From The Rumpus Advice Column.
Dear WTF,
My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. I hated having to rub my grandfather’s cock, but there was nothing I could do. I had to do it. My grandfather babysat my older sister and me a couple times a week in that era of my life and most of the days that I was trapped in his house with him he would pull his already-getting-hard penis out of his pants and say come here and that was that.
I moved far away from him when I was nearly six and soon after that my parents split up and my father left my life and I never saw my grandfather again. He died of black lung disease when he was 66 and I was 15, the same as his father had, both of them coal miners.
When I learned that my grandfather died, I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t happy either. He was no one to me and yet he was always there, the force of him and what he’d made me do moving through me like a dark river.
“Do you remember how we used to have to jack him off?” I asked my sister one day shortly after he died. We’d never spoken of it. I’d never said a word about it to anyone. I was ready for my sister to say no, for everything I remembered about my grandfather and his cock to be an ugly invention of my nasty little mind.
But she said, “Yeah.” She said, “Wow.” She said, “What the fuck was up with that?”
