Don't Tell a Soul

THE DOCTOR’S SON

I was born in 1937 to a prominent physician.  As a kid, things were pretty scary in my house.  There was a lot of abuse going on including physical abuse, mental abuse and sexual abuse.  It was pretty scary stuff.  My father was the one that I was most afraid of.  I didn’t interpret his sexual abuse as incest at the time because there wasn’t any penetration.  But I did perceive it as a death threat.  I went to bed every single night frightened that my father would creep into my room and kill me.  At some point he must have threatened me in a verbal or nonverbal way because that is what I felt every single night of my life. 

The only nice thing I can say about my mother was that she wasn’t as bad as my father.  She did not hit me but she had her own way of abusing me.  She would call strangers on the phone and ask them to come take me away.  She would pick random numbers in the phone book and call them and beg them to come get me.  She said she wished I had never been born.  As a four-year-old, I was confused and hurt.  I thought I must be a pretty terrible kid for my own mother to not want me.

I grew up in a pro-Nazi, Pro-KKK neighborhood.  It was during World War II and I am Jewish and that was no great place to be at the time.  I still have the scars from the fights I had with the neighborhood kids as they tried to carve Nazi Swastika’s into my forehead.  Between the abuse at home and the abuse in the neighborhood, I was a pretty fucked up little kid. 

My father was a surgeon.  He was always in charge of my “health care”. When I was a little boy, I needed surgery on my feet.  My father decided to perform the surgery himself.  He had some of his powerful friends hold me down in an easy chair while he performed foot surgery on me without anesthesia.  He forbid me to move or cry out in pain.  I laid there praying for God to take me.  On another occasion, I needed two molars pulled and again, my father performed the procedure.  He pulled my teeth with pliers without using any type of sedation or anesthesia.    It took 11 grown men to hold me down.  Do I need to tell you how much rage was growing inside of me?  I wanted him dead.  I can tell you I hated that man. 

I was the “Scapegoat” in my family.   I was constantly being beat on by my dad and verbally abused by my mother.  I would be disciplined by being sent to my room.   For good measure, my father would often come into my room late at night punch me in the face.  He would come into my room completely naked and he would hit me so hard in the face that my head would hit the backboard of the bed.  He would hit me over and over again, and my head wound bang against the backboard.  He would beat while he was totally naked.  His penis would swing back and forth as he hit me in the face.  I can still remember the fear and hear the sound of his penis making contact with my cheek.  He would shout obscenities at me during his tirade.  To this day, I sleep in a semi-sitting up position.  It’s a defense mechanism I learned as a child, which allowed me to keep an eye on the door and my back to the headboard, while I drift off to sleep.