More "vulnerability"
The word pedophile was first applied to me when I was twelve by my brother, who had me seduce a girl for him, and then blamed me for the fallout of his request. He flung that word at me for years. I moved away from him, and away from everyone else. I have always managed to avoid making trouble with kids, but I was never so good with teens. When I had to come back to Texas to visit my family, I learned that my brother had started a relationship with a 13-year-old, in her parents home. They got married and had a kid. They're divorced now. In my time, I turned down a couple 12-year-olds, a particularly insistent 7-year-old, and a messed up (abused) 5-year-old boy who both tried to stroke me off and to "entice me" by fingering himself. His parent walked in at that moment, and I was spared from further humiliations. But I digress, in both cases where I failed to make the right choice, the girls were both just turning 16. I've admitted to both of these relationships before, here, and to the police.
So, as you can see, I have some background with incest and sex at an early age. You can also see that despite my early sexualization, I'm fairly consistent in turning down anything I'm really not supposed to play with. This is not me having morals, though. I'm just afraid of prison and would rather avoid it. So, comparing an evening of pleasure with a long sentence of rape and humiliation, the one night stand with the stick girl isn't looking so good.
In Austin, I met a woman who was actually more messed up than me. Cherry was abused from the age of three, raped by her father until her anus and vagina were one hole. She had to have surgery to make them two holes again, and the state turned her over to her grandmother, who ran a dog farm with a crippled vet. The "step-father" (they weren't married) violated Cherry with his stump. He died, and Cherry still had to suffer abuse. She was made to eat her own cat raw when she was 5. She was attacked by dogs, for her grandmother's amusement. When she reported her grandmother to a counselor, he called her grandmother to ask for Cherry's rates.
Cherry became a prostitute when she gained her freedom. She later fought her way free and became a body piercer. While in the shop, she met a men who convinced her he loved her, and he wanted to have sex without a condom. He did this to infect her with HIV, and he had already infected his own sister, knowing he was infected. She started stealing from everyone, including me. She took my rent money, and then told all my roommates that she suspected I did it to buy drugs. I still let her stay because I couldn't let someone hurting so much become homeless.
Cherry suffered from flashbacks and nightmares, and I wanted to help her, but I just made her worse by sharing my past with her. Then, she saw me only as a potential sex partner. For six months I kept her at bay and denied her sex. But then one night, it happened, and we clicked, like we were meant to be together. But Cherry thought about sex all the time. All the time. We had sex three times a day. I had to stop because my body couldn't handle her. And when I couldn't perform, Cherry asked me if I wanted her to recruit a child and bring her to our bed. Because she thought I was a pedophile, and that's what I wanted.
That's why I had her committed to MHMR's care.
I'm saying this because I want to make this perfectly clear. I do not support pedophiles, now do I want people to think I'm promoting it by telling sotries about pedophile. But I feel like someone needs to be telling their stories, and not just as the evil monster that gets killed by a writer's righteous hero. Maybe they aren't morally inspiring stories, but they deserve a chance to be told. Cherry's story is terrible, and I don't really know how it ended for her. But I think about her all the time, and my depiction of Peter was my effort to show readers how messed up she was.
I'm sorry for anyone who reads Peter's book expecting him to be good. I wrote a book with a monster as the protagonist, because that's what Cherry was. She was a terrible, beautiful monster, and a pedophile. And someone should tell her story to explain why she ended up so messed up. That's the motivation where Peter comes from, to explain Cherry.
This did not meant I wanted Peter to be taken as a hero, only a study in the effects of extreme sex abuse. Let me assure you, it does happen, and although the book is upsetting, I don't feel there's anything unrealistic about Peter or his motivations.
