[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring and early summer of 1956, when I became 7. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
I only spent a few boring days at Mina's house. Mina lived in a row house in Maryland, near Rock Creek. I was actually glad to see my parents, when they finally came to get me, just to be going some place that had books.
By the time I was back in Fort Devens, there was only a week left of 1st grade. It ended without further incident. I still have my report card. It shows the number of days I was absent each quintile of the school year except the last. For the last quintile that space is left blank. I believe I missed more than a month.
With the end of school I was still recovering from my injuries. The bandages came off my head first. My wrist continued to have to be in a sling for at least two more weeks.
One day, after some sexual abuse by my Mother, Alex told Kona how he could be summoned in an emergency. He said to just think of a certain line from an old Hawaiian song. It was one of the few lines that I could still remember after the surgery. It was a line which loosely translated meant, "please transport me to heaven."
A day or two later, as Kona, I sat down at the coffee table in the Sun Porch with paper and pencils and called Alex and asked him to sing for me, and help me draw. I needed help because he had to enable me to use the left hand. Ordinarily Kona drew with my right and Alex wrote with my left. Basically Kona needed Alex to allow Kona to guide his "writing" of pictures, and wanted Alex to sing along.
It was a meditative session, following the instructions in meditation that I remembered Lani and Lono giving me. I started with a seed drawing of a symbol representing a target state. My target was integration. The seed was two vertical lines joined by three parallel horizontal syzygies. I drew around it while chanting. I knew the chant was all wrong, but I hoped the magic would work anyway.
My Mother crept up on me, catching me in the act of chanting. She screamed at me. "How many times have we had to tell you not to use Hawaiian in the house!"
She demanded to know what I was drawing. I told her they were sleeping mat designs. She said she wasn't going to allow me to waste my life making sleeping mats or basket weaving "like useless ignorant natives." I had to get an education and a career, so she wouldn't have to support me forever.
Then she said, "I know what would put you in your place." She got a large envelope from her bedroom and threatened to show me the contents. She said there was an X-ray in it that would show me why she was so sure I was "on my way to being a basket-weaver." I didn't know what she was talking about at the time. It wasn't until I was almost 35 that I saw the X-ray she referred to. It was an X-ray taken upon my admission to Tripler Medical Center on my first birthday. It showed the extent of the brain damage I suffered that day.
She decided not to show me the X-ray. Instead, she suddenly shifted gears as she noticed that I was holding my pencil in my left hand. She said, "Show me how you've been drawing." When I drew a little with my left, she said, "So! You've switched personalities. Let's see, you used the left hand, that means the artist is in the right side of your head."
So she took me to the Play Deck and banged the right side of my head repeatedly on the brick wall there. The idea was to kill "the artist personality." She tried to do it so as not to leave any marks. After a while, she decided that wouldn't work. "If I don't do it hard enough to leave a mark I won't kill it either." So she brought me back to the Sun Porch and stuck the pencil back in my left hand and told me to draw. As soon as I drew a little she grabbed my left hand and burned the back of it with her cigarette.
When I stopped screaming, she said, "Draw some more." She threatened to beat me if I didn't. When I did, she burn the back of my left hand, being careful to burn it at the exact same place.
After that even threats wouldn't get me to draw for her. So every minute or so she took my hand with the pencil in it and forced it to draw a line, then burned the same spot.
She spent about half an hour at this, using up at least three cigarettes. Finally she said, "Are you going to use your left hand any more?" I told her I wouldn't. She said, "Good, maybe that personality won't get its way anymore."
Two or three months later I came home with a note from my teacher saying my penmanship had become terrible. My Mother said, "Why is your penmanship so bad suddenly? All through first grade you got high marks for penmanship. Your writing was beautiful."
I said, "Don't you remember? You made me stop using my left hand. That was the hand I was using to write with."
"No!" she said, "You were using it to draw with that day! That's what I remember. The artist was using the left hand!"
"I was only using it to draw then because I couldn't use my right hand, remember? It was in a sling."
"So what are you saying, you wrote with your left hand?'
"Sure. You didn't ever notice?"
She hadn't cared enough to notice before. Both my Mother and my Father wrote left-handed. My mother switched hands according to task, just like I did. She wrote with her left, used scissors with her right. But she couldn't be bothered to notice any of that, until she could see in it a justification for torture.
Showing posts with label alex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alex. Show all posts
Monday, December 3, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Escape Attempt
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.
I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.
Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.
So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.
As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.
I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.
I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"
So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.
Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.
The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.
I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.
Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.
So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.
As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.
I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.
I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"
So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.
Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Recap + Continuation
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.
It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.
After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.
So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.
Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.
I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.
That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.
I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!
So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.
Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.
Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.
Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."
The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.
The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.
It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.
It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.
After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.
So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.
Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.
I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.
That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.
I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!
So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.
Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.
Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.
Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."
The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.
The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Fighting For Peace
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
I didn't want to lead the peace party to the Puerto Rican neighborhood. I wanted someone else to do it. I found out very fast, like within half an hour, that wouldn't work. As I went about trying to persuade different groups of kids that they should join in the cause I was told that they wouldn't do it unless I was the leader, and then they wouldn't do it unless I beat their little group's leader in a fair fight.
I should explain that a little better. All over the Anglo neighborhoods of Fort Devens the kids formed small groups. You couldn't really call them gangs. Packs might be a better description. Each pack had 5 to 10 kids and they all had a clear leader. And as I tried to draw each such pack into the truce plan, I was told by each they would join if and only if I fought their leader and won.
This was the most insane, crazy, stupid, idiotic crap I'd ever heard from anyone outside of my own insane parents. I wanted to lead a peace army. To get followers I had to fight people? Stupid.
I pointed out to these morons that I was not yet 7 and a lot of these leaders were between 9 and 11. They said if I didn't beat them in a fair fight they wouldn't join. I said how could it be fair, if I'm up against someone 4 years older and almost twice as big? They said, well..., we'll let you pick the rules of the fight.
So I said, OK, clean wrestling, no punching. And that's what I did. I went from one pack to another, drawing each into my cause, by defeating leader after leader in wrestling matches. Altogether I fought enough leaders successfully that I gathered up about 55 followers. That means I probably had to win about 7 or 8 of these wrestling matches. I remember one in particular was won against a big 11 year-old. I'll call him Jim. Jim became my second in command.
Jim tried to analyze my ability to win all those wrestling matches. He noticed that I would start each match as if I was right-handed, and then surprise my opponent with ambidexterity.
In fact, I was ambidextrous. Ordinarily I divided tasks up by hand. I used my right to draw and to use scissors; I used my left hand to write and keep time with songs. But in the excitement of the fights and with both Alex (who preferred the left) and Kona (who preferred the right) active and alert, the two could be integrated and at the same time independent. My opponents probably felt like they were wrestling two of me.
But I thought I had another good explanation. I told Jim that because the cause was peace, God was on my side. Jim repeated the view, already stated many times, that I was crazy.
I was crazy, but after two hours and 7 or 8 wrestling matches I had a peace army of 55 kids aged 6 to 11, and all but one was marching with me to the Puerto Rican neighborhood to offer terms of truce. The other one was already hurrying on ahead to take the news of our march to the Puerto Ricans in advance. He'd been sent half an hour earlier, so they they could know we were coming and could meet us on the boundary of their territory with an equivalent group of their own.
There was no point, I thought, in negotiating with just the first stray Puerto Rican we might encounter. We needed to talk to as many as possible. The idea was to negotiate a truce with all of them.
In hindsight that may have been a poor decision on my part.
The march took about 40 minutes. It ended near the Devens sports arena, not far from the housing area where most of the Puerto Ricans lived. Their "equivalent group" had 75 members. We were outnumbered by 20.
I didn't want to lead the peace party to the Puerto Rican neighborhood. I wanted someone else to do it. I found out very fast, like within half an hour, that wouldn't work. As I went about trying to persuade different groups of kids that they should join in the cause I was told that they wouldn't do it unless I was the leader, and then they wouldn't do it unless I beat their little group's leader in a fair fight.
I should explain that a little better. All over the Anglo neighborhoods of Fort Devens the kids formed small groups. You couldn't really call them gangs. Packs might be a better description. Each pack had 5 to 10 kids and they all had a clear leader. And as I tried to draw each such pack into the truce plan, I was told by each they would join if and only if I fought their leader and won.
This was the most insane, crazy, stupid, idiotic crap I'd ever heard from anyone outside of my own insane parents. I wanted to lead a peace army. To get followers I had to fight people? Stupid.
I pointed out to these morons that I was not yet 7 and a lot of these leaders were between 9 and 11. They said if I didn't beat them in a fair fight they wouldn't join. I said how could it be fair, if I'm up against someone 4 years older and almost twice as big? They said, well..., we'll let you pick the rules of the fight.
So I said, OK, clean wrestling, no punching. And that's what I did. I went from one pack to another, drawing each into my cause, by defeating leader after leader in wrestling matches. Altogether I fought enough leaders successfully that I gathered up about 55 followers. That means I probably had to win about 7 or 8 of these wrestling matches. I remember one in particular was won against a big 11 year-old. I'll call him Jim. Jim became my second in command.
Jim tried to analyze my ability to win all those wrestling matches. He noticed that I would start each match as if I was right-handed, and then surprise my opponent with ambidexterity.
In fact, I was ambidextrous. Ordinarily I divided tasks up by hand. I used my right to draw and to use scissors; I used my left hand to write and keep time with songs. But in the excitement of the fights and with both Alex (who preferred the left) and Kona (who preferred the right) active and alert, the two could be integrated and at the same time independent. My opponents probably felt like they were wrestling two of me.
But I thought I had another good explanation. I told Jim that because the cause was peace, God was on my side. Jim repeated the view, already stated many times, that I was crazy.
I was crazy, but after two hours and 7 or 8 wrestling matches I had a peace army of 55 kids aged 6 to 11, and all but one was marching with me to the Puerto Rican neighborhood to offer terms of truce. The other one was already hurrying on ahead to take the news of our march to the Puerto Ricans in advance. He'd been sent half an hour earlier, so they they could know we were coming and could meet us on the boundary of their territory with an equivalent group of their own.
There was no point, I thought, in negotiating with just the first stray Puerto Rican we might encounter. We needed to talk to as many as possible. The idea was to negotiate a truce with all of them.
In hindsight that may have been a poor decision on my part.
The march took about 40 minutes. It ended near the Devens sports arena, not far from the housing area where most of the Puerto Ricans lived. Their "equivalent group" had 75 members. We were outnumbered by 20.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Fort Devens Messiah
I said my Mother tortured me by enema for an hour and a half on a Saturday. I don't really know. It's my best guess. So I don't really know if the events of the next day happened on a Sunday. I'm not even sure it happened in the Spring of 1956.
On the other hand, my memory of the events of that alleged Sunday are very, very, clear. For four or five hours, I became a messiah, a warrior of peace, sent from God.
I woke up that morning calm and whole. Alex, AKA Alaka'i, He Who Points The Way, was joined with Kona, The Calm Side, within me. I was a centaur. For this I could thank my Mother and the previous night's torture.
It was, coincidentally, a very good day. The sky was clear. It was warm. It was the first day in months that could be described as having short-sleeves weather.
Consequently, there were lots of children outside, playing in the green marching fields and wide lawns of Fort Devens. I was out among them by 9 or 10 that morning.
Because there were so many kids I'd never seen before that day, I made a few new friends before the news arrived. The news: someone came running up to tell everyone that so-and-so, who I never heard of, was in the hospital, because he'd crossed into the Spics' neighborhood, and they'd broke his arm. It was, I was told, only the latest of a series of violent attacks by one side or another in turf wars between Anglos and Hispanics on base.
I had to ask what Spics were. I'd never heard the word before. I was told they were Puerto Ricans. I asked, "What are Puerto Ricans?" I was told they were Spanish-speaking people who lived on an island. "What island?" They said, Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean.
I was from an island in the Pacific. OK, no, I was born in South Carolina. But my soul was an island soul, my 'aumakua was an island bird, my color was an island color. I thought that I could talk to these Puerto Ricans as a fellow islander.
I had studied Jesus. I had been a Hawaiian Messiah. I knew what Utu was. I could ask the question "What would Kū do?"
Jesus would have fought for peace. So I would fight for peace.
I started telling everyone that we had to go to the Spics and tell them that we wanted peace. We would offer them a deal: they could have free passage through Anglo neighborhoods, and in return, we would have free passage through theirs. Mutual freedom of movement would be the immediate reward, the carrot. Peace would be the long-term reward.
I was told by one of my new friends that I was crazy. There was no way I could lead a party of Anglos to present a truce to the Spics. I said, maybe Jesus was crazy. He said sure, maybe, "He was crucified, you know."
That decided it for me. This would be my crucifixion. Somehow, I would lead the Anglo kids to present a truce to the Puerto Ricans, that very day, or I would be hung to die, or both.
On the other hand, my memory of the events of that alleged Sunday are very, very, clear. For four or five hours, I became a messiah, a warrior of peace, sent from God.
I woke up that morning calm and whole. Alex, AKA Alaka'i, He Who Points The Way, was joined with Kona, The Calm Side, within me. I was a centaur. For this I could thank my Mother and the previous night's torture.
It was, coincidentally, a very good day. The sky was clear. It was warm. It was the first day in months that could be described as having short-sleeves weather.
Consequently, there were lots of children outside, playing in the green marching fields and wide lawns of Fort Devens. I was out among them by 9 or 10 that morning.
Because there were so many kids I'd never seen before that day, I made a few new friends before the news arrived. The news: someone came running up to tell everyone that so-and-so, who I never heard of, was in the hospital, because he'd crossed into the Spics' neighborhood, and they'd broke his arm. It was, I was told, only the latest of a series of violent attacks by one side or another in turf wars between Anglos and Hispanics on base.
I had to ask what Spics were. I'd never heard the word before. I was told they were Puerto Ricans. I asked, "What are Puerto Ricans?" I was told they were Spanish-speaking people who lived on an island. "What island?" They said, Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean.
I was from an island in the Pacific. OK, no, I was born in South Carolina. But my soul was an island soul, my 'aumakua was an island bird, my color was an island color. I thought that I could talk to these Puerto Ricans as a fellow islander.
I had studied Jesus. I had been a Hawaiian Messiah. I knew what Utu was. I could ask the question "What would Kū do?"
Jesus would have fought for peace. So I would fight for peace.
I started telling everyone that we had to go to the Spics and tell them that we wanted peace. We would offer them a deal: they could have free passage through Anglo neighborhoods, and in return, we would have free passage through theirs. Mutual freedom of movement would be the immediate reward, the carrot. Peace would be the long-term reward.
I was told by one of my new friends that I was crazy. There was no way I could lead a party of Anglos to present a truce to the Spics. I said, maybe Jesus was crazy. He said sure, maybe, "He was crucified, you know."
That decided it for me. This would be my crucifixion. Somehow, I would lead the Anglo kids to present a truce to the Puerto Ricans, that very day, or I would be hung to die, or both.
Monday, October 29, 2007
An Unmentionable Is Mentioned
A dramatic chain of events occurred sometime in the last two or three months of 1st grade. I'm sure of the order of the sequence because each event triggers events following it, as a chain reaction. But I'm not sure of the time of the beginning. Maybe as I relate the sequence now in writing for the first time something will occur to me that will date one event and consequently all the others.
The first event that stands out happened in class. A guest speaker came to class to present slides of a recent trip to Hawaii. Among the slides were pictures of a mock ancient Hawaiian village. One of the scenes showed a small hut. The speaker said she didn't know what the function of the hut was in an ancient village.
Ordinarily my classroom persona was that of Kona, while Alex/Alaka'i only observed. But when the question was raised about the hut Alex suddenly took over and stood up and announced, "I know what the hut was for. It was for the women, for when they bled."
You see, the same question had come up in my conversations with Lani and Lono. I had described a mock village and they recognized it as such. I had described a number of things that I had seen when I was 5 or 6 months old, when my parents carried me around a mock village in their arms. They told me what they thought I had seen, based on the descriptions I gave them. [See Godhood: The Downside, posted June 28, '07]
They told me not to repeat the answer about the hut to anyone else because non-Hawaiians are uncomfortable hearing about such things as women bleeding, it's kapu for them, even when they know it happens. But I had forgotten that warning in the more than 3 years since I'd seen them.
The warning was spot on. As soon as I said, "It was for the women when they bled," the guest turned pale and said, "What are you talking about?" in a angry raised voice. As Alex, I clarified the matter, "You know: you're a women. The women go there for their monthly bleeding."
All hell broke loose. The other kids probably didn't know what the discussion was about. I doubt any of the 6 year old girls had any knowledge of menstruation yet. But the teacher and the guest both reacted as if what I had said had been a graphic description of it for all the kids to hear, when actually I didn't say anything that would have been meaningful to anyone who didn't already know what menstruation was.
They screamed at me, calling me horrible and evil. I ran out the door of the class, down the hall, and ran out of the school, with the full intention of never going back.
I ran straight away from the exit for a while, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure no one was following me. When I was sure I wasn't being followed I rested a while and thought about what happened. By then I had remembered the warning, and I concluded that the warning was necessary because White People are all sick in their heads.
It's sick to scream at a child for revealing a fact you already know. Kapu or not. Besides, kapu , even Hawaiian kapu, are sick and stupid in general.
My parents were called and told I had run away from school. They drove around base looking for me for an hour before spotting me walking near the base headquarters.
My father didn't know what to make of the whole incident. He asked, "How did you get that idea about the huts?" I told him my friends told me about it. He finally told me that I had to learn not to say everything that comes into my head, "Think about the consequences." I don't think that lesson made a big impression on me.
But when my Mother got me alone she started quizzing me. "That happened before your first birthday! What else do you remember? What do you remember about your first birthday? Tell me!"
I had inadvertently given the secret of my early memories away. She now had reason to believe that I remembered their attempt to kill me when I was one.
The first event that stands out happened in class. A guest speaker came to class to present slides of a recent trip to Hawaii. Among the slides were pictures of a mock ancient Hawaiian village. One of the scenes showed a small hut. The speaker said she didn't know what the function of the hut was in an ancient village.
Ordinarily my classroom persona was that of Kona, while Alex/Alaka'i only observed. But when the question was raised about the hut Alex suddenly took over and stood up and announced, "I know what the hut was for. It was for the women, for when they bled."
You see, the same question had come up in my conversations with Lani and Lono. I had described a mock village and they recognized it as such. I had described a number of things that I had seen when I was 5 or 6 months old, when my parents carried me around a mock village in their arms. They told me what they thought I had seen, based on the descriptions I gave them. [See Godhood: The Downside, posted June 28, '07]
They told me not to repeat the answer about the hut to anyone else because non-Hawaiians are uncomfortable hearing about such things as women bleeding, it's kapu for them, even when they know it happens. But I had forgotten that warning in the more than 3 years since I'd seen them.
The warning was spot on. As soon as I said, "It was for the women when they bled," the guest turned pale and said, "What are you talking about?" in a angry raised voice. As Alex, I clarified the matter, "You know: you're a women. The women go there for their monthly bleeding."
All hell broke loose. The other kids probably didn't know what the discussion was about. I doubt any of the 6 year old girls had any knowledge of menstruation yet. But the teacher and the guest both reacted as if what I had said had been a graphic description of it for all the kids to hear, when actually I didn't say anything that would have been meaningful to anyone who didn't already know what menstruation was.
They screamed at me, calling me horrible and evil. I ran out the door of the class, down the hall, and ran out of the school, with the full intention of never going back.
I ran straight away from the exit for a while, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure no one was following me. When I was sure I wasn't being followed I rested a while and thought about what happened. By then I had remembered the warning, and I concluded that the warning was necessary because White People are all sick in their heads.
It's sick to scream at a child for revealing a fact you already know. Kapu or not. Besides, kapu , even Hawaiian kapu, are sick and stupid in general.
My parents were called and told I had run away from school. They drove around base looking for me for an hour before spotting me walking near the base headquarters.
My father didn't know what to make of the whole incident. He asked, "How did you get that idea about the huts?" I told him my friends told me about it. He finally told me that I had to learn not to say everything that comes into my head, "Think about the consequences." I don't think that lesson made a big impression on me.
But when my Mother got me alone she started quizzing me. "That happened before your first birthday! What else do you remember? What do you remember about your first birthday? Tell me!"
I had inadvertently given the secret of my early memories away. She now had reason to believe that I remembered their attempt to kill me when I was one.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
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."
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."
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Normal Life As Two People
My Mother was very happy to have Alex back. The bodily dysfunction problem went away instantly with his return. Less work for her. She was so happy she probably tolerated his Hawaiian singing more than ever. I was now allowed to sing Hawaiian chants any time my Father was gone, so long as I didn't do it with her in the room.
The other rule was, no mention of Alex. I was to call myself "Wesley" no matter who I thought I was, not only with my Father. I think she was afraid of letting me get used to it, for fear that I'd do it in front of my Father and he'd go ballistic.
As Kona, I really appreciated the Hawaiian chants. My Mother was never much interested in music or radio talk, so she never played the radio or the record player when my Father was at work. So the weeks without Alex were filled with long hours of silence.
I should say something more here about the separation between Kona and Alex. When Alex was in full control, Kona would shut down, and have no memory of what happened. From Kona's point of view it would be like a ambulatory blackout. He'd wake up to discover having done things while unconscious. When Kona was in full control Alex might loss consciousness or might not, but either way, when Alex was back in control, he knew everything that happened.
It wasn't always necessary for one or the other to be in clear control. So, for example, when Kona was playing with his toys, Alex could be singing. Alex's use of the vocal equipment didn't require complete control.
When Alex wanted to sing Kona would feel a momentary choking sensation, first, as the control of the throat changed over. It was unpleasant but brief. When it was done, Kona could go about his playing and a song would come out of his mouth, sung by Alex. Sometimes Alex would also take over just the left hand and slap the floor for a drum accompaniment.
I suppose that sounds creepy to a lot of people, but it was just life as normal to me when I was 4.
The other rule was, no mention of Alex. I was to call myself "Wesley" no matter who I thought I was, not only with my Father. I think she was afraid of letting me get used to it, for fear that I'd do it in front of my Father and he'd go ballistic.
As Kona, I really appreciated the Hawaiian chants. My Mother was never much interested in music or radio talk, so she never played the radio or the record player when my Father was at work. So the weeks without Alex were filled with long hours of silence.
I should say something more here about the separation between Kona and Alex. When Alex was in full control, Kona would shut down, and have no memory of what happened. From Kona's point of view it would be like a ambulatory blackout. He'd wake up to discover having done things while unconscious. When Kona was in full control Alex might loss consciousness or might not, but either way, when Alex was back in control, he knew everything that happened.
It wasn't always necessary for one or the other to be in clear control. So, for example, when Kona was playing with his toys, Alex could be singing. Alex's use of the vocal equipment didn't require complete control.
When Alex wanted to sing Kona would feel a momentary choking sensation, first, as the control of the throat changed over. It was unpleasant but brief. When it was done, Kona could go about his playing and a song would come out of his mouth, sung by Alex. Sometimes Alex would also take over just the left hand and slap the floor for a drum accompaniment.
I suppose that sounds creepy to a lot of people, but it was just life as normal to me when I was 4.
Monday, August 27, 2007
"I'm Alex"
While the summer weather held out my Mother saved diapers as she had done when I was two, by putting me outdoors wearing shoes and socks and a shirt and nothing else. But this time, the isolation of the House in Shirley led to outdoor rapes also. She was very lucky to never have been caught. It was risky for her to rape me outdoors because even if she could rely on my Father coming home from work at only the scheduled time, she couldn't assume that no one else would ever drive up. There was a sign that said "No Solicitors" at the entrance to the driveway, but I remember salesmen driving in anyway, claiming they missed it.
When Fall came there were still a few warm days. That was the first time I heard the expression "Indian Summer". The Massachusetts countryside was red and gold wherever the pine trees didn't dominate but it was still warm enough to walk about half naked. So I was outside wandering around without any pants on when Alaka'i came back again.
Alaka'i was now Alex to Kona. Kona had forgotten the Hawaiian name. Alex said he had "rested" and was able to take care of Little Brother Kona again. The first order of business was to put us in pants. The question came, "Why aren't we wearing pants?" and before Kona could answer, Alex knew, because he could read Kona's memories.
Alex hadn't realized that by going away, or becoming asleep, he would be taking the bodily functions with him. But he was sure that shouldn't be a problem anymore.
We went to my Mother and announced to her that we wouldn't need the diapers anymore.
She said, "How do you know that?"
I said, "Alex is back again."
"Really? How do you know Alex is back?"
"I'm Alex."
When Fall came there were still a few warm days. That was the first time I heard the expression "Indian Summer". The Massachusetts countryside was red and gold wherever the pine trees didn't dominate but it was still warm enough to walk about half naked. So I was outside wandering around without any pants on when Alaka'i came back again.
Alaka'i was now Alex to Kona. Kona had forgotten the Hawaiian name. Alex said he had "rested" and was able to take care of Little Brother Kona again. The first order of business was to put us in pants. The question came, "Why aren't we wearing pants?" and before Kona could answer, Alex knew, because he could read Kona's memories.
Alex hadn't realized that by going away, or becoming asleep, he would be taking the bodily functions with him. But he was sure that shouldn't be a problem anymore.
We went to my Mother and announced to her that we wouldn't need the diapers anymore.
She said, "How do you know that?"
I said, "Alex is back again."
"Really? How do you know Alex is back?"
"I'm Alex."
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
All Day Rapes
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Some posts specifically relate instances of sexual abuse conducted by my Mother. I am talking about it because I am tired of being silent about it. People need to know that things like this happen. Today I'm relating events that happened following my fourth birthday in 1953. 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 my Mother was furious that I couldn't control my bodily functions. There was a long screaming interrogation which ended with me telling her what I understood of it, which was just that Alex (my Mother's name for Alaka'i) had gone away and left me. She asked, "Why did he go away?" and I said, "Because you tried to kill him."
That made her more angry. She started to say that it wasn't Alex she wanted dead, it was me. It was the first time I remember her making the distinction. As time went on she would be more clear about. She still believed that I had a dual personality, but she also believed that if she were clever about it she could kill one of the personalities while leaving the other one alive.
The idea that she could do that was based on a naive interpretation of the psychiatrists' assertion that the right and left sides of the brain had slightly different functions. This was years before Psychology Today and before popular articles asking "Are You Right Brained, Or Are You Left Brained" trotted out split-brain studies as evidence that the two halves could operate independently, and before Roger Sperry convinced us that the hemispheres specialized more than a little. My Mother was quite capable of coming up with the notion of independently functioning hemispheres simply on the basis of being told that the different sides specialize differently, a fact which was related to her by the doctors who treated me on my 1st birthday.
[Below: A video describing later split-brain studies. My Mother thought my hemispheres operated separately without the need for any severing of brain connections.]
My Mother thought, all she had to do was figure out which hemisphere Alex lived in, and kill the other one.
My Mother preferred Alex to Kona because Alex was aggressive. Kona was originally created to be passive, precisely because aggressive Alex/Alaka'i could not avoid sparking my Mother's temper by lashing back against her cruel behavior. But my Mother preferred Alex to Kona, even though Kona didn't cause her to lose her temper as much, because she believed that Alex would be more likely to be able to make money for her.
The fact that as soon as Alex was "gone" I had to be toilet trained all over again confirmed her theory that aggressive Alex was the competent side of me and that Kona would have to be taken care of forever.
Finally she demanded to know what happened to the Hawaiian. I told her what Alex told me, it was lost when she held the pillow to my face.
She hit the roof. Instead of accepting her own responsibility for having caused the loss, she shrieked at me for having the gall to try to make her feel guilty. She said the Hawaiian wasn't lost by what she did, but because the wrong personality had died. It was my fault, for not having died as Kona instead of as Alex. She yelled at me as if I were the coffee table and I had maliciously stubbed her toe.
There was an afternoon of rapes and beatings. The beatings were to the buttocks so the black and blue marks wouldn't show when my Father got home. By then she had got the cloth diapers out of storage and put me in them.
My Mother told my Father none of what I told her. She said my loss of function was a delayed symptom of the concussion he gave him. Dad's reaction was first to deny that he had anything to do with it and to say there had to be something wrong with "her" son, and then to get drunk and pass out in the living room.
In the immediate weeks that followed my Mother came up with a new way to sexually abuse me. Up to this time the rapes were strictly either physical punishments or meant to aid her in her masturbations. Now she began to take a more deliberately psychological approach looking for ways to torture me with extreme humiliation and intimidation.
When she found that I couldn't tell her soon enough that a bowel movement was about to happen, she came up with the idea that she could check for herself when one was on it's way. She had me stand naked from the waist down on a high chair next to the dining room table. She put a jar of vaseline and rubber gloves on a shelf behind me. I had to remain standing that way all day long, so that I would be available for a rectal exam every half hour.
If the exam turned up fecal matter I'd be hauled to the training toilet and sit there until the bowel movement was done. If the exam turned up nothing she'd "reward" me for being clean with a rape lasting 5 minutes or so. Just long enough to induce wide-eyed fear and distress. Then she'd warn me not to get down while she went back to housework or reading or whatever she'd been doing, until the next exam.
The exams would start before noon and last until just before my Father was due to come home from the base around 5 PM. The dining room had a big picture window that looked out at the driveway. I remember how one day my Mother lost track of time and was raping me as my Father drove up. She got me back in diapers just in time as he walked in.
Of course my Mother was furious that I couldn't control my bodily functions. There was a long screaming interrogation which ended with me telling her what I understood of it, which was just that Alex (my Mother's name for Alaka'i) had gone away and left me. She asked, "Why did he go away?" and I said, "Because you tried to kill him."
That made her more angry. She started to say that it wasn't Alex she wanted dead, it was me. It was the first time I remember her making the distinction. As time went on she would be more clear about. She still believed that I had a dual personality, but she also believed that if she were clever about it she could kill one of the personalities while leaving the other one alive.
The idea that she could do that was based on a naive interpretation of the psychiatrists' assertion that the right and left sides of the brain had slightly different functions. This was years before Psychology Today and before popular articles asking "Are You Right Brained, Or Are You Left Brained" trotted out split-brain studies as evidence that the two halves could operate independently, and before Roger Sperry convinced us that the hemispheres specialized more than a little. My Mother was quite capable of coming up with the notion of independently functioning hemispheres simply on the basis of being told that the different sides specialize differently, a fact which was related to her by the doctors who treated me on my 1st birthday.
[Below: A video describing later split-brain studies. My Mother thought my hemispheres operated separately without the need for any severing of brain connections.]
My Mother thought, all she had to do was figure out which hemisphere Alex lived in, and kill the other one.
My Mother preferred Alex to Kona because Alex was aggressive. Kona was originally created to be passive, precisely because aggressive Alex/Alaka'i could not avoid sparking my Mother's temper by lashing back against her cruel behavior. But my Mother preferred Alex to Kona, even though Kona didn't cause her to lose her temper as much, because she believed that Alex would be more likely to be able to make money for her.
The fact that as soon as Alex was "gone" I had to be toilet trained all over again confirmed her theory that aggressive Alex was the competent side of me and that Kona would have to be taken care of forever.
Finally she demanded to know what happened to the Hawaiian. I told her what Alex told me, it was lost when she held the pillow to my face.
She hit the roof. Instead of accepting her own responsibility for having caused the loss, she shrieked at me for having the gall to try to make her feel guilty. She said the Hawaiian wasn't lost by what she did, but because the wrong personality had died. It was my fault, for not having died as Kona instead of as Alex. She yelled at me as if I were the coffee table and I had maliciously stubbed her toe.
There was an afternoon of rapes and beatings. The beatings were to the buttocks so the black and blue marks wouldn't show when my Father got home. By then she had got the cloth diapers out of storage and put me in them.
My Mother told my Father none of what I told her. She said my loss of function was a delayed symptom of the concussion he gave him. Dad's reaction was first to deny that he had anything to do with it and to say there had to be something wrong with "her" son, and then to get drunk and pass out in the living room.
In the immediate weeks that followed my Mother came up with a new way to sexually abuse me. Up to this time the rapes were strictly either physical punishments or meant to aid her in her masturbations. Now she began to take a more deliberately psychological approach looking for ways to torture me with extreme humiliation and intimidation.
When she found that I couldn't tell her soon enough that a bowel movement was about to happen, she came up with the idea that she could check for herself when one was on it's way. She had me stand naked from the waist down on a high chair next to the dining room table. She put a jar of vaseline and rubber gloves on a shelf behind me. I had to remain standing that way all day long, so that I would be available for a rectal exam every half hour.
If the exam turned up fecal matter I'd be hauled to the training toilet and sit there until the bowel movement was done. If the exam turned up nothing she'd "reward" me for being clean with a rape lasting 5 minutes or so. Just long enough to induce wide-eyed fear and distress. Then she'd warn me not to get down while she went back to housework or reading or whatever she'd been doing, until the next exam.
The exams would start before noon and last until just before my Father was due to come home from the base around 5 PM. The dining room had a big picture window that looked out at the driveway. I remember how one day my Mother lost track of time and was raping me as my Father drove up. She got me back in diapers just in time as he walked in.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Rains Bleed
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened shortly before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!
I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.
In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.
At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.
Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"
Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.
After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.
The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.
Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.
The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.
I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.
Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.
As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.
Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"
If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.
Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"
It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.
After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.
[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]
At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!
I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.
In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.
At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.
Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"
Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.
After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.
The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.
Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.
The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.
I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.
Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.
As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.
Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"
If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.
Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"
It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.
After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.
[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]
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