Jumping Ahead to the Big One.

Somewhere along the way, at some point in my Junior year, I believe, I got the bright idea that I could use my piece of shit computer to log onto the Internet in the middle of the night, after everyone went to bed.  I would go online and I would mostly just do Survivor stuff, play Survivor games and shit like that.  I downloaded an AIM and MSN and began my first instances of chatting.  Anyway, I have another entire post in mind for what this Internet thing did for me and I plan on skipping back to it at some point.

This is about the big one.  This is about my being FOUND OUT.

Throughout my senior year, I started getting cocky in my Internet usage, not waiting until people went to bed before I logged on.  I don't really know what I was thinking.  So I lived in the basement of our house.  The basement was divided into two parts, my room on one side and the family room/laundry area on the other.  The steps from the main part of the house led down into the living room area, with the doorway between the two rooms right about at the foot of the stairs.

What I would do is take a phone cord and run it from the back of my computer into the phone jack in the family room.  I would usually place something over the phone line where it was exposed and tuck the rest under the carpet.  I thought, at 17, I was being so sneaky.  And I was, I just was stupid as well.  Anyway, one night I got online at like, 11:00.  Around 11:30, I'd guess, I hear the door to the basement open and steps start to come down.  So I immediately cut the power to my computer and dive into bed.  But the steps didn't go to the washing machine, like normal.  They stopped at the bottom of the stairs and I sneak a peek and see that the phone line is being dug up.

I knew I was caught at that moment, I knew it.  But he didn't do anything, he just went back upstairs.  I got back online that night, after he had gone to bed, and I remember telling everyone that I believe that I had just been caught.  I went to bed that night, like normal.  I got up the next morning and everything seemed normal.  I went to school, wondering what the hell was going on.  (This was around, oh, the beginning of March, I believe.)

That day, my mother picked up my sisters and then came for me, like normal.  She was in a pretty quiet mood.  I was especially chatty, talking all about my day, finally starting to get worried.  I was getting one word answers back.  Just as we were turning onto our road, my little sister asked for permission for something and my mother only replied, "No, I don't think you deserve that.  All of my children are bad."

We entered the house and I went to my room.  I froze in the doorway.  My computer tower was GONE.  I started immediately freaking out, pacing my room.  If he took my computer tower then he surely knew what was on it.  Being, really, nothing more than short stories and chat conversations I had saved, maybe some photos.  Nothing serious, nothing pornographic.  I certainly had never had enough balls to look at porn while under his roof, but I did risk looking at pictures of hot guys kissing.  Besides, at that stage in my life, it was all I really wanted.  Kissing, to me, is much more a form of acceptance than sex.  You can totally anger fuck someone, but it's hard to kiss that same person.  Getting off track.

I knew that if my computer was gone, then he knew.  I knew that this very night, he was going to come down and demand an explanation and I knew that I was painted into a corner.  I had no choice, because I had to tell him.  I immediately sat down and wrote out a speech on green index cards.  I thought that green was his favorite color and maybe that would make things go much more easily for me.  I was desperate, clutching at straws.  Halfway through my speechwriting, he came home and made a stop in my room, telling me that he would be down later that night because we needed to talk.

I finished my speech around 5:00.  I knew he wouldn't be down until at least 8:00 and the tension was killing me.  Somehow, somehow I fell asleep.  I don't know what I would have done had I not passed out.  That time needed to move and if I hadn't passed out, I very well might have run away.  I considered packing a bag, I thought I would need it even if I managed to give my speech.  Around 8:30, he finally came down.  I was sitting on my bed, calmly waiting for him.

He sat in my desk chair and said, "James, we need to talk."  I said, "I know.  I wrote a speech."  He smirked.  "Well, by all means, let's hear it."  Slowly, I began my speech.  It was about 7 or 8 index cards long and I didn't even say the words "Because I think I'm gay," until card 5.  Getting to card 5 was extremely hard.  I needed a good few minutes to literally get those words out.  I often wonder how they would have come out if I was delivering them into kind eyes, not ones of ice.  Anyway, to his credit, he let me finish my entire speech before beginning.

"James, I knew exactly what you were going to say.  I looked through your computer and found all of your, eh, nasty surprises.  I know that you've been sneaking online behind my back and that you've disrespected me and my rules.  I know that you've been encouraging this evil inside of you and I will not allow that in my house.  You have severely broken my trust and I'm not even sure how I can allow you to remain here.  You are in a state of severe mortal sin and if you were to die right now, you would be burning in Hell.

"This is what is going to happen.  Your computer is gone, you lost the rights to that for good.  If you had any friends or weekend activities, you would be banned from those as well.  As it is, I am only going to allow you to work one day a week.  You shouldn't be leaving this house and be exposed to dangerous influences.  No more phone calls and you are only allowed to watch television that I approve of.

"We will certainly have to figure out the matter of your college education now, but this is a discussion for another night.  I certainly feel a share of the responsibility for allowing this to happen to you.  If I had been a more assertive father with getting you to explore more masculine outlets, you might have been spared from this.  Therefore, I consider it to be partly my responsibility to fix this.  There are a number of men and women out there who have felt urges like you and who have faced those urges head on and beat them.  I am going to find someone to help you through this and you are going to overcome that.

"In the meantime, I am never to hear you speak the word 'gay' again.  Gay is a term which applies to a more political nature, a political attitude that you want nothing to do with.  You are suffering from homosexual urges, nothing more.  You are not gay.  Now, the only matter left for tonight is what I am going to tell your mother."

It took a minute for this to sink in.  "You, you don't have to tell her anything."  He smiled at me.  "Now, what kind of a husband would I be if I didn't?"

As much as it breaks my heart to say this now, I knew that her knowing this would break her heart then.  I looked at him, I looked at Pat, pleading with my eyes for him to not say anything.  He stood up.  "I wouldn't recommend coming upstairs again tonight."  He left the room.

I sat there in stunned silence.  A few minutes later, I heard a plate fall to the floor and shatter.

It took her a week to be able to look at me.

More Early Childhood

My mother got married when I was six, but she started dating my stepfather when I was four.  I don't remember too much about him from before the marriage, really.  I guess he was around fairly often, but I only have two real memories of him.  One was him buying me Operation and playing it with me, telling me that it was one of his favorite games when he was young.  Back when my mother and I were still living with my grandparents, he and I would sit up in the attic loft that was my mother's room and play Operation.  I guess it was fun.  My other memory of him was up in that same attic loft and he had bought me some book... I think it was The Butter Battle Book.  I can't exactly remember.  But he read it to me and I guess at that point I thought he was pretty cool.  I must have been very young though because we were still living at my grandparents', which means that I hadn't yet turned 5.

Then she got married.  I was the ring bearer at the wedding and I remember being scared witless about screwing up.  It was held at St. Andrew's Church, the parish of my stepfather and his family.  (His family who, by the way, was made up of 13 children.  He was the oldest.  The youngest two, James and Joe were twins and only four years older than me.)  Most of his groomsmen were his brothers and some of his sisters were bridesmaids of my mother.  The wedding itself is pretty fuzzy.  The real fun doesn't come into play until the reception, when I had a mother-son dance to Sha-Boom, which I knew from my favorite movie, Clue.  The entire reception formed a circle to watch us dance to this song and I remember being a bit frustrated because I didn't want it to be just between the two of us, but thinking back on it now, I'm glad that it wasn't any other way.  It was the last time I really got to be with my mother as just the two of us.

At some point during the reception, I went missing.  I have no memories of this whatsoever, I was only recently told about this.  Apparently they had to form a search for me because everyone was panicked about my going missing.  They found me, having found a crawl space underneath the stage.  I was bawling, furious about... not her getting married.... but at having him as a father.  I don't particularly remember much about what I thought of him before the wedding, but if I was crying then, I'm not sure how to take it.

They went on their honeymoon to... Aruba, I think?  I honestly don't remember.  It doesn't matter, but my great-grandmother, Gigi, came to stay with me for the week they were gone.  Before they left, my mother gave me a special gift.  My favorite show at that time was Tiny Toons and I thought that Babs Bunny was just the greatest thing which ever existed.  She gave me a plush Babs before she left so that I wouldn't be too alone.

They were married in April '91, when I was in first grade.  That May, my grandparents took me and my uncle, Jaye, to Disney World.  It was probably the greatest vacation of my life to date, I would wager.  I remember crying hysterically on the King Kong ride at Universal, filming the "bee scene" from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and (for some godawful reason) riding the Small World ride.  I even think we went through the Hall of Presidents.  I dunno.  Maybe I made that up.

That trip ended and I came home to a new life with my mother and stepfather, Pat.  I remember being allowed to call him Pat, at least at first.  I think, in those early days, we simply tried to stay out of each other's way.  In those days, he had some sort of job... I think at the local GE plant.  I'm pretty sure that he and my grandfather kind of knew each other at work.  Pat had been a teacher at one point, a math teacher.  I don't know why he left it, but he was working at the GE plant for some time.  He wasn't home all that much in the beginning, I don't think.  My mother and I would have TGIF nights, watching Full House and playing Clue a lot.

At some point soon after that, my mother and I needed to start taking Catechism classes so we could be good Catholics and join the church of my stepfather.  I remember sitting in some back room of some church, it was very cold and very red.  Those days were the worst for me, sitting there, droning through stuff I didn't understand in the least.  I don't remember if we ever had a ceremony or anything, but at some point, we became Catholics.

We stayed out of each other's way for a while, but that didn't stop me from having a great deal of fear instilled in me.  Maybe I was too young at that point to notice a lot of things that were happening, but I remember being deathly afraid of him.  At one point, Pat and my mother decided to look for a house back in Erie and they would drop me off with my grandparents while they went house searching.  This was a secret for some reason and I was under strict orders not to tell my grandparents.  Well, naturally, I let it accidentally slip out.  I was a freaking kid, it shouldn't be surprising.  But I immediately realized my mistake and started hyperventilating, crying furiously.  I knew that I was in trouble for that one.

My grandparents were a huge influence on me during that time.  I stayed with them every weekend, it was nice to spend time with them, considering how much of an influence they were on me during my early years.  They also gave me a way to escape from Pat from time to time.  Naturally, I was a bit spoiled by them.  I was their first grandchild.  I had a great collection of games, toys, and books.  My room was always a bit messy, but I was a kid.  You know, it happens.  Well... we used to go to Myrtle Beach every summer.  My grandparents, my mother, me, sometimes my uncle, sometimes a cousin or two.

One summer, we went to Myrtle Beach.  Pat never came with us.  Well, I must have been about 8 at the time... but we came home and I went to my room... and I found that all of my toys were gone.  All the games, all of the toys, most of the books.  I guess that I hadn't cleaned my room to absolute perfection before I left on the trip and Pat, deciding that I had too much and was too spoiled, took it upon himself to liberate me of all of this.  So he cleaned my room for me and threw out all of my stuff.  Both Operation and Babs Bunny were victims of this purging.

I think as early as then, I knew I was fucked.

My Early Childhood

(I think that I needed something easy to start with and this seems as good as anything?)

I was born a week before my due date because my mother thought that going sailing on choppy Lake Erie would be a good idea for Memorial Day.  I don't really know many specifics, but I was born at exactly 5 PM, which I think is a little cool.  I was conceived a good 8 months and 3 weeks earlier, about a month after my mother started going to college at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an art major.  She didn't really get to do a lot of art, being there only a semester.  My uncle told me that my father, who's name is Tim and that is all that I know, looked a lot like a white version of Prince.  I say that they should have figured it all out just from that.

My mother, at that time, was a scared, young 18 year old girl.  Regrettably, I do not have much more than that.  Not from this stage.  My uncle was a boy of 15 and I guess he was pretty excited to become an uncle.  My grandmother and grandfather were a happy, very Christian couple.  My grandmother attended Christian Womens' Club every Wednesday and my grandfather was a respected supervisor at the local G.E. plant.  My great-grandmother, Gigi, having lost her husband 2 years before, was becoming something of a socialite.  And I think they were all thrilled to have me.  It certainly seems that way, based on the home videos.  I guess it was because of me, at the tender age of 2 months, that they bought a VCR and a video camera.  I was destined to be spoiled.

I guess I had pneumonia at the age of two, but who's counting?  No, I have three first memories, and no way to know which was actually first.  In one of them, the family is going out for dinner and I'm the last one out of the house.  My grandmother asks me what time it is and I run back to the VCR.  "Six.  Zero.  Zero," I shout out and am very proud of myself.  So are they.  Second memory, my grandmother and I are at a Rite Aid.  I'm browsing the kid aisle and I find a pair of underwear with my one true love on them, He-Man.  I remember asking my grandmother if we could buy them and she says no....  So I purposely shit my pants so we have to.  Even then.... even then....  The third is picking tulips from the garden for my mother and telling my grandmother that I found them growing on the beach.  I don't even know.

My memory is filled with a lot of those little flashes.  I could list two dozen more, but none of them really seem relevant.  All I do know is that when I was very young, I had a penchant for carrying around baby dolls and this fascination developed into Barbies.  I blame the Barbies bit on always watching soap operas with my grandmother.  Well.... that and the fact that she bought me Barbies in the first place.  I had three Barbies and one Ken.  And, naturally, Ken was sleeping with all of them.  And, naturally, they all found out.  So the three Barbies would concoct a plan to trap Ken and tie him up and then dangle him over a bridge (being a yardstick) and taunt him before plummeting him to his death.  This was when I was 3 or 4.

Oh, and my love of He-Man and the Sword of Destiny that he held aloft to gain fabulous magic powers was slowly replaced by a love of She-Ra.  Girl power, I dunno.

I was raised largely by my grandmother.  My mother spent all of her time working as hard as she can, saving up as much money as possible.  By the time I was 5... and she was 23 (which just fucking ASTOUNDS me), she bought us a large down payment on a house.  We moved out of my grandparents house, which rocked my little world, and into a life of our own.

I think that was pretty hard for her.  Part of me admires that in her, I don't know how I would have done, last year, trying to raise a 5 year old who I didn't know all that well.  We would run out of garbage bags and she would fill the trash with paper shopping bags from Giant Eagle.  Once, we were trying to eat breakfast and she'd forgotten to buy milk, so we tried eating cereal with water.  I refused and she tried anyway.  I remember her breaking down in tears halfway through her bowl.

Those days were pretty intense, but we learned to grow up together and trust each other.  My grandparents still played a very large part of my life.  I'm sure they still played a very large part of hers.  I think back to that time and while it is all still very fuzzy...  it is also fond.

And then she got married.

Thesis Statement.

I certainly want to consider myself to be a writer and by that, I don't mean my profession.  Even though it's what I am.  I like to consider myself as a writer meaning my soul and very existence of being.  Why I think this way, though, I am not quite sure because since high school - when I actually could write frequently - and now - when I know how to technically write - I've only produced a couple of short scripts, maybe a few poems, some pretty decent college papers, and a great deal of whiny blogs where I either exult or bemoan my pathetic existence.  I've had writer's block for a good, oh, let's say six years.  If I actually am a writer, I should be ashamed of myself.

Which leads me to the need of finding a way to cure this writer's block.  Over the past six years, I always ditch whatever I happen to be working on, hoping that a new project will bring forth the flow of inspiration.  It never does.  And I need to find a new tactic.  So, when I stopped to consider what I actually find myself being both passionate and free-flowing about when I do happen to start writing... invariably, it is myself.  Writing blogs about myself, my ideas, my politics, my hopes, dreams, and fears... I have no problems with these.  I've lately found myself being especially more passionate about gay rights.  Maybe now, years later, I'm finally ready to own it.  Maybe I've finally grown and developed enough to understand what I need to be saying and why I need to be saying it and, well, how to say it.  I see injustice in the world and it makes me angry and I feel like I need to fight it.

Hold that thought.  Circle back to the beginning and take the other road now.  I have one hellaciously dramatic life.  The shit that happens... you wouldn't believe.  People I know are constantly commenting on this... I personally believe it's the reason that I don't watch television anymore.  Everything seems boring in comparison.  Take this and meet it up with the first thought, and I'm left with what I see as one option.  I'm hoping it works.  Ideally, this idea will solve a number of my issues.  In the least, it will hopefully help at least one of them.

I'm going to write a memoir.  I know, I know, I'm 24.  What the fuck do I have to write about at 24?  I should be three times this age before I have lived a life worth commenting about...  Except, I don't believe that is true.  I think that I have a certain perspective that is, while not unique in the world, at least warrants listening to.  Growing up gay, Catholic, and with depression has certainly screwed me up for life and why shouldn't other people want to hear about it?  Heh.

I'm setting up this blog as a trial run for this memoir.  I certainly have a lot of memories that I want to write about.  Maybe they will work and maybe they won't and this is what I need all of you for.  Everything I'm going to say in this blog is true (although I will change most names to protect the innocent.... or to protect myself from the guilty).  And at the very least, things are going to be presented as I remember them, which is as close to the truth as I have.  I'll be approaching this entire thing with no-holds-barred.  I'll probably cross at points into potentially embarrassing territory, but I'm willing to deal with that as long as you are.  Just as a warning, though, some of these memories are pretty dark in my head.  I don't know how they will translate out onto paper and I guess we will find out together.  If anything is too dark, though, I will want your feedback on that.  If I really am going to turn this into a memoir, eventually, I don't think it will work if the entire book is too serious and dark.

I know where this is going in my head, so I also need a level of trust from all of you.  I'm not going to present you with this memoir in book format, nor in chronological format.  I'm going to write about whichever memories are strongest to me at any given moment and as a result, you may get bits and pieces of my life, scattered all over.  Just warning.  I really don't know if this can turn into a memoir but I'd like to find out.  At least, the frequency I want to write with can hopefully alleviate my writer's block and, as an added bonus, getting all of these memories out will hopefully be pretty therapeutic.  So, please, join me on this journey if you will.  I don't know if I can do it alone.

You're about to get to know James Walter Gardner Campbell pretty fucking intensely.  And... for that matter.... so am I.