I'm writing this post on 3/23/2015, but back-dating it so that casual visitors do not encounter it.
so i started this post to explain why i commented on someone's FB post, but i have since found fresh condemnation, so it occurs to me that the more important point is: i understand if you just don't want anything more to do with me when you get to the end. i have retitled the post accordingly. but please understand: the reason this post is constructed as it is isn't to excuse away what i did. i am solely responsible for that, and my feelings tend to agree with the people who condemn people like me. my main concern now is simply to love those i have hurt so deeply, and to remember that my feelings aren't the same thing as Truth.
I know they often get a bad rep among the non-riding public, and I know that the population of mostly non-thug bikers everywhere feels compelled to go to war against the stereotypes. But to hear someone say, "Bikers are the nicest people you'll ever know," is a blanket generalization in the other direction that just. completely. gets under my skin. Here's why:
The first biker I ever knew personally was the first guy my widowed mom started dating, about 18 months after my alcoholic dad shot himself to death while the rest of us were out of town on vacation shortly after I'd turned 14. For me, life with my dad had been worse than that last horrid clause, for aside from his general drunken stumblings and ramblings and rants, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to gain his love, acceptance, and respect. He'd been a high achieving high school athlete, and to describe myself as unathletic, even mildly klutzy, would be kind. I was smart, though, one of the smartest kids in my school, and he was a self-taught electrical engineer, so you'd think that would have resonated with him. But he never managed (if he even tried) to hide his impatience and disappointment when I failed to grasp some "simple" skill that he thought he was patiently and encouragingly teaching me: the baseball that hit me in the lip again this time when I failed to catch it, another missed layup, the fishing line maddeningly entangled in the bush behind me (these specific instances happened between 7- and 10-years-old). He'd been dead for over a year when mom was finally forced to reveal - because she was afraid someone else would let the cat out of the bag - that he was my adoptive father. She'd been a young, single mom when she met him, and he was willing to accept me "as his own" (he thought) and adopt me, and was a good financial provider for us. My sister was his biological daughter, and on the day my mom finally revealed the truth about my paternity, I suddenly understood why Karen had been able to bring a light to his eyes that I had never seen otherwise. My own biological father was not a topic that she was going to discuss; he clearly hadn't wanted to know me or provide for me in any way once he'd returned to his family (where he belonged, I've concluded). That, along with his name, is all I know about him.
She was careful when she met the new guy, going out with him a few times before letting him meet my sister or me, because she wanted to be sure she could trust him and didn't want to introduce a possible series of guys to us. Once she was fairly sure they were going to be seeing each other for a while, she invited him over for dinner so that we could meet him. It wasn't very long after that first meeting that he convinced her to let him offer me an under-the-table job helping out in his after-hours private garage, because a boy my age could learn responsibility through a job and needed to earn some money to call his own. At first I just cleaned up around the shop, and fetched, cleaned and put away tools, thereby learning what they were called and the purpose of each. "A good helper anticipates what the mechanic is going to need and has it ready for him," he insisted, and it was a lesson that has served me well in various contexts throughout my professional career. With gradually decreasing supervision I started being allowed to work on the vehicles, progressing to increasingly complicated work but never reaching the point of anything like tearing down an engine. He didn't get very many of those jobs anyway. There was quite a bit of body work, though, prepping vehicles for repair paint and an occasional overall paint job. Without belaboring this with further details: this job was my main source of income throughout my high school years. Toward the end of the work day - or evening, when things got to the point that mom was hanging out in the house while we worked in the garage - I'd be offered a beer along with whoever else was working.
He ended up being the one who helped me get ready for my driver's test, and he eventually overcame my mom's protectiveness to get her to let me learn to ride a motorcycle. I started on a small BMW - maybe 125cc? I'm not even certain whose bike that was; probably one of the young guys who was always hanging around and working out of the shop. I soon found a good deal on a used 360cc Honda, bought with my own money, on which I did my road riding and took my license test. Eventually, an artistic friend would paint The Hermit and the symbols from Led Zeppelin's fourth album on both sides of the gas tank. It was my solo-riding bike, and my senior year of high school I'd pick up my girlfriend before school on decent days and drive her home after. I remember having to double back one morning to pick up someone's books that fell off the rack on the way to school, but can't for the life of me remember if they were hers, mine, or both. (I suppose I could go into the other room and ask her whether she recalls.)
He and I would go out riding together at least a couple times a month. He eventually bought a second Harley, and once I was skilled enough to handle it, he'd let me ride his 1000cc Sportster while he rode the 1200cc SuperGlide sometimes when we rode together. Many other times I just rode along on the back of his. I wasn't of legal drinking age, which in Maryland back then was 18 for beer and wine, but I was close enough that when I dismounted a Harley and went into a bar with a middle-aged chaperone I was invariably served. Since I was usually riding on or near an expensive bike that he owned, he didn't let me overindulge when I was driving.
I can't describe what a gift all of this was for a kid whose dad(s) had never managed to love and accept him for who he was. Perhaps the reader has a sense of how wonderful this confidence and support might have felt, without my trying to further elaborate, since I could never do it justice anyway. I wouldn't have ever called him my hero, and didn't exactly think of him as a father figure - his personality wasn't conducive to that role. But he made a huge difference in my young life, and I learned many valuable skills from him. I'd have done pretty much anything he asked of me.
What a great guy, right? Everybody agreed.
And it was all a setup, as I learned so life-alteringly - no, I'm not engaging in hyperbole - on Thanksgiving weekend of 1977.
By then I was a 17-year-old stepping into adolescent rebellion. I'd begun smoking pot occasionally and in other ways not always acting responsibly or doing what was best for me. I'd always been a bit of a procrastinator, and part of my downfall was being smart enough to get away with that. I was thinking about not going to college right away because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do - a high school counselor would eventually convince me otherwise. ("You've got to go to college," she insisted, winter of my senior year, so I did.) I don't know how much these issues factored into mom's boyfriend's ability to talk her into letting me go with him to Philadelphia for his annual trip. In hindsight I think she might have wanted me there partly for his protection: I think it had been the previous year that he'd become the first survivor of a series of claw-hammer attackers in Philly, but he'd gotten beaten pretty badly. But this was primarily intended to be a coming-of-age trip for me. Neither mom nor I had any idea of his real intentions.
We indeed started the weekend off in the City of Brotherly Love, but soon encountered a complication he hadn't anticipated: the drinking age in PA was 21, and I was a not-particularly-mature-looking 17. That meant I couldn't get served beer, and that meant that he couldn't enjoy seeing me let loose and enjoy myself more, as he put it. He could have bought some beer and we could have imbibed in the hotel room, but we both understood that drinking wasn't really the point of the weekend. It seemed like a bigger issue to him than it was to me; I was having a fine time hanging out without the alcohol. But he seemed disappointed, and had cleared a new plan with mom, so I agreed to the change in venue for the rest of the weekend. I've written more about that weekend here, so follow that link and then come back here. It's the least disgusting part of the rest of this narrative.
So from Philly we went to New York City, where the drinking age was more friendly to people with our respective intentions. He didn't have any trouble getting us a room at the YMCA subsequently made famous by the Village People, and that is where, on Saturday night when I was accommodatingly buzzed, his objectively undeniable sexual abuse of me began. (To this day I leave the room when the DJ invariably starts playing that song.) I've since learned through my own therapy that everything before that was part of the grooming process, including a fair amount of playful physical contact which had always been an element of being in his presence. And it probably seems strange for someone who isn't so intimately familiar with sexual abuse to consider that he was grooming himself as much as me. He had to think that I was so special to him that he couldn't hold back his desire to share these sexual experiences with me, even though I was underage and he was dating my mom. I can't tell you how many times over the next 18 months he told me how special I was, how he felt differently about me than about other men, even though I was still a boy and (as I later learned) he considered himself bisexual - he described himself that way to my mom well before he married her, and long before I told her what he had done to me. He probably also believed that I owed him some return for all that he had done for me. When we got back on Sunday, mom was convinced that I'd left town a boy and come home a man. It would be nearly twenty years before, in my therapist's office, I'd finally tell her the truth of what happened starting that weekend, and then only because she deserved to know why I had turned myself in for doing something along similar lines that she didn't at all understand. I am so grateful that she believed me immediately.
There's more I've written about post-New York here, but you probably don't want to read that. There's the link, though, in case you do, and it does reveal more about me (that you probably don't want to know).
I think he was incapable of having a sexual relationship with someone he truly respected and considered an equal. Therefore I believe that I may have had as much sexual contact with him in that 18 months as he had with my mom in their entire life together.
The Jackson 5 sang that "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." (Okay, when you're talking about actual fruit or workplace morale, yes, it does, but in terms of stereotypes:) Of course not! I know that most bikers aren't like my stepfather, and I don't by any means hate or mistrust bikers in general. I don't even hate him, even though sometimes I still work on forgiving him. Neither do I think that most bikers deserve the stereotype that people generally have of them, and don't hold those stereotypes myself. But biking is as amoral as money is: the fact that a person rides says no more about them than the color of their hair does; there are mostly good bikers and a few bad bikers, just like any other group of people you might describe. And even though the good may strongly outnumber the bad, surely the reader can understand why blanket generalizations about the wonderfulness of bikers rub me the wrong way at least as much as negative ones about their moral character bother bikers.
There's more to this area - and more importantly, to me - that the reader should know, and I shouldn't leave it for inference as I have done above. I usually only share it in person, though it isn't really a secret; I've personally told several hundred people in various situations, including the contexts of therapy, family, close friendship, men's fellowship, and testimony in front of a large group. The reader might be surprised that the biggest reason I don't share it more often is not fear of rejection, though it once was. Mostly it's a matter of there almost never being a good time to raise this topic, so I try to wait until it looks like someone is committing to a deep enough level of friendship that to not tell them feels like a betrayal. You can read more about why I draw the line there in this post, but it isn't because I don't want people to know. I wish everyone knew, that I had no doubt that anyone in my life would still choose to be if they knew. I wish I could say that I've remained as accepting of myself as that post might indicate toward the end, but I still hate that I became what I hate, and no matter how many intervening decades pass, I think I will always hate myself at least a little for what I did. I still struggle to receive forgiveness for the abuse I committed as an adult against someone who should have been able to trust me implicitly. (And I've never blamed the abuse I committed on the abuse I received. That also would be wrong.)
The abuse I experienced in my youth has profoundly affected countless other decisions in my life that I must live with, and it is sometimes a challenge to see God at work through them rather than simply lament their effects on my life. But I am convinced that He is continually at work, that He was with me even in the midst of the worst choices that have marked my life - those of others and my own, my immoral decisions as well as my merely broken ones.
One final thought: my stepfather vehemently and convincingly denied ever touching my sister inappropriately, and I tend to believe him, even though part of me would way prefer that he had been more responsible for her drug problem than I think I might have been. I don't think he had the motivation to supply her with drugs that he had for me, but I know he provided stronger substances to others than the pot that he occasionally had for me. He boasted to me about providing drugs to other sex partners. Could he have supplied Karen, too, even if he never did abuse her sexually?
