The USO Show, Part IV

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in January 1958, in Taiwan, when I was 8 and a half. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

So. I was seated at the post-show banquet with headliner Ms. Whiting (or whoever she was) and my parents. I followed prior instructions and kept quiet as much as possible, and just tried to enjoy the adults' banter. That ended when my Mother told me to eat my potato salad.

I didn't want any potato salad. I don't remember why. Maybe I didn't like the way it looked. Maybe I didn't like the way it smelled. Maybe I was trying to save room for dessert. Anyway, I balked. "Do I HAVE to?" My Mother's knee-jerk reaction was the, "Do what I say, we're in public," reaction.

Margaret Whiting defended me by making fun of the situation. She basically asked the question, when would there ever be a dinner special enough that I could eat what I want? The show and banquet were supposed to be fun. The message was essentially, "Lighten up, Mrs. Major Browning." (I remember her calling my Mother that.) My Mother backed down.

After that I wanted Ms. Whiting to be my new Mother. So when dinner was over and all were standing around smoozing over drinks, I hung around her. As soon as she had a moment's break I asked her if I could talk to her in private. She asked what it was about, and I whispered to her that it was about my parents.

She gave me a knowing look, and then she announced to the others that she would be right back and she led me outside the tent.

We couldn't have been out there for more than ten minutes but we covered a lot of ground. I told her my parents abused me and she said, "Your Father? He doesn't seem the type." I told her he used to beat me but now just yells and that the worst was from my Mother. I told her about the rapes. She said, "Oh, yes, I noticed something bad in her eyes."

She told me she had been abused too. She said she couldn't take me away from my parents because it wouldn't work. She would just land in prison. She said if she reported it, my parents would probably retaliate against me before the authorities would act.

I was in tears after hearing all this. No one had ever laid out the barriers to getting help so clearly before.

But she said she might be able to help with advice. She questioned me about how my parents talked about me. I told her they called me idiot and basket-case and freak all the time. She asked me what I liked doing. I told her I liked music and math, but since surgery I wasn't able to do music anymore. She said, probably the music won't work, but I'm sure that if you worked hard on the math they'd eventually be amazed and they would back off some.

She came up with a trick to play on my parents to get me started off as a math genius in their eyes, and quickly rehearsed it with me. My line was simple. I just had to say "39" at the proper moment.

Before we rejoined the party, she offered special advice on dealing with my Mother. She said that she looked like people she had known before that had "an evil eye.'" Her face changed from right to left as she went from kind to mean. Ms. Whiting told me that I should try whistling or humming a tune my Mother wouldn't know and move from her right side to her left and back again, and one side should elicit the kind face, the other should elicit the mean face.

Then we returned to the party and she brought me by the hand to where my parents were standing and announced, "Hey, everyone, I've just been talking to this kid outside and he's is a mathematical genius!"

My parents laughed. My Father said, "That's no genius, that's my son."

Whiting said, "Well, he may be your son, but he's a whiz. I'll prove it to you.I'll give him a puzzle, and I'll bet while all of you are scratching your heads over it, he can solve it in a blink of the eye!"

[Above: Numb3rs establishes the genius of Charlie Eppes simply by briefly showing this formula that you don't understand in the opening credits of every show.]

The puzzle was a word puzzle having to do with ages. I don't recall the exact puzzle but it could have gone like this: "I'm twelve years older than my brother. In 15 years I'll be twice as old as my brother was 15 years ago. Think hard. How old am I?"

"Think hard" was my cue. The idea was to blurt out "39" even while she was asking the question, so no one would get it before I did.

Needless to say, part of the fun was that she was older than 39. But no one thought that I would have come up with the joke. They assumed she did.

My parents were suspicious, but Ms. Whiting did a great job of acting, denying any coaching.

By the time my parents got around to asking me if I was coached, during the drive back to Taipei, I was able to present an elaborate explanation of how I had solved the puzzle, because i'd had enough time to work it out on my own by then. I just let them think I had done the reasoning on the fly.

They were floored by it.

After we got back to Taipei, my Father spent a couple of days and nights with my Mother and I, and then returned to the Mountain. The next 5 or 6 weeks I was alone with my Mother in the Chinese house.

Oh, by the way, my parents and everyone else who was at the banquet who ate the potato salad fell violently sick in the evening after. It was tainted.

The USO Show, Part III

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in January 1958, in Taiwan, when I was 8 and a half. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

And, Video Find of the Day

First, I have to address my own confusion about this part of the story. When I first talked about it for the Art in Balance article for Real Change way back in 1995, I remembered the headline act of the the USO show was Betty White. Then, as I back posted that about a year ago to this blog I convinced myself that the last name was Whiting, not White. So I fessed up to the confusion and noted the changes called for.

Well, now I think we're not talking about a Betty Whiting, but one of the Margaret Whitings. There are two listed on IMDB. I've gone back to the Art and Balance post and made those adjustments.

The confusion continues. I think the Margaret Whiting who headlined was the one IMDB calls Margaret Whiting (I). I think so because of the list of songs she's noted for. She sang at the show, and I recognize some of the titles.

I'm not the only one who has confused Margaret Whiting with someone else. I confused her with Betty White not only because of the name, but because she did some stand-up that had a kind of humor I associate with Betty White, and because of the physical similarities, as shown by these two photos that show them as they appeared in the 50s.

Others have confused Margaret Whiting with Doris Day because of her voice and singing style.

Baby Its Cold Outside - Margaret Whiting & Johnny Mercer



So, OK, this decade I think it was Margaret Whiting.

The show was held in a giant tent. It was a rectangular tent, but bigger than a three-ring circus tent. There was a raised stage at one end and in front of it were long files of rectangular banquet tables stretching back to the other end with a few breaks for waiters to pass between. Dinner wasn't served until after the show, though.

I can't remember any of the other performers. Whoever she was, Margaret Whiting, Betty White, Betty Whiting, or Margaret White, she gathered up all my attention. Her voice told me I could trust her.

A perk of being the boss' son: my Dad was running the base, so the headliner, let's call her Margaret Whiting, was seated at his table. Of course, so were my Mother and I.

Art in Balance

[This is one of several Real Change articles I'm back-posting in addition to columns. A correction has been made to the original article. I realized sometime after this appeared that I had confused Betty White with [Margaret!] Whiting for obvious reasons. I've made the correction to the text set off in brackets. I'm not sure about the date of publication. It was around 9/95 anyway. Remember that back in the future StreetLife Gallery is gone so don't go there expecting to find it.]

Art in Balance

Wes Browning's Images for the God

Introduction

Wes Browning came to Street Life Gallery several years ago during a period when mental illness had forced him from a job as a university professor to sleeping in cars and on public couches.

The 46-year-old artist is now a valued member of both the Street Life Gallery and our own Editorial Committee. He is the featured artist at the Street Life this month, and his colorful acrylic wonders may be viewed at 2301 2nd Ave. Call the Gallery at (206) XXX-XXXX for hours or information on how to donate supplies or volunteer.

I'd intended to write a story on Wes for this issue, but as he shared his history with me over lunch last month, it became clear that all I really needed to do was run the tape and get out of the way. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the story he told. -Timothy Harris



It's hard to believe now that it happened. I was only two years old. I remember it so well now. The memory hasn't changed much in my head. It's very stable.

I remember the guy sitting there, while his brother beat on sticks and chanted. Well, they both chanted. But his brother was doing the drumming. And he would literally go into a trance while he carved his little wooden figures. And they were sort of like what I do now.

The basic shape is that of an animal, but there would be all of this geometric ornamentation around the outside. Once he'd get the basic shape, he'd add all this ornamentation, and that's when he'd start getting into this trance.

Sometimes he'd talk about what he was doing and how it was important to let the god take over, because the art's not really for you. It's for the god. The idea is to transcend yourself and create something that's not really a human vision at all. It's another way of seeing what you're seeing that sets up communication between you and the spirit world, or the god.

As I come to remember that whole way of looking at art, it's as if I remember, "Oh, yeah, that's what I've been trying to do.' It sank in at some level, but I didn't remember where I got the idea.

Sometimes when I'm working, I don't have any idea of what I'm doing. I know how to work the brush, but the actual lines that come up I hardly think about. They just happen. It's sort of like the vision is coming from another channel. That's the way like it. That's why I gravitate to that style.

It goes back to the Hawaiian experience, which becomes more and more the motivation. I didn't remember that experience very well until recently, in 1991, when I broke through in my therapy remembering all the things that happened to me.

Lani and Lono

The brothers were Lani and Lono, which were the names of the sky god and the harvest god. I can remember them explaining what their names meant.

They were non-identical twins, and were from Ni`ihau, which was like a private reservation to preserve native culture. It's the westernmost inhabited island of Hawaii. People could only live there by invitation of the natives already there, and it was called the Forbidden Island. You couldn't go there.

They had jobs as civilian maintenance workers at Schoffield Barracks. It's a normal arrangement at army bases outside of the U.S. to have civilian workers trimming the hedges and doing the lawns and stuff. These guys had a route they would work that included a recreation center about five blocks from where I lived.

Meanwhile, whenever my father was away, my mother would neglect me and was a real pain to be around. She wouldn't feed me and would get mad about anything and start hitting on me, so I left.

I'd wander off, beginning the year I turned two. Some older friends I'd played with started going to school, so I went looking for the school. I didn't know what a school was, but I knew they were there. Then I found out that I could beg for food off the neighborhood housewives. So that reinforced the practice and I started doing it everyday.

I had a little route I worked out, and it got wider and wider. I kept branching out, and finally, at two years and two months, I was doing about twenty blocks a day on this route. And everybody thought my mother was the most horrible person on the planet for letting me do it. But army bases being what they are, everybody kept their mouth shut.

One day, I came across these guys. The first thing he said to me was in Hawaiian, and then he translated right away. "Who's little offspring are you?" I didn't understand. I had trouble with English from a head injury from when my parents ran over me. But it sounded really good, and he had a neat smile on his face, so I followed them around.

I heard them talking among themselves and it was really pretty, and so I first got hooked up with them by following them around just to listen to that. And then after about a month I started talking to them in Hawaiian, and they were naturally very surprised.

I didn't speak English until about six months after that. I had trouble with consonants, and they were easier in Hawaiian. I got Hawaiian first, and then English as a second language.

At first I followed them around at work, until they put stop to that because I was getting in their way too much. So I started seeing them every time they had their lunch break, a nice, long, hour one.

I learned to tell time well enough to get there when their hour started. And after that I'd go away and watch them from a distance. They used to sing while they worked and that was pretty cool. I'd watch them sing and learn the songs.

Just before my third birthday I started to speak English. I'd learned to translate back and forth and that was my big breakthrough. I would talk to them in Hawaiian, but after a while they made me speak to them in English, because they were afraid that I was neglecting the English.

They thought they would get in trouble too, for letting me learn Hawaiian from them. The situation in those days was that there was a lot of bigotry; more so than there is now. Native Hawaiians were really distrusted. If anything had gone wrong, their explanation of what happened would of not been believed. They would have been in serious trouble and lost their jobs, at least. Maybe ended up in jail or something. So I'm sure they were really concerned to not do anything to get in trouble.

They were also afraid of teaching me too much about their beliefs. One of them was a non-christian, a traditional Hawaiian, and was really afraid of telling me anything about it because if it got to my parents there'd be an investigation and the military police would come down on them. Eventually, Lani did it anyway, but without letting his brother know.

They carved at work on their lunch break. Since I only saw them there it was isolated from everything else. They were 18 when I discovered them, and 19 when I left Schoffield. My mother actually met Lani the day we left. He didn't speak English, though Lono did. So I translated back and forth. It was a fairly long exchange. I can still remember the content of that conversation.

Lani told my mother that at 3 1/2 I was speaking Hawaiian very well, and was ready for school, except for one thing: I wasn't very good with numbers. I didn't know at the time that he was talking about grammatical numbers. Hawaiian, for example, has a lot of different ways to say `they,' and I wasn't getting it. So I thought I had to learn numbers in order to make them proud if I should ever come back and see them again.

[Margaret] [Whiting] to the Rescue

Back in the states I lived most of the time in Massachusetts at Fort Devens, though there was a little time as well in Taiwan and in Seattle. I really got into math, but still was doing art, though my mother tried to beat that out of me. She'd say she "wasn't going to have a basket weaver" and have me doing something where I couldn't support her in her old age.

When I was seven years old she caught me drawing some Hawaiian designs and chanting. I still remembered the chants then. I would never speak Hawaiian around her because we had this rule that I wasn't supposed to speak Hawaiian at home. I didn't want to get beat up.

She made me draw while she burned the back of my hand with a cigarette. Until then I was ambidextrous, but after that I couldn't draw or write with my left hand. Then my penmanship got really bad. Until then It was great, and she asked why, and I said, `Well, you fixed it so I can't write with my left hand anymore,' and she said. "You were left handed?!" She was left handed, and my father was left handed, so you would have thought she would have figured that out.

Soon after that, the [[Margaret] Whiting] incident happened. We went to Taiwan right after the chanting incident. They had a USO show around Christmas time, and the place was this mountain-top U.S. Chinese electronic surveillance installation, to spy on the `Reds.'. So my mother and I were blindfolded as we were driven up there in a staff car.

[Margaret] [Whiting] was the main act. She was an actor and stand-up comedienne at the time. Because my father was in charge of the base, she sat next to him, and I sat across from her at the banquet table and got to make friends during the dinner.

After the dinner I yanked on her dress and asked to talk to her in private. We went outside of the tent and I begged her to kidnap me, and she said, `No, that wouldn't be good.' She said they'd just come and take me away from her and have her arrested.

I hadn't thought of that before, and could see the point, so I started crying. I felt like this was my last hope. I'd already tried to get a whole bunch of my relatives to kidnap me, and gas station attendants and things like that. And finally I met somebody who was really nice, and really pretty, whose heart was in the right place, and she wouldn't do it, and even had a good reason not to that I could generalize to other people, so I started crying.

She asked me why I wanted to do this, and I told her some of the stories, and she started giving me advice. She asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I said I hadn't decided, but either wanted to be an artist or do something with numbers. She said, `Stick with the numbers. They'll probably like that better and they'll leave you alone. And when you grow up, you can do whatever you want.'

Then she taught me this joke. One of those things where you ask a question, like `I'm twice as old as my brother, and my brother is seven,' and so on. And she said, `Just remember the answer is 39.' We went back out there and she got a crowd together with my parents among them and said `This kid's really bright. Listen to this.' and she does the riddle, all about what's her age, and I say '39,' and it's a joke since she's not really that old, and my parents are impressed.

We snowed them. And all the way home they're, `Wow, we didn't know you were so good at math. You're like a genius.' It worked. The verbal abuse kept up, and my mother still beat me up once in a while, but this thing she had about hitting me in the head a lot stopped. She didn't want to damage the goods. It was her meal ticket for her old age.

Mental Illness

I decided to become a mathematician when I was 14. I'd spend three or four hours a day studying my own stuff after my other homework. I was kind of obsessed with it. It has that trance thing going for it. You can lose yourself in that too. In a bad family it was kind of like a drug for me.

I got a doctorate at Cornell, and taught evening classes at the U here while I was on leave writing my thesis. I was invited to Swiss Polytechnic for a year. I came back and was supposed to do two years at Rutgers, but the mental illness was starting by then.

I started having problems with post traumatic stress. My father died just before the thesis was approved and that triggered massive panic attacks. I started having anxiety attacks every time I tried to do math, so I wasn't really good for research anymore.

After one year I quit Rutgers. I came back to Seattle and taught at community colleges, and did some more evening division. I liked the older people, but not the regular college-aged students. The anxiety got worse and worse. I taught at St. Martins a year, and during that year started having visions. Those were the worst one. Apocalyptic visions, like from Revelations.

I was getting sick from the stress of teaching. They weren't very happy with my performance because I wasn't really into it, and when they told me I wasn't going to be coming back the next year. I immediately began to look for something else.

A cab driver had been shot and killed at Seward Park, so there was an opening, and I figured no one else would probably want that job and went and applied. There were about 10 others, but they hired us all. I lost money driving cab, but had money and could afford it. The marriage fell apart soon after that, and I became homeless. It was a very cold winter.

Just before that, I went to a career councilor who was from the Caribbean, and she kept saying, you know, there's something strange about the way you express yourself and I'd like to hypnotize you, and she did and she got this Hawaiian character out of me. So she found out about all this stuff before I did.

It happens it situations like that pretty regularly. I had a split personality. And the Hawaiian speaking and English personality weren't really the same. It was the Hawaiian personality that mostly took the beatings. The Hawaiian personality was dominant at that point. So there was some work to be done.

She sent me to a therapist, who I've been seeing since then, November of '83. In '87 after a scary accident, I quit driving, and went on mental disability, which is something she'd been trying to get me to do. So I could afford therapy, and that led to the breakthrough I '91, where I remembered everything.

After that the two personalities started to join. So far as I can tell, they're integrated now. But there were three days when the other personality took over.

I went to the half-price bookstore in the U-District, and was looking through the foreign books, and there was this pocket traveler Hawaiian dictionary. And there was this word, `hele,' which is to go. I used to use it all the time. I saw that and remembered saying it to my mother.

And I found more words, and remembered. That's when memories started breaking through and within three or four days this personality switch happened.

This other personality took over, and for three days ran around and fixed me up with things. Like a phone; I hadn't been able to get a phone up until then, but this other guy could get a phone. This other guy hooked me up with a psychiatrist to discuss the new developments. It was a scary time.

There was this fear of being overwhelmed by the unknown. I was working late at night as a janitor and was terrified. After that I started seeing the therapist again pretty frequently and worked a plan out. Doing art has really helped.

Art and Integration

I started doing art in about '84, or thinking seriously about it. I was having what I now know were flashback related visions and had a lot of visual imagery impinging on me and I wanted to express some of that to the world. This was the main motivation, relating what I was going through.

I'd been doing drawing and things all the time since I was a kid, but that's when I got serious with it. Just before I ended up being homeless and the marriage broke up.

After doing abstract art all those years and feeling like a talentless fool I deliberately taught myself to draw from life. Since I was living in a cab, and my own car which wasn't working, the '69 Rambler, I'd draw windshield wipers, and microphones and cords and clipboards for practice.

I went through this period where I was doing pen and ink drawings all the time in black and white. It was all consciously with the idea of getting out of it eventually. I just wanted to convince myself I could do it. I tried watercolors and didn't really like it, and started with acrylics in '89 and I liked them a lot.

I did a series of realistic paintings with the idea I'd move into more abstract work. The style I have now is what I've really always wanted to do. It balances realism and abstract to the point where I want it to be. For me it's just right.

I had this weird thing about the U-district and Bellevue then, not being able to stand being away from them, and after the breakthrough that subsided. There are places there that resembled the neighborhood in Schoffield barracks, and were reverberating. That area of the base looked like a suburban village.

As I began to realize that it lost its hold on me and I could begin to leave it. Michael Howell offered to ride the bus to the Gallery with me, and talked me through a trip downtown. I started coming to the homeless art gallery on a regular basis.

It gave me a place where, first of all, that merging of the personalities could happen. You can't just do that without interacting with people. You have to let them come out and express themselves.

Also, the art does that too. The struggle to get the realism and abstract balance is also a struggle between my two personalities' way of expressing themselves together. The Gallery is a sort of a practice area, more than anything else.

It's also a sort of a place where I can do for other people what those Hawaiian guys did for me. They gave me a place to retire everyday where I could be a human being and not be afraid. I can see how important that is to somebody. So it gives me a good feeling about my life now and what I'm doing.