Charles

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around late Autumn, 1954, when I was 5. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My first best friend at Fort Devens was a kid my age named Charles. Charles lived in another of the multiplexes on Chancellorsville. His was three or four buildings east. He was so disturbed he made me look like a rock of sanity.

One of the things I'd gotten as a present for either the previous Christmas or my birthday was a set of Lincoln Logs. If you don't know what they are, don't sweat it. It's enough to know they were made of wood, they interlocked, and you built stuff out of them. Like Legos. Only the pieces were bigger and less fun. You were supposed to make log cabins. I think the idea was to teach millions of kids the skills needed to become presidents and know how to free slaves. We don't have enough people like that.

Charles had a weird need to eat wood. His parents asked my parents to have me take pencils away from him, or he would eat the wood and leave only the graphite. It was a pain watching him all the time.

One day when he was over he disappeared, and I thought he had decided to go home without telling me. After an hour playing by myself in my room I heard a sound like rats were nosing around in my closet. I opened the closet door and found Charles had been sitting on the floor in the dark chewing on Lincoln Logs, surrounded by sawdust. He'd chewed his way through a third of the set.

Later I was invited to his house. I found out Charles had a teenage big brother who treated him like dirt. I found out that Charles' parents put Charles down constantly, even in front of me, and told him he'd never be as good as his older brother.

My Mother tried to molest Charles. This is the most direct evidence I have that my Mother was an indiscriminate child molester. She announced that I needed a bath, and suggested to Charles that he might want a bath, too. When he didn't answer, she just pushed us both into the bathroom and said, "It'll be fun." She took my clothes off first to convince him it was OK. He let her take his off.

Then she fondled my genitals and let Charles see how much I enjoyed it, and said, "Don't you want me to do this for you, Charles?"

Charles was afraid, and made it very clear he didn't want that. His Mother didn't touch him that way. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I had been told all mothers did it.

She then tried to get Charles interested in anal stimulation, by showing him that doing it to me didn't kill me.

I'm always amazed when I think of the risks she seemed to take. Charles could have gone straight home and reported all of this. I would have backed him up in an investigation. But somehow my Mother was able to psyche out the kid and figure out that he wouldn't tell anyone what happened.