My mom was a powerful woman. She was very intelligent, hardworking, and had a strong will. Her biggest failing, in my opinion, was that she was groomed from an early age to serve the patriarchy. She deeply believed that men should take the lead in things and that her role should be supportive. Yet she held the greater power in her relationship with Walt. It was her house. He needed her to help him write his sermons. She made the important decisions behind the scenes, and he must have resented his dependency. Although I never saw him hit her, she was cowed by his temper. He would call her “woman” in a derisive tone. I one time saw him grip her upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. There was a time she brought him toast that wasn’t burnt enough for his taste, and he tossed the whole plate back at her. But in the end she sent him packing. His sudden transformation to meekness and his apology to me, after two years of tyrannical domination, left me shell-shocked and confused. At least he was gone. We all felt a sense of relief and liberation in the aftermath.

Content Warning: discussions of suicide and dark insinuations.

My mom made some big mistakes raising us, but now she did something very right. She hauled the six of us into family counseling. Steve was a PhD psychologist and licensed family therapist, and he was great. I remember all of us sitting in a big circle in his office for several sessions, and as I recall it was a lot of fun. He had a calm and cheerful manner that got us all to loosen up and talk about our feelings. I remember there were these oblong pillow things with handles like swords that we could fence with. It was good times, and it wasn’t long before he said, “I think you all are doing quite well and you don’t need to keep coming back at this point. Except I want to continue to see Kirk.” Wow, I felt so special! I mean that in a positive way — I wanted to keep coming, and never thought about why I might be singled out in a negative sense.

So every week it seemed, for the next three or four years I went to see him. In 1974 most kids didn’t have a therapist, and I thought it made me cool. A year into it I bragged about it to my friends at school and they thought it made me a dark and complicated badass. They already thought I was a musical genius. When they asked me if it meant I was crazy, I said I would ask the therapist. He said, “No, you’re not ‘crazy!’ You’re not a raving basket case. I would would describe you as emotionally disturbed.” That satisfied my friends and me. Steve and I talked about my life history up to that point, trying to identify the turning points. I talked about the pants-down spankings, the way I felt singled-out by my father for extra punishments. I decided I must remind my dad too much of himself and so I got on his nerves. I talked about the Catholic school, the bullying. I talked about how Walt seemed to be a cross between Adolph Hitler and Barney Fife: an insecure loser who overcompensated by being a dictatorial douche. But mostly we talked about the bullying that was ongoing: the jocks at school who were always calling me “faggot,” “queer,” and “fairy,” pushing me in the hallways and punching me in the stomach. “What do they think they know about me?” I asked. “Are you gay?” he replied. And that started a long series of conversations about my sexual orientation. He was a good therapist. I never felt judged or in any way unsafe. I could have told him everything, but I withheld a lot. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the desperate need to convince myself that the bullies were wrong about me. I think if I believed that everyone could see who I really was and what had happened to me, if I thought I had failed in my attempts to keep the truth veiled, I would actually have killed myself. So eventually we succeeded in getting me through high school in one piece, but the deepest darkest stuff remained buried.

My sister, Karen, started working as a waitress in a small family-owned Mexican restaurant when she was sixteen. She spent a lot of time at work because she loved it. The other reason was because, due to her good looks and outgoing personality, her two best friends happened to be the richest in town. We were dirt poor, and she needed her own money to fit in, at least in a fashion sense. The owners of the restaurant were wonderful people, very kind, and she was a gifted waitress. One day, a few weeks after Walt left, I came home from school hungry. I looked in the pantry for something to eat and we were out of everything but pancake mix and such. I said, “Mom, there’s nothing to eat!” She was sitting at the kitchen table and, for only the second time in my life, I saw her bury her face in her palms and sob. “I’m so sorry, we don’t have any money. We may have to go on Welfare.” That very moment my sister walked in, home from work, and said, “What’s going on?” My mom seemed so ashamed as she explained the situation. Karen said, “Mom, I’ll loan you $75 so you can get some groceries, and I’ll ask at work to see if we can get you a job.” So for a while my mom bussed tables while my sister waitressed. It must have been a hoot. It wasn’t long before my mom got a part-time job lecturing at the university, and a year later she landed a great position at a community health research clinic as “Director of Intervention” in a multi-year, nationwide study. Like I said, my mom was a powerful woman! Her boss was an internationally-renowned epidemiologist, a Persian MD who got all the credit while she worked herself to the bone cleaning up the messes he created with his imperious arrogance. He was not good with people, but she was. She spent the rest of her career there, working fourteen-hour days to make that place a success. He eventually lost a class action lawsuit for harassment brought by all the other employees. She was probably his chief enabler. But at least we had enough money to get a stereo system, a microwave oven, a new car, and a color TV with cable. We were finally middle class.

Halfway through my ninth-grade year the bullying was getting to be too much. My last period of the day was Physical Education. Whenever PE ended, school was out, and I often found myself face to face with my tormentors. Billy, in particular, was not the scariest, but he was the most persistent. The scion of a very wealthy family, he seemed to take special delight in saying things like, “Kirk, you’re a ‘fairy’ nice guy!” One day he said to me, “You’re such a queer,” and I replied without missing a beat, “You wish!” There did always seem to be a sense of yearning in his pretty blue eyes, so I was calling him out! He responded by physically assaulting me with punches and kicks. I managed to escape and headed toward the band room — a standalone building not far away where my friends and I met up every day after school. That was the very last time I attended PE in junior high! After that I skipped PE and meandered my way over to the band room during seventh period. The band director was a sweet man and never questioned my presence there. I would greet my friends when they arrived after school as if nothing irregular was going on. My sister Karen was off at college now, and I had moved into her old room at the front of the house. My siblings were relieved when I moved the piano into it. They were annoyed at how much I practiced, and this made it less intrusive.

Since my mom was working so much, we younger four were pretty much on our own most of the time. My older brother, Dan, had a motorcycle and a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant on the edge of town. He was gone hanging out with his druggie friends much of the time, and that left me with my sister, Jenifer (two years younger) and my brother, Drew (four years younger). We took turns making dinner, which we would warm up for my mom when she dragged herself in at eight or nine o-clock. She would eat and then promptly fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. By ten someone would run her bath water, then we would herd her off to the tub. We took turns waking her up, helping her out of the tub, drying her off and getting her moving towards bed. This is how we lived. After a few weeks of skipping PE, I started skipping school entirely. I would get up as normal, make my lunch and load it into my backpack with my books, then head out towards school. I found if I walked halfway to school before turning around to go back home it allowed just the right amount of time for my mom to leave for work. I would sneak back into the house and play the piano all day, talking to the composer Beethoven, whose spirit I imagined sitting at my side, coaching me and discussing his music. He was as weird as me, and we vibed together as I developed a special affinity for his piano sonatas. These were the happiest weeks of my life up to then. It was so nice not to have to deal with school anymore.

One Saturday afternoon my mom was reading the mail and she said, “What is this?” I looked at the letter she handed me. It was from the Department of Juvenile Justice. It said something to the effect of “Your son, Kirk, has been declared a habitual truant and will be made a ward of the court if you don’t respond by” such and such a date. Ooops. She looked at me in pained confusion. “But I see you leave for school every morning before I go to work!” Well, actually. I asked what “ward of the court” meant. She said, “They’ll take you away and put you in foster care, probably a group home somewhere.” What, no more private room with a piano?! This was a crisis indeed. “I’ll call Steve,” she said. I still can’t believe how people rallied on my behalf. I’m so lucky. Steve said he was willing to sign a release to get me out of PE for the rest of the year, and the school counselor told me the principal said they would only accept it because Steve was a doctor of psychology. The only caveat was that I would have to take one more semester of PE before I could graduate from high school in three years. Whew! And the band director said he was perfectly happy to have me as a student aide last period for the rest of the year. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting everything I wanted. But they said I had to sign a written contract, which I was to draft myself. So I wrote up a contract saying I would attend every class until the end of the year on the condition that I didn’t have to set foot in the gym again, and if I had even so much as one unexcused absence I would immediately be made a ward of the court. “Wow, that’s pretty draconian,” Steve commented, “Don’t you want to give yourself three strikes or something?” I straightened my back and said, “I don’t see any reason why I would have any unexcused absences.” So we both signed it. I discovered that merely by showing up to all my classes every day I could easily get straight A’s, and at the end of the year I was even presented the “High Achievement in Music” award in front of the whole school. To this day I still believe that if I had gone into foster care I would have died of a heroin overdose or suicide before the age of twenty. Thank you, Steve, you are still a hero to me!