Georgie

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale

Georgie

34

“Oh, my God! You’ve got to be kidding!” said Petra, waking from a dream.

In it, she was inside the shower, rinsing shampoo from her hair. With no warning whatsoever, Harry Connick Jr. pulled open the glass door and stepped inside with three other men.

“What do you think you’re doing, Harry Connick Jr.? Stop smiling at me like that! Can’t you see I’m naked? Get out! All of you. Get out now!”

Still smiling with an exaggerated toothy grin, he reached down with two fingers and jiggled her belly fat.

“Stop that!”

“I can’t help it. It’s so damn cute.”

The prophetic dream, a harrowing omen, predicted the opening of an unexpected and undesirable door. A curveball to the face that threatened to shatter the comfort of Petra’s protective, relationship-free cocoon.

The following morning, as was her custom, she headed out to her morning AA meeting and saw Rick for the first time in months. Born and raised in New Jersey, with the telltale accent to prove it, he reminded her of the East Village and her youthful exploits in New York City.

She loved hearing him share. His voice, a deep booming baritone with an abrasive edge, cut through the air, commanding attention. The tone had an immediate and uncomfortable tensing effect on her body, but the words themselves brought her great comfort. She found the juxtaposition intriguing. Six months earlier, out of nowhere, he had shown up cloaked in mystery.

Arriving late one morning, she scanned the packed room, looking for a vacant seat. Rick caught her attention, pointing out, with a subtle hand gesture, an empty chair across the table from him. He had saved it for her.

They were the same age. Both had spent their twenties roaming downtown Manhattan streets, partying their asses off. Even though their fleeting conversations never lasted more than a few minutes, he continued to save her a seat, which she accepted, reading nothing into it. Besides, older men did not date women their own age.

“I rented a place in Jupiter for the summer. I leave in the morning.”

“Oh, yeah? Jupiter’s gorgeous.”

“The recovery community is stronger on the east coast. Full of New Yorkers.”

“I remember.”

She wished him well, but was sorry to see him go.

Meeting after meeting, she eyed the chair in the corner where he used to sit. He had such an intense presence that people referred to it as “Rick’s chair” long after he left town. She tried to get to the meeting early enough to grab the seat he used to save for her. It was no use.

Giving up, she developed a curious, unexplainable sense of loneliness and a sliver of sadness as she wandered about the room, testing the other seats. Had anyone asked her about it, she would have denied it.

On the heels of her out-of-character sex-charged shower dream, Rick, back in town for a brief visit, was catching up with his male friends. Petra sliced through the crowded meeting room.

“Rick!”

A sea of boisterous men parted, and she rushed through the opening as if a magnetic force was pulling her toward him. An intended welcome back hug between friends transmuted into something more akin to falling into the arms of a long-lost lover.

Rick, somewhat shocked, but in a calm matter-of-fact voice said, “Okay, then.”

He did not resist her affection.

“I’ll take it.”

After the meeting, they talked nonstop for thirty minutes until he broke through the conversation and asked, “Would it be okay if I took you to dinner?”

Without thinking, Petra accepted.

They planned the dinner for the following evening. It wasn’t until several hours later that absolute panic and terror set in.

She texted him.

“Can I call you?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea. It’s been twenty-one years since I’ve been out with a man. It’s complicated. Maybe it’s best if we call the whole thing off.”

“It’s just dinner,” said Rick. “But, if I’m being honest, seeing you squirm like this is unexpected and entertaining.”

—

That night Petra had another dream. She was lying in bed with her son, watching a movie. He was still a little guy, four or five years old. A strange and frightening creature, half-alien and half-octopus, lay curled in the corner. Its rhythmic breathing and closed eyes suggested it was sleeping.

Petra, unconvinced, kept a close eye on it. The slightest irregular movement resulted in her tensing for a fight. The octo-alien opened one eye and glanced around the room, strategizing its next move.

“Cut it out, Georgie! Stay right there. Don’t you…”

Before she could finish, Georgie leapt through the air and landed belly to belly on top of Daniel, wrapping his octopus arms around him in a bear hug.

“Oh, no! No, no… NO! You get off him right now, Georgie!”

She began the arduous task of peeling the alien creature off her son.

“Did he get you? Are you hurt?”

Daniel laughed.

“It’s okay, Mom. Georgie would never hurt me. He loves me. You know he’s been doing this my whole life. I’m used to it.”

With Georgie back in his corner, Petra set about examining Daniel’s body.

“Are you sure he didn’t infect you, maybe by accident?”

A thorough investigation revealed no injection sites or slime residue. She woke sitting bolt upright in bed.

“What the fuck?”

“Who or What is Georgie?”

After a prolonged meditation, she concluded the octo-alien was a protector part with a split personality.

On the one hand, he represented the fierce affection and loyalty driving her loving, non-sexual relationships, as evidenced by his kind-hearted passion for Daniel.

On the other, he protected her with an unparalleled ferocity from any situation that mirrored the lust and perversion associated with her childhood.

Her father’s abuse had infected her. His perverse inclinations, although dormant, lay buried inside her, looking for a way to express themselves. Even though she had suppressed the bulk of her memories, they popped up in the guise of strange sexual fantasies, cloaked memories she dismissed as normal.

Georgie was the best solution her human operating system with its basic survival instincts could muster. His purpose was to prevent her from activating and spreading a virus capable of destroying innocent children.

Like Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, he guarded her gates, keeping her deviant propensities confined to an amnesiac underworld with no way to escape. A dangerous and powerful unconscious entity, Georgie stood vigilant, blocking any expression of her father’s deviant compulsion. No small task, considering the energetic streams of her over-developed childhood sexuality, like an unconscious Lolita, attracted predators from every direction.

In her EMDR sessions with Olivia, Petra received glimpses of what happened. Through tireless meditative practice, she had become rooted and grounded enough to allow a great deal of perverse sludge into her conscious awareness without shattering.

“This work,” said Olivia, “requires the client to wake up inside a memory as an observer, maintain a separate sense of self, and meet whatever comes without judgement or condemnation.”

During one session, she experienced a sliver flash of seduction accompanied by extreme pleasure.

That memory morphed into a startling flashback of her father lifting her tiny body up off the bed, leaving only her head and shoulders resting on the mattress, while he raped her from a standing position. It felt as if her insides were being ripped apart.

Olivia assured her none of this was her fault.

“The pleasure aspect complicates and blurs the lines of accountability. It makes the child feel responsible for what is happening. These predators are monsters who use pleasure to control; to make you accept the painful and dreadful demands of their sexual impulses.”

One detailed memory shocked and horrified her, not because it was unbelievable, but because it solidified her awareness of the unimaginable, unbridled sexual-abuse she suffered as a child.

It began onstage during a theatre production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “Bashful,” falling out-of-character, forgot his lines and Petra, playing the part of “Happy” improvised to cover his apparent emotional breakdown. She played both their parts, saying his lines as if “Happy” was thinking aloud. In character, she placed an arm around his shoulder. Tears streamed down his face, and he gasped for air as his chest heaved with heavy sobs. “Happy” continued to comfort him, escorting the broken dwarf off stage while communicating with the audience the entire time.

At the final curtain call, she received a standing ovation. No one questioned the script change.

They labelled it, “A brilliant performance.”

The memory shifted.

She stood next to her father behind a thick black curtain.

“Don’t be afraid. You’ll like it. Pretend you are acting in one of your plays… You’re the star of the show. Everyone wants to touch you and make you feel good… Give yourself to them. Enjoy every minute.”

He pulled a mask over his face and motioned for her to follow suit.

“Besides, no one knows it’s you.”

When he drew the curtain aside, she realized she was backstage in the theater of her childhood. It was a renowned adult company with a Children’s Little Theatre attached. The children, all under the age of twelve, attended rigorous training classes in various acting techniques every Saturday. They performed their own plays, usually fairy tales, to packed houses, twice a year.

On this particular night, the stage, exhibiting the village backdrop for the upcoming performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was setup to house an orgy. There was a varied assortment of apparatus; ropes, pulleys, swings, a veritable smorgasbord of sexual pleasure props.

Petra, taken aback, pulled out of the memory. Horrified, she found it difficult and embarrassing to describe what she had seen.

“It can’t be true! I must have made it up.”

Olivia shook her head in disgust.

“I’m so tired of hearing all the variations of this same story. Children pursuing their passions in gymnastics, in ballet, on swim teams, or as actors like you, become drawn into adult perversions, used up and destroyed. I’ll bet my life they were gaslighting and indoctrinating you in those weekly classes. They trained you to be a willing participant in their deviant sexual behavior. After all, it was just pretend, wasn’t it? None of that really happened, did it?”

Petra, with Olivia’s help, stabilized her breathing and noticed they were only halfway through the allotted time.

“I’d like to go back in.”

Encircled by adults pleasuring themselves and each other, she lay naked on a Victorian chaise-lounge.

“Get on top of her.”

A young boy, adult hands all over him stimulating his erection, crawled on top of her.

“Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her,” they chanted.

Petrified, he whispered in her ear, “I’m so sorry. I don’t want this.”

The boy, Daryl, was her friend from acting class. The director had cast him to play “Bashful” in their upcoming theatre production.

Petra returned and recounted the memory to Olivia.

“They broke him so bad he disintegrated when he saw me onstage. How dare they!”

“Do you want to punish them?” asked Olivia.

“I want to fucking kill them!”

Enraged, she re-entered her imagination, picked up an axe and splintered their pleasure props into kindling. Next, she splashed a trail of gasoline up to the heavy black velvet curtains, lit a match, and burned the theater to the ground. The destruction failed to soothe her. This was not about revenge; it was about reclamation. She could not remember what happened. None of it seemed real.

“It’s like someone squeegeed my brain.”

She related a story to Olivia.

“When I was twelve, several months before discovering alcohol, I started attending a special program for kids at the local Catholic Church. A compassionate priest who loved children in all the right ways ran it. He provided us a room with games, art materials, and music. He had a stack of 45rpm vinyl records, mostly Motown. The room opened onto a playground with swings, a merry-go-round and monkey bars.

The program operated after school and a few hours on Sunday. It became my favorite hangout. The priest gathered us for a sit-down discussion every time we met. He described what abuse and neglect looked like and offered to help.

‘If you are unsafe in your house, I can help get you out.’

After hearing his message over and over, I summoned up enough courage to ask, ‘Can you get me out of my house?’

‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know.’

He was looking at an abused child. That much was obvious.

‘Can you tell me, are you being hurt?’

Tears ran down my face. I shook my head side to side, in defeat.”

—

“In the past, I attempted to tell my father that my mother was beating me.

‘You can’t believe a word she says. She’s a selfish little liar who makes things up to get what she wants, and she’s an amazing actress. You know all about that, don’t you, darling?’

The two of them were working together to cover up each other’s behavior. There was no hope. No one would believe me. Less than a week later, I crawled into a bottle of scotch, put it all behind me and forgot everything that had ever happened.”

—

Georgie lived inside Petra, keeping a hyper-vigilant watch. He protected her from herself in remarkable ways. If not for his interference, she would have died of AIDS, like so many of her contemporaries who frequented the New York City fetish clubs in the 1980s. Georgie handled that threat by manifesting a peculiar and painful physical condition that impeded any desire she might have developed for debauched, orgiastic sexual activity.

A specialist at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, after running every test imaginable, requested: “If you ever discover what this is, please contact me immediately.”

Four years later, her friend Fred, trust fund back in working order, departed New York City for Los Angeles.

The local street dealers had refused to serve him, considering his style of addiction, “a danger to himself, to others and, most importantly, to business as usual.”

Once re-established in West Hollywood, a part of town flush with cheap brown Mexican heroin that kept him straight, Fred felt stable enough to work some gigs in the film industry. The generous pay, on top of his monthly stipend, led to an interesting and quite generous gift.

Aware, in a general sense, of Petra’s strange illness, he flew her out to California and took her down to Mexico to see a spiritual healer. While she was being treated by a Santeria witch doctor in a strange back room where clucking chickens paraded about, unaware of their upcoming fate, he toured all the local pharmacies, collecting as many legal narcotics as they allowed. When he returned, he found her waiting outside, seated on the curb.

“What happened? Do you feel any better?”

“No. The lady said there’s nothing she can do for me. She said there’s potent magic on me from the Dark Country. She told me the cure is inside of me…that I have to find it for myself.”

He reached for her hand and pulled her up off the curb.

“Well, that’s a load of bullshit…Sorry.”

On the car ride back to the States, she considered the Dark Country comment.

“How did the witch know about Africa?”

Her condition remained elusive and untreatable. It was a spiritual and mental malady, a reenactment of long-forgotten trauma rooted in her unconscious memory.

The entire situation had Georgie’s fingerprints all over it.

Vincent, the only true and loving sexual relationship Petra had known, was a phenomenal lover. Way back, when he first met her in Tucson, she invited him to dinner. Following a gourmet meal, wine and weed, he seduced her in front of the fireplace, rocking her world. She had never felt an orgasm as powerful, not one that she remembered, anyway. Georgie, with his all too vivid recollections, sensed danger and rose from a deep slumber. Reinstating high-alert status, he kept a watchful eye and formulated a workable plan to keep her safe.

A year later, she experienced her first episode. They were living together in the Second Avenue railroad flat, still in the blissful honeymoon phase of their relationship.

Their heroin habits remained in a state akin to infancy, getting high only once a day. Maybe twice a day for Vincent. He kept secrets concerning his personal drug use. If she had given it any thought, she would have concluded that he was getting high with either Dinah or Cookie before coming home to her. He was the man scoring bags of dope for all the ladies, keeping them safe from the big, bad street hustlers.

Of course, he shot up the first chance he got.

He was not cheating on her, but he was, in their presence, garnering information about the underground club scene. Fetish was all the rage. Cookie, the reigning queen of decadence, was right at the center of it all, with Dinah coming in a close second.

Vincent and Petra often spent their days and nights lying around, making-love. Heroin makes a man hard and dulls pleasure receptors just enough so he can maintain an erection for hours. For Petra, heroin quieted her demons, increasing the experience of connection and intimacy. It also made it impossible for her to orgasm.

Vincent took extraordinary pleasure in his ability to make her scream and moan with pleasure. He loved the way her body shook and her chest heaved as it climaxed. Not to be denied his satisfaction, he made it a point to seduce her before she took the shot. In a few hours, the numbing effects of his dose would wear off, allowing her to drive him into exultant states of euphoric bliss.

They had it all worked out.

It was perfect until it wasn’t.

They spent long hours in between romantic interludes, having in-depth discussions about books and poetry which they often read out loud to one another. They gravitated toward poets like Blake, Donne, Byron and Keats. On one occasion, Vincent brought home some Victorian pornography disguised as literature. He read a portion that described two children, a boy and a girl, six years of age, whose responsibility it was to crawl up under the covers and pleasure an adult couple.

The notion sent an imperceptible shiver through Petra that hit Georgie like a bolt of lightning. On the heels of the Victorian pedophilia literature, he became obsessed with the writings of the Marquis de Sade and began initiating conversations about dominance, submission, bondage and sadomasochism. He asked if she had heard about a club that Cookie frequented called The Hellfire Club.

“It’s over on Ninth Avenue in the Meatpacking District. Do you want to check it out?”

Petra responded to the question with a definitive, “No!”

Georgie was not buying it. He understood she had no real boundaries.

How could she?

In response, Georgie came at her with a ruthless maneuver and created an insurmountable boundary designed to keep her away from the sex clubs.

The next time Vincent brought her to orgasm, an excruciating pain that radiated throughout her pelvic region followed the pleasure. She curled up in a fetal position.

“Oh, God. It feels like someone’s twisting a jagged tin can lid inside of me.”

The pain lasted for close to thirty minutes. The attacks were relentless and reoccurred every time she orgasmed for the next fifteen years until she became pregnant with her son. Throughout the pregnancy, Petra was pain-free. Ten days after his birth, it returned with a vengeance. She met with her gynecologist, and she performed a hysterectomy.

After the operation, the doctor said, “I’m surprised you could carry your son to term. It was a miracle. You’ll never be able to have another child. The damage to your uterus is irreparable. Trust me, you are much better off without it.”

All the pieces came together for Petra forty years later during the EMDR session, where she remembered her father hoisting her up off the bed and raping her.

Fifteen years of re-experiencing the pain of that vicious rape every time she climaxed, with no memory attached, did a number on her. During each episode, she felt insane and helpless. She believed God was punishing her. In her mind, she was dirty, disgusting and damaged beyond repair.

The situation proved impossible from the start. She had begged the specialist at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital to take out her uterus, but because she was still in her early twenties with no apparent malady, it was a medical malpractice suit waiting to happen.

Georgie, a creature who scurried about the caverns of her subconscious mind, accessed a repressed memory to protect her future. Without his intervention, it was only a matter of time before she succumbed to the allure of the underground fetish scene and awakened the virus lying dormant inside her.

Even as she screamed, “No!” her body whispered, “Yes.”

Proud of his accomplishment, Georgie congratulated himself on a job well done.

---

If you would like to support my work, I invite you to make a donation. “Buy Me a Coffee” is a friendly metaphor, not real coffee. Each “coffee” is $5 and you can buy as many as you like. It is a one time much appreciated gift. Thank you for caring!