Part One - Earliest Memories

One of my earliest memories connected to my abuse began with some innocent role-playing between myself and my closest brother. Back in those days, the easiest costume a boy could wear was to run around in nothing but our Fruit of the Looms.

That's all we needed to play Tarzan. Add a loosely tied blanket around your neck and presto-change-o! now you're Superman! This vision of childhood innocence is, unfortunately, probably one of the last memories I have of being truly innocent.


The tie-in to my eventual sexual abuse was when my oldest sibling found me and my brother hiding under the sheets, completely naked after one of our silly underwear games. I was 6 years old, my brother was 8. The sibling who found us was nearly 6 years older than me, meaning he was just entering puberty. What we were doing under the sheets was completely and entirely non-sexual. We were little kids. There was nothing perverse about our nudity. But my oldest sibling saw it otherwise. He said we were being naughty and threatened to tell Mom and Dad. He said we would be in BIG TROUBLE if they found out.

Only recently have I begun to connect the dots and see how this was the beginning of our grooming. FEAR is a powerful means of control, and though it seems almost silly to me now; once the abuse commenced, I continued to fear getting in trouble with Mom or Dad for years. I was worried I would be punished if they found out what I was doing...or rather (in retrospect), what was being done to me.

Let me repeat that: I never thought my abuser would get in trouble; but that I would be the one who would be punished! Fear is a powerful weapon, and my abuser continued to use it as a means of keeping us quiet the entire time he was actively abusing us as well as into adulthood.

Some time after that incident, our abuser exposed us to sexual materials buried in my father's night stand. The stuff in that drawer was tame by today's standards; but it was my first experience looking at a naked adult female as a sex object. I remember a coin with heads printed on one side and tails on the other along with the appropriate female body parts, a little telescope with a pin-up model inside, some condoms in what I remember as little metal containers - sort of like mini-film rolls. There may have been more stash in there; but that's all that I can remember.

My brother tried to make this a fun event, laughing about finding my Dad's secret stash and inflating one of the condoms like a balloon. I can't say I exactly understood what I was seeing; but instinctively knew we were doing something bad. After all, this my Dad's private property which he had made efforts to keep hidden from us. We had no business digging around in his nightstand and looking at his stuff while he and Mom were out shopping or bowling or whatever they were doing that night.

This was another means of our abuser grooming us. He impressed upon us the fear of our parent's wrath, should they ever find out what we had done, and also led us to believe that he possessed a magic key to secret knowledge: information that would make us wiser and more advanced than our peers. Not unlike a certain snake so very long ago in the Garden.

The grooming progressed along the same lines whenever my parents left him to babysit us. Having had a taste of adult sexuality, we were introduced to a new game: Naked Hide 'n Go Seek. It was just like the regular kids game; but this was supposed to me more fun because it had the added thrill factor of playing in the nude (something we now understood was naughty) and our Mom and Dad didn't know anything about it. That's cool, right? At this same time, big brother babysitter started playing upon our natural physical desires and allegiance to him by purchasing a ton of goodies while Mom & Dad were away.

Basically, bribing us to keep quiet with bags of potato chips, candy bars, soda, cheese puffs, you name it. All stuff which we normally received in measured rations now available to us in Bachanallian fashion. Eat, drink and be merry, for later tonight Mom and Dad will be home! That's also when we started smoking cigarettes together, which further bonded us together in our secrets.

But I remember there was always a balance between fear of physical abuse and my indebtedness to him for all that good stuff he bought when Mom and Dad were away. Usually when the parents were home, I cowered in fear of being punched in the chest or having one of my favorite toys crushed in a vise; but when they were out for the evening, I revelled in the attention, the treats and a couple of hours of peace.

At some point in the midst of this new sibling tradition of feasting and being naughty, I got to see my first Playboy magazine. This was back in the 70s when Playboy was a bit classier than their competition. No full-frontal nudity and obviously no genitalia; but regardless, the idea of women as sex objects to be used and tossed aside was pretty clear. Playboy was followed by Penthouse with it's descriptive and rather imaginative Letters section as well as whatever else my abuser could get her hands on.

And as a result I was schooled in the mystery of where, how and why a man sticks his penis in a woman's orifices; most often with graphic R. Crumb style comix than with the much gentler Playboy mags. We were schooled and we were groomed and eventually, as a result, experienced firsthand the discomfort of a large penis in our little mouths and the pain of having it forced into our little boy rectums...but I'm jumping ahead. It didn't exactly happen that fast. We went from naked Hide 'n Go Seek to naked browsing of girlie magazines to dressing in our mother's undergarments to being rubbed against in slippery, slippery pantyhose followed by sticky semen from our abuser's penis pumping out upon our backs and legs. This non-penatrative sexual contact went on for some time before the creep went all the way; but all the way he did eventually go.

I'm going to stop for right now. Writing about this stuff is not easy. I'll get into the impact of the abuse in another post. Just suffice it to say that mentally and emotionally I am a mess whenever I re-visit the darkest days of my childhood and I would never wish this sort of thing on any young boy (or young girl, for that matter).