This is pretty much the story of my life. It hasn't been a pleasant journey and I'm writing it as I remember it. I warn you, this is some pretty raw stuff, so Caveat Emptor.
 

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I don’t know when it started really. I remember dressing up in my mother’s clothes and stumping around in her shoes and smearing makeup all over my face like I suppose a lot of young girls do. It was a long time before I could handle the fact that I was jealous of my older sister just because she was a girl and I wasn’t. I thought that was terribly unfair.

I was supposed to be a man and grow up to be like my father, but not quite. You see, my father was a warrior, and I wasn’t allowed to be like him because of our religion. It was weird, because he taught me all the things I was supposed to know to be a good warrior, how to sneak around in the dark, how to live in the wilderness like it was my home, all of the things you needed to know if you were going to be a killer, including how to kill an armed man with your bare hands and keep him from making any noise to alert his buddies as he died and voided his bowels on you with his last breath.

My father wasn’t just any soldier, he was a SEAL, one of the second nastiest human beings on the planet behind Ghurkas(even a SEAL will tell you that, if you get him drunk enough.). Something happened to him in the jungles of Vietnam and the treachery of the intelligence game though, and even though he will not tell me about it to this day, he became a pacifist and joined a religion which forbade killing or military service of any kind. As his child, I was also bound by the dictates of his religion and even though he taught me all of the things he had been taught in his training to be a warrior, I was forbidden to ever use any of those things. I was not even allowed to defend myself if attacked in school, which led to me being the school’s whipping boy. I took beating after beating, never even thinking about defending myself, for my father did not teach me how to fight with the intention of just hurting someone. The only thing I knew was how to kill.

When I was just a little child, I did not even know the words they were using to insult me. I wondered what a faggot and a pussy meant(I had never even heard those words, and had no clue what they meant), since that was what they called me until my big sister stepped up and beat the crap out of a couple of them on the bus one day. I was amazed and grateful, but at that time in our lives, we resented the hell out of each other, so it was almost 30 years before I thanked her properly for doing that for me.

I was 8 years old when that happened and in the sixth grade. I remember that afternoon and evening very clearly because our parents didn’t get home until almost 10 o’clock that evening and a part of their thing was that they didn’t give us a house key in order to force us to do our chores before we would be allowed into the house. It was late fall in the mountains of North Carolina, and though we had been hot on the bus, the air was cold outside. When our parents arrived home, they found us asleep, shivering together under the front porch. They sent us to bed without dinner because we weren’t waiting on the porch for them.

In the morning, we had to haul water in five gallon buckets from the spring, almost  ½ mile from the house. The house was bitterly cold because they refused to light a fire in the morning, saying it was a waste of wood, not to mention that leaving a fire burning in the stove was a fire hazard.

I didn’t understand at that time why they treated us so harshly and to be honest I still don’t. all I really know is that I grew up wanting so desperately to be a big strong beautiful woman like my sister. I didn’t know that she had her own issues that were tearing her apart as badly as mine were to me. In truth, if I had known, I don’t think it would have made much difference, I was so wound up n my own confusion and misery. I had my first boyfriend in those years(He was 12 and I was 8). I didn’t know until many years later that my sister and I got fucked for the first time by the same boy. I do remember how glorious it felt, that my best and only friend wanted me that way. Despite what many of you reading this may think, I have to tell you that I seduced him. I told him to pretend that I was Angel(My other best friend(she of the long and gloriously shiny blonde hair that I envied so much because my father made me get a buzz cut every 3 months) who I grew up with). He did, and I did, and it was the best feeling I had ever had in my life.

I found out a couple of years ago that Angel killed herself with an intentional heroin overdose. I never knew when we were children that her father had raped her throughout her childhood. I grew up wanting so badly to be her twin sister and I was never able to tell her what I felt. As much as I can think back over my own early life and how miserable it was, she had it so much worse than me. I wish I had known; I would have done anything to save her.

When I think back on it, my sister saved my bacon more times than I can count. She knew I was stealing her clothes and wearing them around the farm to do my chores(and yes, to masturbate in). She knew I was shoplifting panties and such from Belk’s, and she protected me as much as she could. Even when I got caught shoplifting, she would wash the swimsuits and lingerie that I had stolen for me and return them cleaned without ever saying a word to the parents. She even rescued her panties that I slept in from their hiding place in my pillowcase and put them back for me to wear the next night.

I didn’t know that at the time and to tell the truth, I resented her horribly, mainly because she got to be a beautiful adolescent girl and I was stuck with hair growing out of my legs and a body that I hated because I thought I was looking so much like a boy even though I got beat up for walking and acting like a girl.

In Junior high school I got a growth spurt and wound up looking the part I was trying to portray, even though my hips were very wide for a boy and I had very little upper body development. I could leg press more than the weight machine in the gym had available though, so even though I was only 10 years old when I entered the 8th grade, I had some measure of respect.

It didn’t stop the teasing though. One day, some of the boys decide that I needed to be put in my place, so they snuck into the girl’s locker room and got a used tampon out of the trash can. When I got back from being beaten half to death in gym class, I went to put my clothes on and put my foot into my shoe only to be met with a bloody mess. I was so mad that when the class bully grabbed me from behind and tried to put me in a headlock, I curled over and threw him into the lockers I was facing. The lockers were narrow enough that he got stuck upside down, just hanging there until the PE teacher came to extract him. I got suspended from school for 2 weeks for doing that but I didn’t mind. What I did mind was the fact that my father beat me until I bled with a green briar switch on my bare ass. He didn’t strip the thorns off before he did it, and I have to tell you, he really tore me up. I cried and tried to run away, but it wasn’t the first time he had done that to me, so I eventually just lay there and let him beat me, knowing that crying where he could hear me or trying to run away would only get me beaten more.

I started to run that summer, just trying to lose myself in the nature that surrounded me when I was in the zone of running. Everything inOklahoma was laid out in one mile squares, so when I ran around the square, it was four miles before I got back home. It wasn’t long before I got addicted to the peace of just running. After all, I had spent most of my life running and it made me feel good to just be out there with the sounds of my own breathing and the pounding of my feet on the gravel road for company.

I was so full of resentment and hatred then. I wanted to kill my parents. I don’t mean that in a casual way, I mean I literally wanted to kill them. I actually plotted and planned the deed. I went to the point of hiding my father’s rifle in the barn, intending to kill him with it as he arrived home from work one day(This was not the first time I had done this, I hid a .22 rifle under the chicken coop when I was 8, intending to kill him with it then.) Luckily, I was too muck of a coward to go through with it since the barrel was plugged with chicken shit and the gun would most likely have exploded in my face. This time, the gun was a .370 deer rifle with a four power scope, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead I took the beating for not having fed the pigs before he got home from work and was just glad he hadn’t made me take my pants down because I was wearing a pair of my sister’s panties. When I got undressed later I realized I was still in trouble because he had cut me so badly with the switch that I had bled all over them.

My sister never said anything about that to me. I realize now that that was her trying to protect her strange little brother. It couldn’t have been anything else; they were her favorite pair, the ones with the rose blossom print and the frilly lace along the edges. It was many years before I realized just how much my sister had protected me, how much she had given up for me. I resented the hell out of her then and for many years after that. Only when we had the chance to talk as adults did I know how much she had done to protect me and I felt so ashamed of my actions and the things I said to her then. In truth, I would pile up many more things to be ashamed of before we ever could talk honestly about it.

Things got so much worse that summer. I think that was pretty much when I lost my will to live. My sister was experimenting with boys and she got in so much trouble for that. She even got beatings for things that I had done. I managed to hide the fat that while my sister was experimenting with boys, I was busy being a bit of a slut. There was the cutest boy who was a junior, he was short but so muscled up he was just a kind of Adonis. He said he loved me when he fucked me and I was dumb enough to believe it. It was almost 15 years before my sister and I discovered that he was fucking both of us at the same time. I can’t complain, he was enough man for us both, and I will say that he was maybe the hottest fuck I’ve ever had.

I’ll never know what really happened to him, but the rumors said that over the summer break he had a shotgun accident that blew his cock and balls off and left him in the hospital mortally wounded. He died that summer, but we were not allowed to attend the funeral since it was held in a Baptist Church. I think he suicided and his family was so ashamed of him being gay that they wouldn’t admit it.

We moved half way through the next year and for me, things got even worse. I had been a straight A student and would have been on the honor roll if my parents had allowed it. I discovered many years later that they had not allowed the school to put me in the Gifted and Talented Enrichment program even though I was testing out at college freshman levels in the fourth grade. Of all the things I can blame my parents for, I think that is perhaps the worst. You might think that them forcing me to follow a gender role that was so obviously wrong for me was worse, but that thing is what threw me into the tailspin of self destructive behavior that has culminated in the bucket of shit my life has become.

I became so disinterested in school that I wound up really acting out, getting myself expelled. I studied the material and took the tests, aced them in fact(I was the only kid they had ever had who consistently made 100% on the tests and they accused me of cheating), but I refused to do any homework or classwork, choosing to read instead(What can I say, I was bored stiff!). I have to say I was bewildered when I got kicked out of class one day for reading an unassigned chapter in the textbook.

I had thought that I could just throw off my teenage years, but I was wrong. My parents wound up sending me to a state run school for truants and other miscreants. Most of the kids there had been sent there as a preliminary to Juvenile Hall on court order, but my parents actually had to pay to send me there since the state didn’t think I was a bad enough kid.

That place made the hell I thought a normal high school was look mild by comparison. On the very first day, I walked down to the convenience store(about a mile way from campus). On the way back, I was trailed by a large group of students who were just taunting me at first. The girls in the group started running up to me from behind and hitting me in the head. I knew better than to respond and give their boyfriends an excuse to beat me up. They stated throwing rocks at me. Several of the rocks hit me in the back and head and caused wound, so I was bleeding and just trying to walk normally and ignore them.

On the final approach up the long driveway onto the campus, they were still torturing me and I was still trudging along, refusing to fight back. Apparently, the frustration was too much for them. The largest of them ran up behind me, grabbed me and threw me to the ground. His friends rained blows on me as I got up and continued walking. He grbbed me and threw me down a total of three more times before I reached the gate and some sort of relative safety. I was punished for fighting, even though I had never even lifted a finger to defend myself. I learned later that a dorm counselor had watched the entire scene since I had turned onto school property, but had not intervened. His testimony did get the ringleader expelled from the school but it simply served to make the 5 months I spent there even more brutal. Unfortunately the ringleader was the most popular kid in school and they al blamed me for getting him expelled, so I was the most hated person there. Picture petty much anything short of rape and it happened to me there.

I managed to get myself expelled from that place by running away to Daytona Beach for Spring Break. I hung out my thumb on Interstate 95 and a nice guy who had been driving for way too long picked me up. I lied and told him I had a license. He turned the wheel over to me and I drove us most of the way down from there to Florida while he slept, a nice 10 hour drive. We had to stop in Georgia for gas and he bought a lottery ticket and a 12 pack of bud, which I drank while driving. He dropped me off right on the beach in Daytona.

I was in heaven and hell at the same time. There were so many ubercute college boys there and I wanted them so badly, but I knew that I was a boy and none of them would want me if I was to truly be myself. The girls there were so hot and the only thing I wanted was to be one of them. I can’t honestly say that I was torn because I knew what I wanted. I wanted more than anything to be one of the hot college girls in the barely there bikinis, being pursued by the hot college boys.

Instead, I was an awkward 15 year old boy with no money. I slept on the beach(Which is really fucking cold at night, by the way). I never got laid(I tried, but I think the bikers realized that I was underage(Spring break at that time coincided with the end of Bike Week)). So I wasn’t molested, even though I desperately wanted some big hairy biker to sweep me off my feet and make mad passionate love to me and call me his girl.

When Spring Break ended, I wound up at a homeless shelter which sent me Traveller’s Aid. They gave me some lunchmeat and a loaf of bread and put me on a bus back to my parents. I had no idea what else to do so I took what they offered and wound up back in Charleston. My parents sent me back to the school where I was sure I was going to be killed.

I cut classes, anything to get away from that hell, I hid out during lunch and tried to be invisible. They expelled me for truancy. The same night my parents came to pick me up, some of the other students firebombed my dorm room and wound up burning down the entire dorm. If I had been there I would have been killed.

It took me a month or so, but at the first opportunity, I ran way from home. I set out with a small duffel bag containing my dress pants, dress shoes, two pairs of jeans and some underwear(half panties I had stolen from my sister).I had some sort of half baked idea in my head that I would go to Oklahoma and stay with my grandfather since he had been the one to offer rescue when he became aware that my sister and I were being brutally beaten by our parents.
I will wonder for the rest of my life what would have happened if my sister and I had not given in to pressure from our parents and recanted in our claims of abuse then. Granddad was an asshole, but he offered to takes us in and put us through any college we could get into and I think he even knew about me. We were so brainwashed by our parents religion that we gave in and went back to our parents, even though DSS was willing to give Granddad custody with no questions asked based on the bruises and marks in the photos they took for evidence.

I got a ride with a trucker, but that ride took me to Oklahoma City. Granddad lived in Vinita, a little piece of nowhere about halfway between Tulsa and Joplin, right on I44, also known as the Will Rogers Parkway. I spent a day and a night underneath a freeway overpass in OKC. I got desperate and hungry enough to hang out my thumb and I was lucky. A trucker named Opie(I’m sure he had another name, but its been a long time and I don’t remember it) picked me up. I didn’t realize it then, but now I’m pretty much certain he felt sorry for me.

Opie was going to Fresno and he offered me a place to sleep in his bunk and some money(60 bucks) for loading his truck and unloading it when he got to his eventual destination. I gladly accepted. He never made a move on me(although I desperately wanted him to). When I say I got lucky, I mean it. I was an impressionable young kid who would have done almost anything for a little acceptance and a kind word from a stranger.

I rode with Opie to Fresno and loaded his truck with veggies for transport to New Mexico. He offered to take me with him because he was going to take a week off in Albuquerque, which turned out to be his destination for the load and also the place he lived.

That was a week of heaven for me. He tried his best to get me laid that night (Not exactly a hard thing since it is a college town.) We went out in his little Toyota 2000 and got lost in the desert. We picked up some college girls and went to get stoned out of our minds up on Sandia Crest. We were sitting on the edge of the cliffs, looking out over a sheer 2500 foot drop while he made out with his girl and I was just sitting there, stoned out of my mind and wishing it was me he was making out with instead of her. I wanted to hurl myself out into the air, to meet the jagged rocks at the bottom of the drop.

That night, I slept on the floor of the living room of the Mexican family he was staying with. We got very stoned and drunk and watched 200 Motels. The next morning, he said he had to go to Colorado, family business. He dropped me off at the freeway exit. I never saw him again.

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