Clean

I.

“Clean” as in “simply good,” I think.

“Clean” as in “not particularly broken.”

“Clean” as in “approved for mass consumption.”

So much of my life has centered itself on Clean. And its many opposites.

II.

My favorite comic book character of all time, growing up, was a girl named Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, a member of the New Mutants, who were themselves the junior team of and housemates with the X-Men.

Illyana, like her best friend Kitty Pryde, didn’t fit in very well with the New Mutants. They were both more “adult” in some ways than their classmates. In ways both Clean and otherwise. I loved Illyana even though she didn’t fit in at her fancy Westchester boarding school, didn’t fit in around other kids her chronological age. Because she didn’t have a meaningful inner measure of Clean, I guess.

Because Illyana didn’t have a regular childhood. She fell into Hell as a toddler and was raised there by demons and twisted versions of the X-Men themselves. She came back all grown up: Very beautiful, very sarcastic, and prey to a kind of natural internal darkness. Her trip through Hell — where she was educated in the ways of adults despite being a child — had given her great power, at the cost of nothing more consequential than Clean.

My favorite musician of all time, growing up, was of course Tori Amos. Not a lot to say there. Only that she seemed to be telling my life back to me at a time that I desperately needed to be seen, reflected. Like with Illyana, I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize it, but there was something about the tattered pride of Little Earthquakes, its traumas large and small, that seemed somehow to explain me. I would have been, I think, 14 when Tori hit. It changed everything.

The deal with Illyana Rasputin is that she was a well-wrought and painstaking portrait of a survivor of CSA: A trip through Hell that leaves you older than your peers. 

The deal with Tori Amos was that she was mid-recovery after a sexual assault when she made Little Earthquakes. Her feminism, her anger, were based at this time in a particular region I knew and know nothing about.

So how did these two figures, informed by a fiery feminism and the ragged edges of horror, come to mean so much to me as a child? I mean before I knew what sexual abuse was, or what women are afraid of, or really even the dangers of just existing as a child — I loved Illyana and felt like she, of all the trauma narratives New Mutants was about, most purely explained my existence as I understood it.

III.

It was the ’90s and sexual trauma was everywhere: I took a college course called something like The Owl Was A Baker’s Daughter, a study in “feminist autopathology” that took us everywhere from Prozac Nation to Push by Sapphire to Girl, Interrupted and a million other personal tales that I didn’t really understand and probably still don’t. 

I mention this class not because it provided any particular clarity, more just to say: It was the ‘90s, sexual trauma was everywhere.

The cruel sexual artifice of the ’80s had combined with the HIV epidemic to create a weirdly sexualized, death-oriented space that left all adults in a bizarre place and kids in a place even more bizarre. Movies seemed to be only about this, recovered memories or ancient trauma — presumably because the adults in charge in the ’90s, Boomers, were just realizing they even could talk about this stuff. Much less, given the plague, that they had to.

So for a long time I thought it was just that: I was and remain a child of the zeitgeist, and if everybody is talking about sexual abuse then that’s the conversation. Never mind that nothing bad had ever happened to me.

Which isn’t really true either. 

IV.

There’s this Madonna song I really love, in a vanishing list, called “What It Feels Like For A Girl.” I love it not because it describes what it’s like for a girl, but because it accidentally describes what it was like growing up gay. 

When you open up your mouth to speak
Could you be a little weak?

It’s all there: The infantilization, the feminization, the undercutting little barbs, the overwhelming sexualizing of everything you do and say. Now, when we grow up gay sometimes we bring these things upon ourselves — the gay who won’t shut up about being gay — but in my formulation those things are always there. 

I grew up, as a gay man, subject to a lot of the things that my cis sisters were taught to ignore or accept: Being treated as a little pet by the people in charge, being treated as an adult sexual being before I even knew what sex was, being constantly told to quiet down, settle down, settle for less, be an object, be a thing. It feels very lame to write all of this out but what it comes down to is this:

There has never been a point in my life as a gay boy and man that I have not been held responsible for (straight people’s idea of) full adult sexuality. And when you’re young and treated like a sexual object, ask any woman you have ever met, it fucks you up.

V.

I never really believed in God, and when I was growing up that meant being better than religion, scoffing, being wiser than organized religion. My mother is a Seeker in the greatest sense, always looking for a new face of God, but for me it was a lot simpler: There is no God, and those who claim to speak for Him can’t be trusted.

I’m six years old when we move to Dell City, a tiny poor suburb outside of El Paso TX, so that my mother can teach English and History at their single high school while I spent the day repeating Kindergarten. I can’t say for certain that my sexuality was one of the reasons, but my teacher and principal — also the main pastor of the town — seemed to find me demonic from the jump. 

Eventually we left Dell City — pregnant and on the run from the religious nutcases who’d seized on my mother’s (at the time avant-garde) teaching of common roleplaying mechanics in order to more fully embody the characters and figures they were studying. If I was six that means it was 1984, and that means Satanic Panic. So for a teacher (a single mother with a questionable son) who brought Dungeons & Dragons into school…

In my memory we scattered in the middle of the night, drove through the darkness all the way to Arizona. I’m not sure it was that dramatic, although I do remember waking up to palm trees at dawn, but the fact that it felt so dramatic is a good indication that I was picking up on more than my fair share of vibes.

VI.

The reason I’m so weird about money is that I was shuttled back and forth between my mother, who was generally on the poverty line, and my father, an attorney and name partner in his own practice. What is money except something that means either nothing or everything? What is money except something pretty arbitrary that defines whether your life sucks or rules. 

What is money, except a tool for a vicious stepmother to weaponize?

While my mom was endangering innocents and getting pregnant, my stepmother was busy as well: By my high school graduation she’d given me four more little brothers. I love them insanely but I didn’t really grow up with them, a somewhat familiar tale these days.

When I tell you I went my first 7 years an only child and was abruptly dethroned in both my homes — my oldest little brothers are a few months apart in age, one in Phoenix and one in Midland to be followed by three more — I mean to say that I was a happy kid. I didn’t hate the babies so much as obsess about them, and what they might mean.

What the brothers meant to my stepmother was — and I don’t tell you this for any reason other than the fact that I have a point to make and this is a necessary part of it — was a chance to do things over, to do them right. In one family therapy session she referred to me as the “first pancake,” meaning the one that you throw away.

I was fat while my brothers were (for a time) thin. I was precocious while my brothers were sweet. I was awkward and talkative, preferring to speed-read and sing to myself, alone, while my brothers were athletic and popular. I didn’t really feel much in the way of jealousy, I’m not designed that way, but what I did feel was massive injustice. 

When adults don’t make sense, and mine had stopped making much, not much else remains. (And that’s where we get Quite Enough Antarctica.)

Where my brothers went to school was a prestigious private academy in Midland TX. This is key. It was an Episcopalian school, full of scions and Republicans. Where I went to school was whatever public school my mother’s latest journey had brought us to. Phoenix, Albuquerque and the outskirts of both. 

My father and I are fond of each other and have a lot in common, but have never been what I would call close. Occasionally my mother would be hospitalized and I’d go live with him for months at a time. As his family grew and mine got more and more iffy, I realized that I was bringing something along with me — some kind of intrinsic fault, some inner poorness, that more than likely confused and hurt my dad.

So I had a lot of privileges but they were all contingent, more than likely to be tossed away with a sudden turn in stepmother’s mood. I wasn’t allowed to handle knives, even at my own birthday party. I was often stuck at home with a babysitter my own age. By high school I wasn’t allowed at the house, and sent to live with the boys’ nanny in an apartment complex. Or she’d spend lavishly on me and then present me with a bill on our return home. 

The object of these little games was to destroy me. I mean, I understood that. But it took me a long time to figure out why — and even longer to admit that it was unfair.  I’ve heard she had some kind of deathbed conversion, where she finally felt bad for this mindfucking, but I never heard about it from her. 

“Dr. Demento’s songs are a little scary,” I remember telling her, and getting back as immediately and predictably as a 25 cent gumball rolling out: “Why, because of that song where they’re coming to take you away, haha? Because it reminds you of your mother?”

I stopped going home for the holidays my first year in college, because she made my first trip home so terrible. This has brought me luck, in the form of my friends whom I went home with instead, and still spend holidays with. But on balance I think I would have preferred my own home, my own father, my own people — and among other things, stepmother was standing firmly against this.

To be a scholarship student in a celebrated school is to know a particular kind of shame that is so white it’s almost blinding, but this is my story so I have to tell it how it was. 

To be poor in a world of rich people, then, became a much larger synecdoche for what was wrong with me. Whatever it was, I got to bring this fault along with me everywhere I went — in my weirdness, in my flabby body, in my draining but once buoyant confidence — and all those things, thanks to stepmother, got filed under one big heading.

I thought of it for a long time as “poor” but more accurate and more descriptively I would say it’s “dirty.” Did you ever watch My So-Called Life? In life there are Angelas, and there are Rayannes; there are also Rickies. I thought I was at worst a Rayanne, since Rickie was too abject even for me. But that was just me falling into a common trap, putting my dirtiness on somebody weaker, and the truth is that probably every Rickie thinks they’re the Rayanne.

(If this makes you think about my book The Urges, that’s because this is the seed of The Urges. The clean and the dirty, the easy path and the hard path. When my mother, for whom it was written, finally read it and loved it she said she would have earlier but on her first attempt she kept thinking it was going to “get sexual.” Which echoed in my head a lot louder than she intended, because of course my entire maturation has been older people presuming I’m always already about to get sexual.)

VII.

For ten years I worked on a novella, tentatively titled “The Book of Ryan,” about a young gay atheist who comes to work in the offices of a small town’s Episcopal Church. I thought it would be an interesting way to explore my feelings regarding church, God, and employment — he could be a more militant atheist than I felt, but as a fictional person was more available for epiphanies and discoveries.

What I wanted was to be Clean. I wanted to be accepted into a world that my reptile brain still thinks is going to kill me. For the judgmental universe to see me and for once not pass judgment — to open up its many secrets and say “You are home, you’ve been home all along.”

I wonder how many people go into seminary just for that feeling? That feeling of overwhelming love and acceptance that churches are always talking about — I wanted that, but without doing the work of being religious or questioning my faith or anything like that. Having a church-adjacent job would probably be the best I could do.

Can you see where I’m going with this yet?

VIII.

Something happened to one of my brothers when I was ten. I don’t know exactly what it was, just that CPS got involved and the whole family was under surveillance. I don’t know what it did to my mother or whether it pushed her to the brink one or more of those times — I just know what form my own scrutiny took.

Suddenly every clue I’d ever dropped, every question I’d ever asked about the world — going back further than my own memory — loomed large in the story our caseworker was building. You could say another male authority figure had judged and found me unclean. 

But the question wasn’t whether I was Clean, the question was whether I was Evil — whether I’d ever hurt my beloved baby brother like that — and the answer to that question couldn’t be found in my statements but in my history. Because the question wasn’t really even that — the question was The Big Question of my life up to that point. Am I gay or what is going on?

When I say it wasn’t so long ago that people popularly conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, I don’t mean like our grandparents — although they did too! I mean that my pubescent years were twisted by this almost unknowably large, horrible thing hanging over me. On top of the unknowably large thing already hanging over me.

Add that back into the system — my dubious questionable nature just becomes another kind of poorness, dirt, another fault I’d just have to deal with. Of course these things are a lot harder to understand when you’re ten, and your body hasn’t come online yet. I was still in the age of my personal development where my feelings for a given male peer could still just  be swept under the rug as a questionable phenomenon and not The Answer To The Big Question.

All teens have drama. What all teens don’t have is certification of Queerness with a big Sexual Pervert asterisk appended. So what this means is that everything I felt and did and suffered in high school is weighted toward that. I’ll never know what a clean teenagerhood is like, because I came into it with baggage, but I know what mine looked like. And it was tough. 

I am a pretty happy, simple guy and I don’t really form a lot of memories, so it’s hard to even access a lot of this stuff. But I do know that high school was hard, and I have no control group to tell me which of those things were just bad luck, fate, and which ones were my fault, for these various dirtinesses. They all felt like my fault and I guess they still do.

I change shape just to hide in this place
But I’m still, I’m still, an animal
Nobody knows it but me
When I slip, yeah I slip

IX.

For now, I work at an Episcopal Preschool. For now, I am Clean. I have the job and the daily contacts to prove it. I can even laugh at some of this stuff. 

For example, in carpool: Every dad and the butcher moms will stop the car and get out to unbuckle their child from the carseat before I can, because something about my giant man-hands reaching for their kid’s crotch just feels wrong. I understand and sympathize, even if part of me is screaming. Part of me is laughing too, because I can’t help thinking “You don’t know half of what I’ve been accused of, this is bush league. And yet here I remain.”

But until very recently I would wake up proud, get in the car proud, walk up those steps proud, and think: I have done it. I am living like a regular person. And there is actual healing in this. To be fully honest the combination of this job and undertaking the use of recreational marijuana have fixed me in ways that forty years of therapy simply cannot.

I’m Clean now. And a big part of being Clean is remembering you already were. 

You always are.

X.

I don’t know how long I will be at the School. When I leave it won’t be entirely my idea, although I’m already excited and interviewing for my next thing. I don’t want to stay longer than I’m needed, and I don’t think I’ll be needed much longer. I don’t want to change that.

What I want is a promise from myself that when I do leave, all this healing won’t go to waste.