Family Debacle

We arrived in Seattle in time for a big Christmas family gathering. The Browning family and various others related-by-marriage were collecting at my Uncle Fred and Aunt Lovilla's house. My grandmother lived in a house by herself near the crest of Beacon hill in South Seattle. Fred and Lovilla lived with two sons halfway down the hill, where they had several acres to grow vegetables and Fred's beloved irises.

It was not a White Christmas by a mile. The weather was so good that the family got together in the yard rather than in the house.

My Mother started in as soon as we got there bragging about what a linguistic genius I was. A few of my relatives might have believed her without any proof but Aunt Lovilla would not, and if there was anyone there my Mother wanted to show up, it was Aunt Lovilla.

My parents had got a Christmas present for themselves before leaving Hawaii. It was an album of popular Hawaiian music, including the Hawaiian Wedding Song, Aloha, and the Hawaiian War Chant, which was big in the States at the time. It was precisely the sorts of popular Hawaiian music that Lani detested.

I hadn't heard the album yet. My Mother brought it out and announced to everyone present that she was playing the Hawaiian War Chant, and that I could sing along and translate. This she said, would prove once and for all that I spoke Hawaiian fluently, and that she wasn't making it all up. There were 25 or 30 relatives watching, including my Father and his sister, Lovilla.

I couldn't find the version of the Hawaiian War Chant that my parents had. That was probably the Bing Crosby version. But there's this lovely Muppet Show version that gives the idea quite well.



Now, those are actual Hawaiian words there. It comes from an actual hawaiian song written in 1860. But there are several problems with asking me to translate it on the fly.

1) It's not sung by Hawaiians. It's sung by non-native speakers, who don't pronounce the Hawaiian words properly. 2) It's sung. How many times have you heard a song in English and not been able to make out the words? "Excuse me while I kiss this guy?" 3) It's a love song. I was 3 and a half. I had to have love songs explained to me even when I understood the words. 4) It was in the standard Kamehameha dialect, not the dialect I was learning. And of course, 5) I was still only just learning.

According to the Wikipedia article, here are the original lyrics by Prince Leleiohaku, who called it Kaua i ka Huahua'i, "We Two in the Spray."

* Tahuwai la a tahuwai wai la
* Ehu hene la a pili koo lua la
* Pututui lu a ite toe la
* Hanu lipo ita paalai

* Au we ta huala
* Au we ta huala

* Tahuwai la a tahuwai wai la
* Ehu hene la a pili koo lua la
* Pututui lu a ite toe la
* Hanu lipo ita paalai

* Au we ta huala
* Au we ta huala

Even now I can't figure this out. As best as I can tell these lyrics were written to be read by non-Hawaiians. The word breaks are in the wrong places.

In any case the opening line threw me for a loop when I was 3 and a half, and I never recovered. How would I have known what a Tahuwai is? It's an archaic word referencing a custodian in charge of water rights! The whole song begins with an obscure reference to colonial-period property management!

I simply was lost. It was gibberish to me then, and when everyone saw how lost I was, Lovilla said, "I could translate it that well," and everyone burst into laughter, except my Mother, who turned bright red.

Later she threatened me with bodily harm if I ever embarrassed her like that again. The threat rolled off me, because I figured I was in danger of bodily harm from her always, anyway. She had many times complained to my Father that he should have finished me off when he had the chance.

The threat that didn't roll off was the one I got from Lovilla a little later on. I got a chance to be alone with her for a few minutes, and used the opportunity to tell her that my parents had tried to kill me.

She said, "What are you saying to me? You're saying your Mother tried to kill you?"

"Not just her, both of them."

"DON'T YOU EVER SAY ANYTHING LIKE THAT TO ME AGAIN, OR I WILL WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT WITH SOAP. I WILL DO IT IF I HEAR EVEN ONE WORD OF THE KIND!"

I got the message, and never asked her for help for anything, from then on. I wouldn't ask her for help breathing air in a room, if there was extra.

One of Life's Exceptions

When we returned to my Father he was livid. We had been gone more than twice as long as we were supposed to be. We were late for our plane. He acted like he would beat us both.

Phone calls to the airport were made, while the shrieking continued. Dad was informed that we could get another plane leaving a couple of hours later than the one we were originally to take. He settled down. As he relaxed, my Mother told him about the conversation with Lani, and how it proved she was right and he was wrong. I WAS speaking Hawaiian. He said to her, "How did YOU suddenly get to be the expert on what's Hawaiian and what's Pidgin?" She said, "I was there, I heard him, and anyway I know as much about it as you do, which is nothing, nothing at all, so shut up."

Since we had so much more time to catch the plane, my Father took us the long way to the airport. Leaving Schofield, he drove northwest instead of southeast, and we reached the coast. Then he turned and followed the coastal highway.

I was in the back seat holding the whistle, which my Father hadn't noticed yet. As Alaka'i I studied the whistle, turning it over and over, looking at all of the designs. One of the things that Lani taught me was that asymmetry is not a problem for Hawaiian art, so long as each side of a piece has the same power. I saw how the right and left sides of the red bird were carved differently, but they were equally strong.

Then I gave the whistle to Keiki Kona, telling him that it wasn't a toy, so he should be careful with it. Kona immediately played the whistle loudly.

My Father screamed at my Mother, "TELL YOUR SON TO STOP THAT DAMN NOISE!"

She said, "Stop playing the whistle, honey."

My Father said, "Whistle? Where did he get a whistle? I didn't give him any damn whistle!"

She said, "I was going to tell you. The nice Hawaiian man gave it to him, as a going away present or something."

He said, "Great. So I suppose he's forgot all about the ball I worked so hard at getting him. He's going to just play with this stupid whistle and drive me nuts."

My Mother said, "Well, about the ball, there's something,..."

"WHAT? Where's the ball?!" He pulled the car over, opened his door and got out of the car, and opened the back door on the driver's side and screamed at me, "WHERE'S THE BALL I GAVE YOU??!!"

I said, "I gave it to Lani."

My Father dragged me out and hurled me onto the pavement behind the car. Even though it was December it was a hot afternoon. The asphalt was hot, and I remember the air shimmering in the distance, as I got up off the ground. I don't remember a word he was screaming. I remember he knocked me down again, and then he snatched the whistle out of my hand and threw it toward the ocean, the screaming was just a meaningless muffled background noise to me.


I think I started to hate my Father at precisely the moment the whistle left his hand and sailed away. There wasn't a whole lot to love in that picture.

At that point in the coastal highway the bank of the road is formed by rocks which slant down to the sea. I don't think my Father's throw reached the ocean. I think the whistle landed on the rocks below us. I like to think it's still there.

My Mother had to stand in between us to stop him from hitting me more. She said if he was going to kill me to do it and get it over with -- he should throw me into the ocean -- but if not, he had to stop. They could explain a child disappearing at a rocky beach, but they couldn't explain a battered child.

Dad yelled at me to get back in the car. I said no. So he yelled at my Mother to get in. She did, and he started to drive off without me. I just stood there.

Then he stopped, and they sat in place, about a hundred yards ahead of me. After one or two minutes, the car back up to where I was, my Father got out, walked up to me, grabbed me by the arm and threw me in the back seat. We continued on to the airport.

On the way Kona was in tears because the whistle was lost, but Alaka'i said it was the memory of the whistle that mattered, and since he had committed it to memory it would still do what it was meant to do.

Just before we arrived at the airport we were driving down an avenue lined with tall trees. I imagined they were koa trees. Lani and Lono had told me that the great canoes were sometimes made from koa trees. Koa also means army, so in my imagination the trees turned into how I thought Hawaiian warriors might have looked, one for each tree. I had little to go on, so they looked like dozens of clones of Lani and Lono wearing feather cloaks and holding spears upright before them.

On the plane ride to Seattle my Mother brought up the subject of Kona. She introduced him to my Father as an imaginary friend. He told her he was glad she wasn't pushing the split personality idea anymore. Then he noticed that I called him Keiki Kona.

He said, "That proves he's not speaking real Hawaiian. Anyone who knows any Hawaiian knows they put the adjectives after the noun. If Kona is the name, then it has to be Kona Keiki."

I didn't know what to say. I just spoke it, I didn't know books about it. It was almost 39 years later that I found a Hawaiian grammar book in a Half-Price Bookstore and read that some adjectives, including many that begin with the letters ke or ka, precede the noun. They're exceptions.

Just like me.

Ā Hui Hou Aku

After Lani gave me the whistle I remembered Kona and showed it to him. Is that confusing enough? Here's how it worked. I was there with my Mother, so in my mind, Kona was with me, instead of back at home. I had been Alaka'i while speaking and translating Hawaiian. But Kona was there and he would want to see the whistle, so I let him. Which made Kona take over from Alaka'i.

While the Kona personality was playing with the whistle Lani actually spoke with my Mother in broken English for a bit. I didn't catch it all but noticed when he asked about my little brother. My Mother said there is no little brother, there's just him, pointing to me. I looked up at her as Alaka'i again and said, "That's not true, little brother is right here. See? He's playing with the whistle." And I switched back and blew into the whistle.

My Mother laughed and said he's just talking about an imaginary friend he made up. But Lani, who had heard me talking about a little brother for a long time in earnest, looked worried.

Then he crouched down to my level and said, "Who am I speaking to now?" in Hawaiian.

I said, "Alaka'i."

He said, "I had hoped you'd make your last visit alone. I was going to take you away someplace safe from them. Now I'll never see you again. I'll never have another chance."

"I'll come back," I said.

He said, "No. You won't be able to."

Then a tear down from his eye. He said, "Even if you come back, I won't be here. I can't stand the thought that you'll never escape. I'm going to go away. Please don't look for me."

My Mother interrupted. She told me we were going to be in big trouble when we got back to my Father, for being so late. The sooner we got back, the better it would be.

The thought that I really might not see Lani again made me think of uku.

Uku is the law of reciprocity. If someone gives something to you, whether it's good or bad, you have to give them something in return of equal value, to keep the universe in balance. I thought I was obligated to give Lani something that was as important as the whistle he gave me. Ordinarily I could wait and do it later, but not if I'd never see him again.

So I picked up the ball and held it out to him, and told him he had to take it.

My Mother said, "You can't give him that, that was from your Father. Your Father will be upset."

I said, "Daddy will know I had to give it to Lani." I had a higher opinion of my Father's good judgment than was justified by my experiences with him.

Lani tried to refuse it. He said that uku didn't apply to a hō'ano'ano gift.

I should have listened to him about that. He was right, of course. The hō'ano'ano giving was completely outside of uku. But I couldn't see that in the short time that I had.

Finally, I talked Lani into taking the ball, and we said goodbyes. "Ā hui hou aku" -- until we meet again. Then he waved for a minute as my Mother, and the dog and I walked back home.

The last I saw of him, he appeared to hang his head in sadness, and turn away.

The Growing Gift

Even at the time, at the ridiculously young age of 3 and a half, I had enough sense of irony to realize what a joke it was that my Mother suspected Lani of being a pedophile. I think now it was based on 1) racism, 2) the fact that he was much older than she expected him to be (she later said she thought he'd be six or seven), and 3) she was a rapist, so it was easy for her to think anybody could be.

I've often noticed that the people I most have to worry about stealing from me are the ones who most often voice such suspicions of others. They suspect others because they do it themselves. If a priest berates his congregation about tithing every week, I bet he cheats on his taxes. My Mother taught me the pattern early.

Seeing me talking with Lani set her at ease, though. I assured her he was good, but I think what really settled her was how comfortable I was with him.

I explained how suspicious my Mother was to Lani, and pointed out the irony. I told him she thought he was evil like herself. He asked if I was really sure she didn't understand Hawaiian, and I proved it by looking at her and insulting her with a smile on my face. She just smiled back.

My Mother began asking him questions through me. I already knew the answers to a lot of her questions but she insisted on answers from him, so he had to say he was from Ni'ihau and a maintenance worker, etc., so I could translate and say the same things I already knew to my Mother.

Then she asked him things I didn't know the answers to. She asked him how old he was. The answer was a word I didn't recognize. Lani then showed that he knew some English words after all. He said in English that he was nineteen.

She asked him how well I was speaking Hawaiian. He said I was speaking just right for my age, and was ready to start school. She was surprised and said, "Start school? How old do you think he is?" He said he thought I was five or maybe six. She laughed and told me to tell him how old I really was, and I held up three fingers plus one bent finger to show the half.

So all along Lani and Lono had thought I was about two years older than I was, probably because I was bigger than a typical Hawaiian child my age, and they'd grown up among Hawaiians on Ni'ihau.

Lani said that, if I was that young, then my speech was very good for my age. He said my main difficulty was with number.

That one stray comment had a major impact on my life. I now realize that he meant grammatical number. Grammatical number is much more complicated in Hawaiian than in English. As well as singulars and plurals, there are duals, and additional sorts of "we" and "us" depending on how many of us there are and whether you are included in us, and different kinds of theys than in English, and I hadn't got it all down yet.

But I thought at the time he meant counting numbers. So later on I became obsessed with learning all about counting numbers, thinking I would make Lani proud. This ultimately led to a doctorate in mathematics.

Had I understood better what Lani was saying, it might have been a doctorate in linguistics.

I showed Lani the ball my Father had given me. He said it reminded him of something he had for me. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled out something. It was a sliding whistle. On top of it was mounted the carving he had been working on for months. It had turned into a bird which was painted red. The basic whistle itself, he said, was store-bought. It was white to begin with, and he had added decorations in red and black along the sides. He attached a feather to it. He apologized for not being able to get an 'i'iwi feather. It had to be a dyed feather. He also apologized for the shape of the bird's beak, he couldn't do a long 'i'iwi's beak with the wood he had.

He said that he made the whistle thinking I was older than I was. It was made as a hō'ano'ano gift.

'Ano means kind. 'Ano'ano means seed or to grow in accordance with one's kind. Hō'ano'ano means to help cause something or someone to grow the way they are meant to grow. Lani said that it was a tradition for a kahuna expert in such things to give a hō'ano'ano gift to each child when he or she reaches the appropriate age. Since human beings are creatures of ideas and imagination, the seeds of humans are ideas also. The gift is designed by the expert based on his knowledge of the individual child, to point to and stir the germinating idea that is already trying to grow in the child.

Lani said he was giving me the whistle even though I was younger than he thought, because he wouldn't be able to give it later. He told me I was supposed to meditate upon it once a day. It wasn't the physical object that was important, but the idea of it.

That, he explained, was why he worked so slowly and carefully on the carving. It was why he only carved it in my presence. Seeing him carve it was part of the gift.

He explained a little of the symbolism. The red bird is my 'aumakua because I was drawn to it by its song. Therefore there must be a song inside me, as part of my seed. Some of the decorations on the whistle represent the drum music I loved, and some pointed to questions about life I asked. There was a design that stood for flight, and for imagination, and the feather also did that.

But the main idea was that the bird needed the whistle to sing. The bird was very red and very Hawaiian, but he needed the white non-Hawaiian whistle to be heard. Lani said I wouldn't be able to sing my song to the world in Hawaiian.

[Below: Just an artistic suggestion of it, not really accurate.]

Mother Meets Lani

As the time came to leave Hawaii my Father took an entire week off, so it was looking like I wouldn't see Lani and Lono before we left. I wasn't really clear on the concept of that. I thought if I missed them that week I could come back the next week and see them. Fortunately there was a final meeting, but not with both of them.

It happened because the dog had to be walked before we left. My Father usually did that, but he was a control freak about packing so this time he had my Mother do it. I begged her to go with me to see Lani and Lono. My Father said not to take more than half an hour. I think my Mother went along with the idea just to get away from my Father, because he was getting irritable. Packing always made him surly because he didn't have any spatial sense. He blamed the suitcases at first, then anyone standing around.

So my Mother, Koko and I set off for Stoneman Field. Of course, my Mother had never been to see Lani and Lono, so she had no idea where we were going. I grabbed my ball as we left. I'd finally be able to show it to them.

A lot of what I know about my visits to my friends became evident through this walk. The reason I know about how many blocks down Leilehua Road I had to walk every day to see them is that on this one trip my Mother provided the count. I had only just recently learned the Hawaiian word for five, now I learned the English word.

My Mother was astonished that I had been wandering so far from the house every day. She complained that we'd used up half our time already, just as I spotted Lani. She was saying we'd have to go back right away.

When Lani saw me, he called me over to his side of the Avenue. At this point I was crossing the avenue myself as long as Lani or Lono was there to wave me over.

I started to cross but my Mother grabbed my arm and started yelling to Lani, "Who are you? What have you been doing to my son?" After that she let go of me to step off the curb to march over to him to confront him. But by then a car was on it's way. I ran and yanked her by the skirt and told her, "Not now, a car is coming!" It shocked her to realize that I'd prevented her from being hit, after all the times she'd told me not to cross unattended.

When it was clear again, Lani called out to me in Hawaiian to come over to his side of the street. It's odd to me now that I remember that the word for side he used, 'ao'ao, was one I didn't know before. But I got the idea and I led my Mother across.

My Mother was still wanting to know what horrible things the man was doing to me when we walked up, but if Lani understood anything she was saying he didn't let on. He just looked at me for help. I asked him in Hawaiian where Lono was, and he
told me Lono was out sick. It was another new word for me, 'ōma'i. We talked at length about the meaning of it. The word was funny to me because I knew ma'i to mean genitals. My Mother looked confused through the whole thing, then I explained to her that Lono "had a cold" because that was the only kind of sick I knew.

She demanded to know from Lani why he wasn't talking to her, and I told her it's because Lani didn't speak any English, but I could help. And I began translating back and forth for them.

I believe that my memories of Lani and Lono would have been lost forever if it were not for this one conversation. Up until this conversation my world had been in two pieces, each with its own memories consisting of a separate web of associations. The next 15 or 20 minutes of conversation, translating between Lani and my Mother cemented the two worlds together and made the memories of one world accessible through the other, because they intersected for that time.

Last Chant Learned

The last new chant I learned was the Kamanomano chant. There was an unusual prolonged torrential downpour that drove Lani and I indoors. We were in the gymnasium near the tennis courts. Lono was off somewhere else. I begged Lani to sing a chant and he lost patience and reminded me that the chants are spiritual. You just don't sing them any place, any time.

I must have looked really hurt and made him feel horribly guilty, because he immediately came up with a chant that he could feel comfortable singing in a gym. Years later I found it performed twice on tracks 13 & 14 of the Smithsonian Hawaiian Drum Dance Chants album. It was translated by Mary Pukui in the notes this way:

1. 'Eia o Kalani Kamanomano
[Here is the heavenly one Kamanomano]

2. Kamanomano heke o ke kapu
[The highest and strictest of the tabus]

3. Ka honu pe'ekua wakawaka
[The thick horny shelled turtle]

4. Pip'i ka unahi ma ke kua
[With scales up the back]

5. Hiolo ka unahi ma ke alo
[And scales that come down the front]

6. Ma ka maha 'opi o Kalani
[Along the sides of the heavenly one]

7. Kalani ka hiapo, kama kapu
[The first born, a tabu child]

8. Hānau mua o Hawai'i
[First born chief in Hawai'i]

9. Ka 'īlio nūkea ma ka lani
[A snout raised up to the heavens]

10. 'Eia la ke 'o nei
[Lo, here he is!

Lani's interpretation was unusually clear and specific. He said it was about something you could see in the sky at night. He gave a different translation of line 6, saying it meant, "in the cleft temple of the sky." That referred to a place where the Milky Way appeared to separate and return to itself. So it isn't a constellation, but a relative void of stars. The song is describing it as looking like a fabulous long necked turtle with snout raised and jewels sprinkled over and under it, and suggesting that he is an apparition of a great ancestor.

He touched the right side of my head at my temple, to explain the meaning of the word "maha." The touch reminded me of the car's strike, and it burned Lani's meaning into me.

Retrospect

Now that it's 55 years, one Bachelor of Science and a Ph.D. in Mathematics, a marriage, divorce, a house, and homelessness, later, I think the Huna that Lani explained to me is looking very good.

Western Science is cautious about knowledge. The idea that we all have to be objective and stick to observable facts and regard all theory as tentative until disproved is a great way to enforce the caution that science needs.

But the Huna denial of objective reality takes Western Scientific caution further. It regards theories as not even tentative but relative to the needs and aims of the theorist. The Huna as I understand it is more scientific than Western Science.

Also, after years of consideration, I've come to the conclusion that the core religious thinking of the Kahiko is not faith-based, but philosophy-based.

Lani said that the myths and legends were only for entertainment and illustration. He compared fabulous stories of Maui to stories of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or to the idea that God sits on a cloud and has a white beard. The Huna is the real religious thinking.


The Huna doesn't suppose that gods are persons. When Lani talked about moving in and out of mental states, he said the gods couldn't do that. A god is a mental state, he said. It's the way humans are superior to gods, that as persons we can change our minds, but gods' minds are fixed.

Today I would put it this way: the different gods represent the different possibilities of mind. They are like masks. People can move among them, putting them on, taking them off. You shouldn't let one get stuck on you. You're more than all of them.

It's a view that doesn't require beliefs at all. It's only a view. Like all the best views it survives by seduction, not force. It doesn't demand that you accept it, it entices you. It makes no sense to proselytize for it. It's not about believing, it's about seeing.

Designing Mind

My last few months in Hawaii were frustrating. When my parents found out they would be leaving soon, they wanted to get last minute sight-seeing and beach time in. So my Father started taking vacation days and sick days off for excursions. Of course I wasn't in on the planning of any of this. I'd just wake up one day thinking I was going to see my friends, and instead I'm dragged off to some must-see tourist-trap.

On top of that there were hours spent in a hot car in a parking lot while my parents shopped at furniture stores for the kind of cheap island-style bamboo and wicker furniture that they had to have to remember Hawaii by.

The worst thing that happened was the arrival of relatives. They had to see all the sights all over again, that my parents had already seen. Here's my Grandmother and one of my cousins with me and my parents and the dog at a beach. Doesn't my Grandmother look like she's hearing a voice telling her to wade home? I think my Mother is getting ready to strangle me, as soon as the shot is over. My Father looks like he's having a rare Jeff Goldblum moment in his head. Ordinarily he wasn't at all Golblumesque. I'm much more Goldblumesque than he ever was.


The later conversations with Lani and Lono that did take place were all over the map. Literally.

There was a long conversation in which Lani talked about his theories of Atlantis and Mu. He talked about the lost continent of Mu as though it were a traditional Polynesian idea, when I am sure that it was mostly a Western European fantasy based on misreadings of Mayan texts. I think he mixed up the continent with Hawaiian legends of people also named Mu, who were said to have inhabited the islands before the Polynesians arrived, and might still reside hidden in the mountains.

There were stories of other predecessors of the Polynesians, including cannibals. That was just creepy.

When Lani brought up the Menehune, who were a legendary short-statured people of the islands, he managed to mix them up with Leprechauns. All in all, the sense I get in remembering it all is that I can't rely on much as being genuinely ancient Hawaiian. He filled in gaps with anything he could find.

There were some things that I'm sure hailed back to pre-colonial times. There were ghost stories. There was a strange tale about two shape-shifting gods or demi-gods chasing each other from island to island.

Then there was talk about the Huna. I don't know what to make of that. Could it be ancient, or was it extrapolated from Buddhist and Hindu beliefs? A lot of the natives who ended up on Ni'ihau, though they spoke Hawaiian, had mixed ancestry, including Japanese and Chinese. A strong Buddhist influence on the non-Christian holdouts wouldn't be very surprising.

At any rate I remember some of what Lani had to say about the Huna, traditional or not. He said that just because the word means "hidden" everybody thinks it's an occult secret, but the joke on everyone who thinks that is that the Huna isn't itself hidden, the Huna is about "hidden-ness."

He illustrated by pointing out that when he held the palm of a hand up to me, I couldn't see the back, and when he held the back to me, I couldn't see the palm. He said that the Huna begins with the simple observation that you can't be aware of everything all the time. There are always going to be aspects of reality that are hidden from you, and if you look at them, other things will go hidden. The Huna involves learning respect for what you can't know.

A related idea was the idea of mental states. He said there are many different mental states a person can be in. One state is good for one kind of understanding. Another state is good for another kind of understanding. There is no state that is good for all kinds of understanding at once. That's why there isn't just one god, but many, because there isn't just one way to understand and organize reality. Only mana comes in touch with everything. But mana has no mind.

Minds, by their nature, organize and prioritize. Therefore as soon as our minds awaken and we look out and see the world, our minds impose order on that world, which order is never universal. Some things come forward, other things recede, in accordance with who we are and the sort of state we are in. It even depends on how hungry we are, and what we eat. if we are flies, we look for shit everywhere, and we're happy to find it.

Once we know that there are different mental states that provide access to alternate views of the world, Lani said, that the next thing that Huna does is offer ways to move among the states.

Only one such method was discussed. It came up in a conversation a few weeks before it was time for me to leave Hawaii. I was told about sleeping mat designs.

This is something I've confirmed: Ni'ihau is known for its sleeping mats. The people make sleeping mats which are decorated with geometric designs called pāwehe. The designs featured repeated triangles and squares. There are checkerboard patterns, rows, and a few patterns that seem to grow out from a point.

The Bishop Museum has samples online. See artifacts numbered 02560, 02562, 02564, 02565.

What Lani added to this, which I haven't confirmed, is that long ago the designs weren't just for sleeping on, but were for meditating upon.

The idea was, the meditator would sit and by some means, draw one of these designs. There were chants suitable for different designs depending on the state the practitioner wanted to achieve. While singing the chant the meditator would add to the drawing as his mind and aims moved him. The design would be an evolving ki'i of the state he was reaching toward.

I don't know if the Huna really involved such practices, or if a Taoist injected such ideas into the blend of post-colonial tradition after Ni'ihau was established as a native reservation. Or did the original Polynesian settlers in Hawaii bring such ideas with them from Asia?

What I do know is that a lot of this thinking would later be very difficult to integrate with my Sunday School lessons.

Tiki, or Ki'i

I followed Lani's progress closely as he worked his carving every day. It was slow; he only worked on it during lunch for at most five minutes any given day. Some days he wouldn't work on it at all. He would appear to meditate on it. I eventually found out he wasn't working on it except at lunches. He wouldn't say why.

Lani's carving was a ki'i. That's Hawaiian for "tiki".

People think tiki are idols. Here are six tiki or ki'i:


Ki'i are images. They can be drawings, diagrams or sculptures. They can be visages or representations of visages. They can be accurate or schematic, abstract or concrete, realistic or symbolic. The word tiki, or ki'i means image, not idol.

By the way, the one above that looks like an idol, at the lower right, is a symbolic expressionistic image of a Maori ancestor, and is no more an idol than Michelangelo's realistic but equally imaginary portrayal of Adam at the upper left.

Heavens and Heavens

I had a conversation about heaven and hell with my Hawaiian friends. It was sometime after my 3rd birthday. I had asked my Mother if we were Christian, because Lono had said we probably were and I wanted to be sure. My Mother assured me that I was Christian, as I had been baptised. I told her I didn't know what that meant, so she told me I'd had water sprinkled on me.

"That makes you Christian?"

"Yes. It means you will go to heaven if you keep being good."

"Where's heaven?"

"It's a place in the sky where everybody is happy all the time."

"Where in the sky?"

"I don't know; ask your Father when he gets home."

Instead, I reported back to Lani and Lono, because they gave reliably clearer answers. I said we were definitely Christian, but the heaven thing needed explaining.

They tried, but it made no sense to me. "It's a place in the sky." OK, how do I get there? I don't fly. "God carries you up." Right. So if it's in the sky, why can't I see it on a clear day? "It's invisible." Right. So how can I have fun there if I can't see all the fun things you get to play with, cause everything's invisible? "You don't have fun, God just makes you happy." How? "He puts happiness inside you." Why do I have to go to the sky for that? "The alternative is Hell. You don't want that."

I asked what Kahiko had to say about all this. They told me that ancient Hawaiians didn't make such things a big central issue of their worship. I said, yeah, but they think something about it, right?

So Lani said that some people believed in reincarnation and some didn't. He said that of those that believe in reincarnation some believe you take a rest between lives and some don't. Of those that think that you rest between lives, there's general agreement folks don't rest all in the same place. So there isn't heaven and hell, there's heavens and more heavens, different ones for different people.

Of course we sidetracked for an explanation of "reincarnation". I then wanted to know if all the Hawaiian heavens were invisible heavens scattered around throughout the sky, and I was told that, no, they were where you couldn't see them because they were all in the ground.

But isn't that where Hell is? Doesn't that mean Hawaiian heavens are all hell? No, Lani said (with some exasperation now), because Hawaiians don't regard the Earth as evil the way Christians do.

OK then, how do I get to one of these heavens, I said.

Lani told me about jumping-off places. After you're dead your soul goes wandering around until you find a high place, called a jumping-off place, where if you jump off from it in the right direction the ground will open up for you and you will fall into your own special heaven.

If you jump the wrong way? The ground doesn't open and your soul is broken in the fall, and is doomed to linger at that spot forever, wishing it had chosen better.

How do you know which way to jump? You don't. But you'll know when you've found a jumping-off place because there will be the souls of dead children all around the bottom waiting for you to get ready to jump so they can shout directions to you and try to trick you into jumping the wrong way, just to be mean (as children often are.)

It's a lovely horror story which visited some real living anguish upon me several years later when I took it too seriously. I'll save that for another time but for now, here is a painting I made in the 90s of a jumping-off tree pretty much as I envisioned it hearing the story. Just the faces of the broken souls appear out of the darkness. The tree glows because it calls the dead soul to climb up into it, to jump from it. The children's souls at the bottom, trying to confuse the jumper, are brightly colored by mana that the dead can see.


At the lower left some demons haunting the jumper are hanging about. Our jumper ought to jump into the middle of them. That's the trick. By the way, the smiling demon at the far lower left will smile for you upside-down, too.

A Murdered Dream

A few weeks after my 3rd birthday the roll of photos that included that day's shots were developed. My Father brought them home and laid them out on the coffee table like he was sure they were his best ever. Within minutes my parents were embroiled in an argument: Did the pictures which I posted for Another Crappy Birthday constitute proof that I had two personalities or not?

Not much earlier I would have been allowed to hear such an argument in its entirety because they wouldn't have thought I could understand enough of it. But now they figured I might catch on, so they sent me to bed. It never occurred to them though to check how well the sound carried into my room. I could still hear whenever they talked normally or louder, and they couldn't be bothered to whisper for very long.

My Father never let up telling my Mother she was wrong, but he finally said he would give up photography because of it all. Hearing them arguing, I thought he was quitting because he didn't want to see what was wrong with me in his pictures. I thought it was my fault that he was quitting.

The next day I told him I wanted to talk to him in private about it, "man to man". He thought that was pretty cute.

I said I didn't want him to quit photography because of me. First he chided me for eavesdropping. Then he said he wasn't doing it because I had a split personality -- there were no such things. He said he was quitting because a good photographer would have seen my changing moods when taking the pictures, and not been surprised by them in the developed shots. He was quitting because he was finally admitting to himself that he didn't see human expressions when setting his shots up.

It didn't make a stitch of sense to me.

I had no sense of how good or bad he was at photography, but I didn't see what that mattered. The way I saw it, his love of photography ought to be like his love of me. If his photography isn't very good, that doesn't mean he should kill it.

I still feel very strongly that interests shouldn't be destroyed just because they only stand at knee height. You don't kill children. You let them grow whichever way they reach. Your interests are more than you. They are living things in their own right. You should let them go.

He offered this consolation: He'd finish exposing the remaining film he had, before putting the cameras away for good.

Wonders of Healing

I'll give away an ending of a thread of my memoirs away right now. I don't have a split personality anymore. An old email signature of mine read, "Harnessing Stupidity Since 1991." I picked 1991 partly to be random but also partly as a private reference to a period of re-integration which marked the end of the split for me.

For the record, I don't think "dissociative identity disorders" are disorders. They're just styles of being. So I don't much care about the debate the psychiatrists have over whether they "exist" as disorders or not.

[Upper right: Not my problem.]

I also don't like that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is called a disorder. It's like calling a scab a disorder. If you know anything about scabs, you know that they amazing wonders of healing.

You would never call someone who'd been injured sick for having a scab. You would call someone who was injured and bleeding sick when a scab didn't form.

Anyway, the fact that I can recall the Hawaiian years as easily as I can is due to that 1991 re-integration.

The memories were never lost. But they were always Alaka'i's memories, so they were accessible only when Alaka'i was "out." So I couldn't have written these memoirs unless Alaka'i came out for long enough. The re-integration shared memories so it no longer mattered anymore.

The reason the memories were segregated to start with was to protect Kona from the knowledge that my parents had been so mean to me, so that he would be capable of loving them.

My parents died in 1978 and 1980. After that it was no longer necessary for any part of me to love them.

But in 1952, when I was 3, that was an urgent need.

For a while Alaka'i spent time trying to create edited versions of the events of the previous 3 years that would cover up the abuse, so that Kona could have as long a past as he did. But it was too complicated. So he finally gave up and let Kona only remember back to his own creation.

The Tricycle

At some point my Father came home with a tricycle for me. I think he was feeling guilty about all the stink about the ball and wanted to give me something that was brand new and free of any painful history. For a while I forgot about the ball as I peddled the tricycle up and down the block on either side of our house.

Again, my Father wouldn't let me take the tricycle past the end of the block because I might lose it. So when I went see to Lani and Lono I had to just describe it to them, just as I had to just describe the ball.

It occurred to me that if my father came with me to see Lani and Lono I could bring the tricycle with me, and they could see it themselves. I also thought that if my Father talked to them, he would like them and maybe have the over to the house, and I could see them more often.

So I begged my Father to come with me to see my friends. To my surprise he agreed. He followed along with me one Saturday as I peddled the trike clear to Stoneman Field to look for Lani and Lono. They weren't there. We ended up at the nearby tennis courts where I often met them. They weren't there either. My Father took this picture of me triking around the tennis courts.


If you click on the image for the full-size picture, you can clearly see the bulge of the cup I was still wearing.

Lani and Lono weren't there because it was the weekend. It had never occurred to me before that they got weekends off just like my Dad did.

The Precious Ball

Two days after my 3rd birthday, Dad came home from cashing the week's pay with a horror story about how hard it was to find an ordinary round rubber ball on the island of O'ahu. He had one, and he made sure I knew that his shopping for it was a supreme sacrifice. It was his Iwo Jima, his landing on Normandy Beach, his Alamo. Except that he had lived, of course, and was unscratched.

It was about 4 inches in diameter. I remember it being red, white, and blue, with five-pointed stars on it. The important thing, though, was that it was spherical, and it bounced predictably.

I completely ignored his speech about how much pain he went through to get the ball. All I cared was that I was going to be bouncing it.

And I bounced it, and bounced it. I was obsessed, really, with bouncing the ball. That's what I had wanted it for. I'd seen another boy bounce a ball, and I wanted to do that, too. Endlessly.

My Father could not relate to that. He offered to play catch with me. I kept bouncing the ball. He had to keep reminding me what the point of playing catch was. Finally he gave up. "Why did he need the damn ball so badly if he didn't want to play catch with it?" I was free to bounce it to my heart's content.

For days I bounced it on the sidewalks all around the house. I wasn't allowed to take it away from the house. It was too precious, the sacrifice to get it was too great, for me to ever lose it.

Then I discovered that if it hit a wall it would bounce back to me. I bounced it off the front of the house. This went on for about two minutes before my Mother sent me around back, hoping the noise would be tolerable back there. I then bounced it off the back of the house over and over again, softly singing chants to myself.

After doing this for an hour or so the ball took a bounce off something on the lawn and rolled into the crawl-space under the house. At that point there were slats in the way, and the space was too low for me even if I could get past the slats. I tried to reach the ball but my arms wouldn't stretch that far. My Mother's would, though. I knew that she would have to help me get the ball that Dad had struggled so much to shop for.

So I hollered as loud as I could, "E Mami! Ke ka'a ka pōpō malalo o ka hale!"

My Mother came to the kitchen window at the back of the house and looked out. "What did you say?"

"Ke ka'a ka pōpō malalo o ka hale!" I pointed under the house.

She came out and looked where I was pointing. She said, "The - ball - rolled - under - the -house."

I was really excited for a second. I thought she had understood Hawaiian finally. I said, "Ae."

But she hadn't understood. She said, "Say 'The - ball - rolled - under - the -house.'" She was just describing what she could see and giving me an English lesson.

I slowly repeated, "Da pall wollet una da hale." Then I added, "malalo o ka hale," for emphasis.

She was satisfied that she had made progress with me, and got the ball out, and I went back to the wonderful bouncing.

Another Crappy Birthday

OK, it wasn't as bad as the first. It was even better than the second, which wasn't celebrated at all, since animals don't get birthday parties.

It began with my Father getting his photographic equipment out. He set up a tripod in the middle of the living room, and a dining chair was set in front of it.

I was placed in the chair. He had to focus the camera. He measured the light and did his calculations to set the exposure time just right. He had to hang a sheet up to block sunlight from the window.

Then the big moment came. My Mother handed me an oblong object and my Father said, from behind the camera, "Here it is! Here's the ball!" I was excited! I looked around for the ball. I didn't see it, but I was sure it was there somewhere. I was happy, and there was a flash, as my Father got this picture.


After the picture was taken I said, naturally, "Where ball? What ball?"

My Father said, "It's in your hand, silly"

How is a football a ball to a 3-year-old who has never even seen a football game?

I've often wondered how bad it would have been if we were a normal family, and my parents hadn't tried to kill me on my first birthday, and I hadn't only just recently begun to bond with my Father again.

The way things were, it just symbolized everything that was wrong. I had a Father who couldn't see me unless he was imagining me being him. If I couldn't be identical to him, I was disposable. My Father was a football fan. I must be a football fan.

Even before I started crying, my Mother said, "I told you he wanted a round ball." I burst out in tears, and my Father said, "It's a ball! What's wrong with him that he can't see it's a ball!" "It's not a ball," she said. "It's a football." "A football is a ball!"

It took several minutes for my Father to calm down. Mother talked him into promising to get a real ball soon. I was talked down out of my sobbing, as I gradually was convinced that the next time wouldn't be just like this one, and the next "ball" wouldn't be shaped like a donkey, or the Eiffel Tower, or a stupid coat hanger.

Another present was brought out. I got a "kelepona", a telephone. It was a toy telephone with a spinning dial, just like the new one that my parents had recently got, replacing the old wall model.

Below are four photos. In all but the one on the lower left I was Kona. My Mother said something mean about me just before that shot was taken, and Alaka'i came out, protecting Kona from hearing the insult. You can see anger that Kona wouldn't have had. My Mother said to my Father, "See? See what I've been telling you? Look at him. You can see he's different! I told you the freak's got a split personality!"

My father told her she was crazy. "There are no such things as split personalities."

Pronoun Problems

At first, it was clear to me that Kona was me with a different personality. But that didn't last long. As it seemed that Kona stayed behind when I roamed away from the house, or anyway, he wasn't accessible when I was with Lani and Lono, the illusion was created that he had a separate physical existence. Since I was only just turning three, that illusion could overcome my limited experience with the world. I came to think of Kona as capable of splitting off from me.

The use of the word "me" gets problematic. At first, Kona is a creation of my imagination. He's an idea that has been allowed to take on a life of its own.

But people who have thought deeply about human existence carefully for thousands of years will tell you that we are all ideas that have been allowed to take life. All existence is illusion, right? This is part of what that means. The me that did the creating of Kona was a fiction to the same degree that Kona started out being.

Once Kona could be believed in, once the illusion was strong enough, Kona had as much right to be the "me" that the first imaginer had. I should say imagined imaginer. Alaka'i didn't really imagine Kona into existence. Kona came into existence by the same imagination that imagined Alaka'i into existence, and that imagination simply imagined that it was Alaka'i.

At any rate, it's admittedly a tangle, and I dealt with it at the time by using "me" relatively. "Me" was whoever I was at the time. There were 3 names. Alaka'i meant the original personality. Kona meant the new one. Wesley meant either one, depending on who was active.

By the way, my English was still not very good. I mostly pronounced words in accordance with Pidgin rules for changing English sounds into Hawaiian sounds. That means b and f become p, that s, t, d, z, zh, sh, ch, and j and g all become k and sometimes t, that r becomes l, and that vowels are inserted after consonants that don't already have them. So "Wesley" was actually "Wekali" to me, accent on the first syllable.

I still wouldn't use Wekali with Lani and Lono, because it meant nothing to me, except that my parents gave it to me, and I detested it.

That's not to say I detested all of my parents' gifts. My Father was by now in the habit of spending a small amount of each payday's check on cheap presents for me. There were jacks, marbles, toy cars, toy soldiers, pinwheels, balloons, and sometimes picture books. Not all bad. I learned that Fridays meant stuff.

As my birthday approached I kept asking if that Friday's stuff included the promised ball, only to be told that my birthday hadn't arrived. I didn't know calendars yet.

Keiki Kona

It was days after my Mother arrived home from the mental ward before she spoke to me. She was drunk a lot of the time. She kept in her bedroom. Finally she came out and I tried to say the nicest thing I could think of saying. I asked about the baby that was due.

I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.

Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.

She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"

Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"

Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.

In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.

I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?

So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.

Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.

To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.

I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.

So I called little brother Kona.

When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.

Reconciliation

I got surgery for a ruptured penis. Even though I was under a general anesthesia I woke up from it with dreams of horrific pain. I dreamed my body was being sawn in half from the crotch up, with dreamed pain to match. That pain I remember.

When it was over and I could go home, I had to wear a cup for a month or two.

My Father drove me home from the hospital, and for the next two weeks took care of me. My Mother wasn't around. When I asked about her, my Father just said she's resting up in the hospital.

My Father got to know me more in those two weeks than he had in a year. I felt a bond forming.

At the same time, I wanted to get back to Lani and Lono. I believed that all the horrible things that had happened since I stopped seeing them happened just because of that. If I had not turned away from them I wouldn't have taken up with Jackson. If I hadn't taken up with Jackson my Mother wouldn't be in the hospital.

But my Father wasn't negligent in the way my Mother was. He wouldn't let me run off for hours in a day. I had to stay by the house while he was taking care of me.

I had a birthday coming up, in July. My Father asked me what I wanted most, and I told him I wanted a ball. I had in mind a rubber bouncing ball like one I'd seen Jackson play with. Dad said it would be easy to get me a ball, and asked me what else I wanted. The only thing I could think of was to beg him to go to Stoneman Field with me so he could meet my friends. He said, no, he was too old to meet my friends. When I told him my friends were big people too, he just laughed, like he didn't believe me.

Finally, the two weeks were up and my Mother came home.

In those days mental patients often had to dress just like convicts in a penitentiary. That's the way my Mother was when she stepped out of the car. She was wearing striped pajamas with big black and white stripes so she couldn't get far without being seen if she ever escaped. Her head had been shaved and was still bandaged.

As she came in the house I stood waiting. I'd been coached by my Father to say "I love you Mommy." I squeaked my line out as she glared at me. She said, "Get the fuck out of my way, you filthy freak. I don't want to ever see you again. You did this to me." She went to bed and didn't come out for the weekend.

Then the weekend was over, and my Father had to go back to work. That morning I ran off to see Lani and Lono.

When I saw them I rejoined them in tears. I told Lani I was sorry for being angry with him, and he was right, I should be outside the kapu, I wasn't meant to live like normal people.

Lani told me that he was the one who had been wrong. It was wrong of him, he said, to laden me with all his hopes and dreams and not consider my needs, and it was wrong to talk about the old ways as if they were perfect and the way things should be now.

He said he had already known that the kapu was wrong, but he was just clinging to everything, and you can't do that. Some of the old ways are best left dead.

I told them everything that had gone wrong during the month since I'd last seen them. Then Lani took out a piece of wood he was carving, and got ready to work on it. It was a different piece than I'd seen him working on before. He said he'd been saving it in the hopes of seeing me again, he wanted me to watch him carve it from the beginning.

I asked what it was going to be. He said some sort of animal. He said it would be a gift for a special little brother. I said I didn't know he had a little brother, that I thought the one he had died. He said this is for a different little brother. Then he started carving, while Lono sang a chant.

The Screaming

I'm sure that my Mother understood that "I made a present for Mommy" was a reference to my first birthday. She went berserk.

She screamed and dragged me into the house through the back door. There was a utility sink around the corner inside the back door. She turned the water on and held my face under the stream until I nearly drowned. Periodically she let me gasp for one quick breath then immediately put me under again. I started taking in water. I was gagging on water when she pulled me up by my arm and dropped my whole body in the sink.

She rinsed me off in the sink for a while, then, still screaming, she never stopped screaming, she took me out and stood me by a metal tub we had. Without warning she took hold of my penis and lifted me in the air by it and threw me down into the tub. There was horrible blinding pain coming from my penis, and just at that moment I heard the sound of our car in the driveway.

I leaped out of the tub and squirmed away out of my Mother's grasp. I ran out the front door with my Mother chasing behind me. I ran naked and screaming up to my Father who was on the sidewalk coming in.

My Father said, "What's wrong with you? What are you screaming about?"

My Mother said, "Don't believe anything the little shit tells you."

That tipped my Father off. He bent down and said, "What happened?"

I was sobbing and screaming, but after a few tries I managed to say, "Mommy hurt it!" and pointed to my penis. He tried to pry my hands away so he could see but I only screamed more. Then he turned on my Mother. He shouted at her "What did you do to my son!"

She said, "He deserved it! He's a shit! A filthy shit!"

My Father responded by punching her so hard he drove her head halfway though the wall.

I screamed at him, "No, no, no, no, please don't hurt Mommy! I'm sorry! It's all my fault!"

My Father made a phone call. Then he took me by the arm and put me in the back seat of the car and drove off with me. He drove me to Tripler Medical Center. On the way I screamed more. I remember the pain being unimaginable, but oddly I don't remember the pain itself. I remember every other pain. I remember the pain of the car rolling over me on my first birthday. But I don't remember this one. I take that as a sign that it really was as bad as I thought it was.

I managed to ask about my Mother. Didn't she have to go to the doctors? He said there was going to be an ambulance for her, but I was getting a special ride with him.

Couldn't Mommy go with us? "No," he said, "she couldn't."

Payback

My Mother was pregnant again. You couldn't tell by looking at her; she wasn't big in the belly yet. My clue was my Father continually telling me to not bother her because she's pregnant.

I could hear them talking at night, when I was supposed to be going to sleep. They talked about how the new baby was a chance to start over and do everything right this time. The new baby won't be damaged. The new baby will be everything Wesley was supposed to be.

I wasn't supposed to play with Jackson again after we were caught sneaking into houses. I was ordered to stay at home or in the yard. For about a week I hung out at home trying to be nice to my Mother and staying out of her way.

I was in deep pain. I was isolated. I felt rejected by everyone. I couldn't imagine killing myself, but I thought of what I could imagine. I thought that when the good baby came to replace me, I would go away. I pictured a hole in the ground, somewhere a long way off, and sitting in it, and never coming out.

My Mother was as cruel as ever. When my father was at work she would regularly lock me in my room. The rapes weren't as frequent as when my Father was in Korea, but still happened.

One day, I think it was in the middle of May, 1952, Jackson found me in our back yard playing by myself, and told me he had an idea of something fun to do, and I should come along. I knew I could only get in trouble by leaving with him, but I thought it didn't matter because I was treated like dirt no matter whether I was good or not. Besides, I'd be leaving permanently to live in dirt, so it would all be over soon.

So I went with him. He took me to a house that had a crawl-space beneath it that was gated and padlocked. The gate consisted of wooden slats. We could see what looked like toys to us through the slats. Jackson talked me into helping him rip away slats so we could take the toys out. So he had escalated his activities to breaking in to places, and he wasn't so concerned anymore about leaving evidence. I thought he was probably in a bad mood too.

When we got the toys out, Jackson recognized them as forming a croquet set. I didn't know what that meant, so he told me I was stupid. Then we left, with the croquet set strewn all over the lawn.

We went into some woods. He talked to me about how mean his parents were. So I opened up to him and shared my feelings about my parents and how they hated me an wanted me dead. He said he didn't blame them, I was a stupid shit, and to prove it he defecated in front of me, and picked up some of his shit and smeared it on me. Then he left.

At that moment I had my first remembered fugue experience. A fugue experience is a period in which you must have been active but you can't recall being conscious during it. It's like sleep-walking, only you weren't asleep to begin with. It's often seen in people who have experienced trauma.

This first fugue experience lasted long enough for me to strip and smear my whole body with feces. When I came out of the fugue I was confused for a second, not knowing how I got that way. Then I had an idea that it had a purpose.

The woods I was in were very close to our backyard, I just had to go down a small hill and across an alley.

When I got to the backyard I started to think that my idea of what to do was no good, and I tried to get the garden hose out to clean myself off. But before I could do it my Mother came out of the house and caught me. She demanded to know what I was doing, and I didn't have any answer but the one I'd already thought of. I said it in Hawaiian first, and then I translated it for her.

"I made a present for Mommy!"