I awoke groggily, and for a moment, could not remember where I was. A foggy light seeped into the room, and as I took in my surroundings, the older man lying next to me asked if I was awake. I nodded and he proceeded to wrap his long arm around me and, with a sigh, squeezed disturbingly close to me under the covers.
Panicked and utterly uncomfortable, I excused myself, claiming to need a glass of water. I had put myself in this position and, for the moment, there was no way to escape.
I have never considered myself easily manipulated, but the strange man was a high-school teacher of mine, a man I had once respected. He was pressured to resign halfway through his first year at my school, during spring semester of my senior year, under suspicion of pedophilia. Fearing bad press, the school kept the story quiet.
To the best of my knowledge, he had not slept with any of his students; the worst he had done was sit on the edge of a bed. The allegation came from the parents of his favorite pupil, a classmate of mine. He was an unattractive, eccentric man, and the headmaster was simply tired of defending his innocent, if odd, behavior.
That ominous morning came last October on the final day of a trip to Boston, which I had made to visit my teacher and the student who got him fired, a year and a half after graduation. We had spent the weekend watching graphic, sexually themed movies, handpicked by the old eccentric. In the evening, I had to sleep with him due to a lack of beds, which made me very uneasy. Still, I had been groomed and manipulated for so long that I could not stand up to my old mentor.
How it ever got so far is hard to explain and even harder to understand. One of the first times I saw the man that I now fear, he wore a trench coat, an oversized cowboy hat and ambled along, slight in build, carrying a large birdcage in his gloved left hand. I was intrigued by his quirkiness and set out to befriend him.
I took his English class and participated in his after-school drama program. He was brilliant and immensely well-read. I did not yet recognize how he fed off of his students or the disturbing pleasure he garnered from molding their worldviews. Whatever my concerns were, I disregarded them, believing my teacher was simply an odd man. After his dismissal, my friends and I called and visited our ex-teacher to comfort him, even talking him out of suicide.
Now unemployed and living off state benefits, he pressured his old students to reunite him with his estranged prot?g?. He demanded absolute loyalty and secrecy. It became obvious that the boy was his obsession, and our once-distant teacher began to admit things-his virulent hate for the boy’s mother, his homosexuality, a crucifixion fetish and, eventually, his physical attraction to the boy. He swore that he would make no advances.
Somehow, he convinced my old classmate’s father of his “pure intentions” toward the boy, and found ways to visit his young friend after graduation. When he did, the two slept together in the boy’s bed.
However much we spoke over the phone after graduation, I never saw much of him or his adoptive “son” in person. He relocated to a school in New Mexico, far away from my school in Washington, D.C., but he still wielded considerable power over me, even from such a distance.
The power of my mentor’s ideology was in its ceaseless repetition-he would call up to three times a week, for an hour and a half at a time. I became indebted to him, because he always offered advice in times of need and showed concern for me long after his dismissal from my school. My “ex-teacher” became my “friend.”
During our lengthy telephone conversations, he began to persuade me of axioms that now seem completely erroneous and arbitrary. He told me that I could never show a woman true, loving or intimate affection unless I could do so with another man. Extraordinarily sensitive to homophobia, he was militant about abolishing it among his friends. I found his sexual proclivities strangely captivating in conversation.
At Georgetown, I could never explain the relationship to my new friends; it made them wary and apprehensive. This left me questioning the friendship. I began to sense a sick pleasure in his idea of bringing two of his “younger friends” together, and worried about his desire to make us comfortable with one another’s “emotional nakedness,” as he called it.
Despite my growing reservations, I visited the odd couple in Boston. My mentor expected the trip to be the first step in forming an intimate relationship between his two favorite pupils. I was less certain.
It was that final morning that my ex-teacher, ex-mentor and ex-friend made his move on me. I waited until he left that day to break down about my worries to my old classmate, but he remained unconvinced.
When our teacher heard of the conversation, he perceived it as utter betrayal on my part. He felt blindsided and deceived, so he immediately disposed of me. He did not leave quietly, however, and harangued me in a series of letters and blacklisted me among his remaining friends. He asked how I could have said such vile things. When did I become such a homophobe?
I have grown afraid of any contact whatsoever with my old teacher or his pupil. He knows my secrets, my fears, what buttons to push; I am still making sense of what has happened. After our falling out, my erstwhile mentor assumed there was something vile and hateful in my soul. He wrote to me in a parting shot, warning me “never to have sons,” because I would never be able to love them, man-to-man.
