Remembered Nightmares

In 1989, two years before receiving his HIV-positive diagnosis, poet and writer Dennis Rhodes wrote a series of candid letters to New York psychotherapist Daniel Bloom. They remain relevant today.

Dear Dan,
When I'm asked if I have nightmares, my usual reply is, "Only when I'm awake." And many of my life's circumstances to date would suggest that there's more truth than flippancy in that statement.

I want to tell you about two "living nightmares" I had. I can also kill two birds with one stone and address the topic of humiliation. I suppose the nightmares were nightmares because of the humiliation involved. God knows, they certainly weren't daydreams.

The Orphanage

I'm not sure I ever told you much about the first orphanage I went to. This was circa 1958, after my mother's first nervous breakdown. I was four years old.

Sacred Heart Home was an awesomely foreboding place. An edifice straight out of a Dickens novel, it was an unstormed, impregnable Bastille, a dark and dangerous fortress of fear. While other, more fortunate lads were sent off to day camp or packed off to visit relatives in the country, I was sent, indefinitely -- perhaps forever -- to Sacred Heart.

My brother made his First Communion at Sacred Heart. I remember this because there is a photograph of him (the earliest photograph I remember in my lifetime) standing in a snow-pure white suit, his hands folded like a little angel, an enormous statue of Saint Joseph looming behind him. That smug little sonofabitch has a feckless smile playing across his lips. He looks like such a good little boy, but he never fooled me.

I do not remember much about life (if you could call it life) at Sacred Heart because, as fate would have it, I was not there very long, and I was very young. I do remember the vastness of the place, everything on a grand scale: a dining room that looked like it could seat thousands of orphans for their porridge all at once; formidably sized nuns with huge black headdresses billowing behind them as they charged down the cavernous corridors. I was a lost little soul, motherless, fatherless, but not hopeless, never hopeless. When I dared to look out a window late at night, I must have looked to a distant observer like a tiny candle burning, if not merrily, then stoically. Then, as now, I generated my own light.

A Life In Flames

Here's what happened: Early one evening -- it was dusk -- dozens of us were in the playground just across the road from the Fortress. Suddenly one of the boys started bellowing excitedly, pointing at the Fortress. A general commotion and uproar commenced. Smoke -- black, rancid, and evil -- was billowing from the rooftops. Within minutes, Sacred Heart was engulfed in flames.

It was, to my innocent eyes, a mighty and dreadful conflagration. We orphans watched spellbound as the indestructible was destroyed. And we who had been rendered homeless, and who had been consigned to this dark place, watched as some unseen hand fanned terrible flames, rendering us homeless yet again. Yet we rejoiced. Children can take delight in terror, can thrill at disaster, because not only does it bring all the senses acutely alive, it is liberating.

A legend, a small but fascinating one, came out of the great event: As Sacred Heart was engulfed in flames and about to fall, a nun was seen high on the ramparts, her habit ballooning in the fierce wind. She vanished in the gray smoke. She couldn't possibly have survived. And yet, in the aftermath, no nun was missing.

I spent the night of that unforgettable day in a dormitory of an outbuilding on the Sacred Heart grounds, a building that had been spared destruction. The dormitory was very large, and I lay -- I'm not sure I slept that night -- on an army cot, probably donated by the Red Cross. All around me other orphans lay on cots. I lived through the first conscious humiliation of my life. And the acrid, suffocating odor of a childhood in flames stays in my nostrils.

The Catholic School

Another notable humiliation came years later. Actually, only seven years later -- times seems to expand with hindsight.

Dan, this is a very painful incident I have to recount. I cannot bring my characteristic wry humor to it, and I cannot, as I often try to do, minimize it, gloss over it, put it into a safe, arm's-length perspective. It hurts, and it will hurt all my life.

In 1964, when I came out of Saint Joseph's Village, I resumed living with my mother. My grandmother lived up in the attic, and we lived in the basement. Come September of that year, a school had to be chosen for me. Our neighbor's kids went to a Catholic school a few blocks away called Immaculate Heart of Mary. The neighbor, Gloria, convinced my mother to send me to this school. I was friendly with her kids and the school was close by, so why not?

On the first day of school, I sat in Sister Regina Mary's fifth-grade class. Even though I had already completed fifth grade at Saint Joseph's, I was forced to repeat it. I suppose my new school didn't trust the quality of my old one; I didn't mind because two years before I had skipped third grade. Life has a way of balancing out.

I liked Immaculate Heart of Mary and I liked Sister Regina Mary. I was my usual bright, precocious self and I did well. I loved dressing in my charcoal grey paints, crispy white shirt, and blue Immaculate Heart of Mary tie. I loved wearing that school uniform. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I belonged. Life was finally settling down.

Paying My Dues

Since this was not a public school, it was not free. Tuition was charged. It was not an extraordinary amount of money in those days, but we didn't have much money. We made do on our Railroad Retirement benefits. We got by.

The school collected tuition in a peculiar way: Rather than having parents mail in their checks, each student was to bring the tuition in to class, in an envelope, twice a year.

When the first payment was due, my mother gave me the money and I dutifully brought it to school. A few months later -- trouble! It was a few days before tuition was due, and my mother was having a hard time amassing it. She felt bad. I know she was trying. I have always given my mother the benefit of the doubt.

In retrospect, I can see now what was happening. My grandmother, so miserly, so unforgiving when it came to money (and who closely monitored my mother's spending), clearly held my tuition money back. Just her usual cruelty.

Humiliation

So, on the appointed day, I had to walk to school without my tuition envelope.

All the other students in my class surely had their envelopes. Envelopes that would be collected by Sister Regina Mary in an incongruous public ritual, literally like passing a hat around. I had to sit all morning with feverish, impending dread. I suffered through history, cringed through geography, was miserable through math.

Then it came. Like all the prior pain of my life, like all the unavoidable, uncontrollable torment, it loomed before me and I set my jaw and steeled my backbone. And I knew that I would deal with it.

Sister Regina Mary came to the front of the classroom with her collection box. Just before she could speak, I raised my hand and asked if I could go to the bathroom. Oh, that compassionate, merciful nun! She let me! At no other time would she have let me, but she and I knew what I had to do. So I fled to the small bathroom adjoining the class, and I locked the door and I listened, hot with shame, as my schoolmates noisily surrendered their envelopes.

They all knew why I was in the bathroom. To their everlasting credit, none of them ever said a word. They liked me, and my plight was nothing to joke about. They say that kids that age can be the cruelest people in the world. But not those kids, not Sister Regina Mary's students. Somehow they knew the cruelty I'd already suffered in my young life. They saw me hanging on. I love them for it.

Nothing that has happened to me before or since has lacerated me like that moment. I have borne the pain most elegantly up to this point. It's now come to the surface. It has spilled over. It is healing. Another cup is passing.

Dennis Rhodes is a poet and writer who lives in Provincetown and who serves as Poetry Editor of Body Positive magazine.

Back to the March 2000 Issue of Body Positive Magazine.