As I spoke more Hawaiian I asked more questions. Every day I had to be led back across Leilehua Road, and Lani and Lono left. Where did they go? Where did they come from? Would they come and meet my parents? Why not?
At one point I asked them if their Mother gave them the food they brought for lunch each day. They said no, it was their own food. Then they said they didn't live with their Mother, she still lived back home. So I asked where home was, and got an answer that meant nothing at first. Home was Ni'ihau. All I could imagine was a house, maybe half a mile up further than I'd been. I asked which way was it, and could we go there.
So that led to a long discussion about the concept of "moku", or island. O'ahu is an Island. Ni'ihau is an island. We'd need a boat.
What's a boat? They described the old wa'a to me, the traditional canoes. They sang an odd Hawaiian chant about the crew of a war canoe asking their captain which way to sail, and repeatedly having their question put off. I remember the gist of one verse. The warriors ask which way, meaning which way to war. The Captain answers by silently pointing to the leeward, the calm side. I've never been able to find the chant in the literature, but I'm sure that verse was in there, and I know it was sung in Hawaiian, not English.
But after we talked about that, it led to more talk about war. Lono was prompted to recite the Charge of the Light Brigade.
I was fascinated by it all, and asked if they knew any warriors I could meet. They laughed at that, and said, look around you. This is an Army base. All these men in uniforms are warriors. They said my own Father was probably a warrior. I was skeptical, but determined to try to figure it out. They told me what to look for in the way of insignia.
When I said I was sure nobody was doing any killing among my Father's friends, they brought up the attack on Pearl Harbor. They pointed north to the green Ko'olau Hills and told me that on a day just like that day not long ago (it was ten years earlier at the time, but "ten" could have meant nothing to me) Japanese planes appeared from exactly there and flew over Schofield Barracks and beyond to Pearl Harbor, killing many American soldiers like my Father, who then took up arms and went to war against Japan.
The history lesson provided an insight into what my father might be about. I remember wondering if he was picked to be a soldier because of his fits of anger. Maybe anger is good in a fighting man.
But that's not what the song said. The song said, if you want to know the right way to war, look to the calm side.
Showing posts with label 1951. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1951. Show all posts
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Rape by Fritos
One of the problems that child sexual abuse survivors have is dealing with feelings of guilt for possibly having led the perpetrator on. It's very hard to see things in perspective and recognize the enormous power imbalance that was involved, because you're dealing with memories of your own earliest best efforts at coping with life. You're blind to the power that was being wielded over you.
I was 35 years old, in therapy, telling my therapist that my Mother routinely fondled my genitals to discourage me from masturbating. The theory Mother presented was that if I knew she would do it for me every few days, then I wouldn't do it myself and risk becoming "sick." I told my therapist I started getting suspicious about this when I was 8 or 9 and she couldn't be specific about the sort of sickness that would result, the bit about blindness and hairy palms being too absurd even for her to repeat.
Then suddenly it dawned on me. Even the fondling was rape. It was easy to understand the anal violations as rape because they had been so often frightening and distressing. But somehow I had convinced myself that the fondling was brought on by my own desire.
But I wasn't in control! She set the whole situation up, manufactured the need, and exploited my trust in my own Mother not to exploit me to convince me the need was legitimate.
It doesn't matter if I took pleasure from some of it. It is part of the betrayal I experienced, that my childhood ability to take pleasure from so much, my polymorphous perversity, as Freud called it, was used to satisfy HER needs at the expense of my emotional health.
I should have seen it before I was 35. My Father gave me a lesson in the principle well before that. We got a beagle when I was 19 or 20. My Father was nuts about Peanuts, so he had to have a beagle, name it Snoopy, and imagine it AS Snoopy. As it happens the beagle was neurotic as all hell when we got him, thanks to a very poorly run kennel. The dog was an over-eater.
In order to satisfy his own emotional needs my Father completely caved to the dog's over-eating. My Father would feed the dog all the time, throwing Fritos one at a time into his mouth, all the while talking about how I would be a decent son if I was only half as good as the dog.
"Snoop" literally died of obesity at the age of 7. The picture is one I took of him at his thinnest as an adult, when he was not yet two years old. I don't have any later pictures. You'll have to take my word for it that he was twice as wide as this when he died. His stomach dragged on the ground.
My Father never made a real emotional connection with any one in his life, least of all with that dog. It was rape by Fritos, really.
I was 35 years old, in therapy, telling my therapist that my Mother routinely fondled my genitals to discourage me from masturbating. The theory Mother presented was that if I knew she would do it for me every few days, then I wouldn't do it myself and risk becoming "sick." I told my therapist I started getting suspicious about this when I was 8 or 9 and she couldn't be specific about the sort of sickness that would result, the bit about blindness and hairy palms being too absurd even for her to repeat.
Then suddenly it dawned on me. Even the fondling was rape. It was easy to understand the anal violations as rape because they had been so often frightening and distressing. But somehow I had convinced myself that the fondling was brought on by my own desire.
But I wasn't in control! She set the whole situation up, manufactured the need, and exploited my trust in my own Mother not to exploit me to convince me the need was legitimate.
It doesn't matter if I took pleasure from some of it. It is part of the betrayal I experienced, that my childhood ability to take pleasure from so much, my polymorphous perversity, as Freud called it, was used to satisfy HER needs at the expense of my emotional health.
I should have seen it before I was 35. My Father gave me a lesson in the principle well before that. We got a beagle when I was 19 or 20. My Father was nuts about Peanuts, so he had to have a beagle, name it Snoopy, and imagine it AS Snoopy. As it happens the beagle was neurotic as all hell when we got him, thanks to a very poorly run kennel. The dog was an over-eater.
In order to satisfy his own emotional needs my Father completely caved to the dog's over-eating. My Father would feed the dog all the time, throwing Fritos one at a time into his mouth, all the while talking about how I would be a decent son if I was only half as good as the dog.
"Snoop" literally died of obesity at the age of 7. The picture is one I took of him at his thinnest as an adult, when he was not yet two years old. I don't have any later pictures. You'll have to take my word for it that he was twice as wide as this when he died. His stomach dragged on the ground.
My Father never made a real emotional connection with any one in his life, least of all with that dog. It was rape by Fritos, really.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
No Arguing Over Poi
Even though my English vocabulary must have been fairly large by the time I was speaking Hawaiian, I wasn't thinking in English. It's hard for me to believe that, but I know it's true because I have numerous memories from the next few months of trying to think in English and falling back on Hawaiian.
My Hawaiian friends didn't know that at first. They thought I was just holding back.
I started singing the songs Lani sang. I wouldn't sing when he did, because I thought that adding my voice would spoil it. But afterward I would repeat the songs. One day I surprised them by singing a song Lani had not sung for days, and which they hadn't heard me sing before. Lono asked how I could remember so well. I said, I didn't know, I just could. I told them I could remember every single one of the songs, by the sound of it, without always knowing what the words meant.
They asked me what was the first song I recalled. I said I remembered a song from before I met them. When I agreed to sing it for them I'm sure at that moment they were both thinking they were finally going to hear me speaking English. Instead I sang the entire 19 lines of the Kaulilua song that I had heard once when I was 5 or 6 months old, nearly two years earlier.
The Smithsonian Folkways series has a tape and a CD called Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants (at the link you can hear excerpts). It has archival recordings of numerous old performances. There are 25 tracks on the tape. Tracks 10, 11, 18, 20, and 22 (110, 111, 118, 120, and 122 on the CD) present different versions of the same Kaulilua song. The liner notes include the words and two translations one from 1935 and one from 1952, both by Mary Kawena Pukui (mistakenly called Pukai in several places on the CD information page). A version of this is what I had remembered phonetically:1. Kaulīlua i ke anu Wai'ale'ale
2. O ka maka hālalo ka lehua makanoe
3. O ka lihilihi kukū iā no 'Aipō
4. O ka hulu a'a 'ia o Haua'iliki
5. A i pēhia e ua 'eha ka nahele
6. O māui e ka pua 'uwe 'eha i ke anu
7. O ke kūkuna wai lehua a'o Mokihana
8. Ua hana 'ia e ka pono a ua pololei
9. Ua hā'ina 'ia aku nō 'iā 'oe
10. O ke ola no 'ia o kia'i loko.
11. Ki'ei Ka'ula nānā i ka makani
12. Ho'olono ka halulu o ka Mālua Kele
13. Ki'ei hālō Maka'iki'ole
14. Kāmau ka 'ea i ka Hālauaola
15. He kula lima 'ia no Wāwaenoho
16. Ma ke pūko'a hakahaka iā i Wa'ahila
17. Ka momoku a ka unu Unulau o Lehua
18. A lehulehu ke ka pono le'a ka ha'awina
19. Ke ala mai nei o ka puka o ka hale.
[some versions have "Ka hauna" replacing "Ke ala"]
Here's the 1935 translation:
1. Doubly cold it is at Wai'ale'ale
2. Where the stunted lehua blossoms grow
3. They are the fringed flowers of 'Aipō
4. Like the bright feathers that cover Haua'iliki
5. Pelted by the rain, the forest is bruised
6. Crushed are the flowers, they weep with the cold
7. In the sunshine that shines on the waters of Mokihana
8. All things are done and done well
9. I have told you before
10. This is the way that the keeper of the pond made his livelihood.
11. Best watch within and toward Ka'ula
12. Question each breeze, note each rumor, even the whisper of Mālua Kele
13. Search high, search low, unobserved
14. Here is life, it is breath from the body
15. A fond caress by a hand most constant
16. Like fissured groves of coral
17. Stand the ragged clumps of lehua
18. Many are the houses, easy the life, you have your share of love
19. Humanity stands at your door, yes, indeed.
I can hardly quibble with Mary Kawena Pukui (she literally wrote the Hawaiian Dictionary, along with Samuel H. Elbert) but Lani and Lono would have. I know because when I asked them at lunch to explain what the song meant (it made no sense to me then, and very little now, even looking at two translations) they broke out into what bordered on a shouting match over the meaning of the key line, number 10.
When I embedded the excerpt of the song back at the Early Music Memories post, I ended with line 10. The song naturally falls into two halves and that middle line is the transition. It receives dramatic emphasis. It has to be important.
It was at this point that I learned that Lono was Christian and that he had a Christian interpretation for line 10. He said it was a reference to Jesus. That's who the keeper of the pond was, really.
Lani was not Christian. He was traditional. He said the song had an underground meaning. It was all about how the Hawaiian culture and the power of the people had been undermined, but would ultimately be restored. He interpreted 'pond' of the 10th line as being about the inner soul of the people, that still lives on, because it has a keeper, in the guardianship of those who are preserving it.
Mary Kawena Pukui said it's about a ruling-class love affair.
At each of Lani and Lono's lunches, held on the grass on Stoneman Field, there was always a covered pot of poi. When the argument between Lani and Lono got too much for me, I took the lid off the pot and waved my hand at it. They both quieted down, because when the poi is exposed you have to be civilized, the ancestors are listening. So I was told. Anyway, the argument stopped.
By the way, I had no idea at that time what a Christian, or a non-Christian, might be. Neither meant anything more to me than a lehua blossom, which so far as I knew then, I'd never seen.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Bloody Dog
As I've said before my first word was "Daddy", prompted by my Mother saying, "tell Daddy who your present [the shit] is for!"
After my parents were both dead I found an old album they had of me. It was called Baby's Album, or something similar and equally obvious. The album had ready-made entries for "Baby's first smile", "Baby's first steps", etc., with room for snapshots where appropriate, and blank lines to be filled in with dates and other details.
The entry for "Baby's first word" had originally been "Daddy", but was later struck through and replaced by "shit" in the kind of bad handwriting my Mother had after she came down with arthritis in the Seventies. So maybe she remembered it a little differently. But clearly our memories aren't significantly different.
A few hours later I parroted "Goodbye Daddy" from memory. Then I went to the hospital and didn't speak a single word again until sometime toward the end of November, 1951. I don't remember what I said now, but I remember Lani and Lono placing it in time for me, and saying I had told them they had forgotten to do some one of their chores. It was an entire sentence in Hawaiian.
Things moved quickly after that, and already by December I was carrying on simple conversations with them, entirely in Hawaiian. It would be several months yet before I spoke any English again. But, unlike my insensitive parents, Lono was alert to the fact that I understand a lot of English, and so he alternated Hawaiian and English with me. Lani spoke only Hawaiian.
After I began speaking Hawaiian, Lani began to warm to me. One of the earliest conversations I remember was one I had with Lono when Lani had to leave us for a few minutes. He told me Lani had been keeping his distance because he had suffered too much from the loss of a younger brother. The discussion took some time because I didn't know what a younger brother was.
I still thought Hawaiian and English were one language and every night after going over the day's events and conversations in my head I would try to make English sounds in the hope of extending my speech to that part of "Hawaiian". I deliberately babbled, with the conscious goal of mastering the consonants and consonant combinations.
That was the main problem. Hawaiian has 7 consonants plus a breath stop: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, '.
The brain injury affected my speech motor control. I could whistle like a bird but I couldn't say hard g when I wanted to. Double consonants like gr and bl were even worse. So I worked on making those sounds constantly whenever I was alone. I recall sessions that went "tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, dok, dok, dok, dok, ..." on and on like that, until I fell asleep.
Speaking of "dok", we got a dog right about this time. He was nominally a Christmas present to me. My Father, who was back from Korea in time for the gifting, was sure that the dog was half Springer Spaniel and half Miniature Schnauzer. He named him Koko Head after the Hawaiian promontory east of the more famous Diamond Head. It was a common name that all the haole would give any pet that had dark fur on its head. Get it? "Koko": sounds like "Cocoa"!
But I already knew "koko" to mean "blood" in Hawaiian. I didn't like the idea of naming something with sharp teeth "Blood". I was very suspicious of this "gift", as you can see for yourself. This is the best picture my Father ever took, in my opinion.
After my parents were both dead I found an old album they had of me. It was called Baby's Album, or something similar and equally obvious. The album had ready-made entries for "Baby's first smile", "Baby's first steps", etc., with room for snapshots where appropriate, and blank lines to be filled in with dates and other details.
The entry for "Baby's first word" had originally been "Daddy", but was later struck through and replaced by "shit" in the kind of bad handwriting my Mother had after she came down with arthritis in the Seventies. So maybe she remembered it a little differently. But clearly our memories aren't significantly different.
A few hours later I parroted "Goodbye Daddy" from memory. Then I went to the hospital and didn't speak a single word again until sometime toward the end of November, 1951. I don't remember what I said now, but I remember Lani and Lono placing it in time for me, and saying I had told them they had forgotten to do some one of their chores. It was an entire sentence in Hawaiian.
Things moved quickly after that, and already by December I was carrying on simple conversations with them, entirely in Hawaiian. It would be several months yet before I spoke any English again. But, unlike my insensitive parents, Lono was alert to the fact that I understand a lot of English, and so he alternated Hawaiian and English with me. Lani spoke only Hawaiian.
After I began speaking Hawaiian, Lani began to warm to me. One of the earliest conversations I remember was one I had with Lono when Lani had to leave us for a few minutes. He told me Lani had been keeping his distance because he had suffered too much from the loss of a younger brother. The discussion took some time because I didn't know what a younger brother was.
I still thought Hawaiian and English were one language and every night after going over the day's events and conversations in my head I would try to make English sounds in the hope of extending my speech to that part of "Hawaiian". I deliberately babbled, with the conscious goal of mastering the consonants and consonant combinations.
That was the main problem. Hawaiian has 7 consonants plus a breath stop: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, '.
The brain injury affected my speech motor control. I could whistle like a bird but I couldn't say hard g when I wanted to. Double consonants like gr and bl were even worse. So I worked on making those sounds constantly whenever I was alone. I recall sessions that went "tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, dok, dok, dok, dok, ..." on and on like that, until I fell asleep.
Speaking of "dok", we got a dog right about this time. He was nominally a Christmas present to me. My Father, who was back from Korea in time for the gifting, was sure that the dog was half Springer Spaniel and half Miniature Schnauzer. He named him Koko Head after the Hawaiian promontory east of the more famous Diamond Head. It was a common name that all the haole would give any pet that had dark fur on its head. Get it? "Koko": sounds like "Cocoa"!
But I already knew "koko" to mean "blood" in Hawaiian. I didn't like the idea of naming something with sharp teeth "Blood". I was very suspicious of this "gift", as you can see for yourself. This is the best picture my Father ever took, in my opinion.
More Loose Ends
Besides the day Robert was born and died the hardest event of Hawaii to place in time is my Father's second stint in Korea. I am so confused about it that I wonder if there wasn't a third. What is certain is he went back. There was talk about how active duty in a combat zone would help him get promoted. Also that being shot at the first trip out was a fluke. It was just because the Army was caught off guard. My Father kept saying there was no danger because his work usually put him far from the actual battles. He worked with a typewriter not a rifle. I remember that it wasn't a whole six months the second time. It was cut short for some reason.
But when? One clue to timing the memory of the second stint was that when he first heard me speaking Hawaiian around the house it was a surprise to him, and my Mother said, "He started doing it when you were gone."
Also there was a change in the rapes that had a bearing on the timing.
Before the change, the rapes were entirely vicious in nature. She was enjoying seeing me suffer, but not using the rapes to get sexual pleasure. At some point, the rapes tended to take place more often in the bath than in diaper changing, maybe just because my toilet-training at home was progressing. Then she started occasionally pulling her own pants down during the rapes and rubbing herself. She was using her anal raping of me as a form of live pornography to masturbate to.
Later on I found that she used rape in that way on a regular basis when my Father was unavailable sexually. So it always happened when he went on active duty. It also happened when he got onto drinking jags, when he would get drunk within an hour of arriving home every night. But that didn't go on so much until I was 8.
So, putting it all together, I think the second stint in Korea took place around the time I was meeting Lani and Lono and learning Hawaiian from them, up to and just past my first Hawaiian words. Roughly Autumn, 1951.
But when? One clue to timing the memory of the second stint was that when he first heard me speaking Hawaiian around the house it was a surprise to him, and my Mother said, "He started doing it when you were gone."
Also there was a change in the rapes that had a bearing on the timing.
Before the change, the rapes were entirely vicious in nature. She was enjoying seeing me suffer, but not using the rapes to get sexual pleasure. At some point, the rapes tended to take place more often in the bath than in diaper changing, maybe just because my toilet-training at home was progressing. Then she started occasionally pulling her own pants down during the rapes and rubbing herself. She was using her anal raping of me as a form of live pornography to masturbate to.
Later on I found that she used rape in that way on a regular basis when my Father was unavailable sexually. So it always happened when he went on active duty. It also happened when he got onto drinking jags, when he would get drunk within an hour of arriving home every night. But that didn't go on so much until I was 8.
So, putting it all together, I think the second stint in Korea took place around the time I was meeting Lani and Lono and learning Hawaiian from them, up to and just past my first Hawaiian words. Roughly Autumn, 1951.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
The Walks
Here's a recent satellite image of the area of Schofield Barracks where I would find Lani and Lono. North is up. It doesn't look like much has changed.
I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.
Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.
As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.
As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.
Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..
Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?
As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.
Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.
I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.
Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.
As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.
As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.
Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..
Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?
As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.
Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
E Hele Mai
Back to the day in mid-to-late October 1951 when I met the two dark-skinned men. The one who first spoke to me was my new best friend within minutes. He introduced me to the other as such, and the other look worried, and walked away, like he wanted nothing to do with me. The first one shrugged. Then they started off together.
I followed as they walked along the each of the field, until we reached one of the avenues I wouldn't cross. Seeing how I hung back, my friend said "E hele mai". When I didn't come to him he returned to take my hand, and walked me across the street.
For the next few hours I followed them around while they worked. They were groundskeepers. They worked at the recreational fields, and the gymnasium, and tennis courts, and took care of plantings along the avenues. They set up sprinklers, trimmed plants, picked up litter, and washed walls. They were a crew of two. No one else ever joined them.
Whenever they spoke together they spoke the musical language. Occasionally the friend would add something in English to me. I actually thought at the time that it was all one language. The musical language was just a part of English I hadn't heard before.
Periodically, as they worked, the aloof one would begin singing, or you might call it chanting. Sometimes the other one would join in, at other times it would just be the one. For a taste of it, listen to Charles Ka'upu for the first two minutes of this video. With your eyes closed, imagine a skinny 18-year old is singing, dressed in a brown uniform while another one is listening.
They took a long break at one point, and shared lunch with me. After the lunch, the aloof one sang while the other one beat two sticks together, sometimes calling out the beginning of lines. I don't remember any dancing that day, but some of the singing sounded like what you hear in the next video. There was dancing like this in days to come.
Finally late in the afternoon my friend walked me back across the avenue and said goodbye. They had to go. I was sad. I thought I would never see them again. But the next day when I did my route I made sure to look for them at the same avenue crossing, and they were there.
I abandoned my Quest for the school. Best quest I ever failed at! From then on I followed the young men around at work so much every weekday I learned their routine. I would pick up sprinklers and move them before they would get around to it. They began calling me "Alaka'i", leader, boss. I learned my friend's name was Lono, and the aloof one was Lani. I started picking up new alternative words for such things as work, water, and plants.
I followed as they walked along the each of the field, until we reached one of the avenues I wouldn't cross. Seeing how I hung back, my friend said "E hele mai". When I didn't come to him he returned to take my hand, and walked me across the street.
For the next few hours I followed them around while they worked. They were groundskeepers. They worked at the recreational fields, and the gymnasium, and tennis courts, and took care of plantings along the avenues. They set up sprinklers, trimmed plants, picked up litter, and washed walls. They were a crew of two. No one else ever joined them.
Whenever they spoke together they spoke the musical language. Occasionally the friend would add something in English to me. I actually thought at the time that it was all one language. The musical language was just a part of English I hadn't heard before.
Periodically, as they worked, the aloof one would begin singing, or you might call it chanting. Sometimes the other one would join in, at other times it would just be the one. For a taste of it, listen to Charles Ka'upu for the first two minutes of this video. With your eyes closed, imagine a skinny 18-year old is singing, dressed in a brown uniform while another one is listening.
They took a long break at one point, and shared lunch with me. After the lunch, the aloof one sang while the other one beat two sticks together, sometimes calling out the beginning of lines. I don't remember any dancing that day, but some of the singing sounded like what you hear in the next video. There was dancing like this in days to come.
Finally late in the afternoon my friend walked me back across the avenue and said goodbye. They had to go. I was sad. I thought I would never see them again. But the next day when I did my route I made sure to look for them at the same avenue crossing, and they were there.
I abandoned my Quest for the school. Best quest I ever failed at! From then on I followed the young men around at work so much every weekday I learned their routine. I would pick up sprinklers and move them before they would get around to it. They began calling me "Alaka'i", leader, boss. I learned my friend's name was Lono, and the aloof one was Lani. I started picking up new alternative words for such things as work, water, and plants.
A Loose End in Time
I need to interrupt the flow of the memoir's narrative, to pick up a neglected thread.
During my second and early part of my third years my sense of time was rather non-linear. Every night I would go over the day's events in my head. Those would be in a neat linear order for me. But different days were disconnected. Looking back on it all I have to use incidental clues, later information, and reason to figure out times. For example, schools started after Labor Day throughout the U.S. and its more populous territories. Therefore, the start of school coincided with early September.
Another example is my Mother's second pregnancy. I remember wondering why her belly was sticking out. She regularly took me in to the bathroom to have me shower with her, so I saw her naked often and I could touch the belly. One of those intimate moments stands out in my mind because she used it as an opportunity to urinate on me.
As vivid as that memory is, it has, in itself, no place in time. It's like the snapshots of my family album that were once attached to pages but have since come loose, so I just tuck them with each other between some blank pages at the end, or keep them in an envelope, in a jumble.
Still, I'm able to pin it down a little. I know she wasn't too visibly pregnant when I was released from Tripler Medical Center, because I have pictures from that day. And I know she was pregnant a third time. I know that third pregnancy ended in miscarriage about a month before my third birthday, after time started getting linear for me. I know in fact that the third was a different pregnancy from the second one, just because the second went to term.
I know that the second pregnancy ended with a birth. I wasn't there for the birth, of course. I don't even remember anything at all said about it afterward, by either of my parents, for several years. All I knew at the time was, she went to the hospital with a big belly and came home without.
The earliest memory I have hearing the birth discussed was when my Mother was abusing me at age six or seven and taunted me by telling me that my brother Robert was better than me. When I asked about him, she told me he was the one who died because he was born without anything below the waist, so he wasn't dirty like me.
The main way I can place the time is by using the fact that my Mother wouldn't let my Father photograph her appearing pregnant. I recall a trip to the beach around the time the little girls had started taking care of me. The picture below, which shows me getting annoyed at one of my girlfriends, and about to whack her head with my shovel, may have been taken on that trip to the beach. My Mother isn't in any of the pictures accompanying this one. My memory is that my Mother was extremely pregnant on at least one trip to the beach. So I think the birth of Robert occurred in the summer, maybe July or August of 1951. Before the Quest began.
[Below: Getting tired of the goddamned papparazzi.]
During my second and early part of my third years my sense of time was rather non-linear. Every night I would go over the day's events in my head. Those would be in a neat linear order for me. But different days were disconnected. Looking back on it all I have to use incidental clues, later information, and reason to figure out times. For example, schools started after Labor Day throughout the U.S. and its more populous territories. Therefore, the start of school coincided with early September.
Another example is my Mother's second pregnancy. I remember wondering why her belly was sticking out. She regularly took me in to the bathroom to have me shower with her, so I saw her naked often and I could touch the belly. One of those intimate moments stands out in my mind because she used it as an opportunity to urinate on me.
As vivid as that memory is, it has, in itself, no place in time. It's like the snapshots of my family album that were once attached to pages but have since come loose, so I just tuck them with each other between some blank pages at the end, or keep them in an envelope, in a jumble.
Still, I'm able to pin it down a little. I know she wasn't too visibly pregnant when I was released from Tripler Medical Center, because I have pictures from that day. And I know she was pregnant a third time. I know that third pregnancy ended in miscarriage about a month before my third birthday, after time started getting linear for me. I know in fact that the third was a different pregnancy from the second one, just because the second went to term.
I know that the second pregnancy ended with a birth. I wasn't there for the birth, of course. I don't even remember anything at all said about it afterward, by either of my parents, for several years. All I knew at the time was, she went to the hospital with a big belly and came home without.
The earliest memory I have hearing the birth discussed was when my Mother was abusing me at age six or seven and taunted me by telling me that my brother Robert was better than me. When I asked about him, she told me he was the one who died because he was born without anything below the waist, so he wasn't dirty like me.
The main way I can place the time is by using the fact that my Mother wouldn't let my Father photograph her appearing pregnant. I recall a trip to the beach around the time the little girls had started taking care of me. The picture below, which shows me getting annoyed at one of my girlfriends, and about to whack her head with my shovel, may have been taken on that trip to the beach. My Mother isn't in any of the pictures accompanying this one. My memory is that my Mother was extremely pregnant on at least one trip to the beach. So I think the birth of Robert occurred in the summer, maybe July or August of 1951. Before the Quest began.
[Below: Getting tired of the goddamned papparazzi.]
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Widening Search
When I started my Quest for the Schofield Barracks Elementary School I thought it was going to be just around the corner at the end of the block. It wasn't. I looked all around the block. There were only homes. I had heard that the school was big. I expected to find children around it.
Instead of giving up, I widened the search. One of the things my Mother had taught me was not to step off the curb of the main thoroughfare by our house. The training consisted in taking me to it, letting me wander into it and then whacking me. I got the message. So I wouldn't cross that avenue or a parallel avenue like it a long block away. But the two avenues were connected by less trafficked smaller roads, that I now know were mostly 250 feet apart. After I was sure that there was no school on my block, I made the decision to risk crossing those streets. That greatly increased my range.
I left home every weekday that my Father went to work. I left as soon as my Mother wasn't watching me. I didn't keep to the sidewalks. I walked around houses, into backyards. I poked through openings I found in hedges. I followed alleys that the dump trucks used to pick up trash. Each day I followed a path identical to the path I followed the day before, except for new loops added to cover more ground.
The reason I tried to cover the same ground every day was because I discovered a source of food. It turned out that several of the wives staying home on weekdays were glad to offer cookies and pie and fruit to the stray cutie. So I learned to maintain a route that took me by all those houses. I would go so far as to knock at the door of the softest and most generous touches.
An amazing confluence of social and personal circumstances made the Quest possible. My Mother really didn't care that she couldn't find me for hours at a time. She wondered out loud about it, but she didn't want my disappearances to stop. She was glad to be rid of me. How the rest of the Army wives let her get away with it is a little harder to understand, especially for people who have never lived on an Army base in the Fifties.
There was in fact at least one woman, the one my Mother called the Meddling Bitch, who frequently called my Mother about my wanderings and told her she should keep better watch over me. After Mother hung up on MB a bunch of times, MB must have called some higher-ups, because there was at least one visit from the MPs about it when I was home.
But all that happened was, my Mother pointed out that MB raises the issue all the time, "but my son is never in any trouble, he's well-behaved, and he always comes home in time for dinner. Look, there he is, he's fine." "Well, he's awfully young to be wandering around by himself." "You aren't his Mother. You don't know him like I do."
That was the culture of that time and place. You didn't interfere with a parent's method of raising a child without proof that the child or society was in danger. As long as I didn't break into homes or beat preschoolers with a stick or get lost and spend a night outside and fall into a stream and drown in the dark, anything I did was between me and my parents. The MPs apologized for interrupting her day, left, and as far as I know never responded to another complaint about me.
My Mother came to be aware that there were women gossiping about what a horrible Mother she was. But Schofield Barracks in 1951 was a bastion for Parental Rights. If the Promise Keepers were around then, Schofield Barracks could have been their Promised Land.
I had no sense of time on my walks. I didn't know months then. But using maps and information I picked up later when I could ask about it, I know that I was still following my Quest until about the middle of October, after six or seven weeks of it. By that time I was beginning to lose hope of ever finding it. In all directions I had encountered avenues that I thought I shouldn't cross. My range was about 50 acres. The route I followed was twisted and crossed itself several times. It was at least a mile and a half long, maybe more like two and a half miles. Being a playful toddler disposed to stop and play in every puddle and look under every rock, I probably needed two or three hours to complete the route.
That was the routine when one day in October as I was at the Western edge of my route, I encountered a dark-skinned man working in what could have been a marching field. He saw me and walked over, bent down, smiled, and said, "Na wai ke kupu 'o 'oe?" Then he translated, "Whose little sprout are you?" I didn't know what either sentence meant at the time. I didn't know the word "sprout". But I liked the man's smile, and I liked the music his first sentence made, and I followed him until he met up with another dark-skinned man and the two of them spoke the same kind of music between each other.
Instead of giving up, I widened the search. One of the things my Mother had taught me was not to step off the curb of the main thoroughfare by our house. The training consisted in taking me to it, letting me wander into it and then whacking me. I got the message. So I wouldn't cross that avenue or a parallel avenue like it a long block away. But the two avenues were connected by less trafficked smaller roads, that I now know were mostly 250 feet apart. After I was sure that there was no school on my block, I made the decision to risk crossing those streets. That greatly increased my range.
I left home every weekday that my Father went to work. I left as soon as my Mother wasn't watching me. I didn't keep to the sidewalks. I walked around houses, into backyards. I poked through openings I found in hedges. I followed alleys that the dump trucks used to pick up trash. Each day I followed a path identical to the path I followed the day before, except for new loops added to cover more ground.
The reason I tried to cover the same ground every day was because I discovered a source of food. It turned out that several of the wives staying home on weekdays were glad to offer cookies and pie and fruit to the stray cutie. So I learned to maintain a route that took me by all those houses. I would go so far as to knock at the door of the softest and most generous touches.
An amazing confluence of social and personal circumstances made the Quest possible. My Mother really didn't care that she couldn't find me for hours at a time. She wondered out loud about it, but she didn't want my disappearances to stop. She was glad to be rid of me. How the rest of the Army wives let her get away with it is a little harder to understand, especially for people who have never lived on an Army base in the Fifties.
There was in fact at least one woman, the one my Mother called the Meddling Bitch, who frequently called my Mother about my wanderings and told her she should keep better watch over me. After Mother hung up on MB a bunch of times, MB must have called some higher-ups, because there was at least one visit from the MPs about it when I was home.
But all that happened was, my Mother pointed out that MB raises the issue all the time, "but my son is never in any trouble, he's well-behaved, and he always comes home in time for dinner. Look, there he is, he's fine." "Well, he's awfully young to be wandering around by himself." "You aren't his Mother. You don't know him like I do."
That was the culture of that time and place. You didn't interfere with a parent's method of raising a child without proof that the child or society was in danger. As long as I didn't break into homes or beat preschoolers with a stick or get lost and spend a night outside and fall into a stream and drown in the dark, anything I did was between me and my parents. The MPs apologized for interrupting her day, left, and as far as I know never responded to another complaint about me.
My Mother came to be aware that there were women gossiping about what a horrible Mother she was. But Schofield Barracks in 1951 was a bastion for Parental Rights. If the Promise Keepers were around then, Schofield Barracks could have been their Promised Land.
I had no sense of time on my walks. I didn't know months then. But using maps and information I picked up later when I could ask about it, I know that I was still following my Quest until about the middle of October, after six or seven weeks of it. By that time I was beginning to lose hope of ever finding it. In all directions I had encountered avenues that I thought I shouldn't cross. My range was about 50 acres. The route I followed was twisted and crossed itself several times. It was at least a mile and a half long, maybe more like two and a half miles. Being a playful toddler disposed to stop and play in every puddle and look under every rock, I probably needed two or three hours to complete the route.
That was the routine when one day in October as I was at the Western edge of my route, I encountered a dark-skinned man working in what could have been a marching field. He saw me and walked over, bent down, smiled, and said, "Na wai ke kupu 'o 'oe?" Then he translated, "Whose little sprout are you?" I didn't know what either sentence meant at the time. I didn't know the word "sprout". But I liked the man's smile, and I liked the music his first sentence made, and I followed him until he met up with another dark-skinned man and the two of them spoke the same kind of music between each other.
The Quest
[Continued from the previous post. Same warning. I'll be talking about sexual abuse I've experienced as a toddler. ]
Being home with my Mother got worse with time. The soap rapes evolved into finger rapes. She locked me in a closet periodically, sometimes for long periods. I don't know what she did that needed me out of the way like that. Maybe it was to take naps, or maybe she was going on long walks without me.
Then something good happened for a change. The little girls that lived on the block got to know me because two of them [pictured] belonged to the white family that occasionally took care of me. They started coming around every day and asking my Mother to have me to play with in our front yard. I believe this started sometime around the beginning of summer, maybe in June 1951, before my second birthday.
Basically, all the little girls took turns being my Mommy. They were all way better at it, too. It was heaven.
Some of it was a little too heavenly. I still had the increased libido symptom from the head injury. The girls wanted to change my diapers even when they didn't need changing. My Mother told them go right ahead, just keep using the same diaper if it isn't too dirty, and pretend it's clean.
I have a vivid memory of the very first time the girls changed my diapers. I had an erection, and the next thing I knew they were all gawking at it, with jaws dropped, and a couple of them were touching it. I was quite happy with that and squealed gleefully. Then the oldest girl, who may have been 7 or 8 and who'd actually been the first to feel it, said it wasn't right to touch it too much. They should just touch it to clean it (she thought she should be the one, since she was the most mature) and no more.
Not much later, maybe the same day, I remember my Mother telling them to have me go without diapers outside because she didn't want to have to wash them. I found myself standing in the middle of the front yard with an erection and four or five little girls staring. Then I looked over at the house and saw my Mother looking out from a window, with the same leer she had when she was raping me. I was frightened by it. At the time I couldn't know what the leer was really about. I now see it as the earliest indication for me that my Mother was capable of sexually abusing other children.
The girls played with me almost every sunny day, all through the summer. Then I started hearing them talk about something called "school". I had no idea what school was. I picked up the idea that it was a place they were all going to go and learn things. I imagined that they might take me with them. They talked about how soon it would be. It would be a week. Or it would be some days. Or it would be tomorrow.
Suddenly one sunny day no little girls came to play with me. I was back to having Jemmie Browning as my only Mommy.
That would not do.
I made up my mind I was going to go find this "school" where all the little girls went, and I was going to surprise them and they were going to be happy and get to play with me at the school just like they did in our front yard.
So with the start of the new school year in September, 1951, at the age of 2 years and 2 months, barefoot and still in diapers, I set out from our house in Schofield Barracks, without my Mother's knowledge, on a Quest for the Schofield Elementary School.
Being home with my Mother got worse with time. The soap rapes evolved into finger rapes. She locked me in a closet periodically, sometimes for long periods. I don't know what she did that needed me out of the way like that. Maybe it was to take naps, or maybe she was going on long walks without me.
Then something good happened for a change. The little girls that lived on the block got to know me because two of them [pictured] belonged to the white family that occasionally took care of me. They started coming around every day and asking my Mother to have me to play with in our front yard. I believe this started sometime around the beginning of summer, maybe in June 1951, before my second birthday.
Basically, all the little girls took turns being my Mommy. They were all way better at it, too. It was heaven.
Some of it was a little too heavenly. I still had the increased libido symptom from the head injury. The girls wanted to change my diapers even when they didn't need changing. My Mother told them go right ahead, just keep using the same diaper if it isn't too dirty, and pretend it's clean.
I have a vivid memory of the very first time the girls changed my diapers. I had an erection, and the next thing I knew they were all gawking at it, with jaws dropped, and a couple of them were touching it. I was quite happy with that and squealed gleefully. Then the oldest girl, who may have been 7 or 8 and who'd actually been the first to feel it, said it wasn't right to touch it too much. They should just touch it to clean it (she thought she should be the one, since she was the most mature) and no more.
Not much later, maybe the same day, I remember my Mother telling them to have me go without diapers outside because she didn't want to have to wash them. I found myself standing in the middle of the front yard with an erection and four or five little girls staring. Then I looked over at the house and saw my Mother looking out from a window, with the same leer she had when she was raping me. I was frightened by it. At the time I couldn't know what the leer was really about. I now see it as the earliest indication for me that my Mother was capable of sexually abusing other children.
The girls played with me almost every sunny day, all through the summer. Then I started hearing them talk about something called "school". I had no idea what school was. I picked up the idea that it was a place they were all going to go and learn things. I imagined that they might take me with them. They talked about how soon it would be. It would be a week. Or it would be some days. Or it would be tomorrow.
Suddenly one sunny day no little girls came to play with me. I was back to having Jemmie Browning as my only Mommy.
That would not do.
I made up my mind I was going to go find this "school" where all the little girls went, and I was going to surprise them and they were going to be happy and get to play with me at the school just like they did in our front yard.
So with the start of the new school year in September, 1951, at the age of 2 years and 2 months, barefoot and still in diapers, I set out from our house in Schofield Barracks, without my Mother's knowledge, on a Quest for the Schofield Elementary School.
My First Rapes
It will probably be hours before I can get all the Tahitian dance and drum videos loaded. So meanwhile, back to the story of my horrid childhood.
Good place for a warning. I am going to try to avoid salacious language, but there is no way to talk about child sexual abuse without some sick creep thinking you're trying to turn him or her on. So if you start to think I'm trying to help you get off, stop reading here and go browse real porn. Or scroll down to things I've posted that were deliberately erotic, like Sex, Art, Sex.
It was probably November, 1950, when I was brought home from the hospital. I was 1 year and four months, or I was a week old, depending on what you or I mean by "I". At first the daily routine was alternately boring and stressful. There was almost no joy. When both my parents were home and sober, there was silence or argument. Often the argument was about me.
My Mother repeatedly called me the Freak. She said I'd never speak or understand English, even though I was already understanding it. She couldn't tell. My Father sometimes seemed to agree with her by not challenging her about it. Other times they would get into heated arguments about it, which neither one could win. Only I could ever win.
They'd usually be drunk within two hours of my Father arriving home from work. After that the arguments would be about whose fault it was that it all happened. On weekends my Father would hold off getting drunk until the evenings. Otherwise the ritual was pretty much the same.
They rarely spoke directly to me for an entire year. I just learned words by listening to them talk to each other. My Mother tried to teach me simple commands, like "come" and "go", as if I were a dog.
Maybe once a week, or every other week, my parents would put me in the care of one of usually two other families. There was a family on one side that had a couple of little girls that would take me while my parents went out together. There was another one down the street in the other direction, who happened to be black. I remember that my Mother had no problems leaving me with the black family, or even visiting with them to socialize, but she wouldn't let my Father have them to our house as guests.
When my Father was out and I was home with my Mother, I was mostly neglected. She wouldn't feed me for the entire time my Father was away at work. If the weather kept me in the house she would keep me in diapers but rarely change them.
It was when she changed my diapers that the sexual abuse started. She would set me on the changing table and remove the dirty diaper. As she did I'd invariably get an erection. She'd clean me and then start playing with it. That was fine. I had no sense that it was inappropriate. But then she would get mean. She always had a lit cigarette, she was a chain smoker. She would wait until I was giggling, then lean forward and blow smoke in my face from an inch away, and laugh at my coughing. Then she'd drop glowing ashes onto my genitals.
In the 40s and early 50s there were pediatricians writing books advising the use of soap suppositories as a way to get your baby regular and on a schedule convenient for you. The people who came up with that were flakes in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg, who deserves a whole post of his own. He's very relevant.
It may be because my Mother had read about the soap suppositories that she started cleaning my rectum with soap and then raping me with pieces of it. The progression from cleaning and nurturing to following quack advice to rape needs to be noted. One of the reasons Mothers don't get caught often enough raping their children is because they can arrange the scene so even if you walk in and catch them in the act, they can pass it off as care-taking. At the worst they get accused of using bad judgment. Malicious intent is almost always impossible to prove.
But I remember the way my Mother leered at me when she raped me, and I remember how she laughed when I cried and screamed. The malicious intent was obvious to me.
Good place for a warning. I am going to try to avoid salacious language, but there is no way to talk about child sexual abuse without some sick creep thinking you're trying to turn him or her on. So if you start to think I'm trying to help you get off, stop reading here and go browse real porn. Or scroll down to things I've posted that were deliberately erotic, like Sex, Art, Sex.
It was probably November, 1950, when I was brought home from the hospital. I was 1 year and four months, or I was a week old, depending on what you or I mean by "I". At first the daily routine was alternately boring and stressful. There was almost no joy. When both my parents were home and sober, there was silence or argument. Often the argument was about me.
My Mother repeatedly called me the Freak. She said I'd never speak or understand English, even though I was already understanding it. She couldn't tell. My Father sometimes seemed to agree with her by not challenging her about it. Other times they would get into heated arguments about it, which neither one could win. Only I could ever win.
They'd usually be drunk within two hours of my Father arriving home from work. After that the arguments would be about whose fault it was that it all happened. On weekends my Father would hold off getting drunk until the evenings. Otherwise the ritual was pretty much the same.
They rarely spoke directly to me for an entire year. I just learned words by listening to them talk to each other. My Mother tried to teach me simple commands, like "come" and "go", as if I were a dog.
Maybe once a week, or every other week, my parents would put me in the care of one of usually two other families. There was a family on one side that had a couple of little girls that would take me while my parents went out together. There was another one down the street in the other direction, who happened to be black. I remember that my Mother had no problems leaving me with the black family, or even visiting with them to socialize, but she wouldn't let my Father have them to our house as guests.
When my Father was out and I was home with my Mother, I was mostly neglected. She wouldn't feed me for the entire time my Father was away at work. If the weather kept me in the house she would keep me in diapers but rarely change them.
It was when she changed my diapers that the sexual abuse started. She would set me on the changing table and remove the dirty diaper. As she did I'd invariably get an erection. She'd clean me and then start playing with it. That was fine. I had no sense that it was inappropriate. But then she would get mean. She always had a lit cigarette, she was a chain smoker. She would wait until I was giggling, then lean forward and blow smoke in my face from an inch away, and laugh at my coughing. Then she'd drop glowing ashes onto my genitals.
In the 40s and early 50s there were pediatricians writing books advising the use of soap suppositories as a way to get your baby regular and on a schedule convenient for you. The people who came up with that were flakes in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg, who deserves a whole post of his own. He's very relevant.
It may be because my Mother had read about the soap suppositories that she started cleaning my rectum with soap and then raping me with pieces of it. The progression from cleaning and nurturing to following quack advice to rape needs to be noted. One of the reasons Mothers don't get caught often enough raping their children is because they can arrange the scene so even if you walk in and catch them in the act, they can pass it off as care-taking. At the worst they get accused of using bad judgment. Malicious intent is almost always impossible to prove.
But I remember the way my Mother leered at me when she raped me, and I remember how she laughed when I cried and screamed. The malicious intent was obvious to me.
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