A House Interrupted. Maurita Corcoron
and me, it wasn’t a bomb at all, just a firecracker. It almost felt like we had known all along. For our father, however, it was an atom bomb.
David came down from New York to tell my parents that he was gay. This must have been the summer of 1986. After pretending and giving excuses for such a long time as to why he didn’t have a serious girlfriend to bring to family functions, he finally was in a relationship that he really valued. David was simply tired of living a lie to those who mattered the most to him.
The bomb, then the fallout and concussion of the announcement to our parents, rattled the house. My father was old fashioned and religious. He was not the type to quote a particular Bible verse to a specific situation, but he knew what he believed to be right and wrong. Faced with the thought that his only son was, in his mind, no longer a man, Dad absolutely exploded.
“It’s disgusting. It’s a sin!” he bellowed from all around the house. His tirade lasted nearly half an hour—this full-throated appraisal of sinning and homosexuality, and most important to him, the “death” of his son. David suddenly no longer existed to my father.
In a rage, he ripped pictures of David from the walls, stomped around the house hollering about not having a son, about men having sex with other men. My mother had no idea what to do, so she and my brother sat at the kitchen table in stunned silence.
It was absolutely awful.
My mother, who usually deferred to my father in moments of decision or strife, said nothing. When he continued removing photos from the walls of the house, David had had enough, and he walked out the front door.
Their relationship never rebounded. My brother had been the apple of our father ‘s eye, the sole heir to carry on the family bloodline. After that night, the only thing my father could see was an abomination and a sinner.
My father kept good on his promise of disowning David. We would talk about David when we were all together but nothing more than information of the week and quick updates. As soon as my father entered the room and realized the topic of conversation, he would try and silence us, as if information about my brother, his only son, physically hurt his ears.
I called my brother the night before Ben was scheduled to contact me, after I read Out of the Shadows. I picked my brother and not my sisters because I remembered once David telling me he had some friends in recovery, and I thought he might have heard of this addiction.
“Why do you think he wanted me to read about that? Have you ever heard of such an addiction?” I asked David.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” he said.
“Listen to this,” I told him. Then I read David excerpts I had marked with a yellow highlighter. “There are three levels of sexual addiction divided by behaviors, legal consequences, and victims.”
I continued reading. “Level one is masturbation, compulsive relationships, pornography, prostitution, strip clubs, and anonymous sex with women, men and both men and women.”
“Level two deals with exhibitionism, voyeurism, indecent phone calls, and indecent liberties, whatever that means. There is no way he is doing anything in level three.”
“It’s probably just level one, the masturbation thing,” David said. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Call me after you talk to him and let me know what is going on.”
I immediately felt better when he said that. “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow night when I talk to Ben,” I told him.
After I hung up with David, I thought back and the only thing I could connect to Ben in the realm of sexual deviance were a few occasions of masturbation. OK. I think I can deal with that. Immediately, I could recall instances of him and his friends making jokes and references to masturbation. But what did I know? I’d even caught Ben a few times in the middle of “pleasuring himself,” as he liked to call it, and even then I’d thought it simply embarrassing and nothing else. I certainly did not view it as a “dangerous addictive behavior.”
About a week and a half into his treatment program, my husband called me around 10:30 at night. Our kids were in the living room a few yards away from my closed bedroom door, watching a movie. At that time, Ella was tall and thin at twelve, Henry was ten, Harper was nine and still wearing her gymnastics leotard from practice that night, and little Olivia was just six.
I can still remember looking at the phone as it rang the first long and full ring. It looked like a foreign object, and the noise it was making was an intrusion. I wanted to pick it up, and I didn’t want to pick it up. After the second ring, I reached for the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” Ben said on the other end. He sounded tense and got straight to the point.
“Hi, honey,” I said, trying to keep my voice level and normal. “How’s your week going?”
“I am doing all right. Did you read the book I asked you to read? The Carnes book?”
“I did read it,” I said. “So, what level are you?” I had meant it to be a light, almost comical question, as a way to ease the tension.
“The first,” he said.
A wave of relief flowed over my shoulders and back. A chronic masturbator, while a little off-putting and gross, is still manageable. That’s not so bad, I thought.
“I figured,” I told him, then asked, “Well? What part of level one are we talking about?”
“At one time or another, almost all of it.”
This was not a good list to be on. This was the prostitution, pornography, anonymous sex list.
“Almost all of it?” I asked. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I doubled over at my waist.
“Yeah, almost all of it,” he said. He went on to tell me that he had also abused drugs and alcohol, but the sexual addiction was full blown, the true addiction in his life. He said that he had been a sex addict way before we ever married—that this disease had started in his early teens. His disease had flourished during our fourteen year marriage. He then said I needed to get tested for sexually-communicable diseases, most importantly HIV. My beloved husband had been having anonymous, faceless, unprotected sex even while I was pregnant with our children.
I dropped the phone.
I fell to my knees.
For a few moments, I had the sensation of falling down a deep, dark hole. I believe now that I fell into hell on earth. I think I went into shock. My breath got shorter and shorter, and I began to hyperventilate. With every quick exhale, I quietly, almost in a whisper, repeated the words, “God, what am I going to do?”
Still on the floor, I rocked slightly back and forth. I could hear Ben weeping on the phone from where the receiver lay next to me. He kept saying, as if he were answering me, “I don’t know, I just don’t know.” I reached for the phone, a white Slim line, and I hung up the receiver.
I realized that night, that the one person who I should have been able to count on—to guard my heart, my very life—didn’t exist and never had for my entire married life. I had an overwhelming feeling of being utterly alone on this Earth.
As soon as I caught my breath enough to cry, I wept deep, long sobs that came from within my soul. I was physically sick with disbelief over his behavior. My life was a total, complete lie.
The kids were in the living room waiting for me to say good night and put them to bed. They may very well have saved my sanity that night.
I pulled myself together and opened my bedroom door. Thankfully, the only light on was from the TV, so the kids couldn’t see my red and swollen eyes. I asked if any of them wanted to sleep with me that night. That wasn’t a common occurrence, but I needed the reassurance of my children, pure and real, next to me. Two of the kids, including Harper, jumped at the chance and got into our bed. The other two slept peacefully in their own