Books |
The Tricky Part
Martin Moran
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Memoir
Every picture tells a story.
Look at the picture on the cover of this book.
It tells two stories.
One is of an open-faced, twelve-year-old boy with a Paul McCartney haircut holding a kayak paddle aloft in triumph — a portrait of innocence.
The second is of a kid of uncertain but budding sexuality, a pre-pubescent boy in tight swimming trunks with an unmistakable bulge — a chicken ready to be plucked.
And right now, if you are as smart as I suspect, you are hoping that I’ll cross a line in this very sentence, so you can click out and escape what you know is coming — my passionate advocacy for a tale of soul-searing pain.
Please give me ten seconds more. Because although this is a story of sexual abuse — told so honestly that, like young Marty Moran, you will be hard-pressed to figure out the difference between exploitation and love — this is not just a book for parents. Or kids who have been abused. Or men who can’t stop looking at boys.
Just for a moment, let me expand the focus of this book. And ask you a few questions.
Is there a pain you’ve been carrying around so long it seems like part of your being — a wound that’s welded to your psyche?
Do you have any compulsive behavior — sex, smoking, drinking, eating, spending, gambling, whatever?
In your heart of hearts, do you feel worthless? Unlovable? Do you ever think: "I wish I were dead"?
If you can buy into any part of that, this book is for you. Yes, this nasty memoir of forced sex and hot sex, exaltation and disgust, cheating and lying and self-loathing — this book can help you more than you could possibly suspect with your very personal hell. Because, at some level, "The Tricky Part" is your story. Lord knows, though nothing like this happened to me, it is a story I know well.
I say this because the book delivers exactly what its subtitle promises: "one boy’s fall from trespass into grace." Huh? That jams the brain. Falling into grace? Isn’t grace what we labor mightily to receive? In the Catholic Church — the center of young Marty’s life, and the institution a sick man used to get to boys like Marty — isn’t grace the ultimate achievement?
Martin Moran says otherwise. And that is why the book starts in 2002, with a visit to "Bob," who had been Marty’s counselor at a Catholic camp in 1972. Bob taught Marty about Bucky Fuller and geodesic domes. About mountaineering and rafting. And, at night, about the things men do to boys in the heat of a sleeping bag.
Bob is now in a Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles. He’s got diabetes. Part of his foot has been amputated. He’s old.
Marty, now 42, has had enough therapy to open his own practice. And now he’s coming to confront Bob. "Wring his friggin’ neck for me," Marty’s best friend advises him.
Will he? What will Marty say? What will this meeting do for him?
You won’t know until you read this book — this visit starts with the first chapter and ends with the last. Between them is the story. A family of four in a suburb of Denver. A church, appropriately named Christ the King. And, negotiating his way through school and church and family, is a smart little boy who knows this much: "Halloween is nothing to a kid from Catholic school. Everywhere you look, there’s blood and gore and metaphor."
A sensitive boy looking for answers meets a sexual predator. Who, right off, sees a prospective victim. And pulls him into his sleeping bag. Marty is terrified. And thrilled: "My whole body humming with…touch, a force mightier than family or church or anything I’d ever found in a book." Except that it’s…wrong. Marty prays: "Stop the accident." But God doesn’t appear. And Marty doesn’t call out and wake his fellow campers. "I allowed. It was as though he was touching me into being and I was dying to find out who I was."
Soon he knew. He was a divided soul. An honor student and a slut. Twelve years old and addicted to the sickest of sex, tricked up to look like love. "We’re two good people, helping each other," Bob says. "There’s nothing bad in that. Homosexuals are people without love." And to prove it, Bob acquires a girlfriend, has Marty do her. And then they start as three….
"I am bad so I must go," Marty concludes. To stave off the implications of that verdict, Marty confronts Bob: "I wish we’d never met. I’m ashamed of every single thing that happened between us." But that changes nothing. Marty’s grades collapse. He tries suicide. And then again.
A miracle. Marty transfers to public school. Notices a poster announcing auditions for the school play. Gets a part. Finds "genuine life while at the business of pretending." Makes friends. All because of the school play. Death is "deferred because I could hold a melody."
I don’t want to spoil the book by telling you the whole story. I do want to talk about the end, and what "The Tricky Part" has to offer you. It is this: "With the really rough things it all comes down to grace. A gift from the beyond that moves us toward our own salvation." It’s a hard gift to see in Paradise, so we create — or are handed — our personal hells. And there, with great difficulty, we find that "in the middle of the whole tangled mess, the whole story, there has always been something sacred. Something good that was doing its best to grow."
It’s so complicated. It would have been better if Bob had not corrupted Marty’s innocence, had not stolen his youth; it would have been better if Marty had, on his own, realized he was gay and come out with a classmate, a peer, a friend. And it would have been better if the trauma that marked your life — and mine — had not occurred. But there it is. It happened. We must deal with it.
Little Marty Moran grew up to navigate through the thicket. And now, in his 40s, Martin Moran can pin his sanity on a complicated, oh-so-healing thought: "What harms us might come to restore us." Could you say as much? Could I? After reading Martin Moran’s story — and my God, he can tell a great story — I believe he’s on to something. And I believe, in earning his healing, he has shown us where we might look for our own.
To buy "The Tricky Part" from Amazon.com, click here.
One in four girls. One in six boys. That’s how likely childhood sexual abuse is to be visited upon our children. The good news: You can learn how to stop it — even how to prevent it. Visit Darkness to Light.
