Holy Childhood Revisited
On the one week anniversary of losing my archive of Holy Childhood photos that I took prior to it’s demolition (as well as all of the files I’ve ever collected, thanks to a defective external hard drive), an article was published in the Express entitled "Unholy Childhood," which featured a painfully nostalgic two page image of the school’s face (now a big hole in the ground), and chronicled tales of abuse and sex between nuns and students in eras long before I curiously roamed it’s empty halls. So palpable was my sense of loss on the whole matter, through first losing the physical building, and then the images, that the article gripped me with a fierce tenacity, and threw me wholly into every described scene…as each place, room, and scenario already holds a comfortable location on my cognitive memory map. Following this paragraph is a list of excerpts from that article that I wanted to preserve for a latter date…
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The interview with Jerry was winding down and it was dark outside. He got on his crutches and stepped out to have a cigarette. He talked about the fact that you learn right form wrong when you’re a kid. In his case, he was taught the Ten Commandments, but living a completely different reality with a nun who had drawn him into a world of sex and deception. He threw his cigarette away and went back into the dark duplex again. As he tried to sit down on the armchair, he fell flat on the floor. It was an awkward moment. His face was pale and drawn and there were no more half-hearted jokes about being a young boy seduced by a nun. Just his sober acknowledgement of how a nun’s morbid desire had inadvertently wrecked his life. He thought his openness should have spared him emotional damage, but instead he spent 40 years drinking in a twilight of shame.
"I’m screwed up, I guess. She made a monster out of me. I was promiscuous and violent as hell after I left. But I don’t know hardly anybody who came out of there and done something with themselves. Someday these nuns will have to answer to God for what happened there. When they meet their maker, He’ll know what to do. I’ll be pissed if I see them in heaven."
"They beat you so bad, you’d zone out and go somewhere else. One time I was beat so bad I thought I’d fall on the floor from a heart attack. It was so bad, so long. I didn’t cry, I just looked at them," he said.
"They’d have day rooms, TV and games, and one big couch. Just he and me and the two sisters would sit on the couch, blankets on top of us. The other kids would sit in front of us four. They’d have nothing on under their robes and they’d say, ‘Turn around and watch TV.’"
He said the nuns began their seduction by kissing the boys goodnight. As the boys became older, moving into their 8th grade year, the two nuns would sneak them into their bedrooms- which were right off the large dormitory rooms- at night, and the boys would leave early in the morning.
"She’d get me undressed and get on top of me, lifting her long black robe over her breasts, and she’d move really fast over me. There was a lot of oral sex. She would demand that I pleasure her with my mouth, and she would just masturbate me with her hand."
After Holy Childhood, Jerry said he had terrible dreams of walking down those long dark hallways and hearing someone run up behind him and begin hitting him in the back of the head, "bam, bam, bam." Just when I’d get overwhelmed, I’d wake up. I had that damn dream for years after that. But Jerry said it wasn’t just the sex that haunted him. The nuns constantly told the Indian kids that they were worthless and unloved. "They told me, ‘Your parents hate you and thats why you’re here. Even your parents don’t want you.’ I think that hurt worse than the beatings.
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