kind of vain and really good at charming women, who just rode it too far? It really messed up your life in part because of your own penchant for self-dramatization and in the end self-flagellation, but I never got the sense that anything you actually did with other people was really so awful. I mean, I wasn’t there, but you fucked around, a lot of people do.
When you get to know them a LOT of people, maybe the majority, are kind of screwed up in one dimension or other of their lives. A long long way from perfect, that’s for sure. And that’s without any major concussions. Most live it out in private and only a few people close to them know. Maybe you’re just another one of them, but you chose to live it out more in public.
Anyway sorry if this is too personal, feel free to delete.
'[w]e listen to how those stories are received, we shape our narratives according to the responses we receive." This has always really disturbed and kind of scared me - not only that we adjust the way we tell our stories, but that in doing so we obscure the fresh memories. It is so disorienting to contemplate how plastic our minds are, and that we pretty much are constantly stirring the pots of our consciousness and messing things up (I rarely am better for stewing on things and the increasing blurriness of things is distressing to me. Makes me feel so ephemeral). I am not at all surprised you didn't discuss this for decades and I imagine that to a large extent you kept them submerged from yourself. It's so confusing to be human. I am sorry for your long and isolated suffering. As always, your stories help me so much to understand myself and life in general.