My Sister, Suzie: Perfectly Human, #1

By Bayla Dornon

Sometimes I muse on little things, like the meaning of life.

I was raised in an extreme religious cult filled with all kinds of weird, whacked-out beliefs, all about a two-thousand-year-old dead Jewish zombie reanimated carpenter who desperately wanted to come inside me so he and I could live together forever in a castle on top of a cloud after I die. As attractive as that bizarre fairytale was, I really can't believe it anymore.

For the pack of phony weirdos in that cult, the only point of life was just about saying some magic words before you die (as soon as possible).

A song I used to sing claims that, "Life Is But A Dream".

In the Princess Bride, Westley says "'Life Is Pain', highness… anyone who says otherwise is selling something." That's certainly been my own experience; but that's not all of it.

I think Life Is Horror. And there's a lot of it to go around.

There's the horror we have as children when we get injured: How could this happen to me?

There's the horror of going to school, and finding out that some of those kids we're locked up with all day are murderous animals.

There's the horror of getting caught doing something wrong.

There's a special kind of horror in aging, in the accumulation of aches and pains, as well as watching yourself rot; you see it all the time in young people's faces when we old fucks show our saggy, spotty skins. The dumb kids think that avoiding the oldies is the answer, but it isn't. Aging is a disease, and they're already infected.

But the worst horror, even more awful than falling out of love, is losing the ones we love. It's inevitable. It often starts with goldfish that die; and then it's a gerbil; and then Grampa. And on and on it goes, as the years pile up like wrecked autos in a sixty car pile-up on the freeway. The only solution I can even imagine is to stop loving anyone or anything; but loving is what defines us as human spirits, and we can't seem to kick the habit.

So, Life Is Horror.

Enjoy my horror story!

 

Hugs,

 

Béla Dornon

Seattle, 2024

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bayla Dornon
• Release date: Apr 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224853403

Bayla Dornon

Bayla Dornon's first book is "Gay Testaments, Old & New" an edited compilation of texts from both famous and obscure literature that paint a vivid and exciting portrait of men loving men. In 2020 and 2021, Dornon published the four-book RESTORATION series, the story of twenty-year old Chris Brenner, a gay man fleeing from his ultra-religious parents and their efforts to 'torture him straight' through religious conversion therapy. Escaping to the Center in San Francisco, Chris meets and befriends fellow initiates George and Mary — and falls head over heels in love with Tom Griffin, a charismatic Priest at the San Francisco Center for Restoration. The four novels follow these young adults as they struggle for independence and restoration from indoctrination and abuses of religious and patriarchal families and society. In 2022, Dornon has released the new series of "Jake Bennett Adventures", the stories of sexy bisexual rookie LA cop Jake Bennett, trying desperately to make his way in the asphalt jungle of Los Angeles. Married to one man since late 1988, Bayla Dornon is an author, critic, playwright, former teacher, silly pagan, photographer, cat-lover and videographer. A third generation Californian, Dornon and his husband recently escaped the absurd desert of San Diego and now live happily ever after in Seattle.

Book preview

THE REASON I WROTE THIS (An apology)

Given that I am not a famous person (although I am arguably notorious), you may well be asking yourself why I am offering my autobiography for sale. My husband asked me this, too, so I don’t take offense.

There are three reasons for writing this book (although I may come up with more).

First is the fragility of memory. Phil and I sailed through the Covid shutdown without getting sick at all. This boosted our confidence in our ability to withstand the disease, as it rapidly made its way through the general public, despite the stupidity of the hopelessly useless mask mandate, the unenforceable social distancing, and the moronic stay at home order.

In November of 2022, we ventured to the lovely Olympic Peninsula and stayed at the wonderful Lake Crescent resort, where we promptly caught Covid. Our symptoms were no more than a mild cold, with one important exception. Covid dumped my memory’s logs. Not the memories themselves: just the paths in my brain to get to them. I was terrified. For sixty-one years, I had depended on my extraordinary memory, recalling data instantly and effortlessly on almost every occasion. After the Covid, I lost access to memories, entire song lyrics, movie dialogue I’ve been reciting for decades, whole word sequences, phrases, and more. I discovered techniques to rebuild the recall routes, but it was a wake-up call, because of reason two.

My family are all effectively dead (more in a second). I no longer have access to anyone who remembers my childhood. Families always maintain memories through a system of recall exercises, most of which begin with the phrase, Remember when... and continue to a specific event in the family’s history. I cannot play Remember when... anymore. There is one resource, but that person is younger than I, and suffers from CRS syndrome (can’t remember shit). So, when I forget them, the stories will be gone forever. This is important because of reason three.

In addition to being the sole survivor in my family, I am also one member of a dangerously small group of gay men who remember sex and oppression before AIDS. My story has weight for that reason, but also because I survived addiction, cancer and religion, three of the main scourges of American life. As our Republic careens helplessly toward a tyrannical Theocracy, it is important for the survivors in the war against religion to speak up and remind people why a Christian America must never, ever come into being.

FOREWORD

Sometimes I muse on little things, like the meaning of life.

I was raised in an extreme religious cult filled with all kinds of weird, whacked-out beliefs, all about a two-thousand-year-old dead Jewish reanimated carpenter who desperately wanted to come inside me so he and I could live together forever in a castle on top of a cloud after I die. As attractive as that bizarre fairytale was, I really can’t believe it anymore.

For the pack of phony weirdos in that cult, the only point of life was just about saying some magic words before you die (as soon as possible).

A song I used to sing claims that, Life Is But A Dream.

In the Princess Bride, Westley says ’Life Is Pain’, highness... anyone who says otherwise is selling something. That’s certainly been my own experience; but that’s not all of it.

I think Life Is Horror. And there’s a lot of it to go around.

There’s the horror we have as children when we get injured: How could this happen to me?

There’s the horror of going to school, and finding out that some of those kids we’re locked up with all day are murderous animals.

There’s the horror of getting caught doing something wrong.

There’s a special kind of horror in aging, in the accumulation of aches and pains, as well as watching yourself rot; you see it all the time in young people’s faces when we old fucks show our saggy, spotty skins. The dumb kids think that avoiding the oldies is the answer, but it isn’t. Aging is a disease, and they’re already infected.

But the worst horror, even more awful than falling out of love, is losing the ones we love. It’s inevitable. It often starts with goldfish that die; and then it’s a gerbil; and then Grampa. And on and on it goes, as the years pile up like wrecked autos in a sixty car pile-up on the freeway. The only solution I can even imagine is to stop loving anyone or anything; but loving is what defines us as human spirits, and we can’t seem to kick the habit.

So, Life Is Horror.

Enjoy my horror story!

Hugs,

Béla Dornon

Seattle, 2024

This book

is dedicated

to all the monsters

in my family.

PROLOGUE

If I had to choose a moment in medias res to start this story, it would have to be the beginning of the bridal march music at Suzie’s third marriage. It was her first church wedding, to Terry Chester, on the seventh of March 1992, and it took place at the old church of our mother’s cult, St. Anne’s, in Oceanside.

In that one frozen moment, we’re all standing, looking toward the back of the church, as the bride makes her entrance. Suzie looks fantastic, just like a bride should look. She’s thirty-three and a third years old, she’s slim and in great shape, and this time, she keeps telling me, all the trips to rehab and the prison stints have really worked— there will be no more bad men, wild drugs and disastrous life choices.

I don’t believe her, but I wish with all my heart that I could.

Suzie’s wedding day, this moment, is one of those indelible memories: the kind seared into the brain by heightened emotions. Memories like that never seem to dim or fade, no matter how many decades go by.

This moment occurred half my lifetime ago, as I write about it at the age of sixty-two.

Suzie is easily over six feet tall in that moment, with her hair piled up and her hat on and her high heels augmenting her five foot ten frame. Altogether, I think she’s as tall as my six foot one and a half inches. Beside her stumbles our little brother Fred, at least a foot shorter. Suzie and Fred are struggling vainly to perform the traditional bridal march, since they both lack the ability to dance. Step, stop. Step, stop. Together they lurch awkwardly down the aisle of the old Episcopal church on West Street, the building housing the cult in which we spent the better part of our childhoods.

Suzie had begged me to walk her down the aisle; I was the obvious and appropriate choice. But, still deep within the indoctrination of my militant feminist phase, I had refused. I would not give her away: I didn’t own her, I argued, she was a free human. I couldn’t escort her under the guise of giving her to Terry, it was absolutely wrong. When begging failed, she had even tried to command me: all our lives, I had always been her slave, in the sense that I adored her, obeyed her, and was generally useful. But even that old master-slave bond failed. I told her again and again she belonged to herself, not to any father or brother, husband or son, and she should walk by herself. Finally she gave it up in disgust, and roped Fred in to replace me.

Suzie’s deep compulsion to observe tradition was solely born from superstition, not reverence. Like all gamblers, Suzie absolutely believed in luck and ritual and their synergistic properties, and she wanted the best possible luck she could get for this marriage.

And so, the memory plays out, like a funny movie, with the music too fast, the people chuckling, the close-ups, the long shots.

Now she and Fred are stumbling along, their steps mis-matched and completely out of sync, their faces embarrassed, their body language non-verbally begging the assembly not to look.

I should have done this for her, I realize too late. I wished I had. I was just being stupid, stubborn, and pig-headed. It’s a tendency I have, putting my principles before the things that really matter, like a career, an education, and family.

Beside me stands my own mate of three and a half years, Phillip. He’s in the last year of his PhD at UCSD, and we too will marry, later in the year, on August first. Before then, our brother Fred will marry Misty, a friend of Suzie’s— on the ninth anniversary of Fred’s first marriage to his high school sweetheart, Tracey. Fred’s first marriage lasted barely two years, though it was given every possible blessing and advantage by our family, cult and society.

A short way away stands our mother, Jean, who will also be marrying in November of this year, to an Episcopal bishop named Paco. Her second or third marriage, depending on how you count marriage, it will last almost eight years.

Once upon a time, there were six of us. Dad, Mom, Suzie, me, Fred, Jeanne. All six of us members of the Don R. Dornon family have passed through these church doors, so many times, each of us never knowing which would be the last time. There’s always a last time for everything, but we rarely know it’s the last when it happens. Some of us passed through those doors for the last time to the endless embrace of the grave, some to a married life, and some to the ultimate freedom of apostacy.

I look around this church, renovated recently, with a different rector to replace Father Duane H. Thebeau, the disgraced former priest of our cult. I don’t know this new priest; he’s bland to the point of invisibility. I can’t even remember his name anymore; I think it was Ted something-or-other. Considering the amount of damage Father Thebeau did with his charisma and evil magnetism to his cult’s members, all the women he slept with, and even his own children, it’s probably just as well the new guy is such a wet dish rag.

Even then, thirty one years ago, I recognized that my family’s history, a smaller part of the larger cult’s history, was sick and wrong and sordid. Drugs, violence, cancer, incest, prison, abuse, lies, cheating, perversion, divorce: all the usual ingredients of good Christian homes. We had it all, in spades, and so did our church’s cult, headed by Father Thebeau.

Focus.

Suzie is at the altar now, next to Terry. I don’t really remember much beyond the entrance and the hand-off. I know what must have come next: the marriage service never changes, it’s always the same. Only the music changes from wedding to wedding. Suzie’s was all modern pap. The worst possible pop-tunes with insipid, stupid lyrics. Embarrassing. If he’d been there that day, Dad would have been embarrassed, I think. Dad had a glorious, operatic baritone tenor voice, and he used to sing with prestigious choirs, and as a highly paid church soloist. He was very fond of baroque, classical, and even romantic music masterpieces, and this junk-music Suzie picked would have shamed him. Dad had a brief but glorious career as a lounge singer, and a much longer one as an elementary school teacher, almost as long as his career as an unwilling farmer. But in the end, he became little more than an historical footnote in the history of the family that bears his name. Even I dumped his name. There’s still a track meet every year in Fallbrook, California, called the Dornon Games. That’s about it. Whatever fame Dad had dwindled away and died out many years ago.

The real celebrities of our nuclear family unit were the women— Mom, Suzie, and Jeanne: The Dragon, the Vampire, and the Little Ghost. My monstrous trinity.

What else do I remember about that moment?

I remember I was jonesing for a cigarette. I had promised myself for months that I would quit, the day after Suzie’s wedding. I wanted to spend this last day of my nicotine dependency with her. Smoking cigarettes was one of the many hidden secrets that bound us together. Suzie had deliberately inculcated all sorts of bad habits in her siblings: smoking, drugging, sneaking around, lying, and above all, keeping secrets. She didn’t do it to hurt us: all the damage was committed in service of her own welfare, and in aid of her war against Mom, a war that I’m told many daughters and mothers share, but perhaps none have waged so bitterly and savagely as the women in my family. In that war, my other siblings and I were only pawns.

Quitting smoking will mean abandoning that special moment Suzie and I used to share together, when we exited whatever place we were in and lit up. But a promise is a promise; I did in fact quit a few days after her wedding, and I never smoked again. Suzie herself would quit a few years later when she got pregnant, for the baby’s sake. So it all worked out fine.

Except that nothing was ever fine, or if so, not for long; the drugs and the terrible, violent men always returned; my beloved sister Suzie always disappeared, leaving the vampire in her place. Sometimes she literally disappeared, and we couldn’t find her for weeks and months at a time. Other times she was still around, but not available. The worst were the times when I couldn’t even recognize my adored sister inside the creature she had become.

But apart from all that, in this frozen moment of time, in this memory-bubble floating in the perfect black vacuum of space, everything is just fine, and we are all singing those crappy Christian-pop songs printed in the bulletin, all smiling and happy as Suzie and Terry take their vows and promise to stay together forever, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or much, much worse.

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Chapter 1: DORNON RANCH SLR

Suzie was doomed long before she was born.

Like a child born with a fatal genetic condition that will kill it before it can really live, my older sister was born with a fatal condition. Suzie’s birth mother never wanted her, and she despised the baby that began to grow in her body in January of 1958. But, more than thirteen years before Roe v. Wade made abortion safely and legally available in California, Suzie’s birth-mother couldn’t safely and/or legally abort her. Instead, she dumped her.

In group therapy many years later, Suzie told me she had recalled that her earliest emotional memories were of being hated, rejected and unwanted.

But despite this, my older sister was a warm, joyful, loving woman who almost made it to the age of fifty-five, even with every card in the deck stacked against her. She had a giant belly laugh that would burst out all the time. She loved to snicker at little jokes, a warm sound like a hum about to become a laugh; and the best of all for her was to get me going somewhere that laughter was forbidden (like church) until we would both be chortling helplessly behind our hands.

Friday’s child, according to the old song, is loving and giving. That was my sister. Suzie gave many, many presents to everyone she knew. She was quick with a hug, or a ride when you needed one. She could sit and listen when needed, and also offer pretty good advice when asked. Her needs drove her, but she never lost her compassion and sense of attachment. Although born without much empathy, Suzie did develop that most human of skills over time. Suzie successfully married and produced a child of her own, a child she showered with all the care and warmth and loving-kindness she never received from her own birth mother.

Rejected by her birth-mother, Suzie was adored right from the start by the families of her adopting parents, Mr. and Mrs. Don R. Dornon of San Luis Rey, California. There are dozens of slide photos of Suzie being bathed, Suzie being dressed up, Suzie being carried all around, and Suzie being adored by smiling parents and grandparents. She was the very first grandchild for Mom’s parents: Mom’s brother, Uncle Raymond, seven years older, married later in life, and eventually adopted three children of his own after Mom got Suzie and me.

Our parents had already been married for two and a half years when Suzie was born on October 10, 1958. Dad had graduated high school in East Palestine, Ohio (pop. 5,201) in 1948 and started college at Ohio State, where he played sportsball. When the Korean War broke out, he joined the Navy, graduating from boot camp in 1951. That same year Mom graduated from Downey High School in the unincorporated city of Downey, California. In the Navy, Dad trained as a parachute packer, and was deployed to Korea; but the war ended shortly after he arrived, and he never flew a mission. By August 1953, he was back in the States, and joined his dad and brother in Anaheim, working in the family’s brake shop on Katella Boulevard. Mom, meanwhile, had done two years at a local junior college, and was seeking work as a secretary.

My dad had a glorious, naturally operatic baritone voice, and frequently sang at weddings and other events for money. He and Mom met when he sang at her church: he was twenty-four and she was twenty-one, and they started dating. Eventually they married, on the first day of spring in 1956.

My folks inherited quite a chunk of cash when Grampa Dornon sold the family’s brake shop and its property on Katella Avenue in Anaheim to Walter Disney, who built part of the parking lot for Disneyland on the site. Before Suzie came, my parents were property flippers; they had already invested in, renovated and sold some properties in Los Angeles County; and then, in 1957, the young couple moved to Oceanside, California, and went into business with a forty year old businessman and professional developer named Ralph Marsden, who lived in Capistrano Beach.

Their partnership was practical in nature: Mom and Dad had the energy, and Ralph had quite a lot of capital. Together they purchased a twenty-five acre grove of mature orange trees, located at Star Route Box 3A, San Luis Rey, between Mission Avenue to the south and the San Luis Rey river in the north, near the back gate of Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. The trees were watered by sprinklers to augment the scanty rains, and there was no farmhouse or other dwelling on the property. The trees were already producing oranges when the partnership purchased the property. Mom went to work as a secretary for the law firm of Feist, Vetter, Knauf and Loy, while Dad started drawing up plans for the ranch house and reservoir, and renting equipment.

The first thing Mom and Dad did was to build a tiny one-room house on the edge of the property to use as a home base. Dad rented a D-2 caterpillar tractor and began grading the property, creating level dirt roads, banks for the roads, and then digging the reservoir. Once that was done (and after Dad survived flipping the tractor over on top of himself, escaping with only a broken leg) they hired an architect and went to work creating the plans for a much larger ranch house they would build below the road on a plateau above the orange grove. Eventually, the address would be listed as 4310 Mission Avenue, San Luis Rey, CA 92068.

I should mention here that Don and Jean Dornon were avid church goers. My mother, at least, was an extremely devoted Christian, going to church each and every Sunday (at the very least) every single week for the entire time I knew her. Back in 1958, they were going to the First United Methodist church on First Street in Oceanside. Dad sang in the choir, where he was a star soloist. Mom also sang, but she had a small and unremarkable first soprano singing voice: she saved her piecing screams and roaring bellows only for those at home.

Before fall of 1958, Mom and Dad had already had a pregnancy which had ended tragically in death. I remember how, thirty years later, as Mom and I were driving to Gramma’s house in Downey, we passed a cemetery. Mom said in a small, quiet voice, I have a baby girl buried there, and I’ve never visited her grave. I didn’t know what to say, so I sat there in the car with my mouth open as we drove past. Mom explained that, that was why, in the fall of ’58, they had begun to discuss the possibility of adoption.

One Sunday (as Mom told it) in October of 1958, at the coffee hour social after the church service, an older man from the congregation, a physician, approached Mom and Dad as they stood chatting with others from the congregation.

He sidled up to me, and he says, I hear you want a baby, Mom said. She told us this story many times, and each time she would imitate a gruff, older man’s voice.

When she and Dad affirmed that they had, indeed, been thinking about adopting, the doctor said, I’ve got a mother who’s in labor now. You can have her baby.

When Mom told us this story, she always said it happened on Sunday. I suspect, however, that this conversation happened at Thursday choir practice, since Suzie’s date of birth was Friday, October tenth. If it was the Sunday before Suzie was born, then it was a five-day marathon labor, and Mom would have included that in the story. But we’ll never know now, since all documents related to that event were falsified, and all of the first-hand witnesses are long gone.

Within a few hours of her birth that warm, pleasant Friday, Mom and Dad were holding Suzanne Marie Dornon, and scrambling to get together all the paraphernalia new parents need. A phony birth certificate, signed by the doctor, was issued, listing Donald Robert Dornon and Jean (nee Redfield) Dornon as parents. That was fairly common practice in those days, especially in areas where adoption was still heavily stigmatized.

And just like that, they were a family. Everything would have been just great, except for one little problem: construction on the ranch house, including the pre-paid services of a carpenter and a contractor, was already well underway in San Luis Rey. My parents couldn’t watch Suzie at the tiny little one-room cottage they’d built on the edge of the grove, and obviously the construction site was no safe place for a new-born baby anyway.

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With no other family in the area, Mom reluctantly called her own mother. They drove eighty miles up the freeway to Downey, and handed over the precious infant to Willis and Mary Elizabeth (nee Wright) Redfield, of Downey, California. For the next year, off and on, Suzie spent most of her time away from Mom and Dad, with our grandmother. Suzie and Gramma both told me, independently, that they had immediately and permanently bonded. This was only natural: they had very similar temperaments, calm and caring; they were artistically inclined; and they were both kind and gossipy and warm. They both loved soap operas. They both loved collecting things from nature: Gramma collected plants and driftwood, while Suzie collected driftwood and shells. They understood each other easily, and got along effortlessly. My sister and my grandmother spoke the same language. Suzie would spend the first thirty-two years of her life allied with Gramma in their war against Mom.

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The Redfield family had also farmed oranges throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Downey, an unincorporated section of the county thirteen miles south of Los Angeles. Gramma Redfield had come from New Hampshire to California as a child with her mother, a professional seamstress; Willis Redfield was born in California, but his family had roots in Canada. My uncle, Raymond Redfield, was born in 1927, and Jean Redfield, aka Mom, in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. In addition to farming the orange grove, Grampa Redfield had also been an avid inventor, gunsmith and machinist, and owned a patent on a revolutionary spring-leaf tractor seat that most tractors used in those days.

Whenever Mom talked about