CHAPTER I

Prehistory

IN THE BEGINNING there is a chaotic jumble of oral tradition and family legend. In truth I know little of my family history—memories prior to the age of five years old. When the world did finally emerge out of my infantile state of pre-consciousness, I was a five year old little boy with a mother and a father and a grownup brother. We lived in a tiny oil town called Taft in the oil-rich southern end of the San Juaquin Valley of California. The whole town was composed of former refugees, economic refugees who fled with their families and whatever meager possessions they had in whatever old clunker car they could find. They came out west to escape the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. They perceived of themselves as the extruded excrement of Oklahoma and Arkansas, the "po’ white trash" folk. Mom and dad fit in well because dad was an "Arkie" and mom was an "Okie". It was just like John Steinbeck described it in Grapes of Wrath. I still find it difficult to read Steinbeck. He hits too close to home. Much later on, after I came along, I discovered I had a grownup brother, Robert, and a grownup sister, Betty, in addition to my grownup brother, Kenneth, who was still living at home—although his continued living home was to prove a tenuously short-lived affair. It seems odd that I should have been a virtual second family for my parents. The reason was medical: when Kenneth was born mom had her fallopian tubes surgically tied, but not cut. Very rarely, tied tubes can come untied, hence mom’s surprise eighteen years later when she became pregnant with me. As a little boy I remember mother telling me the story and reminding me that I was "an accident—a mistake." Unfortunately, I believed her. I have never seen, nor do I now possess, any documentation of my family’s pre-California history. I have met fewer than six of my parents’ relatives, and I have never seen even so much as photographs or family trees to even prove that relatives ever existed. It is as though my whole family tried to erase its own history. In fact, for years my older sister, Betty, denied that she had been born before my family moved from Oklahoma. The past was too painful to even acknowledge. So all traces of it were left behind in the dust of the mid-west. I was born in 1952 in Modesto, California. When I "came to" in 1957 I discovered I also had a maternal grandmother, a maternal aunt who was married to a drunken sot who married my father’s brother. That whole group of relatives lived in Delano, California, another refugee encampment, about a one-hour drive from Taft. Aside from my father’s mother, who still lived in the mountains of Arkansas, I knew no other relatives. Later on I learned there were a great many of them. All I knew was that I hated to visit the relatives. My uncle was drunk when he was there, my aunt was grossly fat and lived in the kitchen, the whole house stank, and my old grandmother slobbered all over me when she kissed me and she wore a giant diaper. Later on I discovered my father had another brother, E.C., wandering around California. He showed up every other year or so and tried to stay sober while he was in our house. When I was about six or seven years old I went to a funeral for a stranger who was said to be one of my uncles. I never knew whether he was a maternal or paternal uncle. He had never been mentioned prior to his death in a traffic accident. I think he was a truck driver. That is the extent of my family about which I have any knowledge. Those whose names are not mentioned are people whose proper names I never knew or have entirely forgotten. That should not be surprising since for years I denied their existence.  Dad and mom were married when dad was eighteen and mom was (I think) fourteen. Such marriages were fairly common in parts of the mid-west. Their first child, Betty, was an infant when they moved to California. The family settled in the farm-rich Imperial Valley near the Mexican border. I have no idea when or where Kenneth or Bob were born, except that they are native-born Californians. At some point after the move to the Imperial Valley a major event took place. Dad was converted to Pentecostal Christianity. He gave up booze; he gave up his trips across the border to visit whores; and he decided he was "called" to be a Pentecostal preacher.

From the time of Dad’s conversion until our time in Taft the history is sketchy. Dad’s life became that of an itinerant preacher, with the family moving from one poor community of economic refugees to another all over California. Mother gave birth to Robert and Kenneth sometime in this period. It was at this time or shortly thereafter that mother had her fallopian tubes surgically tied to prevent any further pregnancies. Or so my parents thought.  At some point after his religious conversion Dad got his High School Equivalency Certificate. He placed great value on education and told me many times that his biggest resentment in life was that as a child he had to work to support his family and could not go to school. I suspect his father was an alcoholic. Anyway, dad was sure that if he had a degree with letters after his name, all our problems would be solved. So he enrolled in a "correspondence" graduate school, Belin Memorial University, out of a small town in Missouri. Belin not only overlooked his lack of any undergraduate work, but eventually granted him a Masters degree and a Th.D., Doctor of Theology—all via correspondence. He even served as a correspondence professor of theology. I was a small child when Reverend Isaac S. Horton became Dr. Horton. Everything was supposed to change. People were supposed to respect Dad. We were supposed to cease being hicks on the fringes of respectability and social acceptability. What happened was exactly the opposite.The only information I have about family life prior to my birth comes from Betty, Bob and Kenneth. Betty married at (?) sixteen years old to get away from home; Bob joined the Navy a year early by lying about his age; and Kenneth left home when I was a small child, immediately after High School graduation. For the rest of my childhood I may as well have been an only child.

Growing up as a virtual second family had repercussions, the majority of which I was not aware until much later. It seemed strange to me as a young adult that, when I read books about the "only child" syndrome, I seemed to have most, if not all of the characteristics described. But it is not strange at all. Not really. Growing up without siblings is the same, whether or not there are in actuality siblings in existence. I learned that I wanted a big brother very badly, and that I was jealous of other little boys who had one. So, I invented an imaginary one. He was loyal to me, and I was loyal to him. We played together, and he taught me many things. He guided me like a tutor. Little did I know that in my thirties I would be given the real thing—a big brother who is real, live, and not a product of my imagination.  I became aware of another dynamic early in my childhood. Dad went to the doctor frequently and took a lot of prescription medication. He took red capsules at night to sleep, and sometimes during the day as well. Sometimes he went to several different doctors, but he always came home with another bottle of red capsules. Along with dad’s continual need for Seconal and the constant doctor’s office visits, mom was diagnosed the year I was born with multiple sclerosis. Much of the time mom had to remain in bed, unable to walk to the bathroom without help. But helpless she was not. Mom ruled the household from her bed. She made the family decisions and called all the plays. After all, she was sick and we had to bow to her wishes. It was not until many years later that I realized how strange it is that mother and father always addressed each other as "daddy" and "mommy." How revealing that is to me now.  In 1961 an event occurred which was to have a major impact upon my life—the first major crisis of my childhood. Little Randy experienced terror for the first time. Dad had a mental breakdown. After several days of sedation—more than usual—the doctor sent dad to Taft Hospital. We put the best face on the situation possible, making up excuses to tell the church people so that no one would find out what was really wrong with dad or why he was in hospital. But Taft is a small town and when it became clear that dad would need much more time in the hospital, arrangements were made to transfer him to the psyche ward in a hospital in Bakersfield, an hour’s drive away.From the beginning of dad’s breakdown, I was told nothing except that dad was sick. Shortly my brother, Bob, arrived and took me to his house to visit. That visit lasted for months. There were times when I believed I had been abandoned and would never see my parents again. Later on I would wish that I had been abandoned. When mom and dad finally did come for me they told me about dad’s "nervous trouble." But when I returned home I began to hear the neighbors whispering about dad being "crazy" and "psycho." The cat was already out of the bag. It was only a matter of time until the church would find out.  Shortly after dad’s hospitalization and while dad’s medication was greatly increased, dad began to visit me alone at night. He would tell me how mom’s MS made it impossible for them to be close. He forced me to be with him sexually several times from the age of seven until twelve years, always after he had taken pills. It got to the point that I had to lock the bathroom door whenever I took a bath, because dad would inevitably walk in under some pretense or other and leer at me.  Shame was the constant underlying theme of those years for me, a theme which began long before the period of incest. I was ashamed of my family history and lineage; ashamed to be a country hick; ashamed to be the "Goody Two Shoes" preacher’s kid; ashamed of my religion and the people who practiced it. Along with the shame went isolation. I had few childhood friends and I never invited anyone to my house for fear Dad would be in one of his crazy moods. I tried to prevent anyone from finding out just how insane dad really was. No one could know that the self-confident preacher who spoke to hundreds of souls each week from his pulpit with the eloquence of a self-educated theologian was a whimpering, drug addicted man who beat his invalid wife and forced himself on his little son.Religion was omnipresent for me—and not by choice, I assure you. Oh, I learned all the Pentecostal dogmas—I was a very bright child. But what it all came down to was emotion—raw, seething, boiling emotion. No one went to church for any reason other than shouting, dancing in the spirit, speaking with other tongues, miracle healings, and slayings in the spirit. Church services allowed everyone present to vent all the repressed feelings they kept carefully hidden the rest of the time, everyone except me. I couldn’t dare let the cat out of the family bag. I hated church, but I went because I had to go. God was a mass of contradictions. He supposedly loved me, but he did nothing to stop the insanity of my family life. All He was good for was a once-a-week emotional escape, a fix, a periodic anaesthetic. By the time I was in third grade even that stopped working. God just didn’t work anymore. My shame was the only God I knew. Somewhere around ten years old a shift began to occur, one which was so subtle I did not identify it for years. Since my own life was so bitterly painful, I invented a fantasy life, including a fantasy father, a fantasy occupation, a whole fantasy world to replace reality—a reality with which I could no longer live.By the time my ninth birthday had occurred we were packing up to move from Taft. The pressure for the "crazy preacher" to resign was too great to resist. So without another job in hand, we put our belongings into a thirty-foot travel trailer and dad became a traveling evangelist. Father used his phony, mail-order graduate school degree to convince the State of California that he was qualified to take me out of school and teach me himself. Every town we visited, every day of the week, I was isolated from any outside people that I knew or trusted, and I was constantly under the supervision of my "teacher," an insane child molester, my own father. That trailer was to be my home for one and one-half years, until dad was finally hired to pastor a starving group of Pentecostal refugees from the mid-west who settled in the San Francisco Bay area. The Bay Area became my adopted home until I turned thirty years old. When we moved to our new mobile home in the South Bay was the point at which I started using my middle name, Dale, and began to consistently lie about my history. I was determined to bury Randy, his family, his crazy father, his vengeful God—everything. The fantasy became the reality. No one could ever know the truth. Not even me.But why was I so afraid to even know the truth myself that I had to invent a whole fantasy life in which I could escape? I don’t know the whole answer, but I have at least discovered a good part of it. Since I felt the need to know that mom and dad were okay and that I was safe, I could not bear the thought that the insane things that dad did to me were the result of his insanity. The only other possibilities were that I must have somehow encouraged or caused him to do those things, or that I was such a bad boy that I only deserved to be treated in that way. Neither possibility was very appealing, and the easiest way out was simply to drop out of reality. It was a defense, granted. But it worked. It got me through life in the asylum. But little did I know that it would eventually almost destroy me.One other tool became available to me to use as a defense against my own internal pain from the time I was about six years old. As a child codeine was an over-the-counter drug in this country, and my father kept a cough and sore throat preparation called Terpenhydrate with Codeine. In actuality, it was mainly alcohol laced with a good amount of the pain killing drug. I hated the taste of it, but soon found that the feeling I had after taking the vile stuff was wonderful. So, I began to go to the drug store and buy it from the neighborhood pharmacist "for my father". It is truly amazing how many coughs and sore throats I had during those years. Many years later I was to find myself drinking NyQuil whenever booze could not be had.