Cradle and All
When I was two, my father, Lynn Bauman, gave me to my uncle, Ward Bauman, to have sex with. He, Ward, painted my face and put me in a dress. When my grandfather found us he whipped and kicked us both and set an ultimatum for my death. What happened next are the memories I have repressed ever since.
My father was a respected man for many years. Today he lives on eighty acres in north Texas within a mile of the Texas-Oklahoma border. In the nineties he talked a group of parishioners from the Episcopal church he had been the priest of to join him in a pseudo-religious community he planned to create there as far back as 1975. They built a neighborhood on one corner of the property my parents bought with the help of my maternal grandparents in the mid-1970s. The intention was to set up a community he could lead when we — my parents, brother and sister and I — returned from the Middle East. Those plans were waylaid for reasons I am still working to understand, but if I am patient enough with my memory and its processes I may be able to piece together the various patterns that led to and created this monster.
I was born March 29, 1969 in Tehran, Iran at 4:35 pm to Lynn Bauman and Jackie Schramm. They had married in June of 1967, and knowing how much she wanted to have children, it must have been difficult for her to wait the first year so they could spend time together unburdened. Both families were German protestant immigrants but with vastly different histories, vastly different geographies. My father’s family was German Baptist, of the Dunkard tradition, having come through Ohio generations before (then on to California) where they settled in relative isolation and farmed. My mother’s side was part of the German immigrant community in St. Louis — first generation, second? — her family history was muted, moot almost, never discussed for reasons that still escape me, irrelevant in the context of the acknowledged family myth. We spent occasional holidays together, yes, but nothing ever accumulated beyond passed-time to become a shared history or any particular moment that might have been elevated later or shared. They were a blank. A blot. A gap. My mother occupied that space, both a window and a door, an outcast of sorts, happy to be acknowledged by association with the Baumans but never quite explaining, or coming to terms with, again, for reasons not explicitly shared, the renunciation of or emigration from the Schramms.
After Clifford’s proclamation they tortured me in hopes of death. His reasoning was this: if they allowed me to live the abomination I would become would preclude our family’s eventual cohabitation in the eternal kingdom of heaven; Ward would be allowed to live for reasons that lack substance — my death would be his punishment. My death would be the greater good. Plus he got to teach his bozos a lesson. This was his primary motivation; pride in knowing what the moment called for.
They started small.
There is a culvert somewhere, a shallow concrete embankment with a flat bottom meant to carry rainwater away from the streets and into a larger drainage system. It is raining. He — Lynn — makes me tumble down it. He makes me do it again. Half-hearted, we return home.
There had been torture before — he crushed my throat for crying, threw me into the street in the middle of the night, bounced my crib off walls and the floor, threw me against the ceiling, stomped my aching body — but if I give you all these details now, the memories of the trauma inflicted on a brain before language could develop, you might not be able to keep up, which is essential in this household — the always forward, manic insistant yes — so for the moment I will keep to the events that transpired when I was two years old, during our time in Los Angeles, the year my sister was born, my father worked to complete his master’s degree at UCLA, and we lived with the psychotic family known simply as “Clifford’s” somewhere on the outskirts of the City of Angles.
At this point, Uncle Carson was a Republican. He sported a crew cut, khakis, a snug shirt, wide belt. He followed the rules and the rules were violent. I rode his hobby horse and he threw me into the mantel. He was eighteen years old, nineteen, twenty? Forgive me if it’s hard to know. Ward and Lynn, the two older boys, were Clifford’s relative disappointments: small, effeminate, book-smart, sensitive. Carson, on the other hand, was a young man becoming a predator. Someone Clifford could look on with pride. He smiled when he was told what Carson had done. A man has a right to take care of his own.
I love the desert. They set me out in it to fend for myself or to die. I put pebbles in my mouth to slack the thirst but it doesn’t really work. Seeking companionship or comfort I kiss a bullsnake once. When I get back within range of the house they throw rocks at me until my eyes are blind with tears and my head is stung. I turn back out.
(At night she leaves a light turned on to show me when it’s safe to eat; she tries to kill and keep me alive, simultaneously.)
There is a swimming pool where Clifford baptizes Jackie so he can molest her. I stand on the steps in the shallow end. There is another pool I am made to swim across in diapers. Once this is a success I am made to do it again. I sink to the bottom of the bright water and am saved by the man who made me do it once others have been alerted to the calamity. He bashes my head in a rage against a stone a few yards away then next to a semi-busy street. A dragonfly alights atop a blade of grass in my periphery. They continue to bathe and feed me.
If there is a Black family who lived down the road from “Clifford’s” where I take comfort in their safety, Carson killed them. “I took care of the n****rs for you, Granny,” he says to Joanne after taunting me with their bodies. “They won’t be bothering him anymore.”
I don’t want the pieces to add up to a picture but that’s what a puzzle is. The confetti is fluttering back down. I have been concussed so many times I am a permanent echo.
They kept taking me places to do it and making me have fun before they did but they were so bad at both we collapsed in disappoinment. It’s difficult to be a balloon and a human toddler all at once. I climbed back up whatever embankment they had thrown me down or blinked in the bright sunlight. Once I was crushed in the built-in ironing board of someone else’s apartment, another at the bottom of an empty pool on a cold and starless night. Once you’ve had a door opened on your head again and again it feels like nothing will ever open for you anymore. A body remembers everything.
Tucked in with the violence was pedophelia and trafficking. Lynn needed a dollar and a blowjob and it seemed like everyone else did as well. “Deron, do you see that nice man over there?”
I have been in a chimney. I have been in a well. The light was harsh and fractured. Once I woke up again and again nothing like it will ever be before. Over and over this happens. And all while I am collecting language, a sense of self, an identity. Where did I go? I ask no one and it answers. What once was a babbling brook is now an underground stream. I lose the thread again and again.
Time for dinner!
Once you’ve been forced to become an abstraction is it possible not to be one? I keep traveling back in time and finding myself there.
If I continue with the story linearly there will be a protrusion of land off the southern coast of California, covered in a foot or so of tide, sharp stone to the touch, a pumice-like texture, with my grandfather standing alone along the far edge in the surf, a new rod in his hand — he likes to buy himself gifts — casting out into the angry waves, ignoring us, as we make our way, feet exposed against the cutting edge, across the promontory, to him.
I can feel myself delaying the inevitable description. The action that will propel the words has haunted my entire life. I live in constant regret in an effort to still not find a way to move beyond, reconcile, or justify what they did to me other than as a byproduct of human ignorance or stupidity. They conspired a party, fed me ice-cream and cake, then separated the child from its mother and went to work. They twisted my head like the head of a rabbit — that’s how they killed them — twist the rabbit’s skull in one hand then twist the body over quickly with the other the other way. It didn’t work. They tried again. Over and over. All night. Put my head in a clamp. Sprayed the shit from my body with cold water. They fed me drugs at one point, complained of the stench. They made with my body a rag doll and defiled it again. I am filled with more rage than can be contained and that results in a concrete paralysis. In the morning they place my body under the wheel of a car or a tractor and do the obvious with it. I survive. (I saw their feet; I saw and felt their hands. There is no way to do justice to the acts of defilement they invested in me; I am disgusted with the inadequacies of language, my own cowardice, the lack of empathy and foresight in anyone I was raised with or by; I have carried this myself across continents and decades, always self-contained, controlled, lolling and bobbing, in a cesspool not of my own.) I was in the trunk of a car. They pulled me out. They fed me ice cream and cake; made of my body a rag doll, delivered me from my mother, upended and deformed, declawed and defanged me. I can see their feet. I point. And this was among the worst nights of my life.
It is snowing somewhere — Kansas City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Tehran — and Lynn has found a way to drag me along to whatever park it is, sled in hand, and sling me down and across with such velocity that a tree makes its mark against my face, then I am leaned against it doing ‘what I like to do’. “See that man over there?” he says, and of course we entertain each other then through violence and sex while I have fun in the cold. That man’s name is Uncle Steve. I don’t know how or where he came from anymore, other than that moment, but there he was. All the pedophiles are uncle someone. It makes them more familiar.
Wherever Steve started he ended up in Tehran after the reign of terror in Los Angeles was over. It turned out my arm was the right size to fit inside mom. When I pulled it out it was puckered. Lynn made sure that whatever happened, he was the conductor. My sister cried in the next room. Jackie went to comfort her. Lynn cleared my throat, tapped me with his baton. I started to hum.
If any of this is real it all keeps happening to me. I blink then close my eyes. It is possible Derith is Steve’s. He or someone else told me. He got in my face, close to my mouth, and said she is mine, you have to take care of her, please. Mommy is quieting now. My arm is the smell of my mommy. I swallow myself, barf them back up. This continues a long time.
