I would be very pleased if you took a look: http://animalnewyork.com

My cover story for WIRED magazine about Foxconn, the spate of suicides last year, and what it means for the consumer of the goods these workers make is now online. (The URL still reflects the work-in-progress name of the piece, which is about as accurate as they come: “Joel In China”.

It’s hard not to look at the nets. Every building is skirted in them. They drape every precipice, steel poles jutting out 20 feet above the sidewalk, loosely tangled like volleyball nets in winter.

The nets went up in May, after the 11th jumper in less than a year died here. They carried a message: You can throw yourself off any building you like, as long as it isn’t one of these. And they seem to have worked. Since they were installed, the suicide rate has slowed to a trickle.

My tour guides don’t mention the nets until I do. Not to avoid the topic, I don’t think—the suicides are the reason I am at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, a bustling industrial city in southern China—but simply because they are so prevalent. Foxconn, the single largest private employer in mainland China, manufactures many of the products—motherboards, camera components, MP3 players—that make up the world’s $150 billion consumer-electronics industry. Foxconn’s output accounts for nearly 40 percent of that revenue. Altogether, the company employs about a million people, nearly half of whom work at the 20-year-old Shenzhen plant. But until two summers ago, most Americans had never heard of Foxconn.

That all changed with the suicides.

I went to Kansas City last week. I’m now back in Portland. It feels like it was generally an unnecessary trip–no one I spoke to in Kansas City in person was necessarily unreachable by phone–but at the time it felt like there was a present danger to my brother and I didn’t know what else to do.

Glen is in jail. After taking off all his clothes a second time last weekend, he was admitted to a local psychiatric care center, where he proceeded to make advances against another patient. He was arraigned for Sexual Deviancy and Forced Sodomy.

Susan L. Dill, who you may remember as a vocal supporter of Mary Beth in my previous post, has been selected to represent Glen in court.

My hope is that Glen’s actions last week will be the final straw that allows Jackson County to recognize that he is a threat to himself and others and needs to be incarcerated or committed for a long time. Ideally at least five years, which would give my little brother time to reach legal adulthood without Glen as a direct threat.

My mother remains in denial about Glen and her history of enabling behavior. I have spoken to several people who were familiar with Glen even before he and Mary Beth were an item. (They worked in the same mental health care facility.) It was apparently rumored at the time that Glen had been assaulting patients. As an administrator, Mary Beth would have been privy to that information.

In addition, Glen was accused by other patients over the years of sexual assault. Mary Beth was aware of these accusations, if not the acts themselves.

That this all occurred before I was abused hurts me deeply. That my mother refuses to acknowledge her role in facilitating the actions of a sexual predator for over two decades compounds that hurt.

Yet even if she were as naive as she claims to be, the fact remains that even after Glen was prosecuted for abusing me, Mary Beth begged me to allow him back in the home, then refused to act when I told her that Glen continued to make advances against me. However you slice it, Mary Beth has been a party to years of abuse against her own family and those around her. Knowing something of her own family history and the abuse therein, it is my belief that she is dealing with issues of shame and denial so profound that she has put her own comfort above the safety of her family, as well as putting dozens of other children in harm’s way.

Unfortunately, simply being an accessory to abuse isn’t illegal, nor is it grounds to remove my brother from her care. In short, I’ve been told that until something actually happens to my brother–he is attacked, abused, or kidnapped–there is nothing that the state can do to remove him from the home.

I’ve been told to “wait and see,” which leaves a feeling of crippling helplessness. I am worn down, tired, and angry. But for the moment I am powerless, except for my ability to put what I know out in public, warn everyone in the community of the situation (something Mary Beth continues to refuse to do), and hope that my brother will be able to survive the immediate physical and sexual threats if Glen is released–and approach the inevitable psychological challenges that are inherent as a child of two mentally unstable adults.

Woke to the news that my stepfather has decided he is no longer gay due to a serendipitous encounter with an old pastor at Panera Bread and has returned to my mother’s house with the intent to take out all their available cash and invest in a company that sells “biblical cologne” made from frankincense and myrrh. After locking himself in the bathroom for a few minutes where he could be heard quoting bible verses to himself over and over, he emerged with a new plan: to convert all their currency to gold.

My mother, who has refused to file for divorce since kicking him out of the house over a month ago after he expressed “worry about his desires” with regard to molesting my kid brother, informed the Family Services case worker that “Nate needs to see his father.” The case worker agreed and did not require supervision.

Calls to MO DFS were not returned, nor were calls to either of the churches that are in various degrees of contact with both my stepfather and my mother. The compassionate detective at the Jackson Country sheriff’s department said she is doing everything she legally can to build a case against my stepfather, but that until he does something illegal or admits to a crime to someone who will sign an affidavit–any one of the two-plus decades of sexual assaults against developmentally disabled clients to which he has confessed to my mother or the reports of “stalking young boys” given by his just-dumped boyfriend-slash-Christian Counseling parter would be a start, if only they’d actually talk to law enforcement on the record–she is legally unable to bring him into custody.

“When he threatens to kill you or your family,” the detective said to me almost cheerfully, “please don’t call my office phone. Call 911.”

Tonight I received a call from my sister who said that Glen, my stepfather, was just released from the hospital were he had been taken to receive stitches after careening into a stop sign while running naked down the street outside of Crown Center, a local shopping center. He told my sister and mother (with who I am not speaking and vice-versa) that he didn’t remember moving my mother’s car and had been running naked to “shed his shame” (or some such).

This is clearly not the right decision in this circumstance. Glen Robert Johnson has expressed behavior that clearly indicates he is a harm to himself and potentially others–he had admitted that he had come out as a homosexual because he felt fear that staying in the closet might cause him to act on urges he admitted he had toward my brother–and I am the panic I have felt for a week or more is coming to a head tonight, because despite everything I do to communicate with the authorities, I am being told there is nothing I can do to immediately protect my family, especially if Mary Beth has decided that she is unwilling to stop interacting with Glen.

The wild card, as usual, is Apple’s willingness to play nice with non-Apple standards. Since Apple has to approve the licensing for every AirPlay certified device—just like the lucrative “Made for iPod” scheme of years past—they could, in theory, require manufacturers to disable any streaming protocol except AirPlay.

I think Apple might refrain for two reasons: Third-party manufacturers still have to sell their hardware—the more capability a device has, the better—so I expect there may be some push back if Apple becomes too covetous; Device-to-device streaming isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence for most consumers. Apple, with millions of iOS devices already in hands of customers, might not need to disrupt other streaming standards if AirPlay becomes the dominant format quickly. History implies a better than average chance.

Still, it will be hard to fight Apple if they turn the screws. As BridgeCo’s Gene Sheridan said to me, “Just to participate in the Apple ecosystem is a big opportunity by itself.” There are companies out there making millions just by selling Apple accessories. Being first in the AirPlay market—docks for content—might be worth billions.

John McAfee might be his own worst enemy—at least when it comes to the press. When I arrived in Belize, Quorumex staffers were still reeling from what they felt was a hit piece of McAfee in Fast Company, which painted McAfee as an arrogant huckster on the run from lawsuits in the United States, including one lawsuit that poses that McAfee’s recklessness caused the death of two men in a flying accident.

McAfee had donated a boat valued at one million dollars to the Belizean Coast Guard. Fast Company implied this was to prevent the Coast Guard from harassing his fledgling water taxi service.

This accusation was one of the first things that McAfee brought up to me after my arrival in Belize. But first: John McAfee’s wig.

By far my most ambitious reporting project, I consider this piece about a new biotech startup in Belize to be fundamentally a failure, as I was unable to prove one way or another the fundamental efficacy of their product. It was a good experience, but ultimately inconsequential.

I did learn one new lesson: working with a great illustrator can make even a mediocre piece shine.

“Disabled Explorers In the World’s Most Badass Short Bus” [Gizmodo]

“Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.”

* * *
The old woman looks up from her brush pile. “My husband has to redo that roof every year.” Her husband is crawling around their roof, sweeping pine needles from the angles to the ground below. “We’ve been here fifty years. You see these two pines?” They’re impossible to miss, at least eighty feet tall. “When we moved in to this house we planted those.”

* * *
The second of June, a couple of years back. A 27-year-old man is biking in downtown Eugene, Oregon. David’s a clumsy, funny man. Easy to love. Lived here his whole life. He’s unsure of what he’s going to do with his Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies—maybe become an activist?—but for now he’s managing this restaurant that also does live music and maybe it’s not what he wants to do forever, but it’s pretty great right now.

He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.

“Stop,” he whispered as he crawled up beside me. “I know I shouldn’t, but it’s just so hard to resist. You don’t realize how beautiful your thoughts are when I’m doing that.”

Glen Robert Johnson had been my stepfather for several years before he started raping me. I’d met Glen in a home for the mentally retarded, where my mother was a manager. He was a grunt, responsible for washing people’s bodies. He had made enough money working there to pay his way through college at Southwest Baptist University, where he majored in psychology and religion.

Everyone loved Glen. He was quick to a joke, to a smile. He was wholesome and good looking, like a Sears catalog model, although even at twenty-years-old his hairline foreshadowed his future greasy baldness.

My first memory of him: sitting on his lap at on the urine-musty couches at the facility, laughing. My guitar-player father had left just a few years before, chased into the arms of a young groupie by my mother. (At least in his telling.) I was perhaps seven or eight, and was glad for the attention.

Glen invited me to his small trailer home before he ever asked my mother out on a date. I sat on the floor watching “Pinwheel” and “You Can’t Do That On Television” on Nickelodeon. A treat—we had never had cable.

Glen was part of a youth outreach program at SBU. They took troubled teens and children from broken homes out to parks or over for taco dinners. Unfortunately it was soon disbanded when the man who led the organization was found to be molesting some of the children, a revelation Glen shared with my mother in the car one afternoon. He was distraught, and she put her hand on his leg consolingly.

By this time Glen had already mostly extricated himself from the group, choosing to spend time with my mother—now his girlfriend, and his first female sexual partner (an experience he later related to me in ghastly detail)—and with me.

Glen and my mother, Mary Beth, were soon married. I was elated. My father moved to Florida, but not before signing the paperwork to allow me to be legally adopted by Glen and to take his name. (I had lobbied aggressively to be allowed to change my first name to “Hawk,” but was shot down.)

Years later in a tiki bar in the Florida Keys, my birth father told me he had been unsure about the adoption, but my mother had threatened to take me into hiding and cut all ties if he didn’t acquiesce. We sipped rum-and-Cokes while I told him about Glen’s abuse, although only by an accident of conversation. I had tried to spare him the pain. My father swore to murder Glen, rising from the bar and stumbling into the parking lot, where I held him as he wept underneath the overcast tropical sky.

The first years were good. Glen and Mary Beth took a job as live-in managers of an assisted-living facility. Thirteen mentally retarded or mentally ill patients were my playmates, which excepting a few episodes—a gushing femoral artery when a woman had a seizure over a dishwasher loaded with knives; shit flung across walls by an angry mute; clients’ occasional sex or masturbation sessions I stumbled upon—was a lot of fun. The facility was in the country, surrounded by straw fields in which I could run, and the State of Missouri paid for a lot of interesting toys for the patients that they were happy to share with me. We had a swimming pool underneath a willow. When the willow leaves steeped too long in the water, the entire pool turned rust red.

One day Glen handed me a treasure map, its terminus obfuscated by a series of clues. I spent the day tromping through the fields to look under cattle salt licks and tracks in the mud, solving riddles to uncover the next clue. I don’t even recall what the treasure was. I was just entertained, flattered by the mystery. For weeks afterward I pleaded with Glen to concoct another mystery hunt, but he begged off.

When I was around ten or eleven, my parents informed me that we were moving to Kansas City—and it was a secret. I wasn’t to tell anyone I knew unless they were family. Months earlier, as my parents became privy to the internal workings of the company that managed the homes—Glen had an informal promotion as a sort of all-around “computer guy”; my mother was an administrator—they had discovered that a considerable amount of embezzling had occurred.

Jack, the boss, had been funneling state money through the company into his own pocket. My parents, fearful of being implicated in the scheme, had gathered files and reports and presented them to the FBI. An investigation had begun, but because of Jack’s connections with local and state government officials, the typical Ozark network of good ol’ boys (a network of genial corruption that included distant members of my family), Glen and Mary Beth feared for their safety.

They were not crazy. Jack later drunkenly confessed to my mother at a health-industry conference that he had hired men to beat up Glen in Kansas City, although Glen had recognized the two burly men waiting at our house as thugs that afternoon and wisely stayed away.

My mother went ahead to Kansas City to start her new job as a nursing home administrator, leaving me in our Springfield duplex with Glen and my kid sister, Rachel.

I don’t recall if this was when the sexual abuse started, although I do remember it being the first time Glen had told me not to talk to my mother about something. That’s a funny thing about sexual abuse: for as much as I believe the furor over “repressed sexual abuse” is overblown, for the first several months I was molested I would not remember it in the morning, despite waking up with Glen in my bed, where he had taken to sleeping instead of with my mother.

But if the sexual abuse hadn’t started by then, the duplicity had.

Glen, he hesitantly revealed, was psychic. “Empath” was his term. (He was cribbing terminology from Star Trek: The Next Generation, one of our favorite shows.) His mother and one of his sisters shared this trait, he confided. It wasn’t simply reading thoughts. Instead he would be struck by “flashes,” impressions of emotion and occasionally facts, most commonly from those about whom he cared the most.

He took me aside one day and showed me a polished, trapezoidal stone. He placed the stone in a divot of skin between his eyes.

“There is a place on me for this stone, which means I have the gift,” he said. He demonstrated how the stone, unlike most rocks, could transmit the current from the frightening static electricity generator he would occasionally use in parlor science experiments.

“Perhaps there is a place on your body where it fits, too,” he said.

That was his game, always tempering the threat of his “abilities” with the lure that I, too, might just be special. A telepath—or, encouraging me to stare at dust motes falling through rays of sunlight in our living room, perhaps someone with telekinesis. I was a regular reader of The Uncanny X-Men and knew about these things, even if I wasn’t sure I believed in them.

The subtext was terrible: if I didn’t have the gift, I should never forget that no matter where I was, no matter what I was doing, Glen knew what I was thinking.

At twelve or so, just beginning to feel the pangs of pubescent lust, I spent most of my waking hours trying not only to avoid thinking of sex because of its sinful nature—we were going to a new church—but because I knew that every sexual thought that bubbled up from the depths went flying through the ether to Glen.

He wasn’t always correct. Glen tried desperately to convince me that he’d “read” sexual thoughts I’d had about my mother, which despite that I was a hillbilly with little compunction about incest, were not true. In retrospect, it’s clear he was simply anticipating the sort of generic sexual thoughts every pubescent boy feels. Yet my own guilty lust provoked him, he said. He knew touching me was wrong, he’d plead, but how could he resist me when my own thoughts called out to him?

I might be special, he promised. And worst of all, as a young teen—awkward, ostracized at school, ignored by girls—I really, really wanted to feel special.

So I stopped fighting.

Those were hard years. Sickeningly charmed in a way, but difficult to shoulder.

After confessing to me his midnight indiscretions, Glen tearfully roped me into his ablution.

“Do you realize what I’ve been doing?” he asked. I hadn’t. Not in the forefront of my mind, at least. But as Glen weeped and promised never to do it again, to go to church and beg for forgiveness, every suppressed encounter came flooding back.

He wanted it to all go away. It was the first time I had to face it, to understand.

Soon he was joining me in the shower, masturbating with conditioner slathered all over his thick cock, asking me if I liked to “feel good, too.”

My mother knew. They would fight. Screaming, slammed-door arguments that ended with my mother crying, sometimes drunk on Kahlua, the only alcohol benign enough to be allowed in our Christian home.

She bought me a lock for my bedroom door, a simple slot-and-chain. I never had a chance to install it—I was afraid of what Glen would do—but when he spotted the unopened package on my shelves, another fight broke out and the lock disappeared.

Glen provided an illicit brotherhood. He took me shoplifting, teaching me how to remove the magnetic security strips from packaging and to hold things securely in the waistband of my sweatpants and how to unpackage large items like Nintendo consoles and stuff them into bean bags, which we then bought for $10.

I was flush with gadgetry. On church trips, I would hand out Game Boys (I had four) to other kids, while watching television on my Sony portable or listening to CDs on my $400 Discman. I had a Super Nintendo the day after it hit the shelves. We were poor then, but no one seemed to question how I could afford so many toys, even if they must have noticed the scars on the battery cases where I had pried off the security cables glued on by Best Buy employees. I was a pariah at church, too pugnacious and goofy and snide to be part of the elite. This was always forgotten for at least as long as it took for the other kids to grow bored with my gear.

My mother, however, did ask where I got the Super Nintendo.

“He borrowed it from a friend,” Glen snapped. He was always quick with a lie, a patronizing smile to cover the venom. Weeks later she asked if I was going to give it back, but I must had given a response convincing enough for her to pretend it was legit.

Glen took me on late-night adventures in his dirty red station wagon. We’d break into abandoned buildings, looting them of worthless office supplies or furniture. We once climbed over the twenty-foot chain link fences surrounding a decommissioned Ford factory, running through the giant hangers looking for interesting tools. We climbed to the top of a three-story open cistern filled with some noxious liquid industrial byproduct and peered inside. I wondered what it would be like to fall in. Not to drown, but to feel every part of your skin go white with chemical frigidity.

He stole chloroform from a small town drug store—they just had it on the shelf—and encouraged me to try knocking myself out. I could never pass out before the smell nauseated me.

We explored the cave-like drainage system that ran underneath the parking lots of Arrowhead Stadium, muscling the iron storm grate aside to emerge just a couple hundred feet from the stadium itself. Glen held up the sliding security fencing just enough for me to slide under and we hid from the security guards behind the seating to look out on the empty football field, still lit up even at night. It was the only time I’ve ever been inside Arrowhead.

Another time we were at the park where the drainage ditch emptied, and he grew upset when a leathery couple walked by with their dog.

“I’m not sure what’s going on, exactly,” he warned me, hurrying us back towards the car. “But I read that they’re going to do something awful to that dog.”

Glen worked as a night mainframe operator for a local aerospace company. I’d go to work with him sometimes, trying to load text games like “Trek” on the consoles of IBM System/38 machines. Sometimes he’d let me load the giant boxes of green-and-white tractor-fed paper into the washing machine-sized printers. They smelled like ink and ions. Glen would steal things from his work, but only little things.

We ate horrible, indulgent food at night. Greasy snacks made up the majority of Glen’s diet; he gave into his quickly expanding gut. We stopped at a 24-hour grocery store one night before heading out on a “mission” to stock up on “supplies,” as if we were going to be gone for days. Thinking of the breaking-and-entering adventure ahead I exclaimed, “This is going to be fun!” as a bag of beef jerky and a tube of KY Jelly came down the belt into the hands of the young female store clerk. She looked at me, still wearing half of my stupid grin, then to Glen, who hung his head. With a start I realized what I’d said and was destroyed, sinking back into a dot, not just because I had spoken openly of our secret mission, but because I had implied that the beef jerky somehow was part of our sex play. I was thirteen or so, used to watching my stepfather masturbate over the toilet while looking at my naked body in the shower, but I didn’t want her to think I was some sort of pervert.

Once he tried to bring my mother along on our night adventure to convince her of his telepathy. It was late, but he piled us all into the car, even my kid sister, and drove towards an empty lot near Eastwood Trafficway on a psychic impulse. He was moody, disturbed.

“It’s, like, the police. Or a criminal,” he said, concerned. “A criminal has escaped.” We all got out of the car at the lot, searching the ground with flashlights for clues as he had suggested. Near the row of three-foot cubic concrete blocks, Glen found half a pair of thin handcuffs on the ground. “He must have broken them here.” The cuffs looked quite similar to the many single-tumbler pawn shop cuffs we had stolen before, to practice how to pick them with our hands cuffed behind our back.

I’m not sure my mother bought it either. She just seemed tired.

No one at church knew. My mother joined the choir, spending more and more time at Kansas City Baptist Temple. Our church was a proto-megachurch, 3,000 people in and out the door every Sunday, with two morning services and another more casual evening one for the truly devoted. The later service would often be delayed if the Chiefs were playing. The congregation sat in the pews and watched the game projected onto a 50-foot screen.

The church was rich from donations and part of a progressive fundamentalist evangelist movement that was combining traditional missionary outreach with a military-flavored internal “discipleship” leadership program that combined intense seminary traning with obstacle courses and automatic weapons.

It was a cult, sure, but a friendly one. The sort of suburban cult to which you’d invite your friends, with youth groups and subsidized ski trips that you paid for with attention, listening to a weekly sermon about how sex was wrong or how we would be eternally responsible if we didn’t encourage our secular friends to attend our Wednesday night youth group, where they might, after a few weeks of soda and sing-alongs, come to realize the redemptive power of Christ. We had milquetoast Christan rock anthems and a wise-cracking youth leader, Shane Crawford, who drove a sporty little Mazda and spiked his hair.

They didn’t much like me. I talked back. I ripped my jeans and started wearing combat boots which made me a rebel at church, but just another dirtbag at school. I’d make jokes when everyone had their heads bowed, so that when Shane was trying to get kids to anonymously raise their hands to say they felt the compelling need for the Lord, they laughed instead. I damned a few kids to everlasting fire by making them giggle, Shane would later yell, though even he laughed at my jokes sometimes.

I didn’t like going to church that much, especially not the tedious Sunday services. One Sunday evening, when Mary Beth was already at church for choir practice, I asked Glen if I could skip. He said I could—as long as he could lay me down on my their waterbed, pour baby oil on my penis, and jerk me off. I let him. He left for church himself but minutes later he returned. It was wrong that he’d done that, he said, and I needed to come along to church to repent.

Some years later, while I still attended the Kansas City Baptist Temple and did my best to live a Christian life, Shane took many of the other teens aside and warned them there was a good chance that I was the Antichrist.

My freshman year at Raytown High School, I got a bad report card.

I had known for some time that I held a certain amount of power, although to wield that power would be devastating. I’d seen the seams rip just a bit in the past: when Glen and I were busted for shoplifting pens—pens!—at the local Hy-Vee (an episode he later blamed on me, since I didn’t run when approached by the store security); when Glen accused my mother of masturbating in the front seat of the car as we pulled out of the driveway to drive to his father’s farm, which, true or not, caused her to break down so badly that she jumped out of the slowly rolling car and ran back to our house; when I’d tried to commit suicide by mashing up a bottle of aspirin into a bowl of instant oatmeal, downing it all in a few chalky bites because I thought I’d rather die than try to spend another day completing the huge matrix of chores that Glen had assigned that would keep me busy from the time I got home from school until the time I went to bed.

But sitting in band class one morning with that report card—my first with a few Cs—I decided it would be easier to use the nuclear option than to face the grounding, beatings and guilt trips that would follow.

I rode the bus home to my friend Jeff Bryant’s house after school, where I called the police. I tried to sound cold and businesslike to the woman at the other end of 911—”Good afternoon! I’m calling to inform you of an incident of sexual abuse that has occurred in Kansas City, Missouri”—but as soon as I started to tell her that I was being abused, the tears broke through and I could barely complete the call. Jeff looked away to spare me embarrassment.

Two police officers came to Jeff’s house, took my statement, and asked me where Glen was at that moment. I told them that he probably was about to leave for work. Half-an-hour later, I was sitting in the front seat of a patrol car trying to figure out how I could steal the dash-mounted shotgun, while a few houses away police officers put Glen into the back of another car and took him away.

I wasn’t relieved. I just felt guilty. I was destroying our family for my own selfish purposes. No one ever asked about the report card.

Glen moved back in with us just a couple of months later.

Among the first people my mother contacted were the pastors at Kansas City Baptist Temple. To their credit, they treated Glen with kindness (he was threatening suicide), but deferred to me when it came down to what next to do.

I sat in the office of Bob Alexander, the gruff co-paster who claimed to be ex-Green Beret and formed the center of the cult of personality that was transforming KCBT from a traditional white-bread Baptist church into a take-no-prisoners onslaught for Christ.

“Do you want him back home or not?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“It’s up to you. I think that’s probably a good choice,” Bob said.

Bob talked to me for a while longer, handed me off to the youth pastors, and that was that. I always appreciated that; him giving me, for the first time in my life, autonomy, authority. Beside the fact that he embezzled three-quarters of a million dollars from the church and was sleeping with dozens of the women in the church’s marriage counseling programs, Bob Alexander was a pretty good guy.

Mary Beth, on the other hand, was a wreck. She would take Rachel out to see Glen in the run-down hotel out on Highway 40 that he was staying in, and when she returned, she’d talk about how hard it was on the family that I refused to let Glen come home, and that I’d refuse to see him.

“He misses you,” she said.

Well, I missed him, too. He was my best friend.

One day we were driving back from church when she let it all out.

“You know, you’re just as much to blame in all this as he is,” she said. “He told me that you would let him touch you for favors. You led him on.”

Years later, I brought this moment up to her. She denied it. That’s not something she would say, she said. I remember the exact corner we were going around when she said it. It was 55th and Skiles, by the brick house that used to be a school. I was thirteen, I think. Nearly fourteen.

Glen and I share a birthday. February 5th. “Just let him take us out for your birthday,” she asked. “Let’s just go to dinner. He wants to see you.”

I gave in. We all had a great time. I spent most of the meal talking to Glen about computers and videogames, reminiscing about the summer before when we’d carried an old Tandy 286 computer to his work so that we could dial out on different phone lines to bulletin board systems, spoofing multiple accounts to run a server-spanning corporation in Trade Wars 2002.

He moved back in the next week. My conditions were simple: He could live with us, but he wasn’t my father anymore. He couldn’t tell me what to do, and if I ever asked him to leave he had to leave.

Glen and Mary Beth agreed, and Glen moved out of the trashy hotel and back into our little house in Eastwood. He began going to regular counseling sessions at the church, as well as the state-mandated ones. He hadn’t gone to jail because my mother had convinced me not to press charges.

“What he did was wrong,” she said, “but he’s sorry. He’s back at church. Do you really want to ruin his whole life?”

It wasn’t long, a few weeks perhaps, before Glen and Mary Beth sat me down and explained how, despite the previous agreement, in a Christian home the father was boss. I would have to obey him if I was going to live there. They typically agreed on theology, although once when Glen explained how when a woman dies her soul is absorbed into the man’s soul, along with the souls of any of his unwed daughters, even Mary Beth had a hard time agreeing.

I ran away several times over the next few years, but I was a kid, couldn’t even work legally in most places until I was 16, and didn’t really have anywhere to go. We moved into a bigger house as Glen switched jobs again to Layne Christensen, a drilling company, where he eventually became the CTO. My mother continued to work in health care, which would sometimes take her on trips out of town.

“What are you thinking about?” Glen said too loudly one night, when I had been laying in my bed to sleep. Their bedroom was just across the hall. Mary Beth was away on business, with my sister.

“Nothing.” I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was up.

“You should talk to me for a while,” he said, in an attempt at a placating tone. I got out of bed, walked directly into his room, and tuned on the light switch. He was lying in bed, naked, stroking himself.

“You fucking asshole,” I said, and went into another room to call my mother. “He’s fucking jerking off while trying to talk to me,” I screamed at her. “Tell him to get the fuck out of here.” I had taken to saying “fuck” quite a bit at that point, especially during the fights, which would end with broken glass or shattered furniture.

They spoke on the phone for a while, then Glen left. Nothing else was ever said about it, although she didn’t leave me alone with him again—for a while. That her son might be raped or abused by her husband was an annoyance, an irritating factor that had to be worked around when traveling, like making sure the pets were fed. It was a hassle she quickly forgot.

Once Glen came barging into my room, furious.

“You’re messing with me,” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. “You’re leaving cum in the toilet for me to find. Why are you messing with me? This is hard enough for me without you trying to make it worse.”

In fact, I’d stopped masturbating for weeks at a time, trying to keep any thoughts of women out of my mind entirely, as we were taught over and again by pastors that even thinking about sex was as bad as actually having it. And masturbating? It might be okay, I once heard a pastor opine, if one could do it without thinking any sexual thoughts. But we were told: why take the risk?

Instead I would hold out for as long as I could until, usually in the shower, I’d be unable to stop myself. Before the orgasm had even left my body I would begin to pray: I’m sorry, Jesus. I’m so sorry. This is the last time. Never again.

The church had accepted Glen back into the fold. Within a couple of years, Glen was a trusted, loved member of the community. Because of his acumen with computers, he was even invited to help run Kansas City Baptist Temple’s little league database, saving them thousands of dollars on a commercial system.

As quickly as Glen was reintegrated, I was pushed back out. I joined the adult choir, whose director, Steve McCoy, showed me the only kindness I’d had from pastors since Bob Alexander, teaching me music theory and encouraging me to write original songs with him for the choir. Even when I stopped doing my music theory homework, Steve would still let me come to his office once a week and talk, or play him ornate secular music like Rush or Dream Theater. Steve wasn’t like the other adults, the ones who would mention in the crowded church lobby that I might be, you know, kind of a queer.

Steve was asked to leave the church when he chose to get a divorce from his wife, a nice woman who was, unfortunately, not a good match, despite their relationship having been tacitly arranged by other pastors in the run-up to Steve’s sanction.

With Steve gone, I didn’t last. I’d dropped out of high school at that point. I hadn’t gotten out of Glen and Mary Beth’s home yet, but I was spending weeks at a time living with my friends at their parents’ house, until I depleted their generosity.

Glen had left me alone sexually by that point, taking up with a set of “friends” who I believe were the same set of guys he had known from his days of cruising parks. I knew about these parks because he would take me to them, but only on adventures, never for sex, although he would point out men walking through the woods in the distance or sitting in their cars, warning me. I don’t know for certain that he was fucking any of them, but he continued to spend hours away from my mother in the middle of the night, or left for work hours early. Sometimes my friends and I would spot his car parked in a lonely lot in city parks.

Eventually I got out for good, making enough money to live with roommates. I saw Glen often, but as he and my mother’s relationship became more and more fragile, I spent most of my time at their house during the day, where I could speak to Mary Beth alone. I still loved her tremendously. I watched her struggle with an endless series of weight loss programs and a compulsive shopping habit which resulted in a mound of still-full shopping bags as big as a car in their garage.

They even had another son. After my sister was born, Glen and Mary Beth tried to conceive for years, going through something like seven or eight miscarriages, including one in which I had to scoop the dead fetus out of the toilet with a 64-ounce QuikTrip cup after my mother had been surprised by a premature dilation. They had needed the body for an autopsy. In time, her doctor discovered that my mother was literally allergic to Glen. Her body would begin to reject his cells as they twined into hers, and baby after baby died in her womb.

At last, a steady course of Heparin throughout the pregnancy allowed it to come fully to term and my brother—her “miracle baby”—was born.

“If God didn’t think Glen and I should be together,” she told me every time I asked her about her abiding and apparent unhappiness, “He wouldn’t have given us Nate.”

I met a girl, then another. I moved to New York. I made fewer visits to Kansas City. My mother, sister, brother, and young niece came to visit, but Glen was too busy and stayed in Kansas City. My sister and I spent most of their visit at each other’s throats, despite that we had grown to be extremely close over the years, particularly since her pregnancy and subsequent marriage at an early age had forced her and my parents both out of Kansas City Baptist Temple.

After a while, we realized it was Mary Beth. When she was around, we became bitter, cruel, wicked. Glen was gone, but the trauma lingered. Mary Beth wasn’t ever happy—and her guilt, her unhappiness, her moments of begging us to say that she was a good mother, it was too much. She wanted to be a victim, too, but instead her weakness made her loathsome. We would prey on her and she would cry. This was the order we understood.

Last year, on the way from New York to Oregon, I overnighted in Kansas City with my sister, who was going to drive with me the rest of the way. My mother called my sister on the phone, who stood in her kitchen repeating the conversation to me, her eyes rolling.

“Well, he said he’ll go out to dinner, but he doesn’t want to see Glen,” my sister told my mother. My sister had become an ambassador. Deals were brokered. Compromises made. We’d go to dinner without Glen. My sister and I would pick up Nate from school, so he and I could spend time together.

A couple of hours later we sat in my friend’s apartment, where I’d dropped off his vintage Kustom amp that he’d stored with me when he moved from Brooklyn back to KC. My mother called my phone, furious and crying.

“This is…it’s bullshit,” she said. “I don’t understand why you are doing this.”

“I don’t want to see him, Mom. I don’t want to see him ever again, in fact. You’re married to a rapist.”

“You can’t… No one gets to tell me when and if I get to see my son.”

Dinner was cancelled. We were to drop Nate off immediately.

For the last few years, I’d asked my mother what she was doing to protect Nate from Glen.

“Well, I keep a close eye on things,” she would say. “I think I would notice if something was going on.” Nate’s friends and cousins were at the house often, but they were also prepubescent, which, as far as anyone knew, was beyond Glen’s desire.

“Besides,” she would say, sort of cheerfully frank, “And don’t take this the wrong way. But I don’t think Glen would do that to his own blood.”

On the short drive to their house, I asked Nate if Glen had ever touched him. Nate was about ten, I think, and probably not that far from puberty. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever have the chance to talk to him again.

I wish I would have had more time, that I would have been able to be in Nate’s life more, that he trusted me more—although I knew that in his way, he loved me. Glen once told me that he ran into the living room and screamed to Nate, “Hey, Joel’s here!” Nate had dashed into the driveway, but it was all a prank, and instead of being only momentarily upset he had cried all night. Mary Beth and Glen liked to tell me that story to illustrate how much Nate loved me.

Nate said that nothing weird had gone on, but mostly he just sneered, trying to act cool for some reason. My sister looked at me from the passenger seat, eyes wide, aware that the moment we’d talked about for years, the moment when we had to talk to Nate about Glen, was suddenly happening without planning. And it didn’t seem to matter. We were trying to give Nate the warning we never got, that his father was not to be trusted, but there were no tears, no confessions, just cold, pre-teen sarcasm and what I desperately hoped was ignorance.

“If you ever need me for anything, if you ever need to get away, if Glen ever touches your penis or Mom tells you to not talk about something, you can always find me,” I told him, eyes on the road. “I will always come get you. You can tell your teachers, too. But you can always call…” I realized he’d never remember my phone number. “You can always Google me.” It seemed like weak advice, but it was true. “You know how to Google, right?”

“Uh,” he said his best jock voice. “Of course.”

I haven’t talked to Mary Beth since that day about a year ago. She called a couple of times. I didn’t listen to the messages. She sent me a message on Facebook which said, in part, that it was “never about choosing between you and Glen, or that you were less important to me than Glen, because I love you both.” I unfriended her. Somehow, I was more comfortable knowing that thousands of strangers could read my thoughts than letting her have access to them.

A couple of weeks ago, my sister called.

“Timmy’s dead,” she said. Timmy was Glen’s sister’s brother-in-law and, as far as I can tell, his first long-term sexual partner. Timmy had killed himself in his barn.

“All those hillbillies can burn in hell,” I said. “I could give a fuck.”

My sister called me an asshole and hung up. And she was right. I never really knew Timmy, despite watching from a distance as he tried to get married, have a family, build his house and be happy, fighting against the nature his family, culture, and religion told him was wrong. Glen’s sister Melinda, although I haven’t spoken to her in years, was always kind to me. It’s just easier to stand alone.

But Timmy’s death has made me realize I’ve kept one last lie inside, one that makes me culpable in all of Glen’s sins against others, his cruelties, his deceit, his sociopathic falsehoods that may very well end up in more pain, more abuse, not to me but to my brother, to his friends and cousins, to someone I don’t even know.

It’s the lie that I can destroy this family by simply talking about the truth, when this family was already destroyed. Despite the stately house, the gleaming Ford truck under the tall tree, the kids laughing in the yard, there is no home, only wreckage.