Pathogenesis, Part 1

This week, speaking to my psychiatrist, we happen upon the past. Fancy that. She is new. Until this past May I had been seeing this incredibly beautiful Korean woman. That was four years. But she was moving to another state and so I had to find someone knew. Dr.C had this incredible body. Our first session I told her I was not sure if I would be able to do this because I found her so attractive and ... but in fact, those dynamics were perfect. Of course, she had to put up with the occasional come on. Me telling her about how I imagined having sex with her.

The new psychiatrist is also Dr. C. But she is not an incredibly beautiful Korean woman. Instead, she is perhaps my age, finishing her residency. She just had what I think was her first child. She is very nice and has remarkable recall. But I've been troubled by the New Yorker column I read a week ago where the doctor confesses to the patient that there were times when he was paying no attention whatsoever.

New Dr. C is getting used to my sexual theatrics. She still doesn't know everything and I think that she is a little uncomfortable with it. Which is not to say that I am propositioning her or anything of the like. She is not really my type. But sex remains this locus for my personality and I have to speak about it at length. I am the confessing subject our friend M. Foucault is so fascinated by. Except that I know it's all production ... ?

When I was still four or five, my parents would employ one of the teenage girls from the church to babysit us. But now that I think about it, that is not when it first happened. No, it was during a square dance. The kids were bored and so we went to the tired old Christian Education Building. How did it come about that I shared a blanket with this teenage girl and that the lights were turned out? And then she touched me, beneath the cover of darkness and wool. Fondled my small and probably inactive penis. And she let me touch her breasts, which were very large because she was due to become a big girl and was only then growing into her body. Big-boned, as they call them in the country. And then there were at least several times this teenage girl would babysit my sister and I.

This poor girl. She was not, would never be beautiful. She is friendly and I suppose outgoing. And she was apparently sexually starved, such that the small hands of a child like mine somehow made her feel desire. She probably just desperately wanted to be touched. Maybe she too had once been touched. But after that first time, I wanted her to touch me again. I would scheme with my sister to have this teenage girl come and take care of us.

I don't know how long this went on. I suspect not very long. And then my parents, who were concerned with liberating my sister and I from the poverty of not-knowing and repression by talking sexuality to death, had one of these talks at the dinner table. Maybe my sister or I had questions. And so I then, innocuously, told them about the things that this teenage girl would do with me. As one might suspect, that was the end of her services.

Now I feel guilty about it, but not because I had been somehow shamed by this event. Been tainted before my time. Rather, because of the way that I have instrumentalized this narrative. I have told several girlfriends about it. Doing so, as a gesture to produce intimacy where there was none. Because I was empty. This was my story. Which is not to say that I abused it as I did myself. In fact, there were probably only about four or five girls. But I knew, the first time I told it, which was in college, underneath a rain shelter, on a snow covered golf course, with the most magical Jen, that my story was not false, but meaningless, and that I was telling to indebt her. That I was telling to obligate her.

Or to excuse myself. I think these things because I think, how could someone be so sexually deranged, so constantly and unfaithfully desirous, without some cause exonerating him. But I do not believe it. I am simply a bastard.