As Ashes Scatter (My Story)

My story in brief, though I may one day finish and publish my memoir. What follows carries a serious trigger warning for child rape and abuse. If you have never heard of a pedophile ring, yes they exist, and yes they are this bad. A ring is a very insidious form of child sex trafficking, carried out largely in private homes, and this type of pedophile organization is very hard to catch, let alone arrest. They disappear like roaches in the light, or like ant hills that just move somewhere else and rebuild.

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As Ashes Scatter

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More of my memories have been resurfacing in the last few years, often in the form of nightmares and brutal flashbacks. I know that I was born into a family that was part of a pedophile ring, that bought, sold, and rented children, so that pedophiles (male and female) could rape them. Many things I’m left to guess or try to sort out with limited evidence, since my father is deceased and my mother seems too damaged to talk and may be incapable of telling me the truth.

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I should add that I do not like calling them “father” and “mother”, as both of them molested and raped me; but these are the terms most others understand. These days, I call a gay couple who care for me and love me “Mom and Dad” and they have helped me heal a lot, by showing me what good parents are supposed to be.

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I believe both of my parents were likely born into the same pedophile ring. It broke my mother, who only seemed to know how to obey, but my father grew to like the torture and rape of children. While I believe some other man or woman (possibly his mother) ran the ring at the time of my birth, my father was eventually the leader of it. He had “ringleader” partners in what he called “the club” and those men were my main abusers, along with my father. The ring “owned” many children, predominantly bred them or kidnapped them, and tortured or killed any that disobeyed, usually with the rest of us made to watch. Sometimes, children were made to harm other children. The ring had as members men and women who were not suspected of being pedophiles. There was a pediatrician, a surgeon, a lawyer, a coach, a nurse, businessmen, parents, a preacher, and all sorts of other walks of life. I only knew the occupations for certain of some of them, others I guessed at by what they said or how they dressed. The doctors repaired us when others broke us, and they all helped control us and keep the secret. They hooked us on drugs, mostly alcohol, pills, and cocaine, to control us along with fear, punishment, and making us witness the deaths of disobedient peers.

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My father was likely abusing me since birth, in the form of slapping me or feeding me whiskey to be quiet if I cried, and sometimes he would try to smother me with his hand, according to my mother. I was raised to worship him as a god and to speak when told to speak. At the age of four, he raped me for the first time, after a year of “training” me to give him oral sex and to accept him placing fingers and other objects into my anus. He put me in homemade chastity devices with anal plugs attached, to “get me ready”; I never knew what it all meant, I just knew it hurt. Virginity is usually sold when a child in the ring turns five years old, and it is often auctioned to the highest bidder. For some reason, my father went against this, and may have gotten in trouble with whoever the leader was at that time. All I knew was that he came into my bedroom one night and made me want to die. After that, he called the rapes a part of my training. Also at age four, he sliced my face and tongue with a long sharp kitchen knife, for reasons I’ve never known. I was left with a Glasgow Smile and nearly severed tongue, which healed badly and left me with a speech impediment. It wasn’t the last time he took a blade or other instrument to me, but it was one of the worst injuries he ever gave me.

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At five years old, he began to rent me to other pedophiles. Sometimes I was rented to three or up to five “clients” per day after I was conditioned to endure it with less injury, which would have rendered me “unable to work” . It started with the ringleaders and his peers and friends, and later random clients associated with the ring, including a preacher who rented me nearly every Saturday afternoon, to “purge his sins into me” before Sunday. He liked to explain that I was the Devil’s child, and bound for Hell, but he’d make me pray for my dirty soul, anyhow. He called me “the vessel” and left me with a horrible trigger about religious dogma speech. The surgeon liked to drug children to pretend they were dead, and the lawyer, castrated by a former victim, raped us with objects meant to turn rape into torture. One man was a professional dog trainer, and taught his dogs to rape children, and to kill them. He also liked to treat and train children like dogs. Compared to these men, the regular clients who wanted to rape a child seemed almost tame to me.

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The ring also made child porn, with me and other children, and sold it, photos and videos. One day after I burned a box of these photos of me, my father tortured me with electric jumper cables in the garage and then had me committed to an asylum for a few months, where some of his friends were also members of his ring. The ring also specialized in snuff films, and that became a common way to be rid of children who wouldn’t obey or who “weren’t good enough”. Sometimes they bought children with Down’s Syndrome to use in those types of films, and the ringleaders often were able to let their sick fantasies run wild because the child’s survival wasn’t an issue. This abuse, with beatings, daily rapes, and torture (often for the pleasure of a client) went on during most of my childhood, right up until I became too old for the usual clients to want me anymore. I was beaten by my father then, because he blamed me for having to find new clients who wanted a teen boy. In time, he found some.

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We were told so many lies and raised and conditioned to believe them all. One of the biggest lies we were told was that all people, all families, were just like the ring. All parents used their children for sex. The ring had ways to make us believe it was true. The rule of “don’t tell or else” seemed in conflict with that, but we weren’t given explanations, just orders. I remember seeing a schoolmate in class with a cast on his arm and thinking that he must have disobeyed his father and gotten punished.

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I was probably never meant to be in school. Most of the ring children were off the books and nobody knew they existed. It was probably my mother’s fault, but I was seen by neighbors and they reported my parents to a truant officer. So I went to school with a heap of new rules on my back and lived in fear of everybody there. Eventually, I met a friend in junior high and later a second friend in high school, and they began changing my life, but the abuse continued, and I didn’t tell. There were times when I was raped at school, usually in the gym showers or locker room, but I never told because my father would have beaten me for “giving his property away for free” or accused me of allowing it to happen and beating me for that. As for telling the coach, he was a client at home.

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People abused as children often grow up to have a problematic hyper-sexuality, and I was no exception. With a desperate need to rebel in secret, I experimented with my junior high friend and sometimes skipped classes and took cash or drugs as payment to be a party favor at adult gatherings my father didn’t know about, or at teen parties. Each time he didn’t find something out put another crack in his “I am god” lie. Another lingering side effect of my abuse has been that I was taught by my mother that I had to give sex to get love, and often to get food. Food and comfort were used against me, to condition me to accept more and more abuse.

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I finally escaped at age nineteen, after coming home to find my father once again brutally beating my mother. I fought my father violently for the first time in my life, having realized I was stronger and he was older. I was so messed up and twisted by their lies, that I threw him out and thought that my mother and I would leave the ring and live together as a couple. She had spun a fantasy for years that we had to be secret lovers, that my father would kill us both if he found out. She turned us into one of her horrible romance novels, and made me think that if I defeated the villain, I’d win the woman. Then to my shock, she rejected me; she only wanted him back. She was addicted to him,  his money, and the fantasy she had always pretended he was. Her rejection crushed me; she had been my only source of any comfort at all for my entire life. I was so angry, I was afraid I might hurt her myself, so I ran away and became homeless; just trying not to die, for almost two years. When others seemed to sense my vulnerability, I barely cared if they abused me, too; I felt I deserved it, for things that my abusers made me do. Guilt and shame, the undeserved baggage of child abuse, has never let me go.

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Learning to dig in dumpsters and behind restaurants for food, I also learned I could do the only thing I knew to make money for food and the drugs the ring had hooked me on: become a male prostitute. I was a street hustler at first, and later tried to work as an escort, but my bipolar illness and no medication for it stopped that soon enough. If bipolar depression made me unable to work, I just starved or tried to beg or “dumpster dive” as they say here in the South. Whenever bipolar hypo-mania (and a few full-blown manic episodes) came around, I could work. Some “johns” (male and female) were relatively kind and generous; others were dangerous. Yet when you don’t really care if you live or die, it can become harder to be careful. Eventually I crawled out of that and began working as a stripper at a private gay club.

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When I stopped a purse snatcher on a hypo-manic whim and gave the bag back to a sweet old woman, she insisted on cooking me dinner to thank me. As I was a scarred up Goth mess with tattoos and piercings, I thought she was crazy to trust me, but I was too hungry to care if she might hurt me or not. I knew I didn’t mean her any harm, and she claimed to sense that. Twice, she picked me up off the street and paid me what a john would pay just so I’d go with her. She’d take me to dinner and try to get me to talk. I found out over time that her plan was to help me get off the street, and she did that by letting me live on her property, a move that took time and a lot of wincing fledgling trust. I mowed her lawn and cleaned her house when not working and not in a depression, and I had a safe little house behind hers to live in. I insisted on paying rent, which she collected in a box and later left it for me as a parting gift. Eventually, I met the gay couple whom I ended up adopting as my new parents, then found my two friends from school again (one of them is my live-in boyfriend). I met my girlfriend, the mother of my children, as a single mom escaping an abusive marriage. I became a dad to her child and we then had three more (two are twins). My adopted parents bought the property from my former landlady when she moved across the country. They got me on medications via talking me into trying therapy. I still go to therapy weekly. I developed cerebral ataxia from toxicity (alcohol and pills) and finally went sober in order to regain the ability to walk. I had already quit a cocaine habit started by the ring as a child when my children came along, but it has been harder to give up alcohol, and I still struggle to remain sober. I am given no access to alcohol, and as an agoraphobic hermit, slipping off to the liquor store alone is not much of an option.

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Abuse left me with a lot of damage, physical, mental, emotional, psychological…. My father blinded my left eye when I was sixteen, by cutting the lid off and pressing a lit cigar into it while sitting on my shackled and bound body. I have so many scars on my face and body, and so many phobias, agoraphobia, PTSD and other crap to deal with, plus bipolar, that I simply don’t know how to draw my next breath some days. At times, I am suicidal. Sometimes I have eating disorder problems where I refuse to eat for days, or I end up cutting. I feel cravings for some BDSM sexual habits; my kinks and philias run rough-shod over me at times when hypo-mania swings around. I try to be as safe as I can and just try to survive, day by day. I have trouble with personal boundaries, trouble with saying no or remembering that I have rights now, that I own myself. At times, just having to make decisions can be terrifying, as a fear of “getting it wrong” shuts me down. If I am triggered or terrified, I crumble, and if I’m not in a safe place when that happens, it can be very dangerous for me. Without my new family and friends, I wouldn’t make it. Without therapy and medications, I might have been long gone by now.

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I’ve started trying to be an advocate, for maybe little over a year now. I tell my story and share my point of view and memories as therapy for me, and in the hope of helping other victims, survivors, and the people who love and try to help them. My essays and posts are often more clear than my poetry. Sometimes I post poems I’m not yet ready to explain, because they have meanings I can’t yet talk about.

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Finally, I have begun to write my memoir. For now, I am writing it just for me, as therapy. Perhaps someday, when it’s finished, I’ll decide to publish it. I try not to pressure myself in those areas, because pressure often makes me drop things in a fit of insecurity and fear.

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I have worked to get survivor websites to offer more help to LGBTQ survivors. I like to rant on Twitter,  and I sometimes post on MaleSurvivor.org or comment on other survivor’s blogs. Also, I often comment on websites like the Good Men Project (for whom I have written essays), but if things get disrespectful or mean in any of these places, I get triggered; so I try to be careful and remember my self-care. I often tell myself, like a mantra, “Breathe… just breathe.”

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Today is Father’s Day, a holiday I try to avoid (much like Christmas) due to bad abuse associations. It is also my father’s birthday. He said to never tell. Every time I tell, I break another of his lies, another of his chains. Someday, I hope to be free and healed, even though I know that the abuse damage can never be erased or healed fully. Since I was born in a ring, and have no “default” to strive to return to after abuse, I often feel that I have to learn how to be a human with rights and choices, from scratch. The “real world” and how non-abused people think, feel, see and interact with the world, often confuses and frightens me. I mostly learn to cope, strive to find some joy, and search for more reasons to survive, to keep fighting; because sometimes even the fight to heal can be so steep and long, it can lead to despair.

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For my fellow survivors, I’ll simply say this: hope and joy can be found in doses, and we can take baby steps, learn to cope as we strive to heal, as we learn to be the people we are now able to be. “Breathe, just breathe.”

– W.R.R.