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My Secret Brother

Steven Wineman

Are birds free from the chains of the highway? -Bob Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D”

    My brother Jimmy is in prison in Michigan for molesting boys. Those are words I very rarely speak out loud.
    Not talking about Jimmy goes back long before his arrest in 2000.
    In the summer of 1962, when he was seventeen, Jimmy had a breakdown and was put in a mental hospital, where he stayed for four months. It turned out he was in love with a boy, one of his classmates. We were at a summer camp for disturbed boys where my father was clinical director. Jimmy’s friend came out to visit, and then the two of them went back to Detroit, sixty miles away. A day or two later, Jimmy called and told my father that he was going to kill himself.
    He showed up back at camp a few hours after the call. I remember seeing him pull up in his car, a pale blue Buick. I was aware of the entire drama, and I was watching it unfold without letting myself feel much. Jimmy and my father went into our cabin and talked for a long time. Eventually my father came out and told my mother that he was going to take Jimmy to the hospital.
    My mother was hysterical, sobbing but muted because our cabin was in earshot of a staff dorm up the hill. The only thing I remember her saying, as she was putting my brother’s name on his clothes with permanent marker, was that she was ruining his shirts.
    Once Jimmy was locked up, we – my parents and I – needed to decide what to tell people. At thirteen I was included in this discussion, and I suppose, from one point of view, that made sense: the story was only going to work if we all said the same thing. We agreed to tell people at camp that Jimmy was spending the summer in Detroit, and tell people in Detroit that he was at camp. It was neat and convenient. There was no serious consideration given to telling the truth, except for one friend of the family, and my mother’s mother. We did not tell my father’s parents, which I understood had to do with my mother not being on great terms with my father’s mother.
    All the lying we were doing didn’t seem the least bit weird to me at the time. Nor did I feel strange about sitting with my parents and helping to plan the lies. It made me feel included and adult, the latter being a status I coveted.
    Three years later, when Jimmy ran away to Florida after being questioned by the police because he’d been looking into someone’s house with a telescope, we told people he was in California and staying with his uncle. My mother actually did have an estranged brother who lived in California, which was as close as this came to the truth. I can’t reconstruct any kind of rational basis for lying about where he really was. He was twenty by then, and heading out on his own is something people do at that age. If we were ashamed of the reason he took off (which my parents were), or if there was some misguided belief that we were protecting him, we could just have left out the parts about the telescope and the police. But lying about my brother was habitual and carried its own distorted logic.
    After Jimmy came back home from that episode, my friend Eddie asked him what he’d been up to in California. Jimmy looked at him like he’d just said something ridiculous (which he had) and asked Eddie where in the world he’d gotten the idea he’d been in California. Eddie turned to me and basically said the same thing. I told him to ask my mother.

    Jimmy was arrested in the February 2000 after two teenage boys reported that he’d invited them for a ride in his car and then fondled them. My brother was driving an expensive sports car, a Dodge Viper. A little while after the actual incident, the boys were in their school bus and noticed his car. They started talking about him, something along the lines of “there’s that creep in the Viper.” An attentive bus driver heard this, asked the boys questions, and then called the police.
    It made the Detroit media and became a notorious sex abuse case. The sensational part was what the police found in his apartment: bags of boys’ underwear; 1,200 audio recordings, videos, and photos of his sexual encounters with boys; pictures on his walls of adolescent and adult males whipping him, which he acknowledged to the police he had paid them to do.
    The only charges were to do with the single incident with the boys in the Viper. Jimmy pleaded no contest. For all the notoriety of the case, he got eighteen months followed by probation. After his release, he skipped the state within a week, violating his probation. In 2002 he was arrested in Seattle, extradited to Michigan, and sentenced to 10-15 years.

*    *    *

    One of my earliest memories is of Jimmy chasing me around our apartment when I was four and he was eight. We had recently moved from Detroit to New York. It is the first time I can remember him doing something that scared me, though I can’t really place memories of him before this event, positive or negative. I also don’t remember specifically what he did that day that scared me so much – chase games aren’t necessarily frightening – but I know I was terrified. Nor do I remember where our mother was. It was not a big apartment and she was a stay-at-home mom at the time, but she was nowhere in sight. To get away from Jimmy, I ran into the bathroom, pushed the door closed with all my might, and turned the bolt to lock it.
    At some point I calmed down enough that I wanted to come back out of the bathroom. At some point my mother called to me and found out I had locked myself in the bathroom. That was probably when I first tried to unlock the door. I couldn’t. I tried with every bit of strength I had, and I could not make the thing budge. It made no sense to me that I had been able to lock it but now couldn’t unlock it. I was crying really hard and kept trying to turn the bolt without any hint of progress. I was four years old and I believed that I would be locked in the bathroom for the rest of the day, the night, as far into the future as I could imagine. My mother was screaming. I have no idea where Jimmy was by then or what he had told her.
    Eventually a maintenance guy used a ladder, climbed in through the bathroom window, and turned the lock with an ease that seemed superhuman.

    My mother’s account of my brother’s childhood, which I heard many times, was that he was a perfect baby and a really good boy until he was eight, when he abruptly turned bad. I don’t know if the Steven-getting-locked-in-the-bathroom incident was the turning point in my mother’s eyes, but it was in mine. After that, Jimmy tortured me for six years.
    His MO was to get me to wrestle with him when my parents weren’t around. We would play act professional wrestlers. He would promise that he would let me win. I would always believe him. For a while he would let me get the better of him, and I would get excited, and it would feel great to put holds on him and get his big body on the floor and start to pin him. At the count to two he would push me off him, but up to a certain point he would let me keep the advantage. Then, abruptly, he would start winning. He would pin me on the floor and apply the “claw hold,” the specialty of one Killer Kowalski. Jimmy would be on top of me and would claw at my stomach until I was frantic with pain and terror. Eventually he would pin me for a count of three, laughing, announcing the match outcome like a guy on TV. Then he’d get up and leave me there on the floor. I have no idea why he would stop when he did. I have no idea – given later events in his life – why he never touched my genitals; but he didn’t.
    I believe that Jimmy abused me hundreds of times, more or less in the same way, from when I was four to ten. For most of that time we were back in Detroit, and after I started Kindergarten my mother was working three days a week. She came home maybe an hour after we got back from school. That hour was prime time. It didn’t happen every day my mother worked, but I think it happened pretty much every week.
    There were three basic things that, as far as I can tell, I never did. I don’t remember ever saying no to Jimmy when he was getting me to wrestle; and maybe more to the point, since I’m not sure what he would have done if I had tried to say no, I don’t remember ever thinking to myself that this was a bad idea because he would end up hurting me. I believed him every time. So that counts as one. The second thing I didn’t do was to just stay away from home for that hour until my mother would arrive. And the third thing was that I never talked to my parents about what Jimmy did to me.
    That had to wait until I was forty-five. This was in 1994, the year before both my parents died. I had become a dad a few years before that, and a lot of stuff was coming up for me, to put it mildly. One of the things way at the front of the list was that my parents had not protected me from Jimmy. When I described to them how Jimmy had abused me, my mother denied ever knowing. But my father reminded her that there were times after dinner when I would call out from the living room and he would have to pull Jimmy off me. I in turn didn’t remember my father intervening; my only memories were (and are) of the times when my parents weren’t around.
    I asked my father what he would do after he got Jimmy off me. He said he took him to his room. And then? My father wasn’t sure what I was asking. Did you ever come back and talk to me about it? I asked. No, he said, he didn’t. Why not? My father said he thought he had done what I was asking him to do.

    Jimmy liked me. I understood this as a child, in some deep, almost nonverbal way. When I was four he taught me to play chess, and he crowed to our mother about how smart I was. I don’t remember pondering the weirdness that he could both like me and abuse me. Jimmy was just plain weird, and was also very explicitly defined as the bad kid in the family. That was plenty to ponder, and it simply led me to do everything possible to not be like him.
    When he was hospitalized in 1962, he wrote me letters.
    I was really happy he was in the hospital. He was finally away from me. Jimmy had stopped physically abusing me three years earlier, when I was ten. We moved to a new house in a new neighborhood that year; I had more friends and I was out of the house a lot more after school. I’m not sure why else it stopped after we moved, but it did.
    But there were many other things that didn’t stop. He would grab the sports section of the newspaper away from me. He would control the TV if neither of our parents was in the room. He could say something bizarre pretty much any time, and he specialized in weirding out waitresses in restaurants. I was embarrassed to bring friends to my house. When Jimmy was in twelfth grade my mother was called to school because he had written the lyrics of a rock song, “The Mashed Potatoes,” on a math exam. After the conference, and countless other times, Mom screamed at him. My father also yelled at him, less often than my mother, but he was home a lot less than my mother. Once I saw my father slap Jimmy on the face, something that absolutely did not happen in our house, but that day it did. There was all kinds of chaos at home, and a good portion of it had to do with my parents’ relationship, but a lot of it swirled around Jimmy, and he had been swirling around me one way or another for as long as I could remember. It was an inexpressible relief to have him gone.
    So there I was getting letters from him in the hospital. They were superficial, and they were friendly. But the underlying, unspoken message was clear to me at the time: Steven, you are a safe person in my life. Steven, you are my link to the outside world, to my family. You are my meaningful connection. At thirteen, how do you respond to these letters from someone who had tortured you for most of your life? I answered them. It was a pretty matter of fact thing. Whatever the content was – how are things at camp? how are the Tigers doing? - I replied in kind. I didn’t think about it that much.
    A little while after my brother was hospitalized, my father asked me if I wanted to see a therapist. I told him no, I was fine. I had no idea how not-fine I was.
    The theme of me being Jimmy’s point of connection would recur. When he ran away after the telescope incident (I was sixteen then), he placed a collect call to me from somewhere in Ohio to say he had left Detroit and would not be coming back. And forty years later, we would correspond during his prison term.

    My mother told chilling stories about what a “good” baby my brother was. One of them was about taking Jimmy on the train from Detroit to Seattle when he was still an infant. My mother would recount how for three days on the train, Jimmy never cried. It defies belief, that it could happen at all and what mayhem must have been going on inside a six month old to clamp down on every natural, healthy urge and need of his own in order to stay quiet and satisfy his mother. When Mom told the story, there was never any hint that this might have been even slightly messed up. For her it was a golden memory.
    The roots of who Jimmy became could not possibly reduce to just one thing, but what happened on that train to Seattle must have been repeated in many different forms throughout his early childhood. Once he “turned bad” and was labeled as such in our family, things cascaded out of control from many directions. And of course he was growing up gay at a time when homosexuality was considered a disease. But I do believe that something in the core of his being got crushed when he was very little.
    My own infancy story, as later told by my mother, was that I cried at night for the first fourteen months of my life. Nothing she tried could stop me. Later, when I went to the orthodontist for braces, an x-ray showed that I had unusually narrow nasal passages. Mom theorized, plausibly, that my narrow nasal passages made it hard for me to breathe at night as a baby; hence the crying. So, strangely enough, my nasal anatomy may have saved me from being crushed like Jimmy at the beginning of my life.

    The counterpoint to all the secrecy about my brother has been my urge to tell. Interspersed with many years of silence, I have gone through various phases of telling.
    During my early adolescence I had fantasies of getting a girlfriend and telling her all about Jimmy. When I was sixteen I actually did tell my first girlfriend, Janet, about my brother. We’d been going out for a few weeks, we’d had our first fight, and then we went to a restaurant to talk and make up. I spent about an hour telling her the story. I started out by saying something like, “In order to really know who I am, you need to know about my brother.” Layered onto the yearning to have someone to tell this story to, I also wanted her to feel sorry for me, to recognize that I came from a seriously screwed up family and should be cut a little slack. It more or less worked, at least in the short run, and it set a tone for a number of relationships which followed: telling about Jimmy became an expression of intimacy and victimhood.
    At the same time, during that period of late adolescence and early adulthood, I was actively reworking my own understanding of the story, reconstructing Jimmy as a victim. I left home for college at seventeen, started getting some distance from my family and the events of my childhood, and had many of my own struggles which pushed me in the direction of critically reexamining my past. Plus it was the last half of the 1960s, a richly turbulent time that was conducive to critically reexamining all kinds of things.
    My second year in college, I wrote a play about my family in which I consciously tried to look at events from Jimmy’s point of view. I called his character Jay and made his “symptom” (the term my parents had used for his homosexuality) that he spoke in poetry and riddles. He was eighteen and coming home from the hospital. Within a couple of pages it was clear that he wasn’t “better” - still talking the same way, still making up bizarre stories about fantasy characters. “Mom” was frantic, “Dad” was ineffectually trying to convince him to change his tune so he wouldn’t be thrown in jail (!), and both were being complete jerks. I was the dead younger brother. Eventually Mom takes off all her clothes and tries to seduce Jay, terrifying him into a murderous rage.
    The play was actually produced at Columbia; my parents knew and were mortified. So there I was at nineteen, going about as public as you could imagine with this transfigured story of my mother as the perpetrator, my father as the hapless bystander, my brother as the victim whose aggression was a byproduct of Mom’s sexual abuse – and me out of the picture.
    More than a decade later, I would write an unfinished novel in which I turned Jimmy into Randolph, a reindeer who is misperceived by everyone to be a human being. Randolph can be nasty and has one episode of violence when he is involuntarily hospitalized. But, like Jay, I mainly portray him as a victim – unseen for who he really is, completely out of place, and living in a state of the most intense isolation and alienation. Randolph is a more complex and textured character than Jay, but in both cases I was aiming for a metaphor that allowed me to try to see the world through Jimmy’s eyes.
    Part of how I did this was to consciously give some of my own attributes to these Jimmyesque figures. I had Jay speaking in poetry at a time when I was making some serious efforts to write poems. (My brother was a math genius, not a poet). I had Randolph form a primal bond with Lake Superior, a place I love and that as far as I know Jimmy never laid eyes on. I was trying to humanize my brother by making him a little more like me, or by integrating some of me into him.
    During that era of my life, I made an admirable effort at trying to understand what it was like to be Jimmy growing up. I didn’t do as well at understanding what it had been like for me growing up as his brother.

    The body, however, does not forget. I have had stomach aches since childhood. They come at unpredictable intervals, but when they hit they can be excruciating, to the point that all I can do is lie down. At a more tolerable level, I have gastric distress every day without exception and have had for many years, so much part of my life that I would not recognize myself without it. Intertwined with the gastric junk, my stomach and intestines are where I carry my anxiety, also with the volume notching higher and lower but always present to some degree. I can’t tolerate being tickled, or being touched on my stomach unexpectedly.
    I recently started meditating, and part of the practice is to do a “body scan” in which you go methodically through each section of your body, feel the sensations, and breathe. When I got to my belly, without warning, without any particular triggering thought, I felt all that accumulated stress and I started to cry, and then to sob. This more than fifty years after Jimmy last abused me.

    In late 2002, I slogged through my ambivalence and started writing to Jimmy in prison.
    I struggled with my decision to write the first letter, and every time I got a letter back I struggled again about whether or when to reply. At the time I had a Post Office box and I gave him that address because I didn’t want him to know where I live. I was scared of him for myself and more so for my son Eric, who was then eleven. I held this fear even though Jimmy was at the beginning of a 10-15 year sentence. I accepted that my feelings didn’t have to be rational, meaning based on realities like how long he was going to be in prison, and that my history was part of my interior reality. If I was going to be in contact with Jimmy, I needed to feel that I was taking some kind of active step to keep it safe.
    Seven years earlier, in April 1995, Eric was three and a half when we went to Michigan to visit my parents. My mother would die the next month. She was very ill and way beyond being able to travel to Boston to see us, which she had been doing about once a year. Jimmy was still living with my parents. The visit was short, we were staying at a motel, and most of the time we spent at my parents’ house he wasn’t home. But there was one afternoon when he was.
    He’s a big guy, taller than me and probably fifty pounds heavier. For about about half an hour we jammed into a very small kitchenette – Jimmy, my mother, Eric, my partner, and me. (No idea where my father was.) Jimmy hovered, talking the whole time, exuding about how adorable my son was and how much he looked like me when I was little, asking Mom to agree with him about everything, saying things to Eric or asking him questions and being completely undaunted when he wouldn’t respond, just surging on with his charged monologue. Jimmy was standing right next to me, in that small jammed space, with his presence completely filling the room. I was carrying my own childhood experience of his abuse in my entire nervous system, and I was acutely aware of how excited he was to be meeting my little boy, and my body was shaking with terror and rage.
    When I decided to write to Jimmy, I needed to strike some kind of balance between a lot of things, and one clearly was fear because Jimmy is a dangerous man. Another was concern for Jimmy as a person whose life was a nightmare. Another was what kind of person I wanted to be – whether I wanted to be someone who could have compassion for my abuser, who could view Jimmy as a damaged human being and a significant person in my life. And yet another was my compassion for myself, for the vulnerable and wounded parts of me that neither I nor my parents had been able to protect. This was not just about attending to safety in the present, but about maintaining an allegiance to my own damaged parts at a very deep level, about holding in full view that what Jimmy did to me is fundamentally not forgivable. How do you possibly balance all that?
    The simple answer is that you do your best, and where you land at one point in time is not necessarily where you land at another. In 2002, I decided to try to hold compassion for Jimmy and compassion for myself on the same page. And so I wrote to him.

    Jimmy’s first letter back to me was dated December 5, 2002.
    Thank you very much for writing to me – you are the only person I knew previous to the year 2000 who has written to me since I have been in jail and/or prison!...
    All is well with me here – amazingly enough. There is plenty to do, the food and housing are good, and prison is a far cry from the way it is portrayed on TV / movies!
    I must have answered him quickly, because his next letter was written January 13. It’s a cheerful account, with no hint of irony, of how there’s plenty to do in jail. He describes the regimentation of a typical day in numbered items from 1 to 14. “(1) I go to bed at 9 p.m. and wake up at 5 a.m. (2) Breakfast – cereal, toast, biscuits, eggs, & sometimes french toast or pancakes – is 6:10 a.m. - 6:30 a.m.” Then TV, yard, TV, lunch, TV, yard, TV, dinner, gym, yard, TV. Each item includes details: gym has ping pong and pool; yard includes an option to stay in and play chess or cards; at 7:30 he watches Star Trek The Next Generation. He ends by saying, “Here I have plenty of time to watch the football games. When I worked at the Detroit News Sports Dept, I never had time!!”
    In a letter dated May 17, 2002, Jimmy responds to questions I had finally raised about his offenses.
    What do I think about the things that I did that led to my arrest & conviction?
    Well, I never thought any of the things I did would lead to prison!
    Just about everyone here obviously made a serious mistake or mistakes, else we wouldn’t be here!
    As for prison time being an opportunity to reflect on life and gain new understanding of what I’ve done, by the time a person gains such insight, it’s usually too late, sort of like locking the barn door after the horse gets out!
    He signs – as he signed all of his letters – “Love, Jimmy.”
    I wasn’t surprised by what Jimmy wrote; but I wasn’t really prepared for it either. I was trying to navigate in a narrow emotional space between the depth of my abuse and the challenge, in some ways the yearning to hold out for the possibility of human connection with someone who has abused you, and the possibility that Jimmy could connect with his own buried capacities for decency – to hold out for these things without being quixotic or just plain stupid. Inside me there was (and is) a little boy who had believed Jimmy every time he promised he’d let me win when we wrestled. Inside me were terror and rage that I do not expect will ever entirely go away, which is another way of saying wounds I don’t expect to ever entirely heal. I needed to muster as much clarity as I could bring to this effort to communicate honestly with Jimmy about what he had done. Not only to the other boys, but to me. I had reached the point where if I was going to correspond with Jimmy, I needed to say these things.
    I sat with this for two, two and a half months. Somewhere around the end of July I wrote back. I kept a draft of this letter, one of only two of my own letters I saved. I wrote it during a vacation in the White Mountains, sitting on the lawn outside a bed and breakfast on a warm summer day.
    Since we have grown up, we have never talked about what happened between us when we were kids....
    When we were kids, you hurt me very badly. You hurt me physically and, even more than that, you hurt me emotionally....I have come to understand that what you did was physical and emotional abuse. When we were alone you would get me to wrestle with you and you would pin me on the floor and claw at my stomach until I was sobbing uncontrollably. You did this many, many times. Those events have left deep emotional wounds that still affect me. I believe that it also wounded you, even more deeply than me, to treat me so badly.
    ...I am telling you now, not out of anger, but out of concern and respect for both of us. I do believe that you, like everyone, have the ability to learn from mistakes and to use that learning to heal old wounds. Healing is what I hope for – for you and between you and me.
    And so, as I see it, there are horses still left in the barn, because your understanding of how you hurt me in the past affects how we can relate to each other now.
    ...I can imagine that this is a very hard letter for you to read. I hope that you will be open to considering what I have said. My main hope is that you will be willing to look at how you treated me when you were little, think about how it affected both of us, and be willing to communicate about it.
    Jimmy’s reply was dated Sept 15, 2003. After a half page about other things, he wrote:
    I don’t remember our relationship as kids as well as you do. I do remember telling Mom, ‘Steven is very smart!!’ When you were just 4 years old!!
    I also remember reflecting the light from the sun onto the ceiling and convincing you that the reflection was a U.F.O.!! Dad was not happy over that blatant deception!
    As for our wrestling matches, from what I’ve read, a lot of kids copy the wrestling they see on TV, and if I used the claw hold that was Killer Kowalski’s favorite hold! Sorry if I over did it.

    How do you hold the terrible reality that someone can be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time?
    This fundamental question keeps coming back, not only to my own efforts to make sense of my relationship with my brother, but to so many intractable problems in the world, small scale and large. At the heart of cycles of violence, there are people on all sides who have been abused, disregarded, dehumanized, whose victimization distorts their capacities for compassion and connection and feeds into their own destructive behavior.
    So: that’s a way I know to analyze it. I think the analysis is a huge step beyond the common tendency to split the world into good and bad – to categorize people like Jimmy as either victim or perpetrator, but not both. I honestly think it’s a triumph of intellect to recognize that this is not an either/or proposition; to insist that victimization and abuse are intertwined.
    But what about emotionally? Where is the triumph of feelings here? How do you actually relate to someone who has the emotional capacity of a stone wall? Who has been so damaged that he has no ability to acknowledge, to consider, to feel the enormity of what he has done to you?

    After my efforts to have a real conversation with Jimmy about our childhood, the correspondence subsided into what for me was mostly chatter – who would win the Super Bowl? who would win the presidential race? It also slowed way down, as there were longer intervals in my replies to his letters. The only point for me was to maintain some minimal contact – for the sake of what? I think I was trying to strike that precarious balance between compassion and self-protection; between loyalty to my child self and this ongoing effort to be an adult; between the undeniable reality that Jimmy is a critical part of my history and shaped way too much of who I am, and the undeniable reality that there was no meaningful dialogue happening between us.
    Then came a letter dated 6/7/06, which started, “Can you believe the last letter I got from you was 8/3/05 from Ogunquit, Maine?” Then, after a page of chatter, the letter ended, “Write soon, Love, Jimmy.”
    Reading this now, it strikes me mostly as pathetic: Jimmy almost pleading with me to stay in touch. But at the time I was furious. Ten months since my last letter; “write soon” – here was my abuser wanting me to take care of him. I felt like telling him, Jimmy you should be fucking grateful I write at all. But I took a while to gather myself. Then I sent a letter in which I told him, honestly, that it was not easy for me to write to him. “It’s hard to figure out,” I wrote, “how to relate to you when you have hurt me so badly. I know that I’m the only family you’ve got, and that it means a lot to you for me to be in touch. In a way it’s important to me too, because you’ve been an important person in my life. It just works better for me to have the letters be not too frequent. Once or twice a year is what feels right at this point.”
    I have only one more letter from Jimmy, dated 2/8/09. I think I must have misplaced one in between, because the gap is too long to make sense. He starts by saying, “It has been nearly 9 months since your last letter, which falls within our guidelines of once or twice a year.” I remember having a reaction to “our guidelines,” as if this was something we had mutually decided; but I also got that he was acknowledging and respecting my wishes. The rest of the letter was the usual fluff about politics and sports.
    I wrote back some time in that next year. I have not heard from Jimmy since then – by now for almost three years. I’ve thought about writing him again, but I haven’t.
    Why did Jimmy stop writing? Was my last letter not delivered? Or has a letter of his not gotten to me? (Neither of these seems likely.) Or did the intensity of my hurt, the disparity between his eagerness for contact and my reluctance, finally touch him in some way he couldn’t tolerate? That actually is my guess, but I don’t put a lot of energy into the speculation. It did occur to me recently to wonder if he had died (though you’d think I would be notified.) So I looked him up on the Michigan registry of sex offenders. There he was, still alive, still in prison.

    The sexual abuse of children is a problem of epidemic proportions. As many as 40% of all girls and 20% of all boys are sexually abused at some time in their childhood. According to the National Center for PTSD, strangers account for 10% of incidents of sexual abuse of children; 30% of perpetrators are family members; and 60% are otherwise known to the victims and their families. In their extensive review of the child sexual abuse literature, Karen Terry and Jennifer Tallon note, “All researchers acknowledge that those who are arrested represent only a fraction of all sexual offenders. Sexual crimes have the lowest rates of reporting for all crimes.” (“Child Sexual Abuse: A Review of the Literature,” p. 3.)
    Jimmy was a stranger to 1,200 boys; but when he abused me (grossly, though not sexually) he was my brother. Out of probably thousands of sexual offenses, he was arrested and convicted for two.

    My brother is sixty-eight and has now served about ten years of his 10-15 year sentence. In all likelihood Jimmy will get out of prison some time in the next five years.
    Then what? What will his life possibly be like once he is released?
    It’s hard to imagine anyone will hire him – an older man with a serious criminal record who’s a registered (and notorious) sex offender. So presumably he’ll live on Social Security. In public housing? Or in a rooming house? Will the Michigan criminal justice system help him with housing or other transitional services? It seems unlikely. And what will he do? Sit around? Watch sports on TV? What will his adjustment look like, back to “freedom” in the community? Probably not very pretty.
    Then there’s the question of whether he will come out of prison in any sense rehabilitated. Also hard to believe. I have no idea whether treatment has been part of his incarceration for the last ten years; he never mentioned it in his letters, and I never asked. He did portray himself as a good prisoner, steadily advancing to lower security levels, a helpful tutor in the prison’s school; and I have no reason to doubt that. But adjusting well to an institution is hardly the same as rehabilitation. And I can barely imagine Jimmy’s sexual activity in prison, which also of course was never mentioned in our correspondence. But we know that before prison he practiced both sadism and masochism for many years, and we know that child molesters are sexually targeted in prisons. Hardly the stuff of rehabilitation.
    So maybe, when he gets out, he won’t just sit around in a room watching sports on TV. Maybe, at 70 or 72, he’ll go back on the prowl.
    Underneath all these particulars is the sheer raw pathos of Jimmy’s life. Prison and its eventual aftermath are, of course, only installments in a lifelong unfolding of this unbearable reality, which has caused so much damage to so many people. Thich Nhat Hanh has written that when you do violence to others, you do violence to yourself; and Jimmy has embodied that truth about as graphically as I can imagine.
    When I was little, after he would abuse me and leave me sobbing on the floor, I would roll over onto my belly, face down on the fuzzy wool fibers of the rug, and I would fantasize about growing to be bigger than Jimmy and beating the shit out of him. I couldn’t yet come close to understanding that he had already hurt himself so much more than he had hurt me. I never did grow to be bigger than him; and by the time I was as big as I was going to get, I believed in nonviolence, and all I wanted to was to get away from Jimmy. Meanwhile he would become an adult who would pay others to tie him to trees and beat him. After his arrest, the press reported that a 26 year old man came forward and told the police that over a period of 11 years, Jimmy paid the man thousands of dollars to torture him.

    A story changes in the retelling. Even when the events themselves have not changed, the narrator inevitably has, producing subtle or larger changes in the point of view from which the narrative is retold. In this case, Jimmy’s story (which is also my story) continues to unfold. So not only am I a different story teller now than other times I chose to reveal my secret brother, but I’m also telling a larger and even more textured story. And of course this effort to re-break a silence is also a retelling of the story to myself.
    This has become, for me, a sad story. Which feels new. Not that sadness hasn’t been there all along; but I don’t remember it being prominent. After the well meaning efforts to see Jimmy as a victim; after being overwhelmed so many times in my life with intolerable feelings; after the struggles of the last decade to find some meaningful way to communicate with my brother; now what’s left – as we are both in our sixties and approaching the final stages of life, and the letters have played themselves out, and Jimmy bears the weight of all that violence, and I live with wounds that were inflicted more than half a century ago – what stands out now is a need to grieve.

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