What the hell, I'll leave the end. If you want the middle, then Buy the book here.
Chapter 1414
Monday morning brought dark skies and the threat of rain, but our first practice scrimmage was close so Marty insisted that the football team meet in Elan Three’s dining room to be sure of the weather. When we arrived the players from Three were huddled around tables talking. We waved to the ones we knew.
Mike Skakel was with Jamie Newfield and John Higgins. He nodded to me when we arrived. Joe Peterson liked to be in charge so I let him pick our table and situate the guys. He did it in a loud, military manner.
“You guys stay here and behave yourselves,” Marty said, “And, I’ll go get the guys from the bus.”
Only Shane McGarrah was lower than Joe, Gary and I, and Joe needed to look like the boss so he looked at Shane. “Did you hear what he said? Behave yourself until he gets back.”
Shane said. “I heard him.”
“Did I tell you to cop an attitude?”
There was no right answer to that question so Shane didn’t say anything, but that wasn’t enough for Joe. He was in his first position of authority and it was obvious that he enjoyed it. He would have fit in perfectly in the old days. “You’re not denying it, so now I’m sure you were copping an attitude.” He said.
“I wasn’t.”
“Now you’re lying.” Joe asked Jamie Newfield. “Is there a room I can use?”
Jamie pointed.
Joe said to Shane. “Knock on this door.”
Shane muttered something about Joe being on a power trip as he passed me and I would have said something, but I agreed. We didn’t nitpick at football. The guys from Three were also uncomfortable because of it.
When Joe was done, Marty and the players arrived. The commotion drowned out Joe’s victory lap, and Shane blended in rather than take the walk through a tense, quiet dining room. Wayne Weaver was having a conversation with one of the guys from his house, and when he saw me I gestured to him that we needed to talk, and he nodded. He put his hand to his face and mimicked eating a sandwich to tell me that we should do it at lunchtime. I nodded.
#
“Jane Tolar told me that she’s going to tell Jeffrey that she lied on you, man.”
“Really?”
I told him the story from the beginning and he looked happy at first, but by the time I was done he looked angry again. Yvette and Jane were a small victory compared to Cathy Collins and Willie Garcia.
“I’m working on Willie and Cathy, but if Jeff gets mad at Jane and tells us to stop talking about the old days I’ll never be able to confront them.”
“Then, tell her to shut up about it for a while.”
“She spoke to him last night. She might have already told him.”
#
That night, I had my first coordinator’s meeting with Jeff Gottlieb and Gary Ross. Jeff started by telling us that Jane had been shot down for guilt that she had copped to, and then he made me the chief coordinator, Joe Peterson a coordinator, and Gary the coordinator of the department heads.
I cut myself for fun and I was in charge of the house. Twenty five people’s lives were in the hands of a fifteen year old who wanted to kill someone. After the next week’s scrimmage game we were scheduled to start the season. Summer was coming to an end and so was my time away from the house. Before long they were going to figure me out.
Jane congratulated me on the promotion. “You’ll be going home soon,” she said, “I’ll miss you.”
“I’m not out of here yet.”
“You’re doing good….You’ll be out of here soon.”
#
If someone makes you angry and you want to sit on the end of your chair in an encounter group screaming at them, you, “Drop a slip,’ on them. Encounter groups took precedent over other groups, so there were a lot more of them. There were rarely slips in the box for static groups.
As the participants set up to scream they’d let you know who they were angry at, and when it began three or four people would start yelling at the same time. Usually one outlasted the others, but in the event that two or more people were going on for too long the group leader had to assign an order.
Cathy Collins yelled at Jane Tolar for getting shot down because she considered her a role model, and when she was done Gary asked me to be in charge of the group for as long as it took for him to yell at Jane too. Jane didn’t shout at them, which was rare for her. She was dejected and embarrassed, so she sat and took it.
When Gary was done, he said, “One more,” and went after Cathy Collins for having the nerve to yell at Jane. Cathy called him corrupt and said he had no right to yell at her. The language had changed in the year and half I was in Elan, but it was easy to see that the residents still hated and wanted to hurt each other.
When the yelling was over Gary confronted Jane about losing her job and asked her what guilt she had copped to. Nothing had been announced except that she was shot down, and the house wanted to know why.
Jane gave the list of offenses but left out the part about lying on Wayne. She told me that Jeff told her to shut up about it. “It wasn’t so much one thing,” she said, “as it was a lot of little things.”
“So, you let it all build up till you lost your job.” Cathy said.
“What do you care?” Gary said. “You just want to jump on her now that she’s down.”
The group felt that, so when Gary said it they agreed.
“Exactly.” Richard Kogut said.
“You’re just jealous of her because you’ve never had a position of authority.” Amy Ericson said.
Gary didn’t like Cathy, so he let the group turn on her. The next ten minutes were spent going over her latest list of incidents. She was always in trouble so it wasn’t hard to do. Jane was relieved until I went after Cathy.
“You’re not jealous of Jane’s position in the house, Cathy. You’re jealous because Wayne Weaver liked her, and hated you.” I said. “So, why don’t you cop to that?”
“Wayne Weaver didn’t hate me.”
“He does now…He told me so.”
“Why would he hate me?”
“Because you lied on him.”
She stopped with her mouth open. “I didn’t…”
“Yes, you did,” Jane cut her off. “Wayne never had sex with you.”
She could see that we were done with the lies, and stared at Jane for a few seconds quietly. Then, she began to cry. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, “Danny was going to put me in the ring.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” I said. “Yvette, Jane and you have all admitted the same thing.” I turned to Willie Garcia. “So let’s have it, Willie…You’re the one he needs to tell the truth. You’re the one they’re still torturing him over.”
Everyone looked at him. “I say the same thing…Danny was going to hit me.”
“So, you made it up?”
“Yeah.” He said. “And he hit me anyway.”
We talked about false confessions for the rest of the group. The worst of the violence was what the program took from our being. Danny picked the one thing he could take from Wayne that would destroy him, and he did it after he had him beaten. He did that to all of us. When the group was over Gary and I put together the notes and gave them to Jeff Gottlieb, but we never heard about them again.
#
Wayne thanked me, but I could see that nothing would change for him. We played out the season, went 0-8, and I never saw him again. Mike Skakel had a great game against Brunswick the last game of the season, and we walked away feeling respectable. Jamie Newfield led us in a song on the bus ride home.
“We’re best friends, we’ll always be…Tackles and kicks, and blocks and blitz…Friends, we’ll be.”
For us there was justice because we publicly hung Danny Bennison in that group and no one was afraid. We also talked about what he did to Mary Jones. We thumbed our nose at the program for a minute and got away with it. What’s more, I pulled it off without losing my job.
Cathy Collins took care of that.
Chapter 15Chapter 15
When Cathy Collins split she was caught in a few hours because she didn’t want to get away. She was dressed in shorts in the cold, and Cathy wasn’t stupid so if she wanted to escape she would have planned better.
At her general meeting Jeff put her in the ring, spanked her with the paddle and shot her down. He gave her a sign, assigned her a P.O. and gave her a twenty minute lecture. None of it was unexpected. After eighteen months in the program I knew what was going to happen before it did. Except for what happened next.
Donna Bouton was Cathy’s escort when she ran, so Jeff shot her down and gave her the same sign to wear. Then, he did the same to Gary Ross because he was her boss and me because I was his. I had heard of that happening but had never seen it done. I fell from the top to the bottom that easily. It was the third time I had been shot down and all three times I hadn’t done anything wrong. The slogan about injustices was right.
My sign said, “Hi, my name is Wayne Kernochan. Please ask me why I’m too busy trying to impress people to be responsible for the people in my house.” It wasn’t very humiliating insofar as signs went and Jeff told me that it would be a short shot-down, so I took it well at first. Things rarely went according to plan in Elan. No one took Joe Peterson into account.
#
Amy Ericson came to me in the kitchen. “You have to knock on the coordinator’s office door.”
Joe was the only coordinator in the house and his haircuts were always motivated by anger and degradation. He talked about the military and discipline, but had little to offer in the way of therapy. I prepared for idiocy.
If you hadn’t done anything wrong it was probably a generic haircut with a theme that made no sense. Those could be about your lackadaisical attitude because your bed wasn’t made well, or your problem with authority because you weren’t cleaning the kitchen floor fast enough. They bored me. Joe didn’t.
“Do you know why you’re standing there?” He asked.
“No.”
I stared at him blankly as he screamed at me about trying to impress people. It was boring until it became about my sexuality, and me being gay. “I’m not gay.”
Joe stopped. “Get back out, and knock on that door.”
I did.
“Who’s out there?”
“Wayne.”
“Come in!”
I did.
“Do you know why you’re standing there?”
“No.”
He screwed up his face, and screamed with all his might about me having the audacity to interrupt him while he was giving a haircut and segued into me admitting to being gay in a general meeting so I interrupted him again.
“I didn’t admit to that, ask anyone that was there.”
“Get out, and knock on that door again.”
I did, and he didn’t ask me if I knew why I was standing there. He said it. “I’m not even going to ask you why you’re standing there…” and he went on for twenty minutes.
Joe was trying to humiliate me in front of the house with lies and I wasn’t going to let him. After knocking on the door for the eighth time, he yelled, “Come in!” and when I entered Jeff was standing there.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
He didn’t want an answer. He cut me off as I was about to. “You don’t run this house anymore. Get that through your head.”
When he was done Joe made me knock twice more. Once for making Jeff take time out of his schedule for a nobody like me, and the second for wanting to impress people. He left the gay thing alone.
#
The bathroom was the hardest work for people that were shot down and Joe Peterson was an Army man so he knew that and gave me the dirtiest work—the toilets. After my defiance he had me scrub them with a toothbrush. I had also heard of that before but never seen it.
“I want this door open all the time,” Joe said, “You’re not going to run off and get me shot down like Cathy did to you…You know what? I think you’d do it just to get me shot down.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Get out, and knock on that door, Wayne Kerningham.”
Joe always mispronounced my name. If I corrected him again it would just be another door to knock on, and another and another. I already told him in an encounter group and he continued doing it, so I got used to it.
When he was done blasting me for talking back I took the pail of water and toothbrush and started cleaning the toilet. He left. There was a shortage of people in positions in the house so I was left without a P.O. When Lisa Kelch came by I asked if I could close the door to use the bathroom and she said I could, so I locked the door, took out the razor blade and cut the bottoms of my feet until they bled.
I bit my hand until it had two semi circular purple imprints of teeth. When the initial pain went away the euphoria settled in and I exhaled. I wrapped toilet paper around the cuts to soak up the blood, put on my socks and shoes and opened the door
#
Over the next week I cut myself. Staff only looked at your wrists because the cutters in the house wanted attention. I didn’t. I wanted the pain. It made the crazy go away and with Joe Peterson in charge of the house I needed that.
When Gary and Jane told Joe that I had never admitted to being gay he changed his assessment of me, and from that point on everything I did wrong was because I didn’t feel like a man and was afraid women wouldn’t accept me. He obviously wasn’t in Denise’s group.
There were always a few that would jump on a bandwagon no matter how stupid it was, so Eric States and Matt Brennan started saying that I was feminine, and made fun of me for it. Joe told them to knock it off, but he smirked when he did.
#
I was cutting when Lisa knocked on the bathroom door. “Wayne, you need to knock on Jeff’s door.”
I said, “Give me one minute.”
“Now.”
I grabbed the end of the toilet paper and pulled it too hard, leaving half of the roll on the floor. “I need a minute to get decent.”
“Hurry up.”
I wrapped my feet and dropped the razor blade into my shoe. Then, I pulled on my socks, put my shoes on and wiped the blood from my hands with the extra paper. I flushed, opened the door and went to Jeff’s office to knock.
“Who’s out there?” Jeff asked.
“Wayne.”
“Come in.”
His voice was calm so I relaxed and opened the door. There was a chair where I was supposed to stand which was usually an indication that you were going to be spanked, but Jeff didn’t have an angry tone in his voice, so it was a talking to.
A talking to, was a haircut without the yelling. The convoluted therapy was the same so it was useless to me, but at least it wasn’t another haircut. It was Jeff, Joe and Jane. I looked at Jeff.
“Do you know why you’re in here?”
“No.”
“Sit down.”
I did.
“Look,” Jeff said, “I’m not gonna pull any punches with you. You were my coordinator and I like ya…you’re a good guy.” He sighed. “But, Jesus Christ man, you’re making it hard on me and my crew.”
He told me that I wasn’t long from going home, but that I wasn’t going until I straightened out and did my thing. He finished. “When you go out of this office, I want you to change the way you act, okay?”
I nodded.
Joe was uncomfortable doing a talking to. He stammered because he was angry, and blamed everything on the fact that I had a bad relationship with my mother. I wanted to correct him because in spite of all the problems at home, I didn’t, but Jeff was there so I left it alone.
Jane told me that she had respect for me but was losing it as my behavior got worse. When she was done, Jeff spoke again. “I want to see a remarked improvement in you.” He said. “Now get out.”
I went back to the bathroom, closed the door and cut some more.
#
By lunchtime that day the pain was almost too much to hide. It took more cutting to get the same high so in a short time I needed to stop. I ran out of safe places to hide it. When I needed relief I hyperventilated but that gave me headaches and didn’t last very long. Joe became more vicious, so I got worse still. I left the talking to with every intention of trying to get my job back, and mutilated myself in the bathroom to try and make it happen, but there was no way I was going to let Joe Peterson win.
It was going to be another long winter. :eek:
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to step up a little if he wants to talk with me.
years.