Christmas, 1954

At the end of 1954 I was severely depressed. If I were 5 years old and that depressed now I'd probably be put on Wellbutrin, instead of being 58, and on Wellbutrin. In those days you didn't treat kids' depressions by giving them pills, you treated them by telling them it's their own fault they're depressed. You were depressed because deep down inside you hated Jesus, or because you were too lazy to be cheerful ("Don't you know smiling uses fewer muscles and takes more work than frowning?"), or because you were trying to put something over on people. "You don't want to play with the other kids and have fun, because you're selfish." This was just about the time that the term "maladjusted" came into vogue. I wasn't maladjusted yet, but that was only because I hadn't yet been diagnosed.

For my own part I blamed the depression on the move and missing the House in Shirley. I especially missed the old retired farmer who owned the house and took care of me periodically.

That's my best explanation for the fact that as Christmas neared I wanted a farm. That, and Roy Rogers had a farm. And I believed at the time that both my Grandfathers had farms. It turned out not quite true about Grandfather Browning, but he did raise fruit and vegetables, chickens, and rabbits.

I couldn't have a real farm. But the Christmas Wish-Book, i.e. the Sears catalog, had pictures of plastic farm sets with plastic sheep and cows and horses and farm house and fences to play with.

My parents were freaked out by my single-minded insistence that a farm was all I wanted. They took me to a store Santa in Worcester in the hopes he could squeeze out other clues. The Santa, who scared the daylights out of me, said, "If you're going to have a farm aren't you going to need a wagon to haul your supplies around?" I nodded yes in the hopes he would be satisfied and let me go. He did, thankfully.

My Father later complained about all the trouble he took setting up the farm under the tree for me to find Christmas morning, only to have me lose interest in the set within an hour.

My two favorite presents were the red Radio Flyer Wagon, which replaced the red Dixie Junior Wagon I'd had that got left behind in Hawaii, and an easel one of my aunts gave me. The easel had a scroll of butcher paper that was about two feet wide and I don't know how long. Fifty feet? A hundred feet? All I know is it took me months to use it up.

Every day I'd set the easel up in front of the TV. As commercials came on I would write down the words that flashed on the screen. I learned to spell a great many new words that way, and was able to add them to my vocabulary. Colgate and Palmolive were two of my favorite new words. I also drew pictures in crayon on the easel, sometimes inspired by the pictures on TV, sometimes not.


For several months the red wagon followed behind me from room to room and went outside with me wherever I went. I haven't been able to find a picture of it. The one I had featured a zig-zag design on the side, instead of the framing ornaments of the one pictured above. It hauled toys, always including the precious muddy tennis ball, and it hauled George, the invisible ghost. George liked to go for rides.

My Father was done with photography but my Mother insisted that it was time I be photographed, so right after Christmas a professional photographer was hired to do it. The guy they hired did house calls. He set up a portable curtain in our living room. He got on my bad side by asking me right off what I wanted to be when I grew up. I despised adults who started off with that question. The underlying premise was, you're not worth anything now, how are you going to rectify that? I shocked my parents by announcing for the first time that I wanted to be a fireman.

My Mother said, "WHAT?! Just the day before Christmas all you wanted in the world was to be a farmer. Before that you wanted to be a cowboy. Where did fireman come from?" "I want to help people." "God help us all," she said.

I then found out that the whole reason the photographer asked was so he could guess which props he should pull out of the case he dragged in. He heard "cowboy" so he pulled out the cowboy props, a toy horse, toy pistols, and cowboy chaps. The scar from the first birthday head injury was prominent at this age, but you can't see it because the photographer was explicitly instructed to airbrush it out. He forced me to say cheese against my will. What's wrong with people these days, that everybody has to be smiling in pictures. Where did that addiction to a graphic lie come from? My great-grandparents never had to smile for their pictures. Why don't I get to be myself?

Topper Influence

When Alex stopped manifesting to Kona, Kona filled the gap with his own imaginary friend. I think that's pretty cool, when you consider that Kona began life as an imaginary friend of Alex. So I didn't just have imaginary friends when I was a kid, my imaginary friends had imaginary friends of their own!

The imaginary friend's name was George, and he was an invisible ghost.

The idea for George was lifted whole from the TV show Topper. Topper was a half-hour comedy that ran for two years from Fall '53 to Fall '55, and was shown in repeats for ages after. It was based on movies that had been based on books. The TV set up was that a wealthy handsome and fashionable but whacky young couple George and Marion Kerby [pictured] are buried by an avalanche, along with an alcoholic St. Bernard named Neil, while skiing in the Alps. Staid down-to-earth sophisticated bank vice-president Cosmo Topper (played by Leo G Carroll) and his not-too-bright wife Henrietta buy the Kerby estate in Los Angeles. Just as they are moving in, George, Marion, and Neil, return home as ghosts to haunt their old digs. For some reason Cosmo Topper is the only one who can see or hear the ghosts, but the ghosts can manage to move furniture and appliances, which they do a lot, because they're party animals. Laughter ensues when Topper finds out that if he tells people what is causing all the activity, they think he is crazy, and the premise was you can't have a crazy man in charge of other people's money, so his job would be on the line, and he still had the mortgage to pay.

Plus, Topper was a straight up tee-totaller, while the Kerbys were cocktail lushes and smokers. So Topper had to keep after them to hide the booze and cigarettes.

The whole thing was designed to appeal to me. You had people who were drunks just like my own parents, but they were fun drunks. They didn't yell and hit. They just joked around and had a good time. They were mischievous but not mean. Just like me!

Marion Kerby was yet another hotty I had an age-inappropriate crush on. It was a little disappointing to learn that the actors, Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys, who played the Kerbys, were married in real life. As my Mother said of that, "It explains the chemistry." I wanted to be Robert Sterling and have it so good.

Then, too, there was the fact that for quite a while (close to two years) whenever anything was spilled or knocked over, George had something to do with it. "How did the lamp get broken?" "George did it, Mommy," was how it would go.

This didn't go over well with everybody. My Mother was surprisingly cool about it. She'd say, "Tell George to be more careful." My Dad would scream and sputter and fume, "I won't stand for any son of mine making up fibs!" "He's not fibbing, dear, he's using his imagination."

Charles

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around late Autumn, 1954, when I was 5. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My first best friend at Fort Devens was a kid my age named Charles. Charles lived in another of the multiplexes on Chancellorsville. His was three or four buildings east. He was so disturbed he made me look like a rock of sanity.

One of the things I'd gotten as a present for either the previous Christmas or my birthday was a set of Lincoln Logs. If you don't know what they are, don't sweat it. It's enough to know they were made of wood, they interlocked, and you built stuff out of them. Like Legos. Only the pieces were bigger and less fun. You were supposed to make log cabins. I think the idea was to teach millions of kids the skills needed to become presidents and know how to free slaves. We don't have enough people like that.

Charles had a weird need to eat wood. His parents asked my parents to have me take pencils away from him, or he would eat the wood and leave only the graphite. It was a pain watching him all the time.

One day when he was over he disappeared, and I thought he had decided to go home without telling me. After an hour playing by myself in my room I heard a sound like rats were nosing around in my closet. I opened the closet door and found Charles had been sitting on the floor in the dark chewing on Lincoln Logs, surrounded by sawdust. He'd chewed his way through a third of the set.

Later I was invited to his house. I found out Charles had a teenage big brother who treated him like dirt. I found out that Charles' parents put Charles down constantly, even in front of me, and told him he'd never be as good as his older brother.

My Mother tried to molest Charles. This is the most direct evidence I have that my Mother was an indiscriminate child molester. She announced that I needed a bath, and suggested to Charles that he might want a bath, too. When he didn't answer, she just pushed us both into the bathroom and said, "It'll be fun." She took my clothes off first to convince him it was OK. He let her take his off.

Then she fondled my genitals and let Charles see how much I enjoyed it, and said, "Don't you want me to do this for you, Charles?"

Charles was afraid, and made it very clear he didn't want that. His Mother didn't touch him that way. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I had been told all mothers did it.

She then tried to get Charles interested in anal stimulation, by showing him that doing it to me didn't kill me.

I'm always amazed when I think of the risks she seemed to take. Charles could have gone straight home and reported all of this. I would have backed him up in an investigation. But somehow my Mother was able to psyche out the kid and figure out that he wouldn't tell anyone what happened.

Tending to Mom's Honor

My parents had to throw parties for the sake of my Father's career, a couple of times a year. The parties always featured cocktails and gin.

With all the noise from these affairs, which were held in the Sun Porch just off my room, it was natural that I'd be kept awake and sooner or later think I needed something, like water, or an assurance that it would be all over soon.

So on one occasion I came out of my room, hoping to get a glass of water, and I found a roomful of adults in various degrees of nakedness. There was a man wearing boxers, a women wearing underpants and a bra. My Father still had his undershirt and shorts and shoes and socks. Had I known that they had been playing strip poker, I would have known that Dad was having a relatively lucky night, with the cards.

Then I saw my Mother. She was completely naked. She was sitting in the sofa with her legs crossed smoking a cigarette and drinking a gin and tonic. I was horrified, and told her she should put some clothes on.

Her answer was to lean forward and blow smoke in my face. One of the men told her it wasn't right, and she told him to mind his own business. I went to bed, forgetting that I was ever thirsty.

Abducted by Aliens?

I was slow making friends on base. A pattern emerged that continued throughout childhood. I'd have one or two good friends to spend one or at most two hours a day. The rest of the time I would retreat into solitude, if allowed.

A typical such retreat would be a long walk for hours around the area of the officers' quarters. I must have looked as depressed as I felt, because other children I passed would often tell me I should smile.

This is one of my huge pet peeves. Whether I smile or not is not subject to requests. Requests are not even welcome. My smile is a sign of my mood and if I'm sad so be it. Anybody that doesn't like that has my permission to make up for it by stapling the corners of their own mouths to the backs of their heads.

Another way I spent alone-time was play in a muddy area near the Officers' Club. For some reason, none of the other children wanted to join me in the mud. The mud was in a very shallow depression with poor drainage. I engaged in earthworks and pie-making. It was very soothing.

Another very soothing activity was tennis ball bouncing in the Play Porch. The wall of the porch against the rest of the building was brick. I had a tennis ball I'd found way back in Hawaii, in the clay mud near where I regularly met Lani and Lono. The tennis ball was permanently stained red from the clay, and smelled like the soil that saved my life on my 1st birthday. Kona/Wesley would bounce the ball repeatedly against the brick wall and catch it, while Alex chanted. I entered a kind of trance state doing this. An outside observer might have thought I was autistic.

Apart from those sessions, Alex and Kona/Wesley began to grow apart. A time-share style of integration began, in which Kona/Wesley would control most of the day, and Alex would control at night. I would go to sleep as Kona. I would wake up around 1 or 2 AM as Alex. Alex would wait until my parents were asleep and snoring. It was especially important that my Mother was snoring, because if she was still awake she might want to make a nocturnal visit to my room, and I had to be there, or I'd be in huge trouble.

When my parents were both asleep, Alex would get up and wander, often sneaking out of the house to explore the base until dawn.

Alex was much more the explorer, and his wanderings at night took him two or three times as far as Kona's day wanderings.

One time, as Alex, I was in some woods on a dark moonless night, unable to see my own feet. I was inching along, when for some reason I had a fainting spell. I woke up as Kona. As Kona, I didn't know what Alex was doing. I didn't know what I was doing in the middle of dark woods at night. I didn't know how to get out of there. I panicked and ran though the bushes getting scraped by branches I couldn't see. I fell down two or three times before coming out of the woods into a clearing I recognized.

As Alex wasn't speaking to Kona during this period the incident remained a mystery for more than a year. I would have suspected an alien abduction, but I hadn't yet heard of such things, so I was stuck with notions of Leprechauns or mischievous-but-not-totally-evil boogey men.

New Home

Sometime in the Fall of 1954 it was our turn to get on base housing. We were assigned a unit in a quadruplex, the fifth of five on Chancellorsville street, which faced out onto a beautiful green marching field having an area of about 8 football fields. We weren't on an overgrown abandoned farm anymore we were on a well-maintained clean military campus.

The officers' quarters and the administration and ASA training buildings were built in the same Colonial Revival style that's found on most US military bases built in the period between world wars.

Our quadruplex had two units on the first floor and two on the second floor. Our unit was the westernmost unit on the second floor. The living room and my parents bedroom looked out over the main street, Chancellorsville, and the marching field. That side was officially the front of the house. The kitchen, and the main bathroom, looked out the back at a service alley and across it, a wooded area, with mostly birch trees. My bedroom would also have looked out on the service alley, but attached to my room was an airy covered porch, screened on three sides. It became a deluxe play room, where I could be indoors but feel outdoors. My parents completely left it to me.

They had their own play room: another covered porch had been attached to the far end of the house with three entrances. You could get there from my room, from the main hall down the middle of the unit, or from a small bathroom that was connected to my parents' bedroom. This porch may have originally been open on three sides like my play area, but someone had decided to build windows, so it became a sunny second living room. My parents treated it as a party room and family retreat. It was the place they invited their best friends, keeping the mere acquaintances to the formal living room.

The Sun Porch, as we called it (as opposed to the Play Porch) got all the Hawaiian furniture which now came out of storage, so it took on a tropical look.

Fort Devens covered more than two square miles. It was decommissioned in the 90s. The old wooden structures like the Kindergarten building were all torn down, but most of the brick buildings were kept to form the Devens Community Center. The map below is based on a current satellite image, and only shows about a third of the total area of the base.


Some of the street names have changed. Chancellorsville became Elm. What is called Walnut Street on the map was called Detrobian Street in 1954. On the other hand Sherman and MacArthur Avenues were called the same back then, so not all the names have changed, maybe not the majority of them. Between MacArthur and El Caney, almost none of the structures were wooden, so nearly all the buildings in that part of the map are as they were then. One notable exception is the nursery which was a wooden structure on the west side of Sherman Avenue.

Another change, not having to do with the structures, is that the golf course appears to have shrunk. Formerly the golf course had fairways on either side of the marching field. Once I caddied for my Father and a golfing partner, and remember how, as we finished the holes to the west of Sherman Avenue, we had to walk across the marching field with the clubs to get to the final holes.

I've marked a building at the top as "Devens grade school." It actually only had first and second grades. I believe it had a total of 160 to 170 children in four classrooms, two to a grade. South and a little west of that, and up a slight hill you can't see in this view, I've marked a complex as the ASA School where my Father taught. I'm guessing slightly. It may have had other functions. Somewhere on the end of the base was the enlisted men's barracks, either in that complex or further east. Or the school may have been further east. I'm more sure about base headquarters which was a much smaller building on the other side of Sherman Ave.

Next door to the alleged ASA School, across a parking lot, was the main Fort Devens theater. It was one of the first new places I visited on base once we settled in, as my parents dumped me off for an all-day cartoon marathon. I got to know it very well, and would never confuse it with a school or barracks. Saturday matinee double features for kids were a dime!

Good Deals and Rip-Offs

Soon after Hurricane Carol I got to go to Kindergarten. Kindergarten was a treat in three ways. 1) I got away from my parents for several hours a day. 2) My 5 year-old fiancée, Kathy, was there. We took advantage and smooched behind the teacher's back frequently. 3) It was almost endless playtime. Even when they tried to teach us crap, they felt compelled to turn it into a game.

I almost felt guilty about it. When my parents wanted me to learn something they usually screamed at me until it sank in or they gave up and called me an unteachable idiot. These Kindergarten softies made games of everything.

Smooching sometimes found its way into the games. One of the games was "storekeeper". We set up a cardboard pretend-store. We had fake money and kids would buy fake groceries using the fake money. The kid playing storekeeper was supposed to count out the customer's change the old-fashioned way, from the price to the amount proffered. Somehow when Kathy was storekeeper, customer Wesley spent far too long haggling with her. "Instead of 50 cents for that, how about 30 cents and a big wet kiss?" "No." "OK, say I give you 70 cents, now how about that kiss?" "OK." Kathy was always very rational.

The Kindergarten was on base in one of the many 2 story wooden structures there [similar to the one pictured] that usually held company offices and enlisted men's barracks. In fact the partitioning of the rooms was clearly intended to serve administrative work rather than a kindergarten. There was almost no useful outdoor space. Like many of the wooden buildings of that type on base the 2nd floor could be accessed directly from outside by means of stairs up the side of the building. We had snacks on the stairs when the weather allowed it.

There were field trips. One I remember bitterly was a field trip to see Peter Pan. Peter Pan, the Disney movie, had been advertised heavily on television, and all of us kids thought that when the teacher said we were all going to a theater to see Peter Pan that meant we were going to see the Disney feature cartoon. Imagine our horror when it turned out to be a live theater stage performance in a small repertory theater. Tinkerbell was a flashlight beam! What a rip-off!

[Below: Disney's Peter would have fit right in on an army base.]

Home Alone

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around and after my 5th birthday, in July and August 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I was so entranced by the TV my parents figured they didn't need to waste so much money on babysitters. On days when my Father was off work they would just help me out of my pants and turn the TV on with instructions to watch it while they were gone until they got back, often as much as five hours later.

One of my favorite shows was a Boston area kids show hosted by a guy called Big Brother Bob Emery. There's a long article about him here, which talks about his whole career -- it turns out he created the Big Brother character for radio all the way back in the 20s.

Between Dave Garroway's "Peace" and Bob Emery's "The Grass Is Always Greener On the Other Side" and toasts of glasses of milk to a picture of Eisenhower with Hail to the Chief playing, there were soaps that made no sense but intrigued me (I was already a xenomaniac) as well as Queen For A Day and numerous shows featuring travel in foreign lands and other exotica. You Asked For It was another favorite along those lines. It was a human interest magazine that did stories that viewers requested by postcard.

It all kept me glued to the set, so maybe it made sense to leave me alone like that, most of the time. But one time my parents definitely crossed a line.

On the 31st of August 1954 Hurricane Carol was approaching Massachusetts. There were already reports of it doing damage when my parents decided they wanted to ride out the hurricane at a nearby bar, and I couldn't go with them. So they left me in the house with instructions not to go outside. The instructions were quite detailed: They told me that after a while the storm that came might stop, but that wouldn't mean it was over, that was just the eye of the storm. "Don't go out in the eye of the storm; it could start up again faster than you could get back in."


[Above: Carol's storm surge on the Connecticut coast.]

Meanwhile, I was in a house with a flat tar-papered roof that leaked throughout, with trees within ten feet of two sides of it, in a storm that, while it was no Katrina, was capable of snapping thick branches and downing old trees.

The eye did appear. I could gaze out the living room window and see the sun shining through the column of clouds all around the house for maybe five minutes, and then the storm resumed. When the storm was at full strength you could see almost nothing out the window, it was like looking out your car windows in a car wash during the rinse.

Then the hurricane ended and half an hour later my parents drove up. Everything was fine. They were happy. I was happy. Why do I complain?

Manly Cap Pistols

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around my 5th birthday, in July 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Of course, all silver linings line something non-silvery. In the case of television there was the mass marketing and associated mass influence. For my 5th birthday, just two months after we got a television, I had to have a cap pistol with holster and chaps, and a cowboy hat. Any parent who did not comply with those sorts of demands was to be subjected to verbal torture for 16 hours a day, said the TV.

"Every one else has one!" "How do you know? You live on a farm." "I know! I saw it on TV!"

It worked. I got the chaps, the cap pistol, and the cowboy hat. My parents soon discovered that it really was a scam to get them to buy caps for the rest of their lives. A roll would only last 30 minutes. Pretty soon they were buying them by the crate.

My Father encouraged it all because it was the only evidence he had seen that I was growing up heterosexual. This was decades before it became common knowledge that the Marlboro Man was gay, and long before Brokeback Mountain. In those days "everyone knew" that cowboys were real men.

If he had bothered to ask my Mother what else I watched during the day, he might not have been so worried. In addition to Gene Autry films, I also had to see Big Picture every week. Big Picture was a weekly show created by the US Army. It ran from 1953 to 1959. It showed film footage of US military battles from WWI onward. In one incredible episode they showed a captured film the Chinese made of themselves attacking South Koreans and Americans. It showed darkness at first, then dawn on a hill covered in brush. After a minute, suddenly, all the bushes stood up. Every bush was really a Chinese soldier carrying a rifle, and they advanced firing. It was probably the assault along Chongchon River, in November 1950. Anyway, if my Father had seen me watching all that raptly he would have been assured that I was male, because I was sucked in by guns, and would never have noticed that I was rooting for the Chinese.

He couldn't see anything that far from his expectations.

Words Have Power

I can't over-emphasize the huge change television made in my life. I've already talked about it a little in earlier posts, My Early Humor(s) and Have You No Sense Of Decency, Sir? I'll talk about it now, and I'll talk about it more later.

My Father wasn't going to get a TV, ever. He grew up on radio and radio adventure shows, and loved them and talked about them all the time, but he considered TV to be entertainment for the mindless. It took time away from reading. Besides, by showing everything, "it doesn't exercise the imagination."

Then the Army-McCarthy Hearings started. The Army accused Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn of inappropriate pressures to give preferential treatment to a friend of Cohn. McCarthy in his turn said that the Army's charges were a retaliation for his investigations of suspected Communists in the Army and the security risks they presented. A special Senate committee began meeting April 22, 1954, to sort the matter out, and the meetings were nationally broadcast live on ABC.

My Father, the Army Captain, was decidedly on the Army's side. My Father always needed to belong to something. Loyalty was the highest value. The Army was what he belonged to then.

It took a few weeks. My Father's buddies wore him down by telling him every day about seeing the hearings on their TVs. Finally he gave in.

Once he decided we had to have a TV to watch the hearings with, my Father became a member of a new class, the class of TV owners. It sparked a new loyalty: now, the television was one of the greatest inventions ever. He got us a 13-inch black and white Zenith with an iron stand. He became a loyal Zenith owner. "Zeniths are the best."

There was a struggle getting the antenna up. This involved many uses of words I wasn't allowed to say. An Army friend of my Father had to come and help. The two of them finally got the TV working and able to bring in the Boston channels on a weekend in late May or early June. My first memory of watching TV was witnessing a routine Sunday morning live televised mass from a Boston cathedral. I amused my Father by insisting that even though the picture was black and white, I could see the colors of the stained-glass windows.

There followed at least a week of watching the Senate hearings. I barely understood what was going on. In fact I could barely hear it half the time, because whenever McCarthy or anyone on his side was heard to say anything my Father loudly derided him. Of course, when the Army side was speaking we had to all be very quiet.

The hearings came to a head on Wednesday, June 9. I have heard that Joseph Welch, the counsel for the Army had rehearsed the line "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" already and was just looking for a good time to spring it. The time came when a possibly drunk McCarthy randomly attacked, by name, a member of Welch's law office. The full line was "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

It was an Army lawyer speaking, so we had been quiet. I heard the line, the applause, and saw the look on McCarthy's face. I was thrilled. It sent a chill up my spine, as I realized even amid my Father's cheers that the incident had implications for my own life.

Words have power.

Opportunity and Temptation

One of the problems I've always had is a slow learning curve when it comes to complex motor skills. An example is riding a bicycle. I don't believe most people take two months learning that. Another is dancing set moves. I enjoy dancing, but when I say "dancing" I don't mean "choreographed." I have to be dancing by myself moving to the music. I can't dance a routine or match a partner.

I have tried to learn to type with all my fingers several times. I have never been able to type faster than 11 words per minute using ten fingers. That's exactly how fast I type with 2 fingers. So why use ten? Anyway, I don't care, because I also think at 11 words per minute. So it suits my needs. I'm not a scribe copying other people's writings, I'm composing this stuff as I go along.

[Right: Even in my dreams I don't do the kind of dancing that guy's doing.]

I have long suspected that my difficulty learning motor skills is a leftover symptom of brain damage, from one of the 1950 or the 1953 head injuries. There were later head injuries I'll be getting to, but I'm sure they aren't responsible for the learning disability, because the disability preceded them.

The first sign I had of it was in 1953-54 when my Mother was trying to teach me to dress myself and tie my own shoes. She got nowhere. My Father blamed her genes.

As I came to have more contact with other children my slowness became a social challenge. The first inkling I had that I was comparatively slow this way was when another couple visited with a girl my age in tow. The girl was astonished that I needed help tying my shoes still.

Fortunately, this girl, whose name was Kathy, decided that not being able to tie shoes didn't make me a pathetic wretch, and I fell in love with her, and she agreed to marry me. So I was engaged to be married before the age of 5 to a beautiful curly haired freckle factory. It wasn't just a one day affair, either. We got together a great deal in the next few years. Whenever we did there was mass kissing. We never had sex, because she wanted to save herself for marriage.

Anyway, back to the House in Shirley and 1954. My Mother, therefore, had to dress me and tie my shoes, all the time.

She made matters worse than they had to be by insisting that I sit down to pee. Her feeling was that doing it standing up was "nasty" and spread germs (because of stray drops.) Great, but that meant my pants had to come down, and back up, each time, and that put Mom in the driver's seat. So to speak.

All of this had an impact on her sexual abuse of me. The more physical involvement she had to have with me during the day, the more opportunities and temptations there were for molestation.

Sometime in February or early March, 1954, my Father had to engage in a couple of weeks of war games. So he didn't come home for two weeks. His absence also added to the opportunity and temptation to molest. The abuse increased during that period. It was a pattern that repeated many times in years to come.

One vivid memory from this time is hearing the phrase, "I'll make you black and blue where it won't show" in connection with rape. It didn't refer to beating me where my pants would cover the signs. It referred to the intention to cause internal bruising of the rectum. It was a form of punishment she came up with that was sure to never be caught, because I would always be too shy to tell people where it hurt.

Punctuated Routines

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened from September, 1953, to March, 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The next six months at the House in Shirley, through Fall and most of Winter, were mostly uneventful. Or the events of one day were like the events of every other day with only a few exceptions.

I spent much of the time in a dream-like state, similar to the dream-state I experienced walking around Schofield Barracks when I was two and a half. Alex sang chants while Kona played, for hours each day. Indoors, because the weather turned cold.

The play was mainly ritual enactment, over and over again, of the Primary Rotating Dramatic Triangle. I'd have three stuffed toys. One would be the Villain. One would be the Victim. The Villain would attack the Victim. The third would be the Rescuer and saved the Victim. But in saving the Victim, the Rescuer would get carried away, and overdo it. So the old Rescuer would be the new Villain. The old Villain would be the new Victim. The old Victim would then become angry, and assume the role of Rescuer, and save the new Victim that had just before been his/her attacker. The triangle would have rotated 120 degrees. Then, the new Rescuer would overdo it, and the roles would rotate another 120 degrees. And then another.


Each rotation would take about ten minutes. All would go on mechanically, without comments, accompanied by Hawaiian chants. If a psychologist had got a chance to watch it I bet I would have been a famous case study. If I'd been filmed, I could have seen myself in Psych 101 doing that, with a voiceover telling me what a clear case of whatever it was my problem would be called. Maybe they'd have made up a special name for it. If the psychologist's name was Robert G Bozo, my behavior would have been called Bozo Disorder, or Bozo Syndrome.

That accounted for about 8 hours a day. There were a few other routines. My Mother taught me new words every day for a while. Then, out of the blue, I told her I wanted to learn numbers, too. She liked that. It made a lot of points with her. So she started me on counting, then adding, then subtracting.

One of the ways I practiced my counting was to count up the number of Hawaiian chants Alex could still remember at that time. Of the songs remembered in their entirety, the count was 12. One dozen exactly. I also remembered enough fragments of songs that I could guess that I had forgotten about an equal number. That inventory is what I'm drawing on when I say that I probably knew two dozen songs at one time.

My Mother let up on the rapes during this period. She made it a daily practice to fondle me to keep me from fondling myself. That was statutory rape, but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even interpret the genital fondling as sexual. I regarded it as physical maintenance, just like what she said it was. I hope people don't misunderstand that as an endorsement of her behavior. Just because it didn't bother me at the time doesn't mean it was justifiable. Later on, as I learned more about sex, I understood how I had been exploited by her, and the subsequent pain of betrayal has been very severe. I've been in therapy for over 20 years, and the hardest parts of my Mother's treatment of me to deal with has been the parts that caused the least distress at the time.

She still raped me anally, but it happened less often. I could avoid much of it by avoiding her. She would be set off by irritation and stress. My presence could add to that. I could prevent an incident by not adding to her irritation.

One day she broke from routine by dragging me around the house and raping me in every room. She was mildly angry, and mildly drunk. She told me the purpose of it was to show me that she was the boss of me everywhere in the house. It was her way of telling me that there were no safe places.

Another break in the routine: My, and Koko's, first big snow. We had a Massachusetts blizzard around the end of November. It was a lot of fun for both of us. Dad swore a lot, having to dig the car out of a foot and a half of snow, chain it, drive it the 800 feet to the highway, only to find that the plows had left an 8 foot wall of snow at the entrance of our driveway when they cleared the highway. He came up with some sort of theory to the effect that the transportation department had no right to do that, and screamed it at my Mother and me for hours.

Then there was an odd excursion to Fort Devens. My parents went to an officer's Christmas party, and left me with a simultaneous children's party that was held at the enlisted men's gym. There were a hundred or more children there, all left there by their parents for the same reason as me, so their parents could go to the same officer's party.

They started with a Punch and Judy puppet show, something like this video. I thought the violence was sickening. Too close to home?



Then there was a magic show, in which a women volunteered to have her head put in a box so that the magician could pretend to make her head vanish. It was obviously a trick of mirrors, but to me it was sick anyway to think that making someone's head disappear was a worthy activity.

Then there was a couple of hours of cartoons. I had never seen cartoons before and, again, I was grossed out by the violence. I was amazed that the other kids laughed and enjoyed it.

Have You No Sense Of Decency, Sir?

Video Find of the Day

It was one month before my 5th birthday that I saw Joseph Welch making that statement on live television. My Father had bought the Zenith just because of the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Until the hearings were broadcast he said we would never get a TV. I was going to wait until I got to that point in my memoirs to post this documentary, but I'm afraid that, by the time I get to age 5, YouTube will itself be the subject of a historical documentary.