It was amazing I was still alive at age 19. My dad had sent me to Europe in 1966 -- high school graduation present was a round trip ticket, a place to live and a job in Geneva, Switzerland. I worked as a typist in a bank, typing often in German, even though I didn’t know the language, but just copying these lo-o-o-o-ng words. But my office in Geneva was very cramped with three people crowded in it already and then all of a sudden here’s this political hire teenager from Los Angeles with no experience or skills at all taking up more space in their cramped office. I didn’t really need the money anyway so I quit the job to just travel around.
Kick around. I was actually mad at my parents for sending me to Europe because there was so much happening in L.A. and California and the whole country in 1966 with love-ins and free psychedelic drugs and bottles of amphetamine pills that fell off pharmaceutical trucks and pot everywhere. Ten dollars for an ounce of pot and it was good pot that you rolled in joints and it smoked smooth, usually imported from Mexico or points south.
I was mad at my parents for picking me up out of the middle of all that and sending me to Europe but today I’m grateful, because when I got back to suburban L.A. a year later my friends who’d been passing joints with me when I left were now passing needles full of speed and heroin. It happened fast and my parents got me out of there at a good time.
I digress. I should list. The reason it’s amazing I was still alive at age 19 was, well one, in Europe, I met these American GI AWOL guys and we decided to go to Paris to trip around. I met them through my sister who also lived in Geneva -- this is Patricia, the sister who was also raped by Father Horne from age five to age eight before he dumped her for me. Her response to the incident was to freeze up sexually for years, remaining staunchly a virgin until age 21, amazing even in the 1960s. However, by the time Trish was back from Europe and living in San Francisco a few years later she got deep in the sex industry, which thrives always in that city and still today Trish parties with the Strippers and Hookers Ball folks and lives in Haight Ashbury near Golden Gate park and is a very unusual person even for San Francisco. Trish plays into this story in many strange ways, but someone else will have to find her and interview her to get her side. She and I do not speak.
So I rode with the two American guys who were AWOL from the Vietnam war in their VW van across the Swiss then French countryside until we got to Paris. Then I dumped them. I was on a mission and it did not include them. I had to be anonymous.
Here is another place where the PTSD induced compulsion did weird things in my life. These cute, cool, my age American guys wanted to party with me in Paris and I said, sure, I’ll be here at this hotel where you're dropping me off, see you in the morning. They watched as I walked into the hotel and went up to the desk. They drove away and I peaked out and when they left, I scurried out of the hotel. I dragged with me this about 10-15 pound suitcase, because understand I was 17 years old from L.A. and I had to have my clothes. All my clothes were in this huge white suitcase and I lugged it for many, many blocks until I found another hotel so I would be totally anonymous and alone in the middle of Paris.
I was on auto-pilot, synchronicity time. It’s hard to explain but it is part of the story, part of the compulsion placed in me by the priest when I was five, and how it played out. I would just move along almost in a trance knowing I was doing something crazy and dangerous but also knowing there was some reason, some purpose, and I had to keep following my instinct because there was something I had to do. And it had something to do with sex and God.
I had one phone number, Patricia’s friend Philippe, who I phoned one time from a payphone. He was a Brit living in Paris and Pat had said he probably would have some acid. (I’d been amazed that you couldn’t find acid in Geneva where the Sandoz Laboratories had developed the drug.)
I wanted to buy LSD because I had already read and re-read Timothy Leary’s Book of Psychedelic Prayers and other writings and I was convinced that mankind was going to go to a higher plane and it was connected to the deep spiritual religious practices of the ancient book of the dead as Leary translated it. So all my LSD trips were in pursuit of some kind of religious thing.
I figured out how to make the pay phone in Paris work and called Philippe and said “Hi I’m Patricia’s sister and she said you might have some LSD that I could buy?”
He flipped out and got so paranoid and swore at me never to call there again. So now I was totally on my own in Paris and may have done that on purpose, as I’m not really that dumb. I was on autopilot, on a Mission from God, driven by a compulsion that came deep inside me and at age 17 I hadn’t quite identified it yet.
Next day after a scary bath in the coed bathroom that everybody on the floor shared where there was pubic hair in the tub, ah the French, I took off to stroll the Left Bank. I sat in cafes drinking wine, wow no age limit, I walked around up and down streets. It was 1966 so Paris was still very much just Paris then. Down one side street I found a bookstore and wandered in, and two young men wandered in close after me. They were my age, my generation almost, a little older, but the hair was long and they wore jeans.
Now remember it was 1966 and in California if someone had long hair and jeans you automatically identified them as a fellow traveler in the counter culture. I was 17 and thought things would be the same in Paris so I may even have been the one who struck up a conversation with them. I know I asked if they knew where to score some LSD and they pretended to know what that was but didn't know where to get some, but we could get some lalalalala, don’t remember the name of it, a drug they said was like LSD and I said, great let’s go.
Somehow in my high school French and their enthusiasm as they explained their house was out in the suburbs I agreed to go to the hotel and get my stuff and take it with us. We rode the train out of Paris to their house, this big empty house in a town up the train line. We walked about a block from the train to this huge brick house surrounded by a 10 foot brick fence. Inside the gate were trees and gardens before you got to the front door.
I was a 17 year old girl hooked up and ready to party. I was no virgin. I was a 17 year old Southern California natural blond tanned girl with a dancer’s anorexic body but Polish curves -- I was hot and probably some kind of fantasy come true for these French guys, who already thought all American women were whores but a girl from Southern California! But I was unaware of that. I was just natural in a sundress and sandals and little else sitting in this kitchen outside Paris drinking wine and eating something home cooked with these two French guys and then taking this drug. . .
It was not anything at all like LSD. In fact I just fell asleep. When I woke up I was locked in a bedroom upstairs, groggy, they came in and fucked me over and over and then gave me more of the drug and that went on for a few days, I really don’t know how long. They came after me in the bathtub, they made me take the drug when I didn’t want it. The sex the first night may have been consensual but after a few days of being locked in the upstairs bedroom except when I was let out to take a bath and then they’d be in there with me -- it was beginning to be a bad experience. I don't think I even thought of the word rape. I was groggy.
I just wished they’d quit fucking me, as it was hurting.
Finally one day strangely my door wasn’t locked so I was able to come to the tof the stairs, then tiptoe down a few steps, and listen to the two French guys having this animated conversation with two men with what seemed to be Arab accents. I peaked and the two new men were dark, wearing Arab robes. The French guys were doing their Parisian French which was really hard for me to follow but I got it that they were describing me, how it felt to touch my skin, the Skin! They kept repeating it, “le peau le teint.” And they talked about money. I shivered there on the stairs hoping they didn’t hear me, realizing “They’re going to sell me to the Arabs.”
So I freaked. Got to get outta here. I listened longer, understood little more but enough to know the deal was done and I was going to Saudi Arabia in a few hours. Then they all left, without even checking on me, which was weird. Thinking back now I realize maybe they’d been up in the bedroom earlier while I was drugged and knocked out looking at me and didn't realize they hadn’t locked the door when they left, then didn't want to make the Arab guys wait, so the French guys left without checking. Anyway, my door was unlocked, and I had to get out of that house now.
I still had my big white suitcase and I still had to take all of my stuff with me. I lugged the suitcase down the stairs. Every window on the ground floor was nailed shut. I ran to the kitchen and all the doors of course were locked, except one, the door that led to the basement. So I dragged the huge white suitcase behind me down the narrow basement staircase in that old French country house.
In the basement there was one small window just at ground level near the high ceiling. Beneath the window were these huge laundry basins like for washing sheets by hand a century ago. I could climb up these sinks and then crawl through the window. It was a tiny opening. I pulled myself through and then went to pull the suitcase through and get us to freedom. But the suitcase was too large. Remember I was a 17 year old girl from L.A. and I wasn’t going to leave behind all my clothes for these French freaks to keep so I pulled and pulled and pulled and the suitcase was just plain larger than the window.
Then there was a BLLLLLLNNNNNNGGGG sound. It came with the wind through the trees. There are even angelic voices in the moment as I remember it today. Whatever happened the suitcase came through the window. The solid 1960s pre-plastic quality suitcase came through the old window which was surrounded by brick wall surrounded, and I was able to get out of there. I had to climb a tree and throw the suitcase over the fence then jump down myself. I scrambled in the direction I remembered the train station to be and got out of there before the French guys came back with the Arabs and probably would have sold me into some kind of white slavery and I wouldn't have lived a lot more years.
Later in life I wondered if because I’d been raped by a priest at age five and had thus gone out into the world with a shitload of confusion and sexual compulsions, always thinking I was doing some holy thing when I was having sex so in no way sinning, just being this fantasy female for men like I was supposed to be.
God, or whatever is in charge of this planet, looked down at me at age five being raped by that priest in the rectory of a Catholic Church and realized, this girl is going to have a lot of trouble in life. So he dispatched a couple of extra angels, or whatever you call them, down to watch over me my whole life. And that's how I got out of that situation, how the suitcase came through the brick-surrounded window so I could get away, and also so many other situations later in life, but this story, the “time I almost got sold to the Arabs as a sex slave at age 17” story, is the main reason I say it’s a miracle I made it to age 19.
There was a man at the train station that day when I escaped. I must have looked pretty disheveled, drugged, scared, shaking, but trying to act cool. The older guy sat next to me and I didn’t tell him at all what happened. He asked if I needed help and I asked something like how can I find a hotel. He was amazed I had money on me, and stopped reaching for his wallet. He said, well then go to the Hilton, hmm, the Paris Hilton, and I thought yeah good idea.
I went downtown Paris checked into the Hilton paid with a couple of my checks, my parents had sent me with a wad of American Express checks, which for some reason the Parisian men had not taken, the checks were still there in the suitcase. I was raised in benevolent neglect. It felt so good to feel the American-ness of the Paris Hilton, and as I walked through the lobby I stopped to get a magazine. About all there was in English was an edition of Playboy. I went to my room and was finally safe and free, took a private bath and luxuriated in the bed with room service for a couple of nights, recovering from the “trauma” as we’d call it today, alone at age 17, achy from several days of involuntary sex.
I found nurturing and comfort in the pages of Playboy Magazine that night.
-----------------------
TEENAGE YEARS
By age 19 I had my own apartment. I paid 20 dollars a month for the bottom half of a duplex in Echo Park, L.A. That was in February 1968 and by June I’d moved to Leland Way near Sunset and Vine and changed my name to Jesica Leland. I often say I was not raised by parents but by Los Angeles. So naming myself for my stage name after my street was appropriate.
This chapter is supposed to be about my high school years, teenage years. Let me resort again to a list to get through it because this period of life can be written pretty much like that, this happened, then this happened, and I have to get through this story.
By age seven I was obese, one of those kids your heart goes out to because they sweat more and can move less and especially today we know that overeating like that is a sign of sexual trauma in children. I do remember the moment I decided to get fat. My atheist mom was giving me a bath around age 7 and noticed I’d put on a few pounds. She said, “Oh Kathy, none of the boys are going to want to be with you if you get fat like that.”
I proceeded to eat my way all the way to having to shop at Lane Bryant’s store for fat girls and stayed obese all the way until age 13 when I reached puberty. Then I suddenly remembered how much fun it had been to be sexually aroused. But by then the actual experiences with Father Horne were totally ingrained, deep inside. However the sexual monster was coming to the surface.
I lost the weight at age 13 and as it happened, we had moved to New York for about a year. So I got to come back to San Marino, California, thin. I left the fat dumpy girl and came back slim and slinky. Well I still had those Polish curves. The boys before I went to New York would tease me and calling me “Tubby-Ebolino” because of my last name which is sort of like Ebolino. They would chant “Tubby Ebolino is a fat tangerine-o” and I’d cry and keep eating and eating not understanding why.
In New York I went on Metrecal and came back a year later to the same junior high school a size six and those same boys were now panting after me. Also I was now accepted with the more popular girls. We all sat near each other at an assembly one afternoon soon after I returned to the junior high school. The boys were sitting in front of us, and I was sitting with a row of the popular girls. I got so excited.
I wore a straight skirt that day, a little short, and a Jackie Kennedy style short-trim jacket and I looked fabulous, just fabulous and was so happy to be with the popular girls and the popular boys in the row in front of me. Especially the boys in the row in front of me.
In fact I had to get the boys’ attention. So I crouched down in my chair, lower and lower so my legs came off the seat, and let the skirt slide and slide up my legs as I spread them apart. Of course the boys in the row in front started to pay attention, so I continued to slide down in the seat and spread my legs wider and wider and like always with these things never being able to do enough so going wider and maybe gyrating a little.
Well the junior high school boys were loving it but my new friends the junior high school girls were not. They were looking at me and at each other with shock and I didn’t care - what did they know - I had all these boys looking at me so I kept it up for a while.
The rest of my time through high school I ran with the sluts.
When it came to losing my virginity I was very clinical about it. I had this boyfriend Animal, a drummer in a rock band, and he wouldn't do it with me because I was still a virgin. So I went over to one of his friend’s house, just showed up there one afternoon ditching high school, and seduced him very aggressively there in his little Pasadena bungalow. He was amazed after it was over saying, wow, usually virgin girls aren’t so aggressive, but I wasn’t even listening. I was packing up to go over and be with Animal 'cause now I wasn’t a virgin any more.
And now I was age 19 living in Echo Park in a hovel of an apartment that rented for 20 dollars a month. Great place, with about a thousand steps in the front yard that led right down to Echo Park Boulevard, all overgrown and the lake and the park across the street, for 20 dollars a month, imagine that.
I began my career as an actress.
To be continued. . .
POST SCRIPT:
From the Snapnetwork.org public discussion group February 2006
-->
SNAP Survivors' Network
The Pope, The Vatican, the Power at the Top
Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
Author
cityofangels1
Registered MemberPosts: 8(2/28/06 10:18 am)Reply Edit
Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
One thing that is part of my experience and that plagues me and that permanently affected my personality is:My predator was also the priest who guided me into first communion. So he also taught me how to go to confession. He taught me to talk dirty to him in the confessional, and apparently over a time I got very good at it. Then we moved from Illinois to California and the new priest at my new church was so shocked when I went to confession that he ran out of the room with his eyes popping out of his head and pointed at me pointed at me pointed at me...So I have this rich filthy fantasy life in my head that was planted there by a holy priest in a holy sacrament in this oh so holy church that I don't understand is still in business but that is a different story.I wonder if other people have experienced abuse at this level, particularly in the confessional, and isn't this an entire new area to "approach" the church in that it is direct "Spritual Abuse"? Perhaps we need a whole new kind of class action lawsuit.Still screwed up in L.A.Kay
Reply from S:
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
Kay,I don't have that experience, but I'm not surprised at all.The only curious thing that happened to me in confession was when another priest who was stationed in our parish said to me, "If someone makes you do something and you don't know if its a sinner, then you haven't sinned"I had no idea why he said that to me, because I was sure he didn't know what was going on. As I matured I realized there was no other explanation.But, I too have residual effects from the abuse. It may not be a rich filthy fantasy world, but it is something!Peace, S---
Reply from sa
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
kay,my abuse consisted the sacrement of confession and at some points I was told things to say...I believe the degradation and humiliation and spiritual aspect of this is beyond words sometimes....there is a great book that I have found to be extremely rewarding in my recovery, by Wendy Maltz called Healing the Sexual Journey....SA
****"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action,engagement and remembering."-Judy Herman****
Reply from RB
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
Perhaps no other form of abuse cuts as deep as abuse connected with Confession. In Confession, we were supposed to be vulnerable. To have either the venue itself or the contents of your Confession used as weapons of abuse leaves one completely lacking in any confidence in church authority to seek one's spiritual interests. It's quite one thing when an authority figure uses those under his charge; but to do so in the context of the "Holy" leaves one lacking in any trust whatsoever.The Baltimore Catechism used to talk about the unpardonable "Sin against the Holy Spirit": a condition wherein the soul becomes so hardened that even the mention of the things of God repel the soul, making reconciliation with God chronically impossible. Such is the context in which many wounded souls simply walk away from God in horror.
Reply from SE
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
What that famous Vatican document commanding that people keep sexual abuse secret under pain of excommunication, at http://www.bishop-accountability.org/resources/resource-files/churchdocs/CrimenEnglish.pdf, is really about, is "solicitation" during confession. That document begins, "The crime of solicitation takes place when a priest tempts a penitent, whoever that person is, either in the act of sacramental confession, whether before or immediately afterwards, whether on the occasion or the pretext of confession, whether even outside the times for confession in the confessional or [in a place] other than that usually designated for the hearing of confessions or [in a place] chosen for the simulated purpose of hearing a confession." The confessional is clearly is a place where abuse would be particularly abusive. Sure, this document talks about some sexual abuse which wouldn't involve the confessional. This mentions sex "with brute animals (bestiality)," and I doubt that what the writers had in mind was that during a confession, the priest would arrange with the parishioner that he bring his big dog to the rectory soon. Yet that document still clearly stresses the opportunities for abuse that the confessional would give.
Reply from GB:
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
If memory serves, the notorious Shanley used the confessional as the locus of abuse on at least oneoccasion with the man he was finally convicted ofabusing as a boy.
Reply from MS
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
Quote:
Perhaps no other form of abuse cuts as deep as abuse connected with Confession.
I am not Catholic, and I am very ignorant of all aspects of the religion. I take it that at this is supposed to be Holy time and that as a Catholic, your priest is an instrumental, central, integral part of you connection to God, and the forgiveness of your sins. And that the priest represents the Lord, and can be trusted completely. If that is close to the way it is, and the child is old enough to appreciate these facts at the time they are molested, it is indeed an exponential aggrivation of what is already an abominable sin.I thought I could trust my perp because even though he told me he was the janitor, and the priest at his church trusted him enough to let him live there. ( he was the priest btw ) So he must be tight with God. I was 16, I know that many Catholics were much younger when they were molested.My heart just goes out to anyone who was molested period, let alone by clergy, let alone as a child. For it to be aggrivated by the crime being commited during a holy ritual.....As a non Catholic MG, your post has illuminated for me how this can impact Catholic child to even a greater degree. I'm not comparing here, saying somebodys experience was any worse or than anyone elses or anything. I'm just sorry it happened to you and so many others this way.
Reply from me:
cityofangels1
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
Yes!!! Now I know why I come here to message boards. AZ wrote: "I take it that .. a priest is an instrumental, central, integral part of your connection to God, and the forgiveness of your sins. ... it (Confessional abuse) is indeed an exponential aggravation of what is already an abominable sin."YES !!And that wasn't all Father Horne did to me, just a part.In the confessional Father Horne (or as I like to call him Father Horne-y) did something more, weird, he taught me to talk dirty to him. I guess he taught me his own sexual fantasies and coached me so I knew how to repeat them back to him. Then in his little enclosed room and me in another enclosed room next to him, he'd listen as I talked. And to me I was still going to Confession because to be honest once the priest shared his fantasies with me they became my fantasies too, so I confessed them as "impure thoughts" and you can see how this is self perpetuating.And how seamless is the stream from sex crime to spiritual crime, if there even is a category in law for spiritual crime.If there isn't there should be.It would take a team of professionals to figure out how many ways this abuse of the Sacrament of Confession harmed me. The point is the church needs to acknowledge this can happen and prevent it from happening even if it means opening up those little confessional rooms or in some other way getting rid of secrecy. Secrecy may give us privacy but it also breeds corruption and deceipt.
Kay In LA
PS I have this fantasy that representatives in the Vatican are reading this message board, monitoring it, and maybe we can get to them this way.....?????
Reply from S
Re: Sacrament Abuse as in the Confessional
I'm not sure if Rome reads this, but I know it is read by clergy and the hierarchy in the Worcester Diocese.It stands to reason that if they read it, so do others.It also stands to reason that the information is passed along.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Pedophile Priest Adopts Rural Family
In 15 years of trying to write this story inevitably it turns into a listing: first this happened then this happened then this happened. That’s in part because there is so much that happens in the story, but it’s also due to how difficult I’m finding it is to write your own story.
So here is a short list of what is going to be in the story:
1930s Chicago ambitious law student works at Hardings Restaurant in the Loop where he meets the former art student now waitress thanks to the Depression who becomes his wife. He’s an ardent Catholic, her family are atheist activists from Poland, but she promises to raise the kids in the Catholic church, anything to land this catch. A law student husband was a big accomplishment for a girl in 1930s Chicago.
1949, they now have three children, three girls age 11, six, and a newborn, me, Kathryn. Family moves from Chicago to the rural area along Route 20 on the way to Elgin. The young criminal lawyer invests in 20 acres of farmland surrounded by woods. The house on the land may have been a mansion. It was huge. It had a ballroom and a tower. It was in the woods between Bartlett and the country club. We saw sheep on the other side of our fence.
Family became active in the new little Catholic Church in Bartlett, where Father Thomas Berry Horne, the pastor who came with the new church from Chicago singled them out quickly as friends. Dad became an usher, mom played the organ during Mass, and priest made visits to the family home several times a week. Dad traveled a lot for work, mom was bored and alone on 20 acres with a newborn and two older girls.
Father Horne was soon diddling the mom and the six year old. Eleven year old was painfully humiliated at being ignored by the pedophile priest and kept running away from home, for reasons no one understood. Mom carried on shamefully with the priest, but it was rural Illinois cloistered in wealth, plus she was an atheist at heart, and grew up in the Roaring Twenties.
Father Horne lost interest in Patsy, as she grew older and by the time she was 10, he had dumped the plumping awkward little girl in favor of Kathy who had just turned five.
Kathy was an enthusiastic participant with the pedophile priest. Out there on the ground in the woods he lit fires in her with the cloudy Illinois sunshine in the trees behind him. After Father Horne’s visits Kathy would run around the house panting with excitement, out of control energy. On other occasions when mom was practicing her organ music for the upcoming Sunday Mass, little Kathy would go off to the rectory behind the church with Father Horne, playing with him on his little mattress on the floor in his room. There was wine. There was some strange thing we smoked in a pipe. Kathy could hear her mother’s organ music coming from the church, the discordant clang of her hitting the wrong keys as she practiced a Mozart sonata.
My family was a pedophile priest’s dream come true: wealth, reverent Catholic dad who was never home, atheist mom who was bored and neglected her kids, plus we weren’t just rural we were out in the woods. But then we upset his applecart so to speak. My dad ever the real estate investor sold the house in the woods and we built a beautiful new home from scratch, right in the town of Bartlett (now Village of Bartlett in the middle of a mass of suburbs, but then a sleepy town about 8 square blocks with a train station and. . .)
The brand new house was a bike ride away from the church and soon little Kathy was showing up at all times of day, panting with excitement as she knocked on the rectory door, chasing around looking for Father Horne because she wanted to do it some more. Father Horne would be embarrassed when she’d track him down. A couple times he acted like they hardly knew each other. Kathy was getting confused.
But ever enthused about all the things the pedophile priest had showed her, Kathy started to tell it to the world. She’d babble about sexy things she did with Father Horne at the dinner table embarrassing her parents and their guests. She talked about it at school, at church. One time she even took a few kids from the neighborhood in Bartlett up to a tree house where she led them in self-touching techniques, showed them all how to masturbate, not even knowing that’s what it was called. She had a tree house full of boys and girls touching themselves all just because she was so excited about what the priest had shown her and she wanted to share it with all her friends so they could feel all that excitement too.
People were starting to talk.
So one day Kathy and her dad piled into the 1953 Plymouth, an exciting day, Kathy got to go all the way to Chicago with her dad and nobody else. They went to a cathedral like building. Kathy was taken into a big dark room with large office furniture, high ceilings, and wall-length windows, but it was dark -- Chicago skies. Out of the dark came the face of a man, the bishop they called him, and he looked down at the little girl and spoke with a brogue. “You’ve been doing a great deal of talking about you and Father Horne haven’t you, my dear?” Kathy nodded. Cardinal Stritch then put his face down very close to hers and said in a very stern voice but it still lilted in an almost melodic way. “Sometimes even if something is true, you shouldn't repeat it to anybody. Sometimes it’s better not to tell the truth, to tell a small lie, if the small lie helps to protect a greater good.” Kathy knew what he was talking about and she kept her mouth shut. She never mentioned what the priest did to her again, for 40 years.
-----
In 1979, 25 years later, little Kathy was now Kay and living in Texas. One thing led to another and she had a degree in Journalism from UT Austin and landed the job of a lifetime. NASA created a position for her in the public affairs office at LBJ space center in Houston. Kay was sharp. She handled news media queries and wrote press releases for the astronauts and the space shuttle.
A couple reporters were grilling her one day, saying, come on, you know there’s a lot of danger with the tiles the way they are now on the shuttle. Don’t they need to be redesigned? Kay, in her early 30s now, was very adept at adopting personae, and now she turned, stared the reporter straight in the eye, and adopted the persona of Cardinal Stritch in that Chicago archdiocese office in 1955. She took on the expression of the cardinal’s face, even the melodic lilt of his voice, as she affirmed to the reporter, “There’s not a problem with the space shuttle tiles any more. Those stories of how a small hole could cause the whole shuttle to burn up on re-entry are totally exaggerated.” She was a 30 year old dressed for success young upstart sharp chick to the reporter, but inside her head she saw herself totally as Cardinal Stritch.
That job did not last three years. Once stories started to get back to her bosses about the way she pursued astronauts at parties and the pilot types and flight engineers who stayed around them, NASA officials probably all the way to Washington were saying get her out of there. She pursued them with a compulsion she could not understand. They were like men connected to God. . .
Another reason she couldn’t keep the job at NASA was the 15 page security form they gave her to fill out. But see, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Little Kathy and Dad came home from their day trip to Chicago and the family suddenly had even more money than it had before. Plus dad had a new job in corporate law so we had to move to California. The brand new beautiful house in Bartlett went up for sale and we drove out Highway 66 and bought a home in San Marino, south of Pasadena. We just all of a sudden had so much more money but no one talked a lot about where it came from or why my dad changed his job so quickly.
Somewhere along the way we stopped going to church at all.
To be continued. . .
So here is a short list of what is going to be in the story:
1930s Chicago ambitious law student works at Hardings Restaurant in the Loop where he meets the former art student now waitress thanks to the Depression who becomes his wife. He’s an ardent Catholic, her family are atheist activists from Poland, but she promises to raise the kids in the Catholic church, anything to land this catch. A law student husband was a big accomplishment for a girl in 1930s Chicago.
1949, they now have three children, three girls age 11, six, and a newborn, me, Kathryn. Family moves from Chicago to the rural area along Route 20 on the way to Elgin. The young criminal lawyer invests in 20 acres of farmland surrounded by woods. The house on the land may have been a mansion. It was huge. It had a ballroom and a tower. It was in the woods between Bartlett and the country club. We saw sheep on the other side of our fence.
Family became active in the new little Catholic Church in Bartlett, where Father Thomas Berry Horne, the pastor who came with the new church from Chicago singled them out quickly as friends. Dad became an usher, mom played the organ during Mass, and priest made visits to the family home several times a week. Dad traveled a lot for work, mom was bored and alone on 20 acres with a newborn and two older girls.
Father Horne was soon diddling the mom and the six year old. Eleven year old was painfully humiliated at being ignored by the pedophile priest and kept running away from home, for reasons no one understood. Mom carried on shamefully with the priest, but it was rural Illinois cloistered in wealth, plus she was an atheist at heart, and grew up in the Roaring Twenties.
Father Horne lost interest in Patsy, as she grew older and by the time she was 10, he had dumped the plumping awkward little girl in favor of Kathy who had just turned five.
Kathy was an enthusiastic participant with the pedophile priest. Out there on the ground in the woods he lit fires in her with the cloudy Illinois sunshine in the trees behind him. After Father Horne’s visits Kathy would run around the house panting with excitement, out of control energy. On other occasions when mom was practicing her organ music for the upcoming Sunday Mass, little Kathy would go off to the rectory behind the church with Father Horne, playing with him on his little mattress on the floor in his room. There was wine. There was some strange thing we smoked in a pipe. Kathy could hear her mother’s organ music coming from the church, the discordant clang of her hitting the wrong keys as she practiced a Mozart sonata.
My family was a pedophile priest’s dream come true: wealth, reverent Catholic dad who was never home, atheist mom who was bored and neglected her kids, plus we weren’t just rural we were out in the woods. But then we upset his applecart so to speak. My dad ever the real estate investor sold the house in the woods and we built a beautiful new home from scratch, right in the town of Bartlett (now Village of Bartlett in the middle of a mass of suburbs, but then a sleepy town about 8 square blocks with a train station and. . .)
The brand new house was a bike ride away from the church and soon little Kathy was showing up at all times of day, panting with excitement as she knocked on the rectory door, chasing around looking for Father Horne because she wanted to do it some more. Father Horne would be embarrassed when she’d track him down. A couple times he acted like they hardly knew each other. Kathy was getting confused.
But ever enthused about all the things the pedophile priest had showed her, Kathy started to tell it to the world. She’d babble about sexy things she did with Father Horne at the dinner table embarrassing her parents and their guests. She talked about it at school, at church. One time she even took a few kids from the neighborhood in Bartlett up to a tree house where she led them in self-touching techniques, showed them all how to masturbate, not even knowing that’s what it was called. She had a tree house full of boys and girls touching themselves all just because she was so excited about what the priest had shown her and she wanted to share it with all her friends so they could feel all that excitement too.
People were starting to talk.
So one day Kathy and her dad piled into the 1953 Plymouth, an exciting day, Kathy got to go all the way to Chicago with her dad and nobody else. They went to a cathedral like building. Kathy was taken into a big dark room with large office furniture, high ceilings, and wall-length windows, but it was dark -- Chicago skies. Out of the dark came the face of a man, the bishop they called him, and he looked down at the little girl and spoke with a brogue. “You’ve been doing a great deal of talking about you and Father Horne haven’t you, my dear?” Kathy nodded. Cardinal Stritch then put his face down very close to hers and said in a very stern voice but it still lilted in an almost melodic way. “Sometimes even if something is true, you shouldn't repeat it to anybody. Sometimes it’s better not to tell the truth, to tell a small lie, if the small lie helps to protect a greater good.” Kathy knew what he was talking about and she kept her mouth shut. She never mentioned what the priest did to her again, for 40 years.
-----
In 1979, 25 years later, little Kathy was now Kay and living in Texas. One thing led to another and she had a degree in Journalism from UT Austin and landed the job of a lifetime. NASA created a position for her in the public affairs office at LBJ space center in Houston. Kay was sharp. She handled news media queries and wrote press releases for the astronauts and the space shuttle.
A couple reporters were grilling her one day, saying, come on, you know there’s a lot of danger with the tiles the way they are now on the shuttle. Don’t they need to be redesigned? Kay, in her early 30s now, was very adept at adopting personae, and now she turned, stared the reporter straight in the eye, and adopted the persona of Cardinal Stritch in that Chicago archdiocese office in 1955. She took on the expression of the cardinal’s face, even the melodic lilt of his voice, as she affirmed to the reporter, “There’s not a problem with the space shuttle tiles any more. Those stories of how a small hole could cause the whole shuttle to burn up on re-entry are totally exaggerated.” She was a 30 year old dressed for success young upstart sharp chick to the reporter, but inside her head she saw herself totally as Cardinal Stritch.
That job did not last three years. Once stories started to get back to her bosses about the way she pursued astronauts at parties and the pilot types and flight engineers who stayed around them, NASA officials probably all the way to Washington were saying get her out of there. She pursued them with a compulsion she could not understand. They were like men connected to God. . .
Another reason she couldn’t keep the job at NASA was the 15 page security form they gave her to fill out. But see, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Little Kathy and Dad came home from their day trip to Chicago and the family suddenly had even more money than it had before. Plus dad had a new job in corporate law so we had to move to California. The brand new beautiful house in Bartlett went up for sale and we drove out Highway 66 and bought a home in San Marino, south of Pasadena. We just all of a sudden had so much more money but no one talked a lot about where it came from or why my dad changed his job so quickly.
Somewhere along the way we stopped going to church at all.
To be continued. . .
Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968
There in the little one room apartment on Leland Way Jesica lay on her mattress, low enough to have Daily Variety spread out on the floor next to the phone, on the floor. Just to the left was a stucco balcony where the breeze blew in through from the parking lot next door. Every night people arrived to go see HAIR! at the Aquarius theater which is what the parking lot is for, but in the day it was a quiet back street, not a lot of sound but for the wind through the palm trees and construction at Sunset and Vine half block away with one of the first high rises in Hollywood going up.
An ad for Miss Soul Queen contestants ran in Variety classifieds. The ad stood out because it was two columns with a big border. In these same columns were ads for Pretty Girl International modeling agency, whose whispered italic words let you know here is where you get the new porn jobs that were showing up in town. Out of work actors were simulating sex in movies for 50 to 100 dollars a day. The movies were being shot in 35 mm and showing up in real movie theaters.
Jesica read the Pretty Girl International ads and passed for now. But she phoned in and signed up as a contestant for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.
Then taking the bus into a south L.A. neighborhood which was unfamiliar, Jesica showed up in the Watts theater with her little suitcase. She packed an “evening gown” and a bathing suit, as the ad had requested, both purchased hastily at second hand stores. She was the only white person in the building and probably for several blocks around, but
Here is where the mania was showing up even early in her life. Here is where the PTSD driven behavior was already showing up in her life.
She plowed right on in to the audition this blond upper-middle class white girl, totally out of place, totally in the wrong place, she still plowed on through as through driven by some invisible force. Her eyes would light on the obvious weirdness of the scene, like being in the dressing room with all these hot sexy black women as they changed into their very, very brief bikinis. Jesica unpacked her little suitcase and put on her one-piece bathing suit. It was a beauty contest, right, so Jesica, totally on her own in Hollywood, no agent or close relative or friend to bounce the idea off of, just Jesica responding to an ad in classifieds of Variety, thought she needed a one-piece bathing suit to be in a beauty contest.
Probably as she tried on the bathing suit in a Goodwill store she imagined herself on a runway like for Miss America in Atlantic City. Only this was Miss Soul Queen in L.A. in 1968 just north of Inglewood.
When Jesica arrived at the old theater all she saw were the fiery ends of cigars and other things being smoked in the front seats of the audience. The lights were half-lit so the audience was half-lit.
A dark man with a 40s style Harlem hat held his cigar halfway to his mouth, the mouth was half open in astonishment, looking at Jesica. He and the other producers of the talent and beauty competetion all stopped with their mouths hanging open, staring at the blond Jesica arriving in the middle of the ghetto to compete for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.
“What the hell makes you think you can win the Miss Soul Queen contest?” one asked.
Jesica looked into the dark and she carried all the truth of Martin Luther King and the 1950s civil rights marches she’d watched as a kid on the news in her gait as she walked across the stage. Her passion matched Joan of Arc standing at the foot of her pyre as, blond hippie hair frizzing and forming a hazy halo around her head in the smoky theater, she took center stage and stated, “Soul isn’t about the color of your skin, it’s about a passion that comes from inside.”
They still stared.
She continued, “I’m going to sing, Since I Fell For You.”
One of the more soulful producers of the Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968 beauty contest dropped a big ash from his cigar and said, “You’re going to stand up there like Lenny Welch and sing Since I Fell For You?”
Mm-hmm, Jesica said because she wasn’t really sure who the singer was, she just channeled the song, she’d been singing it in auditions now for a few months.
The very bemused and skeptical black guy, said “You going to get up here in a theater full of black people here in South L.A. and sing Since I Fell For You?” or something to that effect.
Jesica nodded. And she did it. The night of the beauty contest she ignored all the guffaws and outright laughing out loud that happened as she walked across the stage in her one piece bathing suit. Then in her second hand store “evening gown” she sang the hell out of the song.
She stood at the microphone under a spotlight with some accompaniment, I think there was a small band there, with her frizzy hippie style untrimmed halo of hair and a full theater of black people from South L.A. watching her and she sang Since I Fell For You with soul and passion.
At first the guffaws and shouts were louder than her voice, but slowly the audience quieted down, made little breath “huh?” sounds, then got quiet. Jesica was really into the song, moreso than usual, I mean this was a Soul Queen contest, so she really poured her heart into it. Even the skeptical producers, now the judges, had their cigars halfway to their wide open stunned mouths as she continued to sing the song.
See Jesica really had a lot of talent, especially as a singer. No training, little advice even, she just opened up and took on the persona of singers she’d seen before, and poured it out. Once in about fourth grade she’d stopped the talent show at her grade school standing there snapping her fingers singing “Fever” a capella as in with no accompaniment, just her snapping fingers. Jesica even made her voice sound exactly like Peggy Lee’s on that occasion.
This time she was just channeling herself, her own heartfelt pain from all the weird things she’d already experienced in her 20 years of life, all the confusion and passion and aroused sexuality confused with spirituality and the resulting mistreatment that she’d lived through since age five -- now she could open her mouth and sound like Billie Holiday on one of her saddest but most poignant songs. But it was Jesica’s own voice, her own soul.
She won the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent competition.
She put it on her resume.
I was standing on the corner of Sunset and Vine last week running to make a metro transfer on the way to the medical marijuana dispensary when I looked up and realized I was just a block away from 6235 Leland Way where Jesica lived in 1968 - 1969. The little apartment building is long gone, torn down as the parking lot expanded. The Aquarius Theater, which itself was the old Moulin Rouge, is now Nickelodeon Studios. The first high rise ever built in Hollywood has recently been torn down and they’re about to finish building the new one.
I stood there coming unstuck in time. Right there at Sunset and Vine Jesica, ever resourceful, often stood on the corner selling L.A. Free Press, back in 1968. She would go into Silverlake and pick up a stack of papers for 11 cents each and then sell them on the corner for 25 cents. Sometimes a redneck would drive by and holler something like, “If it’s free then why does it cost 25 cents?” Jesica much like Joan of Arc here again would say, “Because freedom isn’t only about money.”
I stood there and looked up at the new high rise wondering how it’s any different from the one they tore down and remembered what happened to Jesica after winning the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent prize. She got a little trophy and an appointment to meet with a music producer in that very same office building when it first opened. But instead of a recording contract the fat black man had gotten Jesica to sit on his lap. She was so naïve that at first she did sit on his lap and his boner was really big and hard and poked up through his pants. She jumped -- gasped and was across the room then running down the hall and out of the building.
See Jesica would screw just about anybody in those days. In 1969 she made a New Years Resolution to have sex with 69 men in '69. By June she'd lost count but gone way past that number. It was a compulsion placed in her at age five when a deviant priest taught her to talk dirty in confession and showed her how to get aroused, then turnred her out into the world like that -- aroused since age five. . . .
Yeah I would screw just about anybody in those days but I wasn’t going to screw for a job. That wouldn’t be holy.
Continued. . .
There in the little one room apartment on Leland Way Jesica lay on her mattress, low enough to have Daily Variety spread out on the floor next to the phone, on the floor. Just to the left was a stucco balcony where the breeze blew in through from the parking lot next door. Every night people arrived to go see HAIR! at the Aquarius theater which is what the parking lot is for, but in the day it was a quiet back street, not a lot of sound but for the wind through the palm trees and construction at Sunset and Vine half block away with one of the first high rises in Hollywood going up.
An ad for Miss Soul Queen contestants ran in Variety classifieds. The ad stood out because it was two columns with a big border. In these same columns were ads for Pretty Girl International modeling agency, whose whispered italic words let you know here is where you get the new porn jobs that were showing up in town. Out of work actors were simulating sex in movies for 50 to 100 dollars a day. The movies were being shot in 35 mm and showing up in real movie theaters.
Jesica read the Pretty Girl International ads and passed for now. But she phoned in and signed up as a contestant for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.
Then taking the bus into a south L.A. neighborhood which was unfamiliar, Jesica showed up in the Watts theater with her little suitcase. She packed an “evening gown” and a bathing suit, as the ad had requested, both purchased hastily at second hand stores. She was the only white person in the building and probably for several blocks around, but
Here is where the mania was showing up even early in her life. Here is where the PTSD driven behavior was already showing up in her life.
She plowed right on in to the audition this blond upper-middle class white girl, totally out of place, totally in the wrong place, she still plowed on through as through driven by some invisible force. Her eyes would light on the obvious weirdness of the scene, like being in the dressing room with all these hot sexy black women as they changed into their very, very brief bikinis. Jesica unpacked her little suitcase and put on her one-piece bathing suit. It was a beauty contest, right, so Jesica, totally on her own in Hollywood, no agent or close relative or friend to bounce the idea off of, just Jesica responding to an ad in classifieds of Variety, thought she needed a one-piece bathing suit to be in a beauty contest.
Probably as she tried on the bathing suit in a Goodwill store she imagined herself on a runway like for Miss America in Atlantic City. Only this was Miss Soul Queen in L.A. in 1968 just north of Inglewood.
When Jesica arrived at the old theater all she saw were the fiery ends of cigars and other things being smoked in the front seats of the audience. The lights were half-lit so the audience was half-lit.
A dark man with a 40s style Harlem hat held his cigar halfway to his mouth, the mouth was half open in astonishment, looking at Jesica. He and the other producers of the talent and beauty competetion all stopped with their mouths hanging open, staring at the blond Jesica arriving in the middle of the ghetto to compete for Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968.
“What the hell makes you think you can win the Miss Soul Queen contest?” one asked.
Jesica looked into the dark and she carried all the truth of Martin Luther King and the 1950s civil rights marches she’d watched as a kid on the news in her gait as she walked across the stage. Her passion matched Joan of Arc standing at the foot of her pyre as, blond hippie hair frizzing and forming a hazy halo around her head in the smoky theater, she took center stage and stated, “Soul isn’t about the color of your skin, it’s about a passion that comes from inside.”
They still stared.
She continued, “I’m going to sing, Since I Fell For You.”
One of the more soulful producers of the Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles 1968 beauty contest dropped a big ash from his cigar and said, “You’re going to stand up there like Lenny Welch and sing Since I Fell For You?”
Mm-hmm, Jesica said because she wasn’t really sure who the singer was, she just channeled the song, she’d been singing it in auditions now for a few months.
The very bemused and skeptical black guy, said “You going to get up here in a theater full of black people here in South L.A. and sing Since I Fell For You?” or something to that effect.
Jesica nodded. And she did it. The night of the beauty contest she ignored all the guffaws and outright laughing out loud that happened as she walked across the stage in her one piece bathing suit. Then in her second hand store “evening gown” she sang the hell out of the song.
She stood at the microphone under a spotlight with some accompaniment, I think there was a small band there, with her frizzy hippie style untrimmed halo of hair and a full theater of black people from South L.A. watching her and she sang Since I Fell For You with soul and passion.
At first the guffaws and shouts were louder than her voice, but slowly the audience quieted down, made little breath “huh?” sounds, then got quiet. Jesica was really into the song, moreso than usual, I mean this was a Soul Queen contest, so she really poured her heart into it. Even the skeptical producers, now the judges, had their cigars halfway to their wide open stunned mouths as she continued to sing the song.
See Jesica really had a lot of talent, especially as a singer. No training, little advice even, she just opened up and took on the persona of singers she’d seen before, and poured it out. Once in about fourth grade she’d stopped the talent show at her grade school standing there snapping her fingers singing “Fever” a capella as in with no accompaniment, just her snapping fingers. Jesica even made her voice sound exactly like Peggy Lee’s on that occasion.
This time she was just channeling herself, her own heartfelt pain from all the weird things she’d already experienced in her 20 years of life, all the confusion and passion and aroused sexuality confused with spirituality and the resulting mistreatment that she’d lived through since age five -- now she could open her mouth and sound like Billie Holiday on one of her saddest but most poignant songs. But it was Jesica’s own voice, her own soul.
She won the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent competition.
She put it on her resume.
I was standing on the corner of Sunset and Vine last week running to make a metro transfer on the way to the medical marijuana dispensary when I looked up and realized I was just a block away from 6235 Leland Way where Jesica lived in 1968 - 1969. The little apartment building is long gone, torn down as the parking lot expanded. The Aquarius Theater, which itself was the old Moulin Rouge, is now Nickelodeon Studios. The first high rise ever built in Hollywood has recently been torn down and they’re about to finish building the new one.
I stood there coming unstuck in time. Right there at Sunset and Vine Jesica, ever resourceful, often stood on the corner selling L.A. Free Press, back in 1968. She would go into Silverlake and pick up a stack of papers for 11 cents each and then sell them on the corner for 25 cents. Sometimes a redneck would drive by and holler something like, “If it’s free then why does it cost 25 cents?” Jesica much like Joan of Arc here again would say, “Because freedom isn’t only about money.”
I stood there and looked up at the new high rise wondering how it’s any different from the one they tore down and remembered what happened to Jesica after winning the Miss Soul Queen 1968 talent prize. She got a little trophy and an appointment to meet with a music producer in that very same office building when it first opened. But instead of a recording contract the fat black man had gotten Jesica to sit on his lap. She was so naïve that at first she did sit on his lap and his boner was really big and hard and poked up through his pants. She jumped -- gasped and was across the room then running down the hall and out of the building.
See Jesica would screw just about anybody in those days. In 1969 she made a New Years Resolution to have sex with 69 men in '69. By June she'd lost count but gone way past that number. It was a compulsion placed in her at age five when a deviant priest taught her to talk dirty in confession and showed her how to get aroused, then turnred her out into the world like that -- aroused since age five. . . .
Yeah I would screw just about anybody in those days but I wasn’t going to screw for a job. That wouldn’t be holy.
Continued. . .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)