Chapter 31: Changing my mind
This is part of a series. For more please go to the Table of Contents.
As I discussed in chapter 30, (subheading “The shifting sands of psychological counseling”) it was in about September, when I’d been on probation for almost a year, that I changed my therapy strategy from preparing myself to pass a risk assessment to get court approval to visit my grandchildren, to prepare myself to apply for early termination of my probation after 18 months, hopefully with a glowing recommendation from Shane the Shrink.
However, I also admitted that my approach to therapy to that point had, shall we say, not been conducive to getting that glowing recommendation. So it was around this time (i.e. September-October) that I realized I needed a new strategy. I was going to have to address head-on one of the state-approved therapy goals that I’d been resisting the most: the offender is not considered to have completed therapy until he has successfully changed his masturbation fantasies from those that are illegal (i.e. underage children) to something that is legal (i.e. adults).
Not only that but as I considered this goal I realized I’d better be making a sincere effort to change those fantasies because there was no way I could lie my way through a polygraph test about it. The only way to be sure Shane the Shrink would tell the judge that yes I had made great progress and should be granted early termination was to complete this state-approved therapy goal and pass a polygraph test to prove it. My annual “maintenance” polygraph would be coming up in the spring just a couple of months before I’d be eligible for early termination.
Before I go any further I feel like I must say I believe that if you my reader are a normal person with socially acceptable masturbation fantasies you probably consider my state’s approved therapy goal to be completely reasonable. After all, why should any person like me be allowed to walk the streets unsupervised unless & until I can prove that I’ve changed my sex fantasies? Why would anyone object to this goal, and why would I resist it in therapy?
The short answer is that, as you may know, it’s not so easy to give up a deeply ingrained habit. Furthermore, I’d been telling myself and my shrink for a long time that my deeply ingrained habit presented no risk to society, so why was it anybody’s business anyway? Well, this was the time when I had to admit that this was beside the point. The only thing that mattered was what a shrink & a judge believed, and the only way to make them believe I was no danger to society was to actually go about the business of changing my deeply ingrained habit and passing a polygraph test to prove I’d done so.
So it was about this time I began to discuss alternative masturbation fantasies with Shane at our private sessions. It seemed to me that the shortest distance between my current illegal fantasies and new legal ones would be to try to change from underage boys to young adult men.
Now, before you throw up your hands and say, “Duh! That’s pretty obvious, why didn’t you come up with that a long time ago?!” I should point out that as an American man in his upper 60’s living in the deep south I’ve spent most of my adult life in a society where gay sex fantasies really were not considered socially acceptable. In fact, as recently as twenty years ago the American Psychiatric Association still considered homosexuality to be a mental disease. Even ten years ago no psychiatric counseling agency approved by my state’s Department of Corrections would have been allowed to approve gay sex fantasies as a healthy and socially acceptable substitute for pedophilia. The idea that I could propose to my shrink substituting underage boys with young adult men and taking that to a judge as successful completion of my therapy would’ve been unthinkable just a decade ago, a fact that Shane readily agreed with.
But now it wasn’t.
There was, however, one other difficulty with the masturbation fantasy proposal I was making to Shane. I was being quite up front about the fact that I wasn’t proposing to substitute boys with men my own age. I was proposing “young adult” men. This was a potential problem because both the federal and state-approved guidelines for what constitutes a “healthy” sexual relationship included an age difference of not more than five years. Shane & I both knew this because it was in the printed materials he’d been handing to me and the whole group for months. Yet for me, this guideline meant that any fantasy about anyone, man or woman, under 60 years old would be considered “unhealthy.”
In our private sessions, Shane & I discussed how ridiculous this guideline was. American society extols the virtues of beautiful young adults and sees nothing wrong with sexual fantasies about them. If Donald Trump can get away with his misogynistic comments on the Access Hollywood tape, why should I or anybody else in my therapy group be held strictly to a five year age difference standard?
Of course, bending the five-year rule a little bit was a far cry from stretching it all the way out to an age difference of over 40 years. Also, in my discussion about this with Shane, I wasn’t making any bones about the fact that at my age (upper 60’s) I can, while fantasizing, more easily blur the lines between an illegal teenager and a legal twenty-ager than I could have back when I was, for example, thirty. Nowadays they all seem like kids to me, so I wasn’t pretending to make any greater effort than necessary by moving the goal post by those few years.
Nevertheless, Shane agreed that just those few years between 15 and low 20’s made all the difference between what’s illegal and what’s legal. He agreed that this young adult strategy was “good enough” to win his recommendation when I went to court, whether for a judge’s approval of supervised visitation or for early termination of probation based on good behavior & sufficient progress in therapy.
I should also point out here that there were a couple of other elements to my long term mental health strategy, and those were not new. I’d told Shane I wanted to continue with therapy after probation because I thought it would help keep my thinking focused. This wasn’t and isn’t a small thing to me. I sincerely don’t want to backslide into my old bad habits and addictions, I’m quite sure that continuing therapy is the best way to keep my mind focused, and I wanted to make that commitment to the judge when I went for my early termination hearing.
Another element was a commitment to never get home internet service. In my state, once you’re off sex offender probation you are allowed to have home internet service as long as you report your provider and any email address or other “internet identifier” you use to the sex offender registry. In my case, however, I’d been telling Shane right from the beginning that I never wanted to have home internet service again for the rest of my life. As long as I keep myself a few steps removed from the internet I felt confident that I could resist it. I could resist calling up the cable company and adding home internet, or calling my cell phone provider and adding a data plan. For whatever amount of legitimate internet use I will want to have in the future, such as on-line banking, publishing this book on-line or buying/selling on eBay, I can go to my local public library and do it right out in an open, supervised setting.
All these elements taken together, then, were my new mental health plan. Through the fall and winter that year I worked on it with Shane and at group therapy.
Projects
During that fall and winter, I continued working on renovations at my rental properties. At Duplex #2 my tenant Rachel’s lease ended August 31 but she didn’t want to move. She offered to stay the month of September at a friend’s house while I renovated her unit, then return and start paying the higher rent.
Rachel had a 3 bedroom 1 bath unit that I wanted to turn into a more valuable 3/2 with a nice master suite. In the back of the house, Rachel had an old 1950’s era laundry room that had all the electric & plumbing necessary to become a bathroom. My idea was to put a nice wood frame shed in the back yard, right up against the old laundry room, to serve as a new laundry. I got that shed installed as part of my September project but put off finishing it out, moving everything around and building the new bathroom until later.
Another big September project was to create a nice master suite by punching a door thru from one of the bedrooms to the hallway bathroom. I also figured out a way to more than double the size of that bedroom’s closet, so between a big closet and a door to the (newly renovated) bathroom, the new master suite would be ready and waiting for the second bathroom to be built.
After I was done with Erika’s apartment I turned my attention to Duplex #1. The front unit there was 3 bedrooms & 1 bath, much like Rachel’s unit at Duplex #2. There was a storage room at the back of the front unit’s carport which I could convert into the new bathroom. The tenant’s lease ended January 1 and he’d already announced he was leaving, so from October through December, I worked with Rick the handyman to install all the plumbing, the vanity, bathtub & shower surround, and move around a few electric outlets.
As soon as the tenant left Rick & I spent the first week in January cutting the new bathroom door, completing the plumbing & electric extensions and remodeling the kitchen. The whole project was done by January 15. My property manager and I had that unit re-rented with a big rent increase on February 1.
Life after probation … ?
I’d always had some nagging unanswered questions about how my life as a registered sex offender might change after I completed probation, and as time passed getting answers to those questions became more and more pressing.
An example of one such nagging question was whether I’d still need court approval to visit my grandchildren once I completed probation. As I explained in chapter 30 (subheading “The shifting sands of psychological counseling”) finding out that no court approval would be needed after that made me rethink my therapy strategy. Getting court approval had turned out to be an expensive and uncertain process that Shane the shrink assured me would take at least several months, whereas my attorney said getting “early termination” of probation would be much a cheaper, routine matter once I completed 50% of my time. By September that was “only” 8–9 months away.
It was about this time (i.e. September-October) that I decided to make a list of my “Top 3” remaining unanswered questions and nag my attorney until he gave me straight answers about them.
The first of these questions was basic: What restrictions on my residency, movements and activities would continue to apply to me once off probation and which would no longer apply? You would think that would be a pretty easy one, but up to that point, nobody had been able to give me a straight answer. Not my probation officers because, frankly, that was “not their department.” They could answer any question about probation, but once I was off they couldn’t care less what happened to me.
Not Shane the Shrink or anybody in my therapy group. That was no surprise either because none of those guys were repeated sex offenders, so none had any experience being a post-probation sex offender. It also seemed they weren’t thinking much about their lives after probation; most of them had more pressing issues to deal with. Shane was in much the same position in that he had no experience with post-probation offenders.
It turned out my attorney didn’t correctly answer this question either. He said all the restrictions would go away except the requirement to register at the sheriff’s office every six months or if I changed my place of residence. He also sent me the sex offender registration requirements from state law just to prove his point, and it was from that I learned for the first time that if you as a sex offender own a mobile home you have to provide the VIN number to the local sheriff’s department and if you don’t it’s a Class 3 felony! Yikes! I ran down to the sheriff’s department the very next day and turned in the information!
My attorney suggested I call the State Department of Law Enforcement customer service line just to confirm his version of the story, but they confirmed my suspicion that those very harsh but not at all unusual distance & separation requirements would still apply. That wasn’t going to be a problem for me now that I was happy in my double-wide mobile home that met all those requirements. It would, however, be a problem for others still stuck living in sex offender dumps. I was relieved to hear that the restrictions against visiting any of those places I had to live 1000 feet way from really would go away. NO, I wasn’t relieved because I had any intention of hanging around the nearest playground or daycare center. I was relieved because this meant I’d be able, for example, to go to a community event if it was at a school, or to a museum when they had a special art exhibit, or to the “Springtime in the Park” festival downtown. I’d be free of my nightly 10 pm — 6 am curfew, and I could travel out-of-county too.
Speaking of travel, I’ve said several times that my plans for an active retirement included lots of travel. I like to visit national parks and forests, natural wonders and historic sites. Therefore my second question was to confirm once and for all that I’d be able to do that after completing probation. I was relieved when the answer was that yes I’d be able to visit any park I wanted. As I’ve previously noted every state has rules for visiting out-of-state registered sex offenders, usually including checking in at the local sheriff’s department if you’re planning to be in-state more than 48 hours etc. I’d have to make myself an expert on all those rules so I didn’t violate any of them as I traveled, but I accepted that.
The third question was perhaps the most important to me. If I moved permanently to a different state, presumably a state with easier rules and a 10 year or shorter registration period (see Chapter 26, subheading “How sex offender registration varies by state”), would I be removed from my state’s registry or would my name stay in their computer database forever ’til death do we part?
My attorney couldn’t answer this question either, but the friendly representative on the State Department of Law Enforcement customer service line delivered the bad news. Nope, there’s no escaping lifetime registration in my state. If I moved out of state I’d be required to notify the sheriff’s department, after which my name and photo would still be in my state’s database but the file would read “Last reported address: [county], [state].” The silver lining would be that once I established myself in my new state, if I moved again I wouldn’t have to report that to my old state. I’d disappear into my new state’s rules, whatever they were.
That may sound like a pretty good strategy, but the fact remains I’d now be a registered sex offender in two states instead of one. If I ever got pulled over at a traffic stop the cops would know that immediately. If anybody Googled me they’d find out immediately too. No matter how you cut it there was no escape plan, no light at the end of the tunnel of lifetime sex offender registration. This news completely blew up the plan I’d concocted in Chapter 26, subheading “Should I move to another state?”
As always, I’m neither asking for nor expecting any sympathy whatsoever from society. In fact, I expect most people agree that there shouldn’t be any escape from lifetime sex offender registration, no second chance in life. However, if you are part of my much smaller target audience of closeted pedophiles wanting to learn from my mistakes, I urge you again to stop whatever it is you may be doing. Don’t destroy yourself and spend the rest of your life unable to escape sex offender registration.
My brother gradually improves
As I said in the previous chapter, it took several weeks after my visit in early July for my eldest brother to improve enough to be transferred to a VA rehabilitation center, but he did improve and he did get transferred. But after that, he seemed to stall. He got to a point where he could wheel himself around his room a little bit and do a few exercises, but no further.
Then in late September my brother took another turn for the worse and landed back in the VA Hospital unable to keep any food down and just barely awake. A battery of tests revealed he now had pneumonia! Again his recovery was very slow but by the end of October, he transferred back to the rehab center. After that, he continued to improve, ever so gradually, until by Thanksgiving I was able to talk to him on the phone. He was alert, rational, clear-headed and determined to get well. That was all great to hear but remember, by this time it had been five months since he’d been rushed off to the hospital close to death.
Dumbshit
One week I arrived a little late to group therapy to find them engrossed in a discussion about one member who’d been arrested for re-offending! Now, I should begin by debunking what most Americans believe by saying that run-of-the-mill sex offenders like the guys in my therapy group have a statistically much lower re-offense rate than most other offenders. It’s the truth and you can believe it or not, I don’t care. But re-offenses occasionally do happen. Jack was the youngest member of our group, age 26, Vietnamese. He’d been just 20 years old when he committed his first offense while serving in the U.S. Army by having sex with a young teenage girl. He had, of course, served time for that and got out a few months before me.
Shane the shrink explained that apparently Jack had gotten online (which he wasn’t allowed to do as a sex offender on probation), went to a dating website and started chatting with some teenage girl who claimed to be just 13 years old. Yes indeed, the chat quickly turned to sex and before you know it he was sending pictures of his penis to a 13-year-old! Everybody in the group groaned in horror.
No surprise, when Jack arranged to go meet this young girl for a fling it turned out there was never any girl, just a bunch of Fillmore County sheriffs deputies conducting a sting operation. Shane read a few quotes from the statement Jack made to the cops in which he said he knew it was wrong but couldn’t stop himself.
Because Jack was in the Army when he committed his first offense his charges had been federal. His new charges were state charges, he was now a repeat offender and he was headed to prison for a long time and when he gets out he won’t be just a sex offender, he’ll spend the rest of his life as a designated sexual predator. He had totally thrown his life away.
What a dumbshit. If by chance you are part of my small target audience of closeted and still not caught pedophiles, please learn something from this story. Stop whatever you may be doing now and avoid becoming the next Jack.
Holidays alone again
I couldn’t visit with my adult children when they came to Reevestown for the holidays because my daughter, of course, brought her kids with her and I wasn’t allowed to be in the presence of minor children as long as I was on probation.
This meant that for the third year in a row I was alone for all three winter holidays. However, I had to admit that my holidays were getting a little better each year. Two years before I’d spent all the holidays alone in the Box at the River Annex Jail (see Book 1, Chapters 14,15,16). Last year I was out of prison but still living at the Dump (see Chapter 27, subheading “Escaping from the Dump”). This year I was still alone, but I was a homeowner in a decent neighborhood not far from my family, who did call to keep in touch while they were in town (except for the grandchildren who were not allowed to know anything about me).
With any luck, by next year I’d be off probation and able to be with my family for the holidays.
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