Quote of the day

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—(Stepfather) 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, in fact), 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.

-Former Boing Boing and current Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson had a fucked up childhood.