Unrelenting hands. That part stood out the most. It was what he remembered over everything else. Well, almost everything. But he clearly remembered hands, much bigger than his own, all over his body, touching him in places that had never been touched before. Places that made him feel dirty. He’d never wanted this to happen, but somehow it just did.

He’d been very young at the time. Too young to even understand how wrong it was, how against the law it was. Had he been eleven? Twelve? He couldn’t really remember, but he did know that he was a virgin before it all happened. He’d always wanted to do something to stop it, but he never said anything. He always kept his mouth shut, becoming a quiet little shell of a person. He’d covered up bruises, made up excuses for his sullen behavior and generally avoided contact with every and any living creature. And it happened again the next week. And again the next. This went on for three months before rumors started and the whole sordid ordeal was brought to the attention of the police by a kind soul who was never identified.

He was sent away from his home to help get away from the memories and the press and the staring from neighbors and people who recognized him. He didn’t like the situation any better. He felt alone. Utterly alone. He couldn’t talk to his parents; he had no friends.... When he was sixteen, a botched suicide attempt got him a stay in the hospital for a few weeks, when doctors and psychologists would talk to him and try to make him open up and vent everything he was feeling, but to no avail. He didn’t want to talk to someone who didn’t understand what he was going through.

At age 21, he was suddenly inspired to leave home and move to California. Music was the only thing he was even relatively interested in anyway, so he was pleasantly surprised when he quickly found that bands were sprouting up all over the state that made good money. The days he had spent shut up in his room listening to his favorite records back home was the one thing he could do to feel better. He pushed bad memories back in his mind and lost himself in music. He answered an ad in a paper for a housemate with three other guys and apparently passed whatever personality test they had going. The fact that they were trying to start a band was only icing on the cake. They recruited him. He never told them what had happened to him all those years ago.