We all have terrible things happen to us as we pass through our short lives. Some of my worst were experienced when I was very young, at the hands of my father. During my childhood trials it was impossible to see any logic or cosmic sense in what was taking place. Most children cannot imagine why bad things are happening to them and what they could have done to deserve it. This conundrum leads many people down a well-worn, man-made path to a karmic explanation. By the time I was a young adult and begin sifting through such material, I looked thither and found out the following.
It is said that outsiders came to India and invaded the Dravidian peoples already there. Those people spent time observing the indigenous population before carefully crafting what has come down to us as the Hindu Religion. What was the purpose? Simply put, for control.
A religion and belief system tailor-made for that particular population's temperament while serving the ends of the new overlords with a caste system and a belief in karmic debt being key parts of the control mechanism. A man who believes from birth that he is less worthy than another man will not be likely to cause any trouble. A woman who believes from birth that she will be re-incarnated will likely not try to protect her life with the same fervour as a woman who has only one life. A man who believes from birth the concept of karmic debt will not be overly upset when someone near is killed, for he likely believes that they deserved it. No matter how low in rank a person is, there is always someone lower that they can mistreat. This sadomasochistic dynamic was likely well known long before the Pyramids were built.
There have always been a certain percentage of humans who prey on their own species and there likely always will be. Many of these people meet violent ends when their deeds are discovered and a kind of balance is maintained. Thus, it may be argued that with time, patience and technique, willing victims can be raised like so many sheep. Indeed, it is a rare human that will attack a healthy member of its same species. A far better strategy is to choose the sick, the weak, the elderly or the young victim.
The laboratory techniques recorded by Pavlov were sadistic and calling his work science to try and dignify the reprehensible, is in my opinion, patently wrong. People are not dogs, but normal healthy mammals do share many traits across species boundaries. The people who busy themselves with this sort of behavioural study and their paymasters have anything but altruistic intentions. The book, Political Ponerology by Andrew Lobaczewski, shows that the people we call psychopaths can unfailingly detect people in a random crowd who have been previous victims of violent crimes.
There is a physical level as well as a spiritual level in the understanding of these weighty topics. In my estimation, with the hindsight afforded me as a former victim, I conclude that people who prey on other people, especially upon children, have become something other than human by my current understanding of that word. They are mere vehicles, carriers of something ancient and elemental, a darkness that preexists their deeds. Like a slumlord who rents space to anyone with money in hand, they have given over the occupancy of their hearts, minds and bodies to principalities which may be understood as concentrated, magnified destructive energies.
These energies act like powerful drugs upon the person possessed of them. Seeking instant gratification that dulls satisfaction and leads to a stronger desire for instant gratification. A type of Möbius strip. This arrangement may outwardly appear to benefit the person who has laid aside their humanity. Many of the worst characters on earth maintain a youthful, unblemished, seemingly healthy physical husk. Like The Picture of Dorian Grey, as soon as they fall short of a fix, the unutterable ugliness inside will quickly manifest.
Before I began elementary school, I was trained by my father to take physical beatings without crying out. Other than the sound of the leather on my flesh, the only other sounds made during those sessions were his laboured breathing and a strange kind of snorting that I would hear again years later in a very different place. I was always told to undress and to wait in my room before each session and to contemplate the reason for my necessary punishment. I would be required to indict and to incriminate myself for non-existent crimes, before the beating could commence and thus be over with.
I was learning to feel deep shame, over-arching, misplaced guilt and constant fear, all in one step. During the hours I awaited his familiar footsteps, I learned to be very creative at fabricating misdemeanours to furnish up to him. Each instance, I would be told that the process was going to hurt him much more than me. I was sometimes brought hot chocolate chip cookies afterwards by one of my sisters. I used to look at a plaster picture of a cow jumping over the moon while a dish and spoon ran away and another plaster cast of two disembodied hands praying. They were hung on my wall and in my child way, I prayed and jumped over the moon and ran away.
My being trained to be a victim from the age of three was working perfectly. I remember going for a walk once in the back of our country house lot in Texas and two older boys ran up, grabbed my arms and legs and tossed me into a bayou. I was already mentally making excuses for them, as I climbed out of the mud contemplating the trouble I was in for ruining my clothes.
Walking down White Bayou one morning in North-East Houston, Texas, at five years of age, I came upon the charred remains of a cat that had been tied with newspaper string to five stakes and burned alive inside a pentagram of chalk. Disgusted at the sight and horrified by the idea of the suffering endured by the poor critter; I was nauseated at the thought that one of my species had done this to an innocent creature.
I asked around to learn who had done it. Other children told me it was a boy about ten years old in our neighbourhood. I asked where his house was because I needed to see what evil looked like, so I could avoid it. There, dangling from a tree in his front yard, were frogs, lizards, snakes and other small creatures impaled with corn-cob holders. I backed away.
When I was eight and living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, my father took me to the Mississippi River levee. He parked his Impala on a one lane dirt road with the river on my side and sharecropper shacks on the other side down a slope. He told me very clearly not to leave the car for any reason and walked away. After awhile, I heard some voices. Then a clod of dried blue-grey clay hit the car window.
A group of black children of various ages from teens down to my own age appeared. They surrounded the car and noisily demanded that I get out. More fearful of disobeying my father’s orders than I was of the hostile kids, I locked the doors and sat like a stone lion. They pelted the car and slapped the windows and door panels while giving me the verbal “dozens.” I held my mud.
“You so ugly, yo momma hafta feed yo ass wit a sling-shot.”
“You so ugly, yo fambly hafta tie a poke-chop roun' yo neck, jus ta get the dawgs ta play wit ya.”
Eventually, I heard the crunching footsteps of my father's alligator shoes. The same heel-taps I had learned to associate with a beating from age three or so now were the sound track of my rescuer. As if on cue, the kids ran away from the car as he approached. I saw him hand a folded bill of money to the oldest black boy. Much later I learned that this exercise in cognitive dissonance was another known Pavlovian technique that had the effect of making a victim become fiercely loyal to their tormentor.
From five to twelve, there were frequent events staged by my father involving animals. We always had big dogs of one kind or another and my father would catch a stray cat for example and throw it in the living room to fight for its life against two Chow-Chows. He would snort and giggle while us children screamed at the blood sport. After a dog got a ripped nose or a cat got a fang hole in its leg, he would relent and stop the proceedings. Once, he set a giant Texas snapping turtle loose in the living room. We kids had to stay on chairs to avoid getting a finger or toe crimped off by the annoyed reptile.
As I grew through the tiny crack in the concrete of childhood, my punishments and humiliations varied but the important groundwork had been laid. I was as loyal to my tormentor as a wolf is to its pack. Still, though, I wondered constantly, why me? I invented back stories for my father in an attempt to justify his treatment of me.
The fact that I was seeking to justify his actions speaks to my manufactured victim-hood. Righteous anger was the first sign of my healing process as a young adult. Harnessing that anger to accomplish my goals was my choice through to middle-age and by my retirement, I was starting the process of actually undoing the damage done to me. Dismantling acquired mental habits that diminish me, is my work now as an old man.
I learned of some of the harsh trials that my father faced at an early age, but as I matured spiritually, I came to know that although we might not choose what happens to us, we do choose everything that we do. We bear responsibility for our own actions not those of others.
When I was in Grade nine during my last year living in Texas, we lived in a Houston neighbourhood known as Spring Branch. It was near Oak Forest and The Heights where I was born and spent my first few years. My job at that time was that of a bag-boy at a local grocery chain. My family lived in a large apartment complex that had three hundred units, three pools, three launderettes and an on-site cocktail bar. This was in 1971-2.
While walking to work one hot, sunny day with my head downcast, a big black car pulled slowly alongside the boulevard I was striding and the window rolled down. A man in his thirties smiled and offered a comment about the heat of the day and asked if I would like to have an air-conditioned ride. Things were horrible at home and thinking that it was about time to catch a break, I said yes and got in the front seat.
The man asked where I was going and then spoke no more after I answered. I was fourteen and had a head full of my own very real family problems and elusive dreams, so I didn't mind his silence. When we reached the turn-off for my workplace, the man did several things simultaneously. He retracted all the door locks, changed lanes, gunned the motor and started up a laboured breathing and an inhuman snorting. A few seconds later, we were on the Freeway Loop. A few more moments later, we were far from any streets I had ever heard of.
More than twenty boys about my age had disappeared from the environs of my neighbourhood over the prior several years. No bodies had ever been discovered and the head count was rising all the time. I now recalled that nightly news coverage of serial horror and began to realized that I was potentially living the last hours of my life. There was no time to scold myself for being so self-absorbed as to take the ride and to ignore the daily headlines.
A calmness suddenly came over me that I could not account for. I found myself mouthing carefully crafted words with no hesitation and using very particular tones, inflections, punctuation and gestures. It was me talking but I couldn't have choreographed my delivery if I’d been given weeks to prepare. I knew in my deepest recesses, that I was not alone, nor without help. The former human beside me was already dead and I was having a parley with something other. In that species of conversation, there are very strict rules and no spiritual advantages are given the Adversary.
When I mentioned, as a matter of fact, that we had missed my turn, he let out an ugly, whip-saw laugh and began to masturbate violently. I said that I'd be fired if late for work and I would get my ass kicked when my father found out. I spoke and acted as if I hadn't noticed any aberrant sexual behaviour whatsoever. The only tiny hint of concern in my voice was reserved for my being late for work and being fired.
The wretched entity asked me if I liked parties. It's voice was mechanical sounding, as if something else was borrowing the former human's vocal chords between ugly hissing and grunting sounds. And indeed, I believe this was the case. I answered in the affirmative and added that if I lost my job I wouldn't be going to any parties for a long, long time. The more I kept a calm voice, the less ferocity I detected in the snorts, sneers and emo-drivel that was issuing out of the soulless husk driving the vehicle.
I was asked if I liked wine and marijuana. I answered affirmatively with some enthusiasm, a hint of surprise and a faint gilding of gratitude in my voice, bespeaking my supposed surprise that an adult would be willing to furnish a mere boy with those exotic taboo items. In fact, I had long had the job of cleaning the seeds and stems out of my father's pounds of weed. It was nothing alien nor exciting to me and although I didn't yet drink alcohol, I had been taught by my Grandfather to make grape wine.
Then I began to question the Beast. I asked if he would really get me some wine and some weed or if he was just bull-shitting like all the other adults I knew. He became very quiet and almost calm. After he finished masturbating and had put both hands on the steering wheel, he took the bait and asked if I had any male friends who also liked to party.
I answered in the affirmative and added with a note of frustration in my voice that it didn't matter anyway because I was going to be late, I was going to get fired and I was definitely going to be grounded. He asked how many friends I could get to come to a party. I said I could get two friends and that set the hook. He asked what time I got off from work. I told him seven PM, which was two hours later than I actually did.
He pulled onto an exit ramp and parked at a Seven Eleven. He went inside without a word and I sat like a stone lion. He came out with a big Lime Slurpee and his demeanour seemed different. He was like a grotesque overgrown caterpillar dreaming of his next feeding seconds after having had his last. He started the car and drove me straight to my supermarket with a promise to be waiting at seven for me and my two friends. I acted relieved for not loosing my job and happy to still have a chance to party that night. He pulled away smiling and waving.
Inside the store, I apologized to my supervisor for being late and then I told three older Chicano co-workers what had just gone down. They gave me a switch-blade, which I carried from that night until I left Houston. They had seen his car pull away and had noted his license. I was told that if they ever got hands on him, he would need a new car, when and if he was ever released from hospital.
I never saw him again in person and I never told anyone else about my encounter. Within a couple of whirlwind weeks after that incident, my family moved to Canada for a second time. We hadn't been long in North Vancouver when a big news story broke from Houston, Texas.
A man had been shot dead by a teenage boy. When an investigation was conducted into the homicide, it turned out that the dead man was responsible for the torture, rape, mutilation and murder of 38 boys from age 14 – 18, mostly from The Heights neighbourhood of Houston, Texas. The shooter had been one of two teenage accomplices who had taken active parts in many of the torture/rape/murders and had helped to procure many of the victims. Sometimes, even tricking their own schoolmates into going to the “Candy Man's” house.
The Candy Man owned a candy business and several properties but kept several rented apartments as well. Home-made plywood torture boards with steel cuffs were found inside some of those apartments by the police later on in their investigation. The two youths, who confessed their parts in this horrid partnership, identified several mass grave sites used by their leader.
One of those was in on the Bolivar Peninsula, where I played and fished as a young child along the Gulf Coast of Texas every Summer in Gilchrist with my grandparents. The bodies that were exhumed had all been tortured, mutilated and sexually violated. When I saw the first published photo of the Candy Man, I recognized that face instantly and shuddered.
When the addresses were published of the several rental habitations used by the Candy Man, I became aware that one of them was a unit within the apartment complex where my family had lived at the time of my encounter! So, years later and a continent away, a further breath of Cthulhu ran across my back.
But for the grace of God, guardian spirits and the cruel training of my father, all which furnished me with just the right words, tones and non-typical reactions necessary to quell the blood-lust of a killer and turn its greed into a handicap; I may easily have been victim number 39. There was a reason I was spared and I take no credit for my safe deliverance. I simply give my thanks to my Creator and acknowledge my responsibility to make everyday left to me count for as much good as I can.
I visited the Bolivar Peninsula in 2007 for the first time since those happenings and about a year later a massive hurricane had scrubbed it almost clean. I looked up the old news stories of the Candy Man murders a few years ago and learned that some young man from Houston had made a film of the whole evil event. He visited the prison where the two accomplices are still incarcerated, to get their blessings and also procured some of the old clothing that they had worn while committing unspeakable deeds.
I learned, to my disbelief, that he had shot the film in one of the actual locations of the murders and that his actors had worn the murderer's garments, In a short video clip, that young film-maker talked about his film and finished with the words, “Hail Satan!”
I remembered that martyred cat I had discovered in my childhood and realized that people can choose anything they want, at any age. Many people like the cat immolator, like my father, like the film-maker, like the Candy Man and his accomplices, choose very ugly paths. For that reason, people need to be taught from childhood how to not be victims. Being gentle as lambs and wise as serpents applies to today's world. It will always apply. It has always applied.
Fear, anxiety, terror and other strongly negative emotions are the food of dark things, to put it simply and to understate the analogy. It must be realized that the previously human people intentionally causing those emotions in their victims are not the recipients of the evil nourishment. No, they are already dead, inert husks and serve only as automated minions to harvest this foul vampiric crop for the benefit of something non-corporeal which they have established a relationship with.
Their temporary reward is to be like a stolen car that gets waxed and washed everyday for a week while the thief uses it to rob banks and then sends it off a cliff when it no longer suits. Around the world different cultures may use different words to describe this teaching but they are all saying the same truth, which is ancient. All that has changed is technology
And like Mrs. Goldberg on my old postal route once said, “We might as well be good to each other. Our lives are a few short days, but when we die, we are dead for a long, long time.”
fin