In his written account, he described how he used to sneak out of his bedroom at night and slowly make his way along a dirt road to crouch below her lighted window in anticipation of seeing her nude. Describing himself in the third person, as he did in much of his writing:
The youth moved silently through the night over the grass and across the barbed wire fence . . . her shutters folded back, unsuspecting, letting the northwest breeze play through the arrangement of the bedroom. The youth looked in, forgot about the cold and rain outside, forgot about essence, forgot about time. While observing his aunt she began to move toward her collectables, which were small miniature dolls and thimbles which were encased in a wooden receptacle on her wall. My aunt was naked as she moved toward her collections very cautiously, and began to handle the thimbles prudently and discreetly. Her actions in handling the thimbles and miniature dolls were accomplished in a cavalier manner, bringing them close to her naked breasts in a sort of sexual ritual not understood by the observing youth.
He also could not understand why his aunt Katheryn was so different from his modest mother and the rest of the family, in neglecting to wear a robe or nightgown while walking around in her bedroom with the shutters folded back. But he could no more ask questions about this than he could explain his own behavior and the punishment he risked should his prowling become known to his aunt or another family member who happened to see him near her window at night.
The closest he came to admitting his special interest in her occurred one day when he confessed to his mother, prior to his tenth birthday, that he was envious of his aunt’s thimble and doll collection and wanted a collection of his own. (He had already stolen one of his aunt’s thimbles while she was away on a short vacation, but he returned it in time to avoid being reprimanded).
“Well, you can’t collect dolls,” his mother said, “but why don’t you begin collecting sports cards?” She added, “When I’m at Gambles Hardware, I’ll buy you a couple of packs.”
This started him off on a lifelong hobby with sports cards, one in which he would amass more than two million examples by the time I met him in 1980, when he was forty-six, and in his fifteenth year at the Manor House Motel. But his collecting was always associated with his boyhood attraction to his aunt Katheryn, as he explained in his notes.
The youth will confuse sexuality and the art of accumulating objects . . . there was a direct association from his aunt being nude and [his] collecting. Because his tenth birthday was days away, he vowed to begin a collecting routine almost immediately in order to imitate the actions of his aunt.
But even before he was ten, his aunt’s presence induced early signs of his foot fetish that he later imposed on his high school girlfriend, Barbara White, leading to the couple’s breakup. “My aunt would come over for coffee in the morning to see my mom. I was six or so, under the table, looking at my aunt Katheryn’s feet. She wore open-toed shoes. I wanted to touch her toes.”
In addition to collecting cards—in later years he would also collect stamps, coins, and vintage firearms—he had a boyhood interest in muskrat tails.
I collected muskrat tails to determine which was the longest or the shortest. This endeavor was abundantly available to me, because my father was a trapper of muskrats to supplement the family income in the winter months. I was delegated the duty to feed the skinned muskrats to the hogs, and that is when I noticed that muskrats did not have an even length of tails. After a few weeks, I would tire of one particular length and shape, and then after collecting the tail of choice, I would begin the process again, keeping the other tails in a can. I did this unscrupulously and finally my parents objected to the special odor in my room, and I was forbidden to collect muskrat tails. My sports card collecting, however, by comparison was a reasonable and respectable thing to be collecting. Without distinct knowledge, I was following a pattern laid down over time, which was the natural, predictable and aesthetically correct way of accumulating anything interesting.
While his habit of masturbating introduced him for the first time to physical pleasure, it was also accompanied by so much guilt that he sought moral guidance from a priest. “I went to an old and very strict priest for confession, and I asked him about it. To my surprise, he said it was not a sin. He said that every man and woman probably masturbated. He was not liberal in his beliefs, but he was compassionate toward me.”
Gerald was also pleased to learn from an older classmate that no physical harm would result from the act of masturbating, and furthermore was told not to worry if he ever ejaculated a profusion of seminal fluid. “This older male confirmed to me that it was proper, it was OK—and that after I could shoot nine big drops, I’d be a man. Wow! I kept counting the volume and drops after receiving that advice, and finally it materialized.”
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