Was I a victim of abuse? I mean beyond just being beaten occasionally, and threatened with being hit, and being abused emotionally. It was the 60s and 70s and we were proles, Ellis Island mutts. People of certain stripes (and of that particular stripe) could beat their kids in those days and not bat an eyelash about it. They didn't call it abuse. That's why we didn't give our parents any lip–if we did, we'd get hit. That's why old people talk about how "well behaved" kids were back in the day, and what punks kids are today. Duh! You hit us when we misbehaved, and we don't want to hit our kids because we remember what it was like to be hit. 

But I digress. By abused, I mean the harder stuff. Sexual abuse. Getting touched wrong, molested, raped. I wonder sometimes if I was sexually abused, and with all the memories I've lost it's possible. But when I talk to and/or read about people who've been sexually abused, I don't think I fit the profile. I'd have stronger feelings of hurt inside. Be less trusting. Act out with more self-loathing, and more frequently, and with greater consequences. 

But I still wonder. I remember a friend talking to me about a novel I wrote–one that has a hard time finding a publisher because it's about a sexually abused child who grows up to be a sexually abusive adult. This friend wasn't much of a reader, and did what a lot of non-readers do when encountering fiction: he treated it as thinly-veiled autobiography and, after reading the manuscript, wanted me to talk about the experiences that inspired the book. 

"It's fiction, man," I told him. 

"But you wrote it," he said. "If it didn't happen to you, you wouldn't have to write about it." 

I told him what I'll tell you: that honestly, I think I'd be much more fucked up if I had experienced sexual abuse. The abuse I experienced is a subspecies of the same disease that leads to sexual abuse isn't the same species. Me, I got off easy by comparison. 

But the darkness is there, never far away. I remember one time when I was revising that novel and tried to listen to a note I'd recorded on my iPhone. I couldn't piece it together–too mumbly, too low volume. I'd spoken the words in bed, trying not to wake up my wife. I tried every method I could to rescue those words, even importing them into Final Cut Pro and running adjusting the equalization. 

Never could get it, though. And when I gave up, I wondered if something had happened to me, and if I knew what it was I'd be able to solve myself. Instead the file went unread, the mystery remained unsolved.