Call the cops on psychopaths—don’t kill them: Call the cops on them when they do something wrong to you or near you. Give them a bad record with the police. My sister was raped: She did not go to church with us; one Sunday, we arrived back from church, but she wasn’t there. My neighbor’s oldest son suddenly dropped her off out at the road. He had taken her out to the woods and raped her. My brother Dave and I were molested. One Sunday morning in summer when I was eight and Dave was nine, my brothers gathered and watched Dave and I get molested by the neighbor’s youngest son. He must have been eighteen or so. He violently took our clothes off and had us parade around the yard naked. We were traumatized and humiliated. My older brother Jim instigated this and made it happen. My sister Patricia was in the house. An hour or so later, I went in the house to get a little sympathy, but she showed none—she was indifferent. She was in on it. She and her husband were watching us for a few days, while our parents made a trip to Canada to spend some few days with my mother’s family in Ontario.

Those feelings created that day will never go away. Trust, goodness, kindness: I seek them out because I did not get them when I needed them early in life.

I have a first-cousin-once-removed who is an extraordinarily violent, dangerous psychopath. He is in his fifties. He played tricks on my parents when they were old: Once, he killed their cat, skinned it, and brought it to them to cook for dinner, saying it was a raccoon he had recently hunted. Today, he plays tricks on my extended family—my side of the family: He will suddenly swerve his pickup toward them, while they are driving their vehicle, on a back road in the countryside here, and force them off the road. He brought his young wife to emergency once; my sister-in-law, who was a nurse, was working, and helped out that night in admissions. She said to us all, in one way or another, on our side of the family, that she had never felt more humiliated in her life. They had the same name, Battle, and this young woman he had brought in was nearly mangled from her injuries, inflicted by him, Mike Battle. Never defend this low son of a bitch to me. Do not ever speak down to me because of some observation he has made to you about me. Mike Battle, my first-cousin-once-removed was one of the favorite people of the priest who was stationed here seven or eight years ago. Man-of-God, my ass! He was some kind of fucked up thing himself.

Jim was a very sneaky psychopath; Mike Switzer, who raped my sister, was close to being a psychopath. Johnny Switzer, who lives today, is a psychopath—I saw him hit his father in the face once when I happened to be driving by when they were fighting in the yard, near the garage, which was near the road. He is the one that Jim and Duane Pauley (Bud), my brother-in-law, recruited to strip us naked in violent tussles on the roadside slope of our front yard. Mike Battle, my first-cousin-once-removed is the most dangerous of these. Be very careful around him. I have warned him off the property: I will instantly call 911 if I see him. In a violent confrontation—if this occurs, and I am witness to it—and if it is justified, any one of us on my side of the family might get really, really pissed off. I would like him to stay way away from my side of the family—to stay far away. If I get a report that he is slapping around a member of my immediate family, if I get another report, that is—because it happened before with my older brother Joe—a few years ago—I cannot predict the consequences when we, on my side of the family, take matters into our own hands. I, we, I, we—all of us—will do everything we can within the law to stop him. My convictions—because I was nearly raped as a child—are a thousand times more powerful than anyone reading this can fathom. I came out powerfully as a gay man a long time ago—because I was tired of the bullshit: freaky, old cousins messing around with children and other freaky old cousins, or neighbors, or friends, or something. For God’s Sake; life is beautiful; keep it honest and true.