Foraging for Food at Madonna Manor Boys Home (Ted 4 part 2)

Parallel Hells, Continued

Lausche, 2011

(From Interview with Ted Lausche, Summer 2012, Part one is here, in his own words: )

Oh man, after the priest raped me, then I got smart. 

The nuns had meat every day.  They fed us beans and rice, every f---ing day of my life there I ate beans and rice.  I can’t even be in the same room with black eye peas to this day or be around that stench from when they soak beans.

I was about eight years old when I realized there were ways to break the rules, I saw other kids do it, I was so f---ing hungry and so f---ing tired.  I knew if I just got something to eat, I could sleep good.  I hadn’t slept and was getting psychotic, getting two-three hours of sleep and on top of that being starved. 

I finally got brave. I went down this long hallway with a door on each end.  I  had to get by the nuns’ bedrooms to get to the kitchen.  I tried several times several nights and finally I made it.

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I had made friends with a dog who used to sleep on the porch.  One night listening to the dog’s stomach growl, it was like, we're all in the same boat here.

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Lying there one night, I thought I had two choices.  I was starting to tear off corners of paper to eat, some kids were paint eaters, they're probably dead.  I started eating paper at night, the kid down from me was eating his sheet. 

I waited for Sister to get by on her rounds and back to her dormitory, a lot of times they were sneaky-

I waited for her.  I crawled along the floor, I didn't know if the other kids were sleeping.  Once we went to bed most kids fell asleep, a lot of them cried themselves to sleep, some rocked constantly back and forth, so there was always enough noise. 

So I'm crawling along the corners, far away from them as I can get at this slow pace, I get over by the door.  I keep expecting sister to come back.

I close the door and I'm lost.

What was I thinking. 

I don't know how far it is down the stairs, there’s this hallway with eight or nine doors all of them nuns’ private quarters.  A light comes on in one of them.

I Froze.  I stayed there forever, then went back to my sleeping area.  Every time I’d try to go to the kitchen, I’d hear somebody.  I’d stand there and stand there, get tired so sneak back to bed. 

Probably did that for a week getting a little further each time. 

I’d get comfortable with sounds I heard in the nuns’ apartments. 

What made me decide to do something was I had made friends with a dog who used to sleep on the porch.  One night listening to the dog’s stomach growl, it was like, we're all in the same boat here.  Couple days later I thought I know where the kitchen is.  I'm going to go for it.

I decided I'm just going to do it, not going to wait, If I got caught fuck it, because I was hungry.  There was a certain thrill to it, later on.  I felt like a super hero the first time he fights crime. 

I got to the top of a stairway that I never got to before.  d

There was a bright light in the kitchen area. 

I wasn’t even creeping along the wall this time.  I walked the hall like I belonged there, walked down the stairs, wondering how I’d get back, what have I done.  At the bottom of the stairs, the kitchen is dark.  

I know where the freezers are, and that's actually where I was headed for the meat. But then I opened a drawer and saw these bags of potato chips, whatever that Southern brand is. 

Right there I ate the whole bag. 

It was the first time I ever ate potato chips and I couldn't stop, to this day, I love potato chips.

I was so full, and my mouth was on fire.  Oh my god next morning my mouth was just caked from all that salt.  I got sick actually later, but loved it while I ate that whole bag, then tried to clean up.

I wasn’t the only one who stole food. 

Later I’d find other kids down there but we weren't organized.  You’d come to these conclusions of how to get food on your own.  We were so fragmented, most of the time at each other’s throats. 

I got caught one time, the time with the potato chips, and I got reamed, that might have been where I got one of the concussions. 

Sister Martin Marie, about five-five, the one with the free weights. 

She would punch you, and one time she knocked a tooth out.

She did that the first time I reported the sex abuse at age thirteen

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When I Got Older I Worked In The Kitchen. 

You’d serve them these plates of steaming vegetables and cooked meat

Then we were getting bologna on bread, whatever was donated.  The nuns had a full kitchen. They had a budget to pay for their food.  We were dependent on charity. 

If we got some kind of meat, it was a piece of sausage maybe in the grits.  Oh I knew how to get into the kitchen, thing is they walked rounds every couple hours. 

We had lots of vegetables because we had a working farm, so at least we always had fresh vegetables. 

They’d serve enough food for two people divided up among five people and the bad-ass got the most. 

A lot of the nuns at the orphanage were lesbians.  They lived there, it was staffed by nuns, a couple were real butch dykes, one with a free-weight lifting set in her room.

I engaged in threesomes with the other nuns, girls nineteen years old, I was thirteen, oh God, I don't know how many times. 

(Ted has been married five times with so many serial monogamous relationships in his life, he cannot count. In our summer 2014 conversation he was talking off phone to his current fiancee.  Read more on the residual effects of clergy sex abuse on children when they become adults in future stories at City of Angels Blog. )

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Posted by Kay Ebeling

The City of Angels Is Everywhere