Perfectly Human: The Unexpected Autobiography Of A Hick

By Bayla Dornon

A book marketer recently asked me what genre my new series is, and I had to think for a minute to figure that out. Eventually, I came up with Autobiographical Supernatural Horror.

Now, I realize that sounds more like fantasy than reality; but consider this: if your family has monsters in it, and you write about that family, what do you call it? Franz Kafka wrote about a man who transformed for unknown reasons into a cockroach (obviously autobiographical), and no one batted an eye. My story covers adoption, abortion, LGBT rights, cancer, gay marriage, science, violent crime, small farming in California, missionary work, the arid, modern university environment, AIDS, teaching, and the terrible toxicity of an insular family submerged deep within an abusive religious cult.

And all I did was describe my experience growing up in a "normal" American family (of monsters).

For the purposes of focus and variety, I've framed the first book around my family's oldest sibling, MY SISTER, SUZIE, a girl who was adopted at birth, and had all the cards stacked against her. The second book recounts the life of OUR LITTLE SISTER, who started her life as a sick and weak little girl but eventually won a college diploma and a man. The final book details some pretty horrific transformations and catastrophes, since it deals with a disastrous mother-son relationship. If you have a mother or a son, …AND THE DRAGONS might keep you up at night.

PERFECTLY HUMAN is the unforgivable saga of a boy born into one crazy family, raised by an even more dysfunctional family, and in love with another boy from a third family. There's enough sex to keep it spicy, and enough analysis to excuse all the sex.

Offensive Word Count for PERFECTLY HUMAN:  The Unexpected Autobiography Of A Hick, by Bayla Dornon.

Book I, MY SISTER, SUZIE: Shit, 19, Cock, 13, Jesus, 13, Damn, 10, Asshole, 9, Fuck, 8, Dick, 8, Bitch, 4, Penis, 3, Piss, 2, Pussy, 2, and one Bastard.

Book II, OUR LITLE SISTER: Shit, 13, Christian, 12, Dick, 7, Christ, 6, Asshole, 4, Bitch, 3, Cock, 2, Fuck, 2, Piss, 2, Bastard, 1, Damn, 1, Fart, 1, Jesus, 1, and one Shart.

Book III …AND THE DRAGONS: Christian, 27, Shit, 16, Damn, 12, Jesus, 8, Fuck, 5, Piss, 5, Bitch, 3, Asshole, 2, Pussy, 2, Christ, 1, Cock, 1, Cocksucker, 1, Dick, 1, Fart, 1, and one Penis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bayla Dornon
• Release date: Jun 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227717863

Bayla Dornon

Bayla Dornon's first book is "Gay Testaments, Old & New" an edited compilation of texts from both famous and obscure literature that paint a vivid and exciting portrait of men loving men. In 2020 and 2021, Dornon published the four-book RESTORATION series, the story of twenty-year old Chris Brenner, a gay man fleeing from his ultra-religious parents and their efforts to 'torture him straight' through religious conversion therapy. Escaping to the Center in San Francisco, Chris meets and befriends fellow initiates George and Mary — and falls head over heels in love with Tom Griffin, a charismatic Priest at the San Francisco Center for Restoration. The four novels follow these young adults as they struggle for independence and restoration from indoctrination and abuses of religious and patriarchal families and society. In 2022, Dornon has released the new series of "Jake Bennett Adventures", the stories of sexy bisexual rookie LA cop Jake Bennett, trying desperately to make his way in the asphalt jungle of Los Angeles. Married to one man since late 1988, Bayla Dornon is an author, critic, playwright, former teacher, silly pagan, photographer, cat-lover and videographer. A third generation Californian, Dornon and his husband recently escaped the absurd desert of San Diego and now live happily ever after in Seattle.

Book preview

THE REASON I WROTE THIS (An apology)

Given that I am not a famous person (although I am arguably notorious), you may well be asking yourself why I am offering my autobiography for sale. My husband asked me this, too, so I don’t take offense.

There are three reasons for writing this book (although I may come up with more).

First is the fragility of memory. Phil and I sailed through the Covid shutdown without getting sick at all. This boosted our confidence in our ability to withstand the disease, as it rapidly made its way through the general public, despite the stupidity of the hopelessly useless mask mandate, the unenforceable social distancing, and the moronic stay at home order.

In November of 2022, we ventured to the lovely Olympic Peninsula and stayed at the wonderful Lake Crescent resort, where we promptly caught Covid. Our symptoms were no more than a mild cold, with one important exception. Covid dumped my memory’s logs. Not the memories themselves: just the paths in my brain to get to them. I was terrified. For sixty-one years, I had depended on my extraordinary memory, recalling data instantly and effortlessly on almost every occasion. After the Covid, I lost access to memories, entire song lyrics, movie dialogue I’ve been reciting for decades, whole word sequences, phrases, and more. I discovered techniques to rebuild the recall routes, but it was a wake-up call, because of reason two.

My family are all effectively dead (more in a second). I no longer have access to anyone who remembers my childhood. Families always maintain memories through a system of recall exercises, most of which begin with the phrase, Remember when... and continue to a specific event in the family’s history. I cannot play Remember when... anymore. There is one resource, but that person is younger than I, and suffers from CRS syndrome (can’t remember shit). So, when I forget them, the stories will be gone forever. This is important because of reason three.

In addition to being the sole survivor in my family, I am also one member of a dangerously small group of gay men who remember sex and oppression before AIDS. My story has weight for that reason, but also because I survived addiction, cancer and religion, three of the main scourges of American life. As our Republic careens helplessly toward a tyrannical Theocracy, it is important for the survivors in the war against religion to speak up and remind people why a Christian America must never, ever come into being.

FOREWORD TO BOOK ONE

Sometimes I muse on little things, like the meaning of life.

I was raised in an extreme religious cult filled with all kinds of weird, whacked-out beliefs, all about a two-thousand-year-old dead Jewish reanimated carpenter who desperately wanted to come inside me so he and I could live together forever in a castle on top of a cloud after I die. As attractive as that bizarre fairytale was, I really can’t believe it anymore.

For the pack of phony weirdos in that cult, the only point of life was just about saying some magic words before you die (as soon as possible).

A song I used to sing claims that, Life Is But A Dream.

In the Princess Bride, Westley says ’Life Is Pain’, highness... anyone who says otherwise is selling something. That’s certainly been my own experience; but that’s not all of it.

I think Life Is Horror. And there’s a lot of it to go around.

There’s the horror we have as children when we get injured: How could this happen to me?

There’s the horror of going to school, and finding out that some of those kids we’re locked up with all day are murderous animals.

There’s the horror of getting caught doing something wrong.

There’s a special kind of horror in aging, in the accumulation of aches and pains, as well as watching yourself rot; you see it all the time in young people’s faces when we old fucks show our saggy, spotty skins. The dumb kids think that avoiding the oldies is the answer, but it isn’t. Aging is a disease, and they’re already infected.

But the worst horror, even more awful than falling out of love, is losing the ones we love. It’s inevitable. It often starts with goldfish that die; and then it’s a gerbil; and then Grampa. And on and on it goes, as the years pile up like wrecked autos in a sixty car pile-up on the freeway. The only solution I can even imagine is to stop loving anyone or anything; but loving is what defines us as human spirits, and we can’t seem to kick the habit.

So, Life Is Horror.

Enjoy my horror story!

Hugs,

Béla Dornon

Seattle, 2024

This book

is dedicated

to all the monsters

in my family.

A young child and child posing for a picture Description automatically generated

PROLOGUE

If I had to choose a moment in medias res to start this story, it would have to be the beginning of the bridal march music at Suzie’s third marriage. It was her first church wedding, to Terry Chester, on the seventh of March 1992, and it took place at the old church of our mother’s cult, St. Anne’s, in Oceanside.

In that one frozen moment, we’re all standing, looking toward the back of the church, as the bride makes her entrance. Suzie looks fantastic, just like a bride should look. She’s thirty-three and a third years old, she’s slim and in great shape, and this time, she keeps telling me, all the trips to rehab and the prison stints have really worked— there will be no more bad men, wild drugs and disastrous life choices.

I don’t believe her, but I wish with all my heart that I could.

Suzie’s wedding day, this moment, is one of those indelible memories: the kind seared into the brain by heightened emotions. Memories like that never seem to dim or fade, no matter how many decades go by.

This moment occurred half my lifetime ago, as I write about it at the age of sixty-two.

Suzie is easily over six feet tall in that moment, with her hair piled up and her hat on and her high heels augmenting her five foot ten frame. Altogether, I think she’s as tall as my six foot one and a half inches. Beside her stumbles our little brother Fred, at least a foot shorter. Suzie and Fred are struggling vainly to perform the traditional bridal march, since they both lack the ability to dance. Step, stop. Step, stop. Together they lurch awkwardly down the aisle of the old Episcopal church on West Street, the building housing the cult in which we spent the better part of our childhoods.

Suzie had begged me to walk her down the aisle; I was the obvious and appropriate choice. But, still deep within the indoctrination of my militant feminist phase, I had refused. I would not give her away: I didn’t own her, I argued, she was a free human. I couldn’t escort her under the guise of giving her to Terry, it was absolutely wrong. When begging failed, she had even tried to command me: all our lives, I had always been her slave, in the sense that I adored her, obeyed her, and was generally useful. But even that old master-slave bond failed. I told her again and again she belonged to herself, not to any father or brother, husband or son, and she should walk by herself. Finally she gave it up in disgust, and roped Fred in to replace me.

Suzie’s deep compulsion to observe tradition was solely born from superstition, not reverence. Like all gamblers, Suzie absolutely believed in luck and ritual and their synergistic properties, and she wanted the best possible luck she could get for this marriage.

And so, the memory plays out, like a funny movie, with the music too fast, the people chuckling, the close-ups, the long shots.

Now she and Fred are stumbling along, their steps mis-matched and completely out of sync, their faces embarrassed, their body language non-verbally begging the assembly not to look.

I should have done this for her, I realize too late. I wished I had. I was just being stupid, stubborn, and pig-headed. It’s a tendency I have, putting my principles before the things that really matter, like a career, an education, and family.

Beside me stands my own mate of three and a half years, Phillip. He’s in the last year of his PhD at UCSD, and we too will marry, later in the year, on August first. Before then, our brother Fred will marry Misty, a friend of Suzie’s— on the ninth anniversary of Fred’s first marriage to his high school sweetheart, Tracey. Fred’s first marriage lasted barely two years, though it was given every possible blessing and advantage by our family, cult and society.

A short way away stands our mother, Jean, who will also be marrying in November of this year, to an Episcopal bishop named Paco. Her second or third marriage, depending on how you count marriage, it will last almost eight years.

Once upon a time, there were six of us. Dad, Mom, Suzie, me, Fred, Jeanne. All six of us members of the Don R. Dornon family have passed through these church doors, so many times, each of us never knowing which would be the last time. There’s always a last time for everything, but we rarely know it’s the last when it happens. Some of us passed through those doors for the last time to the endless embrace of the grave, some to a married life, and some to the ultimate freedom of apostacy.

I look around this church, renovated recently, with a different rector to replace Father Duane H. Thebeau, the disgraced former priest of our cult. I don’t know this new priest; he’s bland to the point of invisibility. I can’t even remember his name anymore; I think it was Ted something-or-other. Considering the amount of damage Father Thebeau did with his charisma and evil magnetism to his cult’s members, all the women he slept with, and even his own children, it’s probably just as well the new guy is such a wet dish rag.

Even then, thirty one years ago, I recognized that my family’s history, a smaller part of the larger cult’s history, was sick and wrong and sordid. Drugs, violence, cancer, incest, prison, abuse, lies, cheating, perversion, divorce: all the usual ingredients of good Christian homes. We had it all, in spades, and so did our church’s cult, headed by Father Thebeau.

Focus.

Suzie is at the altar now, next to Terry. I don’t really remember much beyond the entrance and the hand-off. I know what must have come next: the marriage service never changes, it’s always the same. Only the music changes from wedding to wedding. Suzie’s was all modern pap. The worst possible pop-tunes with insipid, stupid lyrics. Embarrassing. If he’d been there that day, Dad would have been embarrassed, I think. Dad had a glorious, operatic baritone tenor voice, and he used to sing with prestigious choirs, and as a highly paid church soloist. He was very fond of baroque, classical, and even romantic music masterpieces, and this junk-music Suzie picked would have shamed him. Dad had a brief but glorious career as a lounge singer, and a much longer one as an elementary school teacher, almost as long as his career as an unwilling farmer. But in the end, he became little more than an historical footnote in the history of the family that bears his name. Even I dumped his name. There’s still a track meet every year in Fallbrook, California, called the Dornon Games. That’s about it. Whatever fame Dad had dwindled away and died out many years ago.

The real celebrities of our nuclear family unit were the women— Mom, Suzie, and Jeanne: The Dragon, the Vampire, and the Little Ghost. My monstrous trinity.

What else do I remember about that moment?

I remember I was jonesing for a cigarette. I had promised myself for months that I would quit, the day after Suzie’s wedding. I wanted to spend this last day of my nicotine dependency with her. Smoking cigarettes was one of the many hidden secrets that bound us together. Suzie had deliberately inculcated all sorts of bad habits in her siblings: smoking, drugging, sneaking around, lying, and above all, keeping secrets. She didn’t do it to hurt us: all the damage was committed in service of her own welfare, and in aid of her war against Mom, a war that I’m told many daughters and mothers share, but perhaps none have waged so bitterly and savagely as the women in my family. In that war, my other siblings and I were only pawns.

Quitting smoking will mean abandoning that special moment Suzie and I used to share together, when we exited whatever place we were in and lit up. But a promise is a promise; I did in fact quit a few days after her wedding, and I never smoked again. Suzie herself would quit a few years later when she got pregnant, for the baby’s sake. So it all worked out fine.

Except that nothing was ever fine, or if so, not for long; the drugs and the terrible, violent men always returned; my beloved sister Suzie always disappeared, leaving the vampire in her place. Sometimes she literally disappeared, and we couldn’t find her for weeks and months at a time. Other times she was still around, but not available. The worst were the times when I couldn’t even recognize my adored sister inside the creature she had become.

But apart from all that, in this frozen moment of time, in this memory-bubble floating in the perfect black vacuum of space, everything is just fine, and we are all singing those crappy Christian-pop songs printed in the bulletin, all smiling and happy as Suzie and Terry take their vows and promise to stay together forever, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or much, much worse.

Chapter 1: DORNON RANCH SLR

Suzie was doomed long before she was born.

Like a child born with a fatal genetic condition that will kill it before it can really live, my older sister was born with a fatal condition. Suzie’s birth mother never wanted her, and she despised the baby that began to grow in her body in January of 1958. But, more than thirteen years before Roe v. Wade made abortion safely and legally available in California, Suzie’s birth-mother couldn’t safely and/or legally abort her. Instead, she dumped her.

In group therapy many years later, Suzie told me she had recalled that her earliest emotional memories were of being hated, rejected and unwanted.

But despite this, my older sister was a warm, joyful, loving woman who almost made it to the age of fifty-five, even with every card in the deck stacked against her. She had a giant belly laugh that would burst out all the time. She loved to snicker at little jokes, a warm sound like a hum about to become a laugh; and the best of all for her was to get me going somewhere that laughter was forbidden (like church) until we would both be chortling helplessly behind our hands.

Friday’s child, according to the old song, is loving and giving. That was my sister. Suzie gave many, many presents to everyone she knew. She was quick with a hug, or a ride when you needed one. She could sit and listen when needed, and also offer pretty good advice when asked. Her needs drove her, but she never lost her compassion and sense of attachment. Although born without much empathy, Suzie did develop that most human of skills over time. Suzie successfully married and produced a child of her own, a child she showered with all the care and warmth and loving-kindness she never received from her own birth mother.

Rejected by her birth-mother, Suzie was adored right from the start by the families of her adopting parents, Mr. and Mrs. Don R. Dornon of San Luis Rey, California. There are dozens of slide photos of Suzie being bathed, Suzie being dressed up, Suzie being carried all around, and Suzie being adored by smiling parents and grandparents. She was the very first grandchild for Mom’s parents: Mom’s brother, Uncle Raymond, seven years older, married later in life, and eventually adopted three children of his own after Mom got Suzie and me.

Our parents had already been married for two and a half years when Suzie was born on October 10, 1958. Dad had graduated high school in East Palestine, Ohio (pop. 5,201) in 1948 and started college at Ohio State, where he played sportsball. When the Korean War broke out, he joined the Navy, graduating from boot camp in 1951. That same year Mom graduated from Downey High School in the unincorporated city of Downey, California. In the Navy, Dad trained as a parachute packer, and was deployed to Korea; but the war ended shortly after he arrived, and he never flew a mission. By August 1953, he was back in the States, and joined his dad and brother in Anaheim, working in the family’s brake shop on Katella Boulevard. Mom, meanwhile, had done two years at a local junior college, and was seeking work as a secretary.

My dad had a glorious, naturally operatic baritone voice, and frequently sang at weddings and other events for money. He and Mom met when he sang at her church: he was twenty-four and she was twenty-one, and they started dating. Eventually they married, on the first day of spring in 1956.

My folks inherited quite a chunk of cash when Grampa Dornon sold the family’s brake shop and its property on Katella Avenue in Anaheim to Walter Disney, who built part of the parking lot for Disneyland on the site. Before Suzie came, my parents were property flippers; they had already invested in, renovated and sold some properties in Los Angeles County; and then, in 1957, the young couple moved to Oceanside, California, and went into business with a forty year old businessman and professional developer named Ralph Marsden, who lived in Capistrano Beach.

Their partnership was practical in nature: Mom and Dad had the energy, and Ralph had quite a lot of capital. Together they purchased a twenty-five acre grove of mature orange trees, located at Star Route Box 3A, San Luis Rey, between Mission Avenue to the south and the San Luis Rey river in the north, near the back gate of Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The trees were watered by sprinklers to augment the scanty rains, and there was no farmhouse or other dwelling on the property. The trees were already producing oranges when the partnership purchased the property. Mom went to work as a secretary for the law firm of Feist, Vetter, Knauf and Loy, while Dad started drawing up plans for the ranch house and reservoir, and renting equipment.

The first thing Mom and Dad did was to build a tiny one-room house on the edge of the property to use as a home base. Dad rented a D-2 caterpillar tractor and began grading the property, creating level dirt roads, banks for the roads, and then digging the reservoir. Once that was done (and after Dad survived flipping the tractor over on top of himself, escaping with only a broken leg) they hired an architect and went to work creating the plans for a much larger ranch house they would build below the road on a plateau above the orange grove. Eventually, the address would be listed as 4310 Mission Avenue, San Luis Rey, CA 92068.

I should mention here that Don and Jean Dornon were avid church goers. My mother, at least, was an extremely devoted Christian, going to church each and every Sunday (at the very least) every single week for the entire time I knew her. Back in 1958, they were going to the First United Methodist church on First Street in Oceanside. Dad sang in the choir, where he was a star soloist. Mom also sang, but she had a small and unremarkable first soprano singing voice: she saved her piercing screams and roaring bellows only for those at home.

Before fall of 1958, Mom and Dad had already had a pregnancy which had ended tragically in death. I remember how, thirty years later, as Mom and I were driving to Gramma’s house in Downey, we passed a cemetery. Mom said in a small, quiet voice, I have a baby girl buried there, and I’ve never visited her grave. I didn’t know what to say, so I sat there in the car with my mouth open as we drove past. Mom explained that, that was why, in the fall of ’58, they had begun to discuss the possibility of adoption.

One Sunday (as Mom told it) in October of 1958, at the coffee hour social after the church service, an older man from the congregation, a physician, approached Mom and Dad as they stood chatting with others from the congregation.

He sidled up to me, and he says, I hear you want a baby, Mom said. She told us this story many times, and each time she would imitate a gruff, older man’s voice.

When she and Dad affirmed that they had, indeed, been thinking about adopting, the doctor said, I’ve got a mother who’s in labor now. You can have her baby.

When Mom told us this story, she always said it happened on Sunday. I suspect, however, that this conversation happened at Thursday choir practice, since Suzie’s date of birth was Friday, October tenth. If it was the Sunday before Suzie was born, then it was a five-day marathon labor, and Mom would have included that in the story. But we’ll never know now, since all documents related to that event were falsified, and all of the first-hand witnesses are long gone.

Within a few hours of her birth that warm, pleasant Friday, Mom and Dad were holding Suzanne Marie Dornon, and scrambling to get together all the paraphernalia new parents need. A phony birth certificate, signed by the doctor, was issued, listing Donald Robert Dornon and Jean (nee Redfield) Dornon as parents. That was fairly common practice in those days, especially in areas where adoption was still heavily stigmatized.

And just like that, they were a family. Everything would have been just great, except for one little problem: construction on the ranch house, including the pre-paid services of a carpenter and a contractor, was already well underway in San Luis Rey. My parents couldn’t watch Suzie at the tiny little one-room cottage they’d built on the edge of the grove, and obviously the construction site was no safe place for a new-born baby anyway.

With no other family in the area, Mom reluctantly called her own mother. They drove eighty miles up the freeway to Downey, and handed over the precious infant to Willis and Mary Elizabeth (nee Wright) Redfield, of Downey, California. For the next year, off and on, Suzie spent most of her time away from Mom and Dad, with our grandmother. Suzie and Gramma both told me, independently, that they had immediately and permanently bonded. This was only natural: they had very similar temperaments, calm and caring; they were artistically inclined; and they were both kind and gossipy and warm. They both loved soap operas. They both loved collecting things from nature: Gramma collected plants and driftwood, while Suzie collected driftwood and shells. They understood each other easily, and got along effortlessly. My sister and my grandmother spoke the same language. Suzie would spend the first thirty-two years of her life allied with Gramma in their war against Mom.

The Redfield family had also farmed oranges throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Downey, an unincorporated section of the county thirteen miles south of Los Angeles. Gramma Redfield had come from New Hampshire to California as a child with her mother, a professional seamstress; Willis Redfield was born in California, but his family had roots in Canada. My uncle, Raymond Redfield, was born in 1927, and Jean Redfield, aka Mom, in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. In addition to farming the orange grove, Grampa Redfield had also been an avid inventor, gunsmith and machinist, and owned a patent on a revolutionary spring-leaf tractor seat that most tractors used in those days.

Whenever Mom talked about her childhood, it was always couched in terms of how strict her parents were, about how she had to wash her shoelaces every night and polish her shoes. She always used to tell me that she had a breakdown when she was six, and never fully recovered. That would have been 1939; perhaps in those days people paid less attention to the mental and emotional illnesses of their children.

At any rate, Gramma Redfield proved to be a very good substitute mother to Suzie. I remember Gramma as a gentle and quiet woman who sewed almost constantly, crocheted, knitted, and did many other little hand-work projects. She loved her soap operas, her Programs, as she called them: The Edge Of Night, The Guiding Light, Search For Tomorrow, and As The World Turns. While Grampa Redfield lived, she maintained a large, enclosed garden behind the house on Downey Avenue. The side garden and the front lawn were carefully landscaped with a very delicate grass called dichondra, upon which we were always strictly forbidden to tread.

Grampa’s large machine shop to the west of the house was, wisely enough, also strictly off limits. I remember the smell of the place, an aroma of metal and light oils and rubber parts, and the inevitable ozone scent from electrical activity. It was built like a peaked-roof barn, with twenty-foot high sliding wooden doors, and huge dirty windows that filtered and colored the light a pale beige.

In England, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, while Khrushchev became head of the Soviet Union, opposing President Eisenhower in America. Into this world Suzie was carefully received, though carefully kept away from all of Gramma’s collection of little figurines, bells, and sundry other tchotchkes.

Once Suzie was repatriated with our parents, sometime in summer of 1959, she really took off. The single-story, long ranch house may have been completed inside, but no door could hold Suzie once she learned to walk. Mom often said that Suzie went straight from crawling to running. She quickly became a joyful little blonde escape artist, and the instant our parents’ attention was diverted, she would take off. The pictures of her in the stroller make me chuckle, since I can see the little seatbelt they improvised to keep her from springing out and running away.

In those days, Mom and Dad had a pair of dachshunds they named Cindy and Bobo. Suzie loved them. There are loads of pictures of the dogs with Suzie at the ranch. The sixties ushered in a new age, the television age, and Dad began taking more and more slide pictures. As the Kennedy administration began, Suzie was happily bouncing back and forth between being Mom’s little dress-up doll, and working as Dad’s side-kick in pants and T shirts. She loved to tag along in the truck or on the tractor as he spent long hours working on the grove. Farm work is hard and dirty, digging ditches, pulling Bermuda grass, modifying irrigation plans, and such. Equipment is always breaking down, and everything is covered in dirt and grime. Suzie would often return at the end of a day with Dad covered from filthy feet to her shining blonde hair in muck. Every Xmas and birthday Mom and Dad rained all the love and presents you’d expect onto their fair-haired only child, including dolls and doll strollers, wagons, toy cars, and dozens of cute little outfits. Suzie was a hit, a joyful, energetic and vocal child who smiled and glowed with delight most of the time. All of the jillions of family photos show her laughing and smiling.

Though Mom and Dad were hard-core Republicans and staunch Christians, the pictures of the time unmistakably reveal Jackie Kennedy’s profound impact. Mom’s fashion during the Camelot period from ’60 to ’63 included bouffant hair, pill-box hats and tight skirts. Mom loved to make well-intentioned matching mother-daughter dresses for her and Suzie. Usually these little fashion crimes happened around Easter, which was always a big, important family photo op.

The rest of the time, according to the pictures, Suzie was a complete tom-boy, running wild and exuberant and free in filthy dirty jeans and T shirts, or alternately sulking and simpering in little dresses, when forced to gussy up.

For more than three and a half years, until that fateful day when Mom and Dad brought me home from the adoption agency, Suzie experienced, luxuriated, and eventually grew very dependent on the status and privilege that comes with being The Only Child. I don’t think she had much warning that a new baby monster was coming, which might explain some of her reactions. Because my own adoption was legal, it should have taken much longer than Suzie’s, which amounted to handing a new-born over to the parents and forging a fake birth certificate; but, due to curious circumstances, my advent was accomplished quite suddenly.

Chapter 2: TRAILER INVASION

My adoption happened on the first of May 1962, two days after my first birthday. I wasn’t supposed to come home with them that day; Mom and Dad had gone to the adoption agency in Hillcrest to view me for the second time (my social worker referred to it as a showing), which led to them interacting with me. I remember Mom helping me stack little graduated colored donuts on a stick. She was very good at handing me the right one. The social worker felt that I got along with them very well, so she just signed the papers and shipped me off. Because the Dornons already had a small child, the state adoption services sensibly recommended that I be quarantined for forty-eight hours.

Mom and Dad decided that Mom would stay with me in their old camping trailer. As a three and a half year old, Suzie naturally had no clue what quarantine meant. And so, when Mom and Dad explained to her that Mom had a new baby boy, and that they were going to stay in the trailer in the back, Suzie naturally concluded that my name was Trailer. It didn’t help that, although I was promptly baptized at the First Methodist under the (rather pretentious) name Donald William Dornon, my parents always referred to me by the name my Hungarian foster mother had used: Béla, which is pronounced BAY-luh. It did kind of sound like Trailer. Suzie happily called me Trailer for the first two years I was with the family.

Once the quarantine was over and I was in the house, I instantly became her new doll. By that time, the second bedroom at the ranch had become Suzie’s room, and all they had to do was install a crib with bars on it so that I could join her. Suzie quickly adopted the role of Mom’s helper with her new Trailer.

Life on the grove in San Luis Rey was good. Less than seven miles north and east of the harbor at Oceanside, California, our climate in those days was miraculously perfect: long warm summers alternated with cooler winters, and it never snowed (except once, for two minutes, in 1967), and always we had decent amounts of rain in fall and winter. Freezing temperatures were uncommon, but they did happen, and could ruin the developing oranges. On those rare winter nights when we had a real frost, Mom and Dad had to protect the fruit by putting little heaters under each tree. They would move smudge pots with a thing that looked like a bicycle attached to a big fork, fill the heaters with oil, light them, and stick them under every other tree. This would usually take all night. I remember those mornings, because there would be frost on the windows, and Mom and Dad would come straggling in filthy dirty and dead tired at daybreak.

Later, Dad invested in wind machines, huge engines like the kind on airplanes that turned propellers and moved the air so the frost couldn’t deepen around the vulnerable fruit. The wind machines were mounted on tall metal structures that looked like twenty-foot tall oil rigs. Unfortunately, the local barn owls immediately decided these were the perfect nesting sites, and moved in en masse. Since they ate thousands of the hated gophers, this was not a bad thing, except on those nights when the machines went on and mangled the poor birds to death as they tried to escape.

At a year of age when they got me, it would have been unusual if I hadn’t been talking. Mom recorded my first words as, I want have it (I didn’t understand infinitives yet, but I could correctly stack colored donuts). Suzie carried me almost everywhere I wanted to go, like a large, babbling, barfing doll. Instead of learning to crawl, I sat and worked my legs like oars, scooting along the floor. This must have been pretty hard on the seat of my pants. To promote more conventional forms of locomotion, Dad set up a swing set on the back lawn, the one that looked north across the width of the long river valley, five miles north to where the hills of Camp Pendleton rose. To get to the swing, I had to stand up and walk. It worked.

In the summer of 1962, at the age of almost four, Suzie’s range far exceeded my own, and included the little Ford tractor, the ’54 Ford F100 pick-up truck, and everywhere Dad went in either one. The entire twenty-five acres, extending from Mission Avenue halfway to the San Luis Rey river a mile north, was theirs. Dad drove the tractor down the rows of trees, digging long deep furrows down which the water would flow, through underground pipes linked to the reservoir next to the house. Then he and Suzie, with size-appropriate shovels, would modify the furrows, digging in the clay-and-sand soil to divert the water away from the trees that didn’t need it, and to the ones that did. They always returned to the house filthy and happy.

Five months after my arrival, Suzie celebrated her fourth birthday. We were now quite the item, and had fully developed the ampersand. We were Suzie & Béla.

Summer of 1963 found our little family of four touring the great metropolis of Washington, DC. We arrived in a station wagon with a little potty, loads of camping gear, and two brats in the way back. Sites included the seat of our government, some really great monuments, and a lot of farmland all around. One of the advantages to living next to a Marine Corps base is that my parents became friends with all sorts of young couples who were stationed, however briefly, in Oceanside. In DC, we got to visit a lot of those families and renew ties. That summer we drove east and toured the capital, then camped with other families in trailers and the station wagon. Suzie and I were happy and excited to see all the strange new sites, and Dad’s slide pictures turned out very well. My only memory of that trip, sadly, is seeing a giant slug crawling along a forest path we were walking through. It’s not surprising, really: I’m so horribly near-sighted that anything further than four feet away is just a total blur of light and dark and color. But a slug at my feet would have been well within my range.

That summer, in addition to our travels back east, we also joined Uncle Bill, Aunt Doris and their kids, Linda, Bryan and Mike, down at the Salton Sea, a huge inland sea created by mistake in 1905. While the adults sat around talking under awnings in folding chairs, we kids rampaged up and down the beach. The water was still fairly healthy at that time, though by no means fresh, and not terribly deep. I remember Dad had the motorboat, and we all went water skiing, or at least tried to. The trip was going great, right up to the point where I stuck my left hand into one of those concrete fire ring, right onto some red-hot charcoal briquettes, deceptively covered with white ash. The subsequent second-degree burns covered my left palm, thumb and index finger from the tip of my thumb to my wrist, and there is still a butterfly-shaped scar on the mount of my left thumb. But as horrible as the burn itself was, the subsequent treatment was far worse.

The doctor, once we got home, instructed Mom that she would have to scrub the scab off twice a day and stretch the thumb, or my hand would scar and limit my range of motion to a semi-closed position forever. So there I stood, two years old, twice a day, balanced on a kitchen chair in front of the bathroom sink. First I had to soak my hand in warm water and Phisohex, then Mom would scrub the scab off, as gently as possible. I just remember screaming the whole time, especially when she stretched the scar that was forming. I had a piercing, high-pitched scream like Fay Wray. It’s no wonder she tended to beat me. Then she’d put a fresh bandage on. Twice a day, for eight weeks. This treatment worked, and though I still have scars on my left hand, I experience no limitation in my range of movement.

Once the upgrades to the grove were completed, and the ranch house was completely finished, Mom and Dad (and silent partner Ralph) sold it to a man whose name I’ve forgotten; I think it was Carlton. Loaded with cash, our little family moved on to flip the next business, a Foster Freeze in Fullerton, California. We moved into a house on South Annin Street, where we had a small back yard that looked onto a six foot wall, rather than across the farm and valley to the hills ten miles away. My time in that house was largely devoted to watching television. Dad, still hopeful I’d become interested in sportsball, took pictures of me holding a sportsball bat and ball, though I must admit, in the slides Dad took I look more suspicious than excited.

In Fullerton, I had unwisely been entrusted with some goldfish, a trust I betrayed when I took them out of the bowl to play with them. Lectures and little funerals in the back yard ensued. The loss was real, the grief was temporary.

I wanted some dolls. Mom told me to just play with Suzie’s; but Suzie had become extremely jealous and possessive about her toys, and was no longer willing to share them with me. (I’ll admit, heads had been accidentally ripped off.) She had a Barbie and a Midge. I coveted that Barbie, with her long, silky, shiny, blonde hair. Oh, how I longed to brush that cheap PVC hair. Midge, sadly, had frizzy, dull auburn hair and a nose covered in freckles, and I despised her. Could this have been a clue to my future orientation? More clues were soon to present themselves.

The first solid gay memory I have involves the television set in Fullerton: I was watching my favorite cartoon, The Mighty Hercules™. It had just gotten into the good part, where Hercules rips his top off and all his muscles bulge, and then Mom walked into the room. I leaped up in enormous embarrassment and switched off the TV. She never noticed. I was two in April of ‘63, and I’m certain this happened at the house in Fullerton, where we lived only between fall of ‘63 and winter of ‘64. So I know I’ve been totally gay since at least two.

That September of 1963, Suzie triumphantly went off to kindergarten, with her name and address on a note pinned to her dress. This was a big deal, of course, and so there is a photo of it. Her outfit matched the red Dodge station wagon. There are no photos of my first day at kindergarten; by then, the novelty had worn off. Mom and I were alone in the house a lot that fall, and she cried a lot. I didn’t know why, I just knew I had to watch TV and not make any noise in the little room, while Mom was in the bedroom with the lights off.

The picture of Mom serving cake at Suzie’s fifth birthday party the second week in October of 1963 is notable for the fact that she’s wearing a huge, blue, patterned maternity smock; it was practically a muumuu. I remember that thing very well: I remember wondering why it was so big, like a tent that had settled over her. It was huge, of course, because she was pregnant, for the first time since she and Dad had lost their first baby, six years before.

Our little brother, Fred Eric, the next chapter in the story, was circling Fullerton, ready to make his final approach for landing.

Chapter 3: AKA FERD

In mid-December of 1963, our little brother Fred arrived, coming home from the hospital just in time for Xmas. Grampa Dornon, dressed up like Santy Claus in a storm of red and white polyester with white floss beard and wig, brought in a big bag of presents, which he ceremonially deposited into stockings while Dad took pictures. Then Grampa made a show of putting the blanket-wrapped baby in one of the stockings, for the camera.

Fred was the first natural-born child of Mom and Dad’s marriage to survive, and there was much rejoicing in both families, especially the Dornons. We lived then only a few miles from both pairs of grandparents, though that was soon to change. I have pictures of me and Suzie, taken a little later in Texas, holding our fat little baby brother. Both of us are smirking as we imagine all the tortures he’d soon be enduring. Mind you, we were not necessarily evil back then, but it is the nature of children to torture the new-comer, just as cats cannot tolerate the newest addition to the household and will attack them mercilessly. As little kids, Suzie and I were certainly no better than cats.

There are celebratory photos of all the family holding Fred, shot after shot of beaming relatives. Everyone was glad. But soon after Xmas was over, Mom and Dad decided it was again time to move.

Sometime in 1963, Dad had made the momentous decision, no doubt prompted and approved by Mom, to enter church ministry at McMurray Methodist College in Abilene, Texas. They packed up everything they owned in a U-Haul and drove the station wagon with the weeks-old baby Fred and the rest of us for two straight days to the middle of Texas.

Mom would always say, It seemed like the plains just went on and on forever, like they would never end.

Though Suzie had started kindergarten in Fullerton, leaving me alone for what seemed like most of the mornings, she finished kindergarten in Texas. We had a summer of intense heat and dryness, during which Mom made a series of mother-daughter shame outfits for them to wear. She then started first grade in Abilene in fall 1964, while I remained largely housebound with the infant Fred. Going outside now required supervision, for several reasons.

Unlike the mild and hospitable environments of California, the Texas terrain, or at least all of it that affected me, was hostile, painful and deadly most of the year. The summers were broiling hot, and the winters freezing cold with thick, dull snow. The front yard of our house in Texas was brown heavy dirt, partially covered with scrubby patchy grass that produced these very painful little round burrs. The flowerbeds beside the walk up to the front door were filled with incredibly sharp, small, white agate rocks that shone and sparkled in the relentless summer sun. I still remember the first time I naively ran barefoot from the house across those rocks, screaming as my tender little feet were cut open.

The back yard was a little better: a cement pad beside a large rectangle of grass, with a cheap swing and a plastic kiddie pool on one side. When the little kiddie pool was full of water, we were allowed to play and splash in it if Mom or Dad was watching. Otherwise, we had to stay out of it and play on the grass.

And in the backyard fence there was the magical, alluring gate to the alley, which Suzie and I were forbidden to open. The trash cans went out and came in once a week, and otherwise that gate was shut tight. Suzie, who loved to terrorize me with made-up dangers, told me in hoarse, dramatic whispers that there were terrifying creatures back there, called the burgers; no, not the kind you eat, but the kind that hide in the dust and eat you. Each time she warned me about this hidden menace it got a little bit worse. She would later recycle this myth when we spent time at Gramma’s house in Downey, telling me that the sandy space between the house and the fence was full of burgers that would kill me if I stepped on the sand. We had to walk only on the steppingstones, to save our lives.

Then one day, the forbidden gate was open. Summer attire in Abilene being minimal at most, I had on some little blue shorts and a tan. This was my chance! I pushed my way barefoot and bare-legged into the alley, turned left arbitrarily, and started to explore. The six-foot tall wooden fences lined both sides, and the intense Texas sun wallowed white-yellow on the beige sand. I hadn’t gone far, maybe ten steps, before the red ants swarmed me.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of me, you know that I have pale blue-grey eyes, but you might not know how hopelessly weak they are. I am so hopelessly near-sighted that I never even saw the ants boiling out of the anthills in the sand of the alley. They swarmed me within seconds, and then they all started stinging at once. At first I was paralyzed with pain and shock. I can still hear my three-year old voice screaming.

And then suddenly Suzie was there, and she grabbed me as I danced frantically, bent over, slapping furiously at ants all over my legs. My big sister lifted me like a fireman and ran back to our gate, screaming for Mom as she came. First Suzie dumped me in the empty kiddie pool and dashed to get the hose, but it was in the front yard. Suzie never hesitated, she grabbed me again and ran into the house with me straight to the bathroom, threw me in the old avocado-green tub, and started rinsing the ants off as I screamed and cried.

Mom would tell this story, too, for many years after it happened. The memory and the story have fused, and now I remember it as she told it. She said there were actually not that many of the giant red ants, and that, although their stings were very painful, they were seldom fatal. But I know I was in mortal danger. I know Suzie saved my life. She always did.

That hot, hot summer of ’64 we drove back to California to spend time with the grandparents. We never once flew, the whole time we were kids, and I don’t ever remember even being on a bus before I went to kindergarten. Everywhere we went, Mom and Dad drove us in the Dodge station wagon. My parents were at least considerate enough of other people not to inflict small children on other travelers.

Uncle Bill’s family was at Grampa Dornon’s house, and we had a terrific time playing games in the back yard, with Gramma calling out the window for us to stay away from her rose bushes. She had a careful grass back yard with a small round area in the center planted with roses, and one of those little wire fences that looks like croquet wickets strung together. We were not supposed to ever touch the flowers or go near them. I sometimes wonder whether she was afraid we would be torn apart by the thorns, or damage the roses. Probably both.

The same restrictions applied to Gramma’s bedroom, which was all faux-silk rose-patterned fabrics. We were never allowed in there at all. I saw the drapes through the open door on occasion, frilly see-through things that shimmered in the breeze of an open window. The bathroom had little soaps shaped like roses, and they stunk to high heaven. The rest of their house in Garden Grove was more of the same: slippery, shiny beige and pink furniture with floral patterns and fussy, frill-infested lampshades on rippled pink glass stands.

Grampa’s world was out in the garage. A former gunsmith, he had a lot of machines and tools and things like that, all of which we kids were never allowed to go anywhere near. Grampa Dornon always smoked a pipe, but not in the house. He had a chair in the kitchen by the back door that he sat in most of the time, reading the paper, and then he’d step outside and smoke his pipe. I found the smell of his breath pretty horrible, and I’m afraid I wasn’t subtle about it.

Naturally, since these areas were officially forbidden, they were the number one target on Suzie’s snoop-agenda. Apart from snooping where she was prohibited, however, Suzie also had little or no interest in Gramma and Grampa Dornon themselves. We spent most of our time during visits to Garden Grove pushing our limits and getting yelled at a lot. I and Suzie slept on the couches in the living room. One night, we all sat on the front porch and watched the fireworks for Fourth of July.

Gramma Redfield’s house was far less fussy and more practical, but she also disliked the intrusion of small children. Since Suzie had lived there as a baby, she had established a close relationship with Gramma, and over the years that relationship had developed into a close and trusting friendship. I had no such closeness with Gramma, who didn’t like little boys.

I had only Suzie to follow, and follow I did.

Suzie was always the leader, and I the follower. It amazes me that our parents never realized how bad my eyes were; I guess Suzie and I simply adapted to my handicap and successfully concealed my condition. Suzie was always the dominant one in our relationship, by right of her personality, age, and height, as well as my own willingness to be her vassal.

Whenever Suzie could escape from watchful adult eyes, she would immediately embark on snooping forays.

Gramma's Redfield’s house was a great place to snoop. While Grampa was still alive, there were rooms that were off limits, such as their bedroom, their bathroom, and the front room, as Gramma called it. Suzie would wait until the grownups were occupied, then hurry to the sliding wooden doors of the front room and slip inside. If I was quick, I could follow her in.

The front room was kept closed for several reasons, first because we children were natural vectors of filth and destruction, and second because it contained Gramma's collections of pretties, as she called them. These were delicate tiny porcelain figurines, delicate crystal animals, and all manner of miniature dolls and collectibles. All of these trinkets were displayed on a free standing round walnut shelving piece of furniture in one corner. It looked rather like a Xmas tree made of shelves, and it was completely loaded with irresistible and forbidden treasures. Gramma always said the front room was closed to keep the dust out. But I'm sure that keeping out small, grubby, clumsy careless children was a good reason, too.

My favorite items were the tiny bells. One whole shelf was devoted to bells. There was a delicate little silver bell with a black handle, that made the most delightful tinkling peal. There was a traditional cow bell, for comic relief. There was a Chinese bell, or so Suzie said. It was round and metal, and the bottom half was divided into a series of inward curving tines, so that when the tiny metal clapper struck them they sang like tiny metal wind chimes. Many of the little bells had writing on them. I was three and Suzie almost six, so neither of us could read yet.

Suzie would carefully snoop through the pretties, cataloguing them in her mind. When we were inevitably caught and expelled, we would run outside to play on the forbidden dichondra lawn, or whine and beg for frozen juice pops if it was hot outside.

The front room smelled old and musty and dusty, but it also had a magical door to the outside world in the form of the wood bin next to the fireplace. Along the outside wall of the house was stacked cord wood, and a small door outside opened onto a wood bin closet inside. When Suzie showed me this, I immediately climbed inside the little closet, and she shut the small door and latched it. Over my screams demanding freedom, she calmly informed me that I just had to open the outer door and I could get out. Unfortunately, the outer door was locked from the outside. By the time my screeching had roused the grownups, Suzie had realize the mistake and released me, but it was too late; we both got a spanking.

Suzie always loved to snoop, especially when it was expressly forbidden. She quickly and accurately gauged my own moral flexibility, and decided that the excitement of the forbidden would be enough to lure me into acting as both her accomplice and the sentry. Many was the time she would watch for her chance, then turn to me with the glee shining in her vivid green eyes: Let's snoop! Off we would go, she leading, me following as fast as I could, to the target area. Doors and locks were merely obstacles to Suzie, not legal strictures or indications of privacy to be respected. Suzie would begin sorting through things, revealing each discovery as she made it. I inevitably grew bored, so she would post me as the lookout, watching the door.

The homes of both sets of grandparents were thoroughly and carefully searched on multiple occasions in this way as we grew from curious little children into invasive prowlers.

Both Suzie and I were blonde and fair skinned. Fred, in contrast to Suzie and me, had mother’s coloring: hazel eyes and dark, dark fine brown hair, though he went bald almost right after birth. For the first six months or so he just had a light peach fuzz all over his head. His skin was a pale olive, like Mom’s.

As I said, Suzie entered first grade in Abilene in the fall of 1964. My days were dreary and empty without her, and I complained of boredom a lot. Mom and Dad bought me several different toys, among them one of those cheap record players with the built-in speaker underneath the turntable, and a cover that