.
(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. Read next two chapters here
Chapter Two The Thud and a Nipple Dress
Chapter Three Considering Who We Are
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.
-----------
 |
| The Lost Coast |
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.
----
 |
| Patricia 1970s |
“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.
 |
| Lizzie |
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.
Those few weeks were
the end of the most sedate and the beginning of the most chaotic time of
Lizzie’s five year long life.
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.
-------------
More
to Come from Kay Ebeling.
February
2014
Picture
of Patricia Ebeling (aka Patrisha Vestey) is from Sams blog:
MAY 20 2012
POST
NOTE 2:
The natives of California’s North Coast region were unusually violent, even by the standards of European settlers encountering “Indians” all across the continent in the 18th century.
The first Europeans venturing into Humboldt Bay encountered the indigenous Wiyot. Records of early forays into the bay in 1806 reported that
the violence of the local indigenous people made it nearly impossible for
landing parties to survey the area. After 1850, Europeans ultimately
overwhelmed the Wiyot, whose maximum population before the Europeans was in the
hundreds in the area of what would become the county's primary city. But in
almost every case, settlers ultimately cut off access to ancestral sources of
food in addition to the outright taking of the land despite efforts of some US
Government and military officials to assist the native peoples or at least
maintain peace. A massacre took place onIndian Island in the spring of 1860, committed by a
group of locals, primarily Eureka businessmen
I
remember from the years I lived there hearing the stories. Even among themselves, local native tribes
would massacre each other, as well as all the white people, in astounding displays
of violence and brutality, shocking even by mid-nineteenth century standards.
I
think it's because of the wind.
MORE
TO COME
-
By Kay Ebeling
Producing City of Angels Blog since January 2007
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