Me and My Uncle Ch. 01

I guess you could say that I'm a survivor.

Looking back on it, it's a wonder that I did survive, considering what I went through for the first 22 years of my life.

I have survived losing my father before I was 2-years-old. I've survived being dragged all over the country by my alcoholic, drug-addicted prostitute mother. I survived being sexually molested by my stepfather, beginning not long after I turned 10 and continuing for over a year, and I survived the aftereffects when my mother found out and shot him to death over it. I survived nearly three years in a state juvenile school for girls, where I was used sexually by the older girls nearly the whole time I was there.

And I survived eight years with my Uncle Bill, my mother's older brother who repeatedly exposed himself to me and made me watch him masturbate until I turned 18, at which time he turned me into his little sex slave, a role I filled until I ran away from him when I was 22.

Yes, I was my uncle's whore, and the only good thing that came out of it was that we used the money that was made from selling my body to pay for my college education, which, in turn, gave me the means to pull myself out of the cesspool that was my upbringing.

I survived because I'm tough mentally and physically, in that I was able to accept some awful treatment. I survived because I also have a high intellegence, although some of the choices I've made weren't very smart. But I was smart enough to stay alive, to stay largely free of drink and drugs, and to stay relatively sane. And I was smart enough to carefully plan my escape, and cover my tracks so my uncle could never find me.

The thing is, though, I don't look tough, and that was always my problem. Even today, as I approach age 35, I stand slightly over five feet tall, and I've never weighed more than 105 pounds soaking wet. I've always had this vulnerable image, along with a pretty, innocent look - haunting brown eyes and dark, girlish hair - that always seemed to attract the wrong men like flies.

Of course, to look at me now, you would never guess that I went through any of that. Today, I am happily married to a man I love and who loves me, and we have two little girls. I am a successful computer software designer for a major company in a large Southern city, and Ron is an attorney. We live in a nice suburban home, we're members of the local country club and we're active in the community.

I survived and I escaped my background, but it was a close thing, and I still have nightmares about being dragged back into that sordid life. Fortunately, Ron is my rock of support, and his love has helped heal a lot of the wounds I suffered during that time. I told him some of what I did before we were married, and he kept me anyway, although it might have been different if I'd given him the gory details.

Trust me, a lot of the details are pretty gory.

So why am I telling you all of this? Well, for one thing, I feel the need to unburden myself, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Like I said, I still have nightmares about that life. But it's not only nightmares, it's dreams I'm having, many of them hot, lurid scenes that leave me sweaty and shaking with fear and lust. It's as if my inner psyche is trying to lure me back into the life of a whore and a slut by replaying images of the things I used to do.

You see, for all the hell that I went through, for all that I was used and abused by people who were supposed to guide me into adulthood, the fact is that I willingly let a lot of it happen. Part of the reason was that I was so lonely and starved for affection, and I had such low self-esteem, that I craved the attention I got from selling my body, giving it away to people who used me, many of them for some truly perverted acts.

But more than that - much, much more than that - was the feeling I got when I was engaged in those acts. To be blunt about it, the biggest reason why I submitted to years of sexual servitude to my uncle and all of the others, and stayed with him for so long, was because the things they did to me routinely sent me to and kept me at such incredible heights of orgasmic ecstasy that they made the bad times bearable.

Every night that I worked for my uncle, I would think, "tonight's the night they're going to take me to that place," of sexual nirvana where nothing else matters except pure sensate pleasure. And many times they would.

The amazing - and shameful - part about it is that I actually miss that aspect of my old life. In the 13 years since I ran away from my Uncle Bill, I have never - not once - come close to achieving the kind of high level of sexual pleasure I did when I was his whore.

Oh, sex with Ron is nice and loving, and I do enjoy it. I love my husband with all my heart and soul, and we have an active sex life.

But it's not the same. It is almost impossible for me to achieve an orgasm unless we both work long and hard at it. Even then, when I finally do get to the point of climax, they pale in comparison to what I got almost all the time with my uncle, his friends and the men he sold me to.

God help me, I live in desperate, daily fear that the wrong man is going to come into my life, a man who will push all the right buttons, and before I know it, I'll be right back where I was 13 years ago. Only this time, it won't just be my life that is in danger, but the lives of my husband and my daughters.

And I have come too far and worked too hard to allow that to happen.

So, let me start at the beginning, because that really is where everything started.

First of all, there is the issue of my name. I answer today to Lyn Foster, Foster being Ron's name. My name before I married was Lyn Gibson, Gibson being my father's name. But when I was growing up - and when I was whoring for Uncle Bill - I was known as Sophie Trotter, Trotter being his and Mom's family name.

I was born in April, 1970 at the Infirmary on the base at Ft. Leonard Wood, in Missouri, not far from where Mom and Bill grew up. Mom was 17, but she was already well on her way to becoming an alcoholic and an addict. My father was 19, and a soldier from somewhere in California, and from what I've been told, he was a pretty straight guy.

I really think Mom loved my dad, as much as it was in her capacity to love anyone other than herself. And Dad must have cared for her, because he married her when they learned Mom was pregnant. Maybe it was love, but more likely they married so that I wouldn't be born illegitimate, and to allow Mom to avail herself of the medical facilities at the fort.

Whatever the reason, that's how I came to be born Sophia Lynette Gibson, which is the name on my birth certificate. It was a small distinction that would have enormous impact on my life.

Remarkably, her pregnancy with me was the only time in her life after the age of 14 when Mom didn't do hard drugs and drink to excess. She still smoked a little pot and drank some, but not like she did before and after her pregnancy. Lucky me, because I wasn't born with fetal alcohol syndrome or with a cocaine habit. I hate to think how fucked up my life would have been if I had been.

I always liked to think my life would have been completely different had Dad lived, that he and Mom would have stayed together and I would have grown up as a normal girl. In reality, things probably wouldn't have played out much differently, but it made for a nice alternative life to the one I did live through.

The fact is, however, that when I was about nine months old, right after New Year's, my father was shipped off to Vietnam, and he came home six months later in a body bag.

Without her soldier husband to ground her, Mom was lost, and we spent the next eight years moving about the country. We never stayed in the same house or apartment more than a few months, because Mom was following this guy or that guy, or she was skipping out on bail from a bust for drunk driving or prostitution, or she was welching on the rent.

Mom was quite embittered about the circumstances surrounding my dad's death, and she irrationally blamed him, thinking, I guess, that he should have found some way to avoid going to 'Nam. That's why she dropped the Gibson name and reverted back to Trotter, and I came to be called Sophie instead of Sophia for reasons I have never quite understood.

In spite of our wandering, I started school when I was supposed to, and I proved to be a smart kid and a quick learner who could retain what I learned. But I hardly ever made friends, and even then, the more aggressive boys seemed to sense my vulnerability. They treated me like their toy and played head games with me, some of them vaguely sexual.

When I was nine, and in fourth grade, it appeared that our luck had changed. Mom actually met a man who she thought was worth staying with, a somewhat older man named Schultz, but everyone called him Schultzie. He owned a used-car dealership in a small town in rural Oklahoma, he was glib and he treated me nice, which was a change of pace for my mother's boyfriends, all of whom had barely tolerated my presence.

Schultzie was divorced, he said, because his wife left him for another man and took his daughters with her. After what he did to me, I highly doubt that's what happened.

At any rate, he and Mom got married, and we moved into his house. It was really pretty nondescript, but compared to where we'd lived before, it seemed like Windsor Palace. When Mom first met Schultzie, she was working in a bar, but she soon took another job working nights as a desk clerk for a motel.

Actually, she was using that job as a front so she could turn tricks. She claimed he was the one who put her up to it, but there was never any proof of that.

What it meant for me, however, was that I was home alone virtually every night with Schultzie. He was a fairly big man who drank quite a bit, not like Mom, but he did drink pretty regularly. But he wasn't mean, far from it. Like I said, he treated me nice. Too nice. I had just turned 10 when he began to come into my room before I went to bed, and that's where it started.

Some girls who go through an ordeal like what I went through block it out of their memory, but I never did. To this day, I remember everything. Hell, I want to remember everything, so it stays fresh in my mind and I can keep something like that from ever happening to my little girls.

He began with flattery, telling me how cute I was, and all that. I was just starting to feel my body beginning to change, and for a girl who had never been told that she had any worth, it was music to my ears.

I can't go into any details about what he did, but I do need to outline the progression, because it was a pattern that repeated itself much later.

Once he got my confidence, he started touching me, in innocent places at first, but he soon progressed to touching me more intimately. I told him it felt funny, but I never told him to quit. That's important to remember. I never did tell him to quit, because, frankly, what he did and the way he did it made me feel good.

Let's be brutally frank about this, though. Schultzie raped me. Oh, he didn't exactly force himself on me; it was more like he talked me into it, and I eventually gave in. But it was still a rape. I was scared and it hurt like hell, but he was oh, so soothing, and talked me through it like it was the most normal thing in the world. God, I still retch at the memory, especially at the realization that even then I didn't tell him no.

Still, that was when I began to think that something was wrong. More and more, it was making me very uncomfortable. But I never stopped him. I didn't like what he was doing to me, but I didn't want to lose his affection. Like I said, he was the first man who had ever shown me much kindness, and I didn't want to risk losing him.

The whole time - and this went on for about a year - he made me promise not to tell my mother, that it was our little secret. And truly, I was scared to tell her, because I had learned the hard way that my mother had a vicious temper when she was provoked, as events would prove. So I sure as hell wasn't going to tell her.

But everything came tumbling down the weekend of Independence Day in 1981. That Friday, she got sick while she was working, came home early and walked in on us. I guess she was so sick or so shocked that she couldn't react, so she just turned around and walked out. That was the last time I saw my mother as a free woman.

They said that if she had done what she later did right then, she may have gotten some sympathy from the law. But she walked out and left me with him, and waited to do what she did. She was gone that whole weekend and the following Monday.

Schultzie didn't go to his lot that Saturday, because it was the Fourth of July, and he spent the whole three days pacing the floor like a cat, worrying. As it turned out, he had good reason to worry. The whole time, he didn't lay a finger on me. In fact, he barely spoke to me. Of course, it was too late by then.

Schultzie decided to go on to work that Tuesday. After all, he said, he had a business to run. I stayed home alone, like I always did during summer break. I should have been upset at having been caught, but actually I was relieved, because it meant that I wouldn't have to submit to Schultzie any more, and I figured that I could eventually smooth things over with Mom. I really had no concept of how serious it all was.

I mean, I'd grown up listening to - and sometimes watching - Mom have sex with her many boyfriends, in motel rooms or the one-room apartments we often stayed in. I just figured it was something everyone did, even kids my age. Yeah, I know, for a smart kid, I was pretty dumb in that regard.

It was about 1:30 that afternoon when I heard the doorbell ring, and when I answered the door, there was a police officer and a social worker. They told me to gather up some of my things, that I was to come with them. All they would say was that Mom had done a very bad thing and that I was going to have to move.

I started to cry then, because somehow I knew what had happened. And what had happened was that Mom drove into Texas and spent the weekend getting violently drunk and stoned. Then she went to a pawn shop that was open that Monday, bought a .22 pistol and some ammunition, and practiced out in the country until she felt she was proficient enough to use it.

That Tuesday morning, she drove back into town, to Schultzie's car lot, marched into his office and shot him five times in the face before he had a chance to react. Then she calmly reloaded, stood over his body, which had fallen to the floor, and put five shots between his legs. She sat down then and cried insanely, and put up no resistance when the police came and took her to jail.

The first few days, I stayed with the social worker until they could figure out what to do with me. At that time, Uncle Bill was in the Air Force overseas and couldn't take me in, and both of my grandparents had passed away several years earlier. I don't think my father's family even knew I existed.

Finally, I was sent to the state juvenile school, and I quickly learned some terrifying new tricks. By then, word had spread about what I had done with Schultzie, and it soon became a matter of public record, since that was the defense my mother intended to use. She never did get out of jail, because she couldn't make bail, and no one in the community would help her, because Schultzie had been one of them, and we were the outsiders.

So when I arrived at the state school, I was immediately tagged as the little tramp who had seduced her stepfather and caused his murder. And the second night I was there, two of the older girls pulled me into the shower room, stripped me naked and assaulted me. Everyone in authority looked the other way until I became their little bitch.

I quickly learned that I'd better get good at pleasing them any way I could if I was to survive in that hellhole, and I did. That was actually my first experience as a whore. The girls who "owned" me would sell my services for things like cigarettes, gum, candy, anything that had some value in an institutional setting. I soon began to obtain some pleasure out of what I was doing, and that's how I adapted and survived.

I was technically supposed to be in the foster-care system, and I actually met some prospective foster parents who came to interview me. But I was never placed with a family, I guess, because when they found out who I was, they didn't want me around. How's that for tearing down a vulnerable girl's self-esteem. My mom's case had gotten a fair amount of notoriety, and I don't think anyone in Oklahoma wanted anything to do with either of us.

Mom's trial was a nightmare. She was charged with first degree murder, because she had had a chance to think about what she did, and had planned Schultzie's murder in cold blood. They trotted out all of her old charges from a variety of jurisdictions, found a lot of her customers from the motel who were willing to testify against her, and they even blamed me for somehow luring Schultzie into my clutches. I should have been so talented. I mean, shit, I was 11-years-old, for God's sake.

Still, she did get a little bit of sympathy from the jury, because they convicted her of second-degree murder, not first, and she was sentenced to 25 years in the state penitentiary. I guess maybe they did believe me a little when I testified that it had been Schultzie who had started everything.

My mother's reaction to me was weird. Here she'd gone and killed my abuser, ostensibly to protect me from a predator, but afterward she adamantly refused to see me or have anything to do with me. I couldn't believe it, and I cried brokenhearted tears at how Mom had abandoned me.

In many ways, I hated and feared my mom. But for so long it had just been the two of us against the world, and I thought we had had a bond. Maybe we did, and she felt like I had broken that bond by letting Schultzie have his way with me and not telling her.

Regardless of the reason, it was years before we spoke again, and then it was not long before she died of cancer 10 years ago. She was 42 when she died. Still, she lived long enough to see me more as I am today, and not how I was then, so I have some peace about it.

I had just turned 14, and physically I had matured as much as I was going to, when I got a letter from Uncle Bill. He was getting out of the Air Force, and he wanted to take me in to live with him. He was buying a little country store back in the area in Missouri where he and Mom had grown up, and he was going to need some help in running it.

So that summer, I finally got out of the juvenile school, and I thought my prayers had been answered. In reality, I merely jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

The part of Missouri where Uncle Bill's store was located is kind of a shabby, rundown area of small farms. The place wasn't even really a town, just a scattering of houses and a couple of churches spread along a state highway that led to Jefferson City, about 30 miles away. The county seat, where I went to a consolidated high school, was about 10 miles away from the store.

It was also about 30 miles from Columbia, where the University of Missouri is located, and that's important. I quickly sized up Mizzou as the place where I could go, and maybe escape the life I had led up to that point. And it was, but not before Uncle Bill dragged me through a hell of my own making.

At this point I should describe my Uncle Bill. Like I said earlier, he was my mom's older brother, by seven years. He'd quit school at 16 and joined the Air Force when he turned 18, and had served 20 years. Like Mom, and me he had dusky skin, he was clean-shaven and had looks that were rough, but not ugly by any means. He was of average size and in good shape from his military career.