Yes, Daddy

by Jonathan Parks-Ramage

When I was in Richard’s bedroom, my helplessness was eroticized, transformed into a source of power. I was most alive here, close to death, panting on the floor with a collar around my throat.

Perhaps tedious, lube-thrust-repeat sex was predicated on both parties being physically well matched, but real sex—the kind that keeps you screaming—was about power.

“The things we worship eat us alive.”

Hadn’t I written my way into this situation to begin with? My words had power, and if they had power, then so did I.

I’d record the fears that kept me awake, indent the pages with my heavy scribbles. Writing was the only path to rest. My way of surviving the night.

They were my father, they were the Father, and I was always, in my mind, the son. I loved each of them as I was unable to love my own father.

Sometimes I wrote plays about my father, short one-acts that ended in my confession, his forgiveness. A fantasy, to be sure. I knew he would hate me for what I was. I lived in fear of his hate.

Maybe God hated me; maybe I hated God; maybe I hated myself. I definitely hated myself.

His eyes were dead and blue and beautiful, like an over-chlorinated pool too poisonous for a swim.

So why did you keep coming back? I imagine the answer had something to do with a fear that all your success would vanish if you betrayed the systems of abuse that bolstered it. Your contract with evil.

This is not normal. It was my mantra, my only remaining tether to reality. Each morning, we’d sit inside our windowless shack waiting for our red lights to blink. This is not normal.

Despite my mantra, the constant abuse weakened my resolve: This feels normal.

Life was a horror movie on repeat, less shocking because we knew the twists by heart: the drugs, the bondage, the rape. This feels normal. My body had stopped producing adrenaline, or maybe it was constantly producing adrenaline. Panic deadened into helplessness. This feels normal.

His first attempt at escape resulted in a black eye; the next, a bruised rib. Then he stopped trying. In a way, the abuse felt like home.

This isn’t normal, I thought, clinging to my rage like a life raft. This isn’t fucking normal.

This was the moment I began plotting Richard Shriver’s murder.

Your skeleton is an open secret—death right under the surface.

Because they were boys with ugly pasts. Questionable characters with histories of substance abuse, broken families, sex work, and desperate ambitions to be in show business. It was a cruel irony—the vulnerabilities that made these boys perfect targets for Richard and company were the same vulnerabilities that destroyed their credibility as witnesses in a court of law.

However, there was also the risk that you’d view my public statement as an attempt to get ahead of the story, to respond to accusations I knew would inevitably arise in our current climate. I suppose, in some respects, this was what I wanted: to control the narrative. But isn’t that what all writers do? I needed to tell the truth before it became impossible, before the internet’s collective opinion was already tweeted in stone,

desperate times call for dubious lifestyle brands.