ILLINOIS
The Southern
MOLLY PARKER The Southern
OZARK — Paul Wesselmann remembers well the day he made the decision to reach out for help for the sexual abuse he endured as a young teen. It was 1994 — the year “Forrest Gump” was buzzing as the must-see movie of the summer. Wesselmann, then a young man in his 20s, went to see it alone. On the way to the grocery store after leaving the theater, he had to pull over because he was sobbing so hard.
It was that famous scene where Forrest came looking for Jenny because she didn’t get on the bus for school that morning that rattled him to the core. As Jenny’s father stumbles drunk outside with a flask in his hand and yelling for his daughter, Jenny tells Forrest to run. They head out into the cornfield behind her Alabama shack as her father chases after her, and she hits her knees and says, “Pray with me, Forrest,” and then begins to chant, “Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far, far, far away from here.”
The implication made in the movie — expressed through Forrest Gump’s naiveté; he described Jenny’s father as “a very loving man” — was that young Jenny wanted to get away because her father was sexually molesting her and her sisters. Wesselmann was struck by how much he related to the character’s desire to be transported from that horrid abuse — as it happened in real time, and the many times after that it played like a broken record in his head.
Shortly afterward, Wesselmann said he picked up the phone and scheduled an appointment to see a counselor. He realized that he could no longer shove into the dark reaches of his soul the tragedy he endured as a young teenager at Camp Ondessonk in the early- to mid-1980s.
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