After a year or so of renovations, my family moved back from a small southern town to the country, to a large old farm house on a hill. I had spent many weeknights and most weekends with my mother working there. For much of the time, there was no electricity—I remember boiling pot ash in a giant black iron kettle over a fire in the yard to strip paint from doors. There was no plumbing.
I was unprepared for the disruption in my life that would be caused by the move from my safe place in town to the country. While I was an odd child, my classmates in town had known me since preschool, we had always gone to church and school together, so they knew and were comfortable with my oddness. Out in the country, where I started fifth grade, things were different. To make matters worse, I went from being a sort of invisible part of middle-class kids to being one of the wealthiest kids in a poverty-ridden school. My parents were not rich, but my dad would frequently drop me off at school in his new Lincoln, when the vast majority of my classmates lived well below the poverty line. I was harassed and tormented on an hourly, daily basis. I had nowhere to turn other than inside myself. My imagination developed quickly—the ways in which I imagined torturing and killing my aggressors took up a great deal of my time.
I also began to dream about that knight on a white horse who would come save me from my hillbilly nightmare. In addition to loving me unconditionally, he also typically dismembered a fair number of my classmates. (This was at a time when video games were limited to my Atari at home and Ms. Pac Man at the arcade.) I wanted to escape the reality of my life.
It was in 1982 that I first visited New York. I flew into Teeterboro Airport on a private plane owned by the company where my mother worked. The trip was only a day trip—I was in Manhattan for less than seven hours—but I was a changed person. I never thought about myself or the world in quite the same way. I had always known there was a place where I could escape to, where I belonged, and I had found it.
What I had experienced in New York, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was the possibility of place. The understanding that place (and for me, places of design/art) can fundamentally change a person. New York gave me a sense of hope, and I clung to it. The anonymity, the disinterest of the people on the street, but their meaningful belonging within the spaces they inhabited, was enormously appealing to me.
Sense of place became very important to me around this time. Being alone in the family home the majority of the time—my sister was in college, my brother at military school, my father traveling and my mother mostly working—I took a sense of ownership of the house and everything in it.
There were no children around for miles, and only two television channels, so when I wasn’t reading (which I did a lot) I continued to develop a world of fantasy that I suppose I had been developing for years. I also spent a lot of time creating order in the house—I would not just clean the house and polish silver, I would arrange all of the canned foods alphabetically or by category. I would practice setting the table. I ironed and starched dinner napkins. I made flower arrangements from my mom’s rose garden. I was essentially playing house, alone, with a real house, creating a sense of order where I felt none.
Since my family had moved to the country house, I had been actively seeking out a boarding school of my own. I remember getting a list of them from the Official Preppy Handbook, getting their addresses, writing to them, finding the gayest one possible, until….
In 1983 my brother was in a serious car accident (pot-smoking-related), that required many weeks of hospitalization. I was away with my church missionary group at the time, helping install and replace screen doors for the poor (without air-conditioning) in a very poor rural area.
Back at home, the family board games, which had not been played in years, were on the top shelf of my closet and were where I kept the gay porn stash that I had been shoplifting since I was eleven. With my brother immobile, the family decided board games would help pass the time. I was officially, and rather unpleasantly outed at the age of 13.
My father told me, while sobbing, I love you, you’re my boy and I’ll always love you, but you’re going to Hell. I didn’t believe him at the time, and I hated him for years for saying it, but it came true. It wasn’t the Old Testament Hell with devils and fire that he had probably envisioned, but one of my own making.
Addiction took away all possibility of hope, of joy, of love. Pain, fear and paranoia would eventually overwhelm me. Anger and resentment dominated my actions. I abandoned my friends, my family and my life. There was just a stain of rage where a soul should have been. If that isn’t hell, I don’t know what is.