Chapter 1 First Light
By Kay Ebeling
Chapter 1 First Light . (First installment of a book to be published here a chapter at a time. Please support this project by clicking the PayPal "Buy Now" button on the left with High $5's or higher. You are buying readership.) Faster Than the Speed of Life Chapter 1: First Light Elgin, Illinois May 2013 I walked all the way to the end of the train then, quick, turned around and walked back. That blew his cover. The guy following me kind of jumped, got a what the f— expression on his face, then recovered and nodded like a polite stranger as I walked past him. But for that brief moment of eye contact I knew, and he knew I knew. I walked up the hill to my apartment and spent the day laughing in an isolated sense of victory. See, I had a feeling that because of my blog, they’d put a device somewhere in my apartment that allowed them to read everything on my computer. So as a test, I journalled an elaborate plan involving a Chicago church and Father Horne. I tapped details about it on my keyboard knowing the spooks were reading every bit of it and freaking out, I even emailed myself the journal to “save it in the cloud,” and make sure they’d read it. Then that Sunday morning at the Elgin Metra station, I blew their cover. It felt good to out-trick them. “What, did they think I was going to do, throw eggs at a church?” . Heh heh. In April 1994, I picked up the phone and called my sister Patricia who I hadn’t spoken to in six years. After very little conversation, I asked her, “Do you remember anything about Father Horne? Because I've been having these dreams.” Before I even finished the sentence, Trish answered, “Oh no, he got to you too?” When I intimated yes, she went on: “He molested me until I was about ten years old. Hmm, then he must have dropped me for you.” (She is six years older than me.) The tone of her voice became like a betrayed wife: “That means when I got too old for him, he dumped me for you.” Her voice then changed to a guttural whisper: “No wonder I've been so hostile to you your whole life. You took away my first lover.” I screamed into the phone, no, no Trish don't say that but she repeated it. You took away my first lover. As I held the phone, my daughter Lizzie stood in the doorway watching and I realized, it's because she's five years old. She's the age I was when Father Horne got to me, that's why I've been so overly protective of her. She turned five years old and I remembered what happened to me when I was five years old. Now she’d heard this phone conversation. Geography played a big part in those events in 1994 that completely changed my life. The North Coast of California is starkly barren. Temperatures in the newspapers are deceptively warm, because a few minutes after sunrise almost every day, the winds start up. Morning to afternoon the winds blow as high as 50 miles an hour, and they continue nonstop until sundown. So every time you walk outside in daylight, you are fighting the wind. As a result the population of California’s North Coast is internalized, isolated, and bent up for battle wherever they go. I’d come up from L.A. because I could afford rent here. When I got pregnant on my own at age 39, I approached it the way I’d approached everything in my life since I could remember: Going Faster than the Speed of Life, I dive so hard into solving the problem, I have no time to stop and think what caused it in the first place. Soon after Lizzie was born, I began reading out of town newspapers until I found a town up north on the coast with rentals I could afford, even if I ended up on welfare,. And it had a decent climate, at least according to the weather reports. I figured idyllic surroundings would be good for me and my newborn daughter. It turned out rents were low in Eureka because there was almost no one living there anymore. We lived on F Street near Fourth, just blocks from Main, where Highway 101 runs through heading to Oregon. And there were no cars at all on our street. Eureka is the Humboldt County seat and in the early 1990s it was almost a ghost town. Lizzie and I would sit in the middle of the road in front of our house for hours and never have to move because a car was coming. We did that, honest, and I wasn’t drunk or stoned, just making a statement about how empty the town was. When Lizzie turned three years old, I’d realized I had to clean up, so I went to Alcoholics Anonymous for the fifth time in my life and this time the program kicked in. So in 1994 I had been clean and sober for two years, not even using marijuana. As I approached two years sober, a preoccupation with the way my sex life messed up everything else in my life grew more and more preoccupying until it was all I spoke or thought about for weeks. “I've seen this before,” my sponsor surmised between long pulls on a Marlboro. She had twenty some years in recovery. “When someone is sober awhile and they start obsessing about something else, the way you are, it means there’s something else inside, something you aren't even aware of and haven't been aware of because you've been drunk and stoned most of your life. Now that you're clean and sober, that something else inside you might be about to come out.” I had no idea to what she could be referring. Then my AA home group brought a Catholic priest up from L.A. for our monthly speakers meeting, and I could not go. No matter how my friends tried to help- they arranged childcare, they arranged a ride- I just could not, would not go see the priest speak. People in the program can be pretty forceful, and as the evening approached, it looked like I was going to have to go anyway. Then this pain started, pain that shot all over my body, total body pain that I still live with today in 2014. It started right then in Eureka in Spring of 1994. I've hurt all over my body almost 24 hours a day now for twenty years. I can get pretty bitchy. Around the same time in 1994 as the pain came in, I started having this half dream half memory, or a dream that turned into a memory, it's so hard to describe it. Every morning in the moments between being asleep and waking up, I’d go there: I am moving into a room where Father Horne sits on a mat on the floor beckoning me. In this half-awake state at age 45 I'm thinking, Why am I in the bedroom with Father Horne when I'm only five years old. Each morning in the dream, I get closer and closer to his bed, and I think, Why am I in that room with him. Then I pop awake, covered with sweat, panicking, and so horny I can barely stand it. Over the next few years, that same horniness came back every time I spoke or wrote about what Father Horne did to me, in fact, it still happens today. After my dad’s funeral in 1997 I was in the hotel room talking on the phone to a relative about Father Horne, and the horniness got so huge, it became a presence that filled up the room. Again, these things are really hard to explain. And again, there was Lizzie in the room there with me the whole time. “Now I know why I’ve been so hostile to you your whole life,” Patricia said. “You took away my first lover.” And I screamed into the phone loud sounding like Hitchcock’s violin in Psycho, “No Patricia don't say that, don't say that.” It just struck me wrong, like it was a really weird way to respond, exactly the opposite way I was responding to this whole memory. But I knew what she meant that she’d been “hostile” to me my whole life. In April 1994 I had not spoken to my sister Patricia for almost six years. In late 1988 She’d come up from San Francisco to meet her newborn niece, but about four hours into the visit, I’d had to throw her out of our home. She’d been tense since arriving, and after a few Southern Comforts, some switch snapped in her head and she went into a rage, because I put a can of green beans into a stew I was cooking. These kinds of rages are not logical. She swiped the counters in a coloratura about canned food having “no nutritional value at all, only fresh goes in the stew.” She she was foaming at the mouth, she literally had foam in the corners of her lips. So I threw her out of my house. It wasn’t the first time Trish had gone off on me like that, but this time was different, as there was a baby in the other room I had to protect Trish's rage Thanksgiving 1981 affected me so bad, it had a lot to do with why I lost my job at NASA. Well, that and them doing the investigation for my security clearance and finding I’d once worked on the Timothy Leary for Governor campaign . . . . and before that as a porn film performer. Albuquerque Fall 2010: They've been watching me for weeks, through the windows, over the internet, in the phones. Now they've found a way to cock block my blog so it never shows up in a Google search. I can put up a post, then go to Google and enter keywords from that post, and everything else on Earth comes up but my blog. Also someone is lurking on the survivor message board and it's so weird. As soon as I put up a post, my phone rings and it's the same voice, saying something like, “Can I speak to Ms. Muu-Muu,” or something like that. I told everyone in the world I was coming to Albuquerque to find out more about Servants of the Paraclete. Then the first day I was at this hotel, the electric lock on my door broke, from, the maintenance guy told me later, someone tampering with the lock. Switching rooms apparently was not enough to keep them from watching everything I do. Over the weeks that spring in Eureka, images of what happened with Father Horne came in that were so real I would also experience whatever senses were involved, as if the memories had a life of their own. I’d see Father Horne hovering over me while I lay on my back on the ground in the woods near our home outside Chicago and feel the cold air. I’d see his head silhouetted against the gray Illinois sky, know his hands were going to work on me, and I’d get aroused so much, again, the horniness filled up the room. Giggle. Horne. Horniness. God Does have a sense of humor. Another memory that began to rerun in my head was from First Confession class. Father Horne was on the altar with me and other children my age sitting on the floor and stairs in front of him. He made reference to “impure thoughts” as one of the sins a person has to confess, and I asked him, “What are impure thoughts?” Thing is, I know exactly what he means by impure thoughts. And he knows I know exactly what he means. He blushes, even gets a little flustered, and says, “I'll tell you more about that later, after class.” That day in First Confession class I did, for the first time, what I would end up doing to men for most of my life. Because Father Horne did get together with me after class to explain exactly what Impure Thoughts were. As a six year old girl with a tingling between my legs, I learned how to snag a man’s attention with a flirty comment and a look. Right there in First Confession class I learned how to trick a guy into sex. All our lives, there had been a weird connection between Patricia and me. We went through changes at the same time and in the same way, even when we were living on different continents. We were both shockingly promiscuous, each in our own way. Even by the loose standards of the circles in which we moved, we were promiscuous. Even hippies were shocked at my sexual aggression as I romped around the state of California in the late nineteen sixties. Even patrons at topless bars where Trish danced were shocked by what she did after closing. Our cousins are normal, married with children and careers, but Patricia and I were these profound whores from the time we reached puberty. And my father knew. He would look at us with an expression of resigned defeat, and let us get away with pretty much anything. As I remembered in 1994 what happened with Father Horne in 1954, I had some weird physical reactions. At one point I even flew across the room and banged against a wall, the memory was so powerful it had a momentum all its own. It happened to me when I was around five years old, and five year old Lizzie was nearby the whole time watching me remember it, knowing she had something to do with it. She turned five and I started remembering what happened to me when I was five, and her home life was never stable again. Arcadia, California, early 1970s Soon after Patricia gave birth to a son, she had a “nervous breakdown” and came to live at the family home, but her behavior was so strange my parents soon put her in a mental health center in San Gabriel Valley. I happened to be home from my wanderings around the state at the time, so I was there when Patsy came back from the hospital. Patricia sat in a daze in the living room. I asked my dad, What's wrong with her? “Well the doctors gave her electric shocks,” he said. “They did it twelve times,” he added. I looked at my sister wondering if it was the electric shocks that caused her hair to frizz like that. I mean, I’d never seen her hair that frizzy, burned and singed, every strand. I asked, “Why did they have to do it twelve times?” Dad said, “She had these memories inside her brain, and we decided we had to get rid of them.” When he saw my look of disbelief he added, “That's how they do it.” What kind of memories could she have that were so bad they had to be removed? I asked, but my dad didn't answer. Thank God they didn't totally vacate her mind. When I recovered these memories in 1994, there was no therapist involved. Since I'm admitting it was a repressed memory, some people may not believe me, because there is so much information out there about psychologists placing memories about child molestation inside people’s heads. With me it was truly a perfect storm. I was living in a totally un-stimulating place, I was clean and sober for two years the first and only time in my life, that priest was coming to speak at my home group meeting, and most importantly, my daughter turned the age I was at the time of the abuse. I had always remembered something happening to me that involved sex as a little girl. I just thought I’d been visited by St. Michael the Archangel while I was playing in the woods and he did this thing to me that excited me. I didn't know it was sex. But I did share it with other kids, becoming at the time a six year old sexual predator. It was a perfect storm. If Lizzie hadn’t been born at the time she was, if she hadn't turned the age I was at the time of the abuse just as I was clean and sober for two years. if we hadn’t been living in the middle of nowhere, if the priest weren't coming up from L.A. to speak, if it all hadn’t happened just the way it did, I never would have even remembered any of it. Truly a case of angelic intervention. And her home life with me was never structured again. After I recovered the full memory of what Father Horne did to me, for a good six months I was ecstatic, walking around on a cloud, shouting for joy even, sometimes there in the north coastal wind. Finally I understood why I’d been so screwed up my whole life and it was like a reconciliation, like a gonging bell jar of a huge church tower had been chiming and chiming nonstop in my head and it had finally come to a stop. And I started once again going Faster than the Speed of Life. I jumped into research about pedophile priests in the Catholic Church. Going Faster than the Speed of Life, Lizzie and I held a yard sale, raised enough cash to move, and we were on our way to San Francisco within weeks, with no plan, just trusting a higher power and the universe and this speeding cloud that I was riding. I’d learned there was a support organization for pedophile priest victims somewhere in the Bay Area and I was off to find them. All I knew was they called themselves Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. NEXT: Chapter Two: Patricia the Haight St. Homeless Advocate (Which I’ve outlined and will start drafting now) POST NOTE: Back in Elgin, spring 2013, problem is, what do I do now about anything else I want to type in that bugged room? - - - Please support this work in progress by sending me High Fives ($5 and higher) through my PayPal button in the top left corner of this blog. You will be paying for “readership” and helping to keep the blogger alive. –ke PREVIEW: “Father Horne is so handsome.” When my mom would say those words, she’d squirm in her seat and blush. She adored Father Horne, from the time I was a little girl right up to the day she died. She’d gush out, “He’s so handsome” in a singsong voice with a hint of sexuality, even at age ninety. So I probably was not surprised at age five when I walked in on her sitting on Father Horne’s lap. He had her robust bare breast in his hands and was ravaging it. Both of them looked up embarrassed, but for me it was just something to look at.
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