The White House Boys: An American Tragedy (6 page)
“SHUT UP!” he shouted without turning around.
“Yes, sir, Dr. Curry, sir,” I said meekly.
“I SAID SHUT UP GODDAMN IT!” he shouted again.
“Are you going to help me be normal one day, Dr. Curry?”
“JESUSFUCKINCHRIST! CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND PLAIN SIMPLE GODDAMN ENGLISH?!”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Curry, sir.”
Without warning, he spun his chair back around. He placed his chin in his hand and stared at me. He said not a word.
“Are you going to help me, Dr. Curry?” I asked again.
He continued to stare at me. There was such a look of hatred in his eyes and on his face that I could tell he hated me as much as Mother Winters did when I would not help her masturbate herself.
Raising his bushy eyebrows curiously, he asked softly, “How many times do you jack off each day?”
I knew what that meant, but I was not going to answer the question.
That’s a real private kind of thing and nobody’s allowed to know about that ’cept me
, I secretly thought. “I don’t know what you mean, Dr. Curry, sir,” I said.
His hand slipped from beneath his chin and both his arms slammed down onto his desk.
“You are a lying little bastard.”
I sat perfectly still not saying a word, afraid to even swallow the spit that had accumulated in my mouth. My legs began to shake, and I felt my eyes begin to well.
“I want you to show me how you masturbate.”
How could anyone ask such a personal thing? How could anyone ask such a nasty kind of thing?
I just sat there, afraid to move, speak, think, swallow, or even blink. As confused as I was, I tried to rationalize how this kind of thing was supposed to be helping me. I mean, after all, Dr. Curry was a doctor. He had to know what he was doing. He went to the rich people’s school and all. Maybe my doing the masturbation thing was the reason I was so crazy and why I couldn’t learn. Maybe I shouldn’t do it anymore and then I would be normal like everyone else and no one would ever know about the bad things I had been doing.
Sitting there staring at him, I knew my back was against the wall. I was trapped with no way out. I looked at him closely, searching for some compassion, but there was none to be found. Then, all at once, I became brave. I swallowed the spit that had accumulated in my mouth, and I reached up and wiped the slobber from my chin. I asked again, “Dr. Curry, are you going to help me be normal one day like the other boys?”
His head tilted downward, and he peered at me over the thick rims of his glasses. “You are never going to be normal kid. You are an idiot. Do you hear me? Do you understand that fact?”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Curry.”
At that very moment, I feared that I was going to grow up to be just like the people who were now teaching me, that I would be nothing more than a mean, evil, cruel man. I also decided right then and there that there was no hope for me to ever be happy. No hope.
“Dr. Curry’s” building, 2008.
Photo by R. Kiser
The atrocities that occurred in this building will haunt me forever—perhaps even more so than the atrocities that took place in the White House.
I
lay in my bed, about two months after being taken to the White House for the first time. I remember seeing Mr. Sealander’s shadow on the wall. Several minutes later, the speaker in the cottage fell silent. I drifted off to sleep thinking about the finishing words of “El Paso,” which was being sung by Marty Robbins when the radio was turned off.
I am not sure how long I had been asleep when I was shaken awake to see Mr. Hatton and a strange man standing at the foot of my single bunk.
Ordered to get out of bed, I immediately jumped to my feet and stood at attention facing the door leading out into the bathroom. The stranger grabbed me by the arm and said, “I bet this skinny little bastard could really suck a dick.” If any of the other boys were awake, they didn’t let on.
I had no idea what he meant—or, at least, I had convinced myself I did not know what he meant. My only thought (and horror) was that I was going to be taken back to the White House for another brutal beating. Ordered to move forward, my legs would not respond. Tears began to fall and my body began to shake as if in convulsions. Mr. Hatton grabbed me by the back of my neck and forced me toward the open doorway.
Crying harder now, I placed my hands over my mouth to muffle the sound so the other boys would not think me a coward.
All at once, the strange man kicked me in the backside and said, “Shut up, boy. I’ll give you something to cry about in a few minutes, you wimpy little son-of-a-bitch. I bet this skinny little fucker can really suck a dick.”
It was then that I remembered what my friend Joseph had told me about several men taking him to a strange place (the rape room we later called it) and then doing it to him in his behind. By then, we had reached the hard dirt area known as the “capture the flag court.”
Standing to the right of the court by the stationary bars stood Dr. Curry. In a car were two boys and another man.
“You ever been fucked in the ass, you little fucker?” said someone from behind me.
That’s when I began to scream at the top of my lungs. I fell to the red clay dirt and began to kick at the two men as hard as I could. The next thing I knew, Mr. Sealander was standing next to me, shouting at the two men.
“I’ll call the damn police department!” he yelled. “You leave that damn boy alone.”
A very heated argument ensued for several minutes. When it quieted down, Mr. Sealander sat down in the dirt beside me and wrapped his arms around me. Then, he picked me up off the ground and told me to go into the cottage and take a shower.
When I entered the cottage, several boys were standing at the doorway.
“Did they do the bad thing to you?” one whispered.
Unable to speak, I walked to the shower, turned on the warm water, laid down on the shower floor, and fell asleep.
The next morning, I awoke in my bed and was ordered to report to Dr. Curry’s office.
Dr. Curry made it very clear to me by screaming and pointing his finger in my face that if I ever told anyone about what had happened that I would be buried in the graveyard along with the other boys who had opened their mouths.
Until today—Sunday, September 28, 2008—I have never voiced nor written about this particular incident. That was the second time I had been told by someone at the school that they would kill me if I ever told anyone about what had happened.
That night, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Sealander, I know they would have taken me to the rape room. While my memories of Mr. Sealander are mostly good, I can’t vouch for his behavior with the other boys. I was fortunate to have found a friend in him. But understand, at a time when friends were few and far between, I wasn’t very discriminating.
In all honesty, I don’t recall ever being taken down into the rape room. However, on October 21, 2008, at the closing of the White House ceremony, the entrance to the rape room was clear enough in my mind for me to be able to describe it to another fellow.
As I followed the superintendent and media down the stairway into that now-vacant portion of the building, I cringed, afraid that with every step I took, some horrible memory would come flooding back. I was being pushed along by a large crowd of reporters who wanted to see “another room of horror.” I walked from room to room, wondering with each step if I might be jumped by a horrible memory. Thankfully, there was nothing.
Steps leading to the rape room, 2008.
Photo by R. Kiser
A room within the rape room, 2008.
Photo by R. Kiser
O
ne day, Mr. Sealander took a group of us boys to the farm where much of our food was grown. I recall how amazed I was to learn that peanuts are grown in the ground, not on trees.
We walked from field to field and eventually came up to a large plot of land where thousands upon thousands of rows of carrots were growing.
I don’t know why it came to mind just then, but I started wondering if these were the fields that I had heard about, the fields where some of the “dead boys” were buried.
Rumors were rampant around the school that boys who’d been molested and then beaten to death were taken out into the fields where their bodies would be tilled over and over by the tractors and then plowed under . . . never to be seen again.