Predators

Predators

 

As I write (April. 2017), a sexual molester is still squatting in the White House, although these days his hold on the presidency is getting as shaky as his grasp of reality in general.  As far as I know, the Orange Oligarch with a penchant for grabbing women’s private parts with his pudgy little hands has restricted his unwelcome attentions to grown women, but with the Drumpfster, any form of trashy behavior is possible.

Trump’s compulsive lying, the tantrums he pitches whenever he thinks someone has insulted or betrayed him, and his  conviction that he is the smartest, most successful, and best-liked person in the world (despite all evidence to the contrary) add up to the delusive mind set of a cranky, spoiled three-year-old.  In lieu of an indulgent mommy to cater to his whims, he has surrounded himself with toadies and yes-men who reinforce his childish delusions. And to keep reality from pricking his infected boil of self-esteem, he reads only news clips from the far right wing-nut media. He lives in a fantasy bubble, and on the rare occasions when facts manage to infiltrate his dream-world, he denies their veracity and claims they are lies spread by his enemies. Psychologists have pointed out that by all clinical standards he is insane, though they can’t agree on the precise nature of his madness.  Narcissism? Megalomania?  Paranoid schizophrenia? All of the above? The shrinks are still debating, but sociologists have suggested that his derangement resembles that of Mussolini and Hitler. But although those monsters gleefully engineered acts of inhuman atrocity, neither of them was a serial sexual abuser.

What drives sexual predators of all kinds, up to and including rapists, is not an uncontrollable libido, but a lust for power. By forcing himself, either directly or through the use of threats and/or promises, on his invariably less powerful prey, the molester reaffirms his self-esteem, which in almost all cases is so shaky that it needs constant reinforcement. As has been shown in studies of what is called situational homosexuality – the sort of sexual behavior that occurs in prisons, military camps, ships on long voyages, cloistered monasteries and nunneries, and anyplace else where men or women are forbidden contact with the opposite sex – the aggressors don’t think of themselves as homosexual. They are simply attending to a powerful need, rather in the same way that they empty their bowels and bladders when nature calls. This point of view utterly deprives their victims of human dignity: those whom they rape are seen as nothing but convenient receptacles for momentary urges. Since the victims are seldom capable of fighting back effectively, the predators feel justified in despising them as weaklings, cyphers, nobodies.

That is vile enough, but the attitude of more sophisticated predators toward their victims is worse.  The Catholic bishops who tried to cover up for priests who were abusing boys began by flatly denying that the abuses had ever taken place.  When altar boys, choir singers, and other once-devout young Catholics finally came forward, years after their degradation and suffering at the hands of the priests they were taught to revere, to testify to their terrible experiences, Pope Francis defrocked the abusive prelates, but he never reported them to the cops, nor did he fully apologize to their victims. That dereliction of duty is one of the reasons why the foundations of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church are beginning to crumble.

I don’t mean to single out the Catholics for fouling their nests. Sexual scandals abound among many other sects, particularly those whose preachers thunder loudest against homosexuals, women who have abortions,  trangendered people, and even straight couples who live together without being married.  The most bellicose of the fundamentalist preachers ranting in their megachurches against those who ignore  God’s Sex-Ed Lessons are precisely the ones who get caught with their pants down. Howling hypocrisy among the Evagelicals is as common as sleazy sanctimony among the Papists.

But there is another milieu in which men prey regularly on boys, and women (less frequently) molest girls. Same-sex private schools, even the most prestigious of them, have always been havens for adults with a taste for pederasty. And whenever a predatory teacher gets caught, the administration, instead of reporting him to the police, which would damage the school’s reputation and reduce the flow of alumni gifts and bequests, quietly dismiss him without a blot on his record, as if he had simply come to the end of his  contract.  This dodge enables him to migrate from school to school, continuing to prey on students, until he reaches retirement age and collects his full pension.

Part of the problem is that originally, American prep schools were slavishly modeled on British “public” schools (which, of course, are anything but). I refer to institutions like Eton and Harrow, where sexual predation was almost part of the curriculum, along with bullying, harsh physical punishment for minor violations of the regulations, and terrible food. The aim of subjecting boys to an environment almost as cruel as prison was to toughen them up and get them ready to assume their roles as defenders of the British Empire. When Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, he was disgusted by the customs that obtained within the Royal Navy, which ruled the seas for Britannia’s viceroys and proconsuls. He remarked that since its inception, the First Service had depended on rum, buggery, and the lash to keep its sailors docile. He banned flogging, but British tars are still issued a tot of rum every day, and I have no doubt that on long cruises, buggery thrives below decks.

By the time I entered puberty in the early 1950s, Britain, wrung dry by World War Two, was no longer capable of maintaining its empire.  The United States had replaced it as the West’s supreme power, but the Soviet Union, under Stalin, was mounting an all-out challenge to the Imperium Americanum.  It was up to American private schools to turn out the steely-eyed, square-jawed Cold Warriors who would fight the Red Menace  to the death, even if they had to take the whole world with them in a nuclear holocaust.  When the going gets tough, the tough get crazy.

When I was twelve, my mother and stepfather, with some financial aid from my paternal grandfather, sent me to a pre-prep school near our home in Wayland, Massachusetts. The previous year, while my father and mother wrangled through a divorce, I had lived in North Carolina with my youngest aunt, and at the local public school, I had learned precisely nothing. The Fessenden School offered a rigorous curriculum designed to get boys ready for elite secondary schools like Andover and Exeter, and I struggled to keep up during my first year.  I had particular trouble with math, for over the course of my year  in North Carolina, I had almost forgotten long division and multiplication, and my instructor, a Mr. Claridge, taught algebra.

He was a dashing fellow in his thirties who drove a red MG sports car and coached the squash team. As it happened, our odd little home, located on the estate of an extended old-money WASP family, and originally purposed to house  weekend guests, had a squash court just off its tiny kitchen, and my stepfather had taught me the game.  I’d gotten fairly good at it, so I made the Fessenden team.

Claridge was a hands-on coach, in more ways than one.  To adjust the way his players held their racquets, he’d stand behind them and reach around to correct their grips, pressing himself against their rumps.  A couple of kids quit the team because of his up-close-and-personal techique, but I really wanted to improve my game, so I put up with it, even though I could feel his erection as he hugged me from behind. Once, after squash practice, he encountered me walking to the showers, and he put both hands down the front of my shorts and fondled my cock.  I asked him to stop, and he did, but he suggested that if I wanted to pass my upcoming math exam, I should “be nice” to him.

By then I had some idea of what he meant, and it scared me.  But I was more scared of failing math, so I said that I’d try.  He was delighted, and offered to drive me home after school that afternoon in his MG, saying that it would be a lot more fun than taking the bus. The bus – actually a beat-up station wagon pressed into service as transportation to and from Fessenden for me and three other students who lived in Wayland and Weston – was driven by a grumpy woman who yelled at us to shut up every time we started talking or laughing, and it was no fun at all. So the prospect of a ride in Mr. Claridge’s spiffy sports car banished my queasy feelings about him, and I agreed.

It was quite a trip.  Claridge wore a tweed cap and leather driving gloves, and he sent the little MG screaming along the highway, weaving it in and out of traffic, upshifting and downshifting expertly on the curves. But on the straightaways, when he was in top gear and doing 75, he put his right hand high on my thigh and squeezed it.  I didn’t dare slap his hand away, because I was afraid of breaking his concentration and causing a wreck.  I had told him how to get to my house, but he blasted past the entrance to the driveway, still massaging my thigh and letting the backs of his fingers graze my balls. I asked him where he was going. He said that just down the road there was a pretty little pond in the woods where we could “get to know each other better.”

I told him that I had to go home, because my mother would be starting supper and wondering where I was, and he relented, turning around and starting back. On the return trip he stayed scrupulously under the speed limit, and he kept his hands to himself. When we stopped in front of the house, Mother ran out before he had even turned off the ignition.  She was furious, demanding to know who he was and why I was with him.  He started to explain that he was my math teacher, and he had just offered me a lift home.  She cut him off, saying that she knew all about him, because one of my classmates, a son of the family that owned the estate, had complained about him to his own mother.  And she told him to go away and never bother me again, or she’d report him to the principal of the school and the cops.

Claridge drove off,  his wheels spitting gravel, and Mother asked me exactly what he had done to me.  I gave her a rather confused account, because I wasn’t quite sure myself about all the details, except that his attentions made me feel funny.  She put her arms around me – a rare display of maternal affection, since she had a WASPian disdain for physical coddling – and assured me that Claridge would never make me feel funny again.  And he didn’t.  But I flunked his math test.

There was another teacher at Fessenden who also took a peculiar interest in me.  I can’t remember his name, or what subject he taught, but he coached the football team and told  the players to call him Uncle Tank, perhaps because he was built like one, wide and hefty.  I played fullback, with more enthusiasm than skill, and Uncle Tank enjoyed taking pictures of me in uniform, posed in mid-stride with the ball tucked under my left arm and my right one extended to fend off an invisible tackler, or catching me in the act of punting the ball (even though fullbacks hardly ever punt).  He had a fancy camera with an array of different lenses, and he used the medium-range one when he posed me, out of uniform, dressed in khakis and a white shirt, standing in front of a small copse of trees.  He said I looked like a faun.  I thought he meant a baby deer; in the print he gave me some days later, I do have a sort of deer-in-the-headlights look of bewilderment. It wasn’t until my first year at Andover that I realized he’d meant the woodland sprite of Greek and Roman mythology.

Uncle Tank never laid a hand on me or on any of the other boys he photographed. He was the sort of pederast who preferred looking to touching, which is why nobody ever complained about his rancid little hobby. But his suggestive pictures made me feel just as funny as Claridge’s  groping did, and I never showed them to my mother. I still have them somewhere, buried in the mare’s nest of my files. I’m not quite sure why I saved them – maybe out of vanity. In my boyhood I was considered handsome, which is why creeps like Mr. Claridge and Uncle Tank had been so interested in me.

In a way, I am grateful to them, for they wised me up about men who prey on the boys in their trust.  During my third year at Andover, I got stage-struck, and wound up playing Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral.  The play was directed by an Englishman named Rafe Symonds, who taught French.  Symonds had flamboyant mannerisms and a cutting wit, which were ascribed by most of the students to the fact that he was British.  The administration knew he was gay, but he was a brilliant teacher, and in any case, there were were a good number of closeted homosexuals on the Andover faculty.  As long as they restricted their amours to adult men and kept a low profile, they were tolerated, even prized, because they were passionate about the subjects they taught, and made them come alive to their students.

Rafe Symonds’s French class was the high point in my weekly academic schedule, for after drilling us briefly on irregular verbs and the use of the subjunctive, he would read us passages  from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Arthur Rimbaud’s Un saison en enfer, in his creamy Parisian accent. Only after I read both works in their entirety at Yale did I realize he had picked the novel and the poem because they touched on wildly illicit sexual affairs: Emma Bovary’s with Léon Dupuis, and Arthur Rimbaud’s with Paul Verlaine. Of the two couples, it was obvious to me that Monsieur Symonds preferred the latter.

Rafe hit on me during the rehearsals for Murder In The Cathedral, but he accepted my rebuff gracefully, for he had plenty of other prey.  Boarding school is a grim and lonely place for kids living away from home for the first time in their lives, and they naturally turn to any teacher who is kind to them. And Symonds was a good deal more than kind. He kept an apartment in Boston to which he invited his young friends on weekends, getting their parents’ permission by saying that he was taking the boys to the Boston Symphony or the Museum of Fine Arts.  He always followed through on that promise, but listening to a Beethoven syphony or looking at a  Braque painting wasn’t the only cultural experience he had in mind for his pets.

In the puritanical 1950s, boys who knew they were homosexual but were ashamed to admit it, may have been grateful to have their sexual preferences confirmed by kind, loving, and gentle older men.  But such cases are a far cry from those in which a man uses his power and authority to coerce a boy who identifies as heterosexual, however tentatively, into becoming his catamite. Such an act may not be physical rape, but it certainly qualifies as emotional assault, and it leaves wounds  that can take a lifetime to heal, even with the aid of a therapist.  Men who do such things belong in jail, where they will be victimized themselves by predators who are bigger and stronger than they are.  They may not even survive their terms: the jailhouse expression for them is “short eyes” meaning men who have sex with children.  And in the harsh social hierarchy of prison, short eyes rank last. We all need someone to feel superior to, and convicts – even multiple murderers – are  no exception to the rule.

However, as I said above, prep-school predators, like corrupt priests, are hardly ever imprisoned for their crimes.  They are simply passed on from school to school until they reach retirement age.  Rafe Symonds, for example, was spotted by my mother-in-law Sally, who lived in the town of Andover, on a beach in St. Barth’s, many years after his Phillips Academy adventures. He had a much younger male companion, and he looked very pleased with himself.  Sally didn’t ask the lad how he felt about the arrangement.

All-male private schools are on the way out, but as the recent Choate-Rosemary Hall flap demonstrates, going co-ed simply means that predators can set their nets for girls as well as boys. And as usual, when they get caught, they predators escape legal prosecution: the Choate-Rosemary Hall pederast wound up teaching at my own tarnished Alma Mammy, which merged with its neighbor, all-female Abbot Academy in 1973. Some Abbot alumnae have called the merger a kind of corporate rape, with the arrogant males of the PA administration using their money and power to have their way with the unwilling female administrators of their sister school. Translated from academese, Andover responded, Trump-style, that Abbot was a second-rate school run by losers.

Since that time, Phillips Andover has pretty well obliterated all traces of Abbot. I attended my 40th  reunion in June of 2000, and found that few students knew an independent  girls’ school had ever existed.  With my wife along to keep me from making a complete fool of myself,  I had a wonderful time at the reunion, catching up with my fellow old grads and getting maudlin drunk on free wine and beer.  The combined campuses were beautiful, the lush green lawns freshly mowed, the flower-beds next to the walkways in bloom and the stately old trees leafing out.  We took a tour of the new visual arts building, and I was duly impressed by the sophistication of the student projects. But part of me remembered the hostile takeover, to use the corporate phrase, and deplored it.  In general, I’d had a fine four years at Andover, but the bullying and sexual harassment had disturbed me, even though fending off Mr. Claridge and Uncle Tank at Fessenden had prepared me to resist the slimy attentions of Rafe Symonds. So the pleasure I took in meeting my classmates was not unalloyed.

Now comes the news about Choate-Rosemary Hall. In the prep school world, nothing has changed in any substantive way. I get barraged with demands for money from Andover, even though the school already has endowments that rival those of many small colleges.  And now that I’m 74, PA’s fund-raisers badger me to leave a bequest to dear old Royal Blue, acting under the assumption that anyone who attended Andover and went on to Yale must be rich. Nothing could be further from the truth, and as long as  Andover continues to shelter pederasts who have been fired from other schools, it won’t get a cent from me. I learned a lot at Andover, and not all of it was good. There’s something rotten under the glittering façade of the private school system. Until it has been completely excised, like the cancer it is, and extreme measures taken to ensure that it doesn’t recur, the atmosphere of even the most distinguished boarding schools will be tainted by an odor of corruption.