Bethe's Birthday

Tomorrow would have been my daughter's 27th birthday. She was born Diez y Seis de Septiembre, the second to the last all squares day of the century, 9/16/81 (the last being 9 days later.) Her 24th birthday was in 2005. For that one I made 24 designs for her in Photoshop, each one based on a number from 1 to 24. Here are numbers seven through 12:

I've posted the lot of them at Somewhat Art. Clicking on the image above will take you to just that post.

Birthday Burlesque

Video Find(s) of the Day

Last July 9, when I turned 58, I posted a video find I just called Burlesque. I've decided to make this a tradition. One day a year, Daddy gets to post burlesque videos. As I turn 59, I found four I like. FYI, the first three were posted by videoloops who is based in Seattle, and were all performed at Seattle venues.

This one is just fine comedy.

Inga Ingenue burlesque act 1 for SinnerSaint @ noc noc



This one, I like the song, and enjoy any excuse to hear it.

Lucky Lucy O'Rebel burlesque act 1 @ the Bit Saloon



This one is mildly, just ever so very mildly, deliciously, blasphemous, in an artistic way.

Catrina Kaboom burlesque for King's Cabaret @ the Funhouse



And this one is one I'm going to remember.

Lola Van Ella in "The Best of Midwest Burlesk!"

Another Crappy Birthday

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freak

I don't know cars. Here's a picture of the car my parents used to run me over, taken when my Father first bought it. I wish someone could tell me the make and model.

It's also visible in two of these next snapshots. All these pictures were taken in a downtown Honolulu park the day I was released from Tripler Medical Center. It's amazing what a difference a haircut and a change of clothes can make. That's me, the same kid on the same day as in the shaggy hair and hospital gown from two posts ago. My Father was NOT going to have HIS SON looking like a GIRL anymore. The haircut was the first item on the agenda.

While we were getting my haircut, my Mother pitched a fit because the shoes that I had been allowed to wear on the hospital grounds were taken back by the nurse who loaned them.

When she got tired of complaining about that, she returned to the more important subject of telling my Father what a fool he had been in not killing me when he had the chance. Now, she said, they were stuck with "the freak" forever. She started calling me the freak when she found out I couldn't speak but could whistle exactly like a bird (complete with warbling.) She also called me the basket-case a lot. My Father would occasionally try to correct her but mostly gave up. Neither of them realized that I was understanding a lot of what they were saying. I got about every other word, and I was learning more fast. Just because I couldn't speak didn't keep me from learning the meanings of words, and I was obsessed with that.

When we left the hospital I was crying. I was terrified. I thought they'd finish killing me right away. By the time we got to the park for the photos I was calmed down and I could laugh at my Father's attempts to amuse me. That's what's going on here. You can see the process in the circular-cut pictures going from top to bottom. Top: uncertainty. Next down: warming. Lower: almost comfortable. Bottom: scared again. Whenever I looked at my Mother the fear returned. You can see why in this enhanced closeup. Her eyes and that grimace show exactly what she wants. She wants me dead. She's tolerating the little freak because she expects to get her way.

She didn't know yet how much of a freak I actually was. Because my parents were told that I wouldn't suffer any speech loss, when I did they decided together that the psychologists knew nothing. So they didn't bring me back for the tests and therapy they were asked to. As a result they were never in a position to be told that I had two major symptoms of brain trauma besides the obvious ones.

One, they wouldn't ever guess on their own. I came out of the coma with an eidetic memory. Not only could I phonetically remember a great deal of my first year the coma, but now I could remember every conversation and sound I heard during every day and play it back in my head at the end of the day or weeks later. My phonographic memory was near perfect. I also had a good photographic memory. But without being able to speak, and without trained psychologists observing me, my parents wouldn't know about it. By the time I learned to speak English, I was advised not to let them find out about it. Later my Mother suspected it and she would test me to try to confirm her guess, but by that time it was mostly gone.

The other symptom was found out right away by my Mother when she changed my diapers, but I don't believe she knew it was a symptom of brain damage. I had the condition made famous by John Waters' A Dirty Shame. At 16 months of age I was over-sexed. She discovered I would get erections from the smallest of stimulations. It was enough to just unpin my diapers.

The increased sex drive condition is quite common in cases of severe head injury. The eidetic memory condition is relatively rare but happens and if it lasts it can be identified as a form of Savant Syndrome. It's sometimes associated with left brain damage (my injury was to the right, but my development was reversed also) or limbic damage or both. Limbic damage is apt to occur whenever there is any severe head trauma because the limbic system lies at a focal point of the skull. It would have been easy to miss in a case like mine. The eidetic memory is believed to result when more normal "higher" mechanisms of memory are inhibited forcing the brain to fall back on more primitive mechanisms.

The fact is that having an eidetic memory is not an efficient way to take in information of a large range. In the long run it's narrowing. I'm glad I lost it eventually, or rather, that normal memory function returned and took over. That happened after my 4th birthday. So until I was 4 I reviewed every day's experiences in detail at least once before sleeping every night. As a result I have a very detailed memory from ages most people barely remember at all.

If I don't remember anything from a day or a week back then, I can be pretty sure nothing interesting happened, from my perspective at the time.

The Omega

When I tell people I lived three memorable years in Hawaii they often ask me how I liked the beach and the palm trees and the sand. I was in Schofield Barracks most of the time, which, as I've said, looks like a low-income suburban housing project. It's situated almost at the center of O'ahu, miles from any of the beaches. There was very little that would seem exotic to a lower forty-eighter, apart from the beautiful hills in the distance.

The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.

I'll describe my first birthday in detail.

It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.

As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.

I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.

Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.

When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.

My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)

My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.

Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.

That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.

My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.

At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.

He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.

For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"

When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."

She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.

About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"

That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.

At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.

My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.

After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.

By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.

My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.

My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.

I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.

As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."

My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.

**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]

The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.

On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.

The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.

After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?

So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"

What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.

The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.

I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.

Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.

The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.

It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.

But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.

My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.

I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!

My Mother almost fainted.

Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.


By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.

When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.

What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.

That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.

[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]

The Alpha

I remember my birth. I haven't always believed that it was my birth that I was remembering. For a long time I assumed, as most people do, that no one could remember much of anything of their early pre-verbal life, much less their birth. But I've changed my mind.

The turning point regarding my belief in this thing came in the Spring of 1984. I was 34 years old, and I had always had a vivid detailed "memory" of being run over by a car on an early birthday. I could not only remember it, I could remember a sequence of dramatic events leading up to it, which would have needed at least an hour to transpire. I remembered suffering two blows to my head, one to the top, one to the side. I remembered a tire of the car rolling over my chest, forcing my lungs empty and pushing me deep into the soil. I remembered the trip in the ambulance to the hospital afterward.

I knew from documentary evidence, family photos for example, that the event, if it had actually occurred, could have happened no later than my second birthday. There was no way anything like that could have happened on my third or fourth or any later birthday. I had assumed until 1984 that it either hadn't happened at all and I had dreamed it, or it happened on my 2nd birthday.

Then I found a box of documents my parents had hidden from me all their lives. The box included doctors' reports and x-rays concerning the admission of a baby to Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. The documents were dated in multiple places. The date of admission was July 9, 1950, my first birthday. I almost fainted when I saw that. Then I thought, no, this can't be, this must have been a brother I never knew.

I knew my Mother had given birth to a baby that died within hours of severe organic deformities. If he had lived, they were going to call that baby my brother Robert. So I looked again at the admitting documents, expecting to see the name Robert. The name was mine. The documents described how a one-year-old baby was picked up by ambulance after arriving at the scene at 9:05 PM July 9, 1950. The baby was admitted with evidence of two instances of head trauma, a fractured and dislodged skull, tire-tracks across his chest, and a story from the Native Hawaiian ambulance attendants, duly noted, that he had been lifted off the grass. Exactly as I remembered it.

I couldn't believe anymore that I had simply dreamed it. But that also meant that I didn't dream waking up in the hospital later with a detailed and accurate memory of not only the events of those few hours but of the previous year. I am convinced now that I was so shocked by what had happened that I became obsessed at that time with the earliest events of my life, going back to my birth, because I needed to know what went wrong.

I suspect that most any 1 year-old child could tell you of memories of his birth if only he could interpret them and articulate them. What I did was preserve them out of a desperate need to find an interpretation, until I could.

Here is that interpretation.

First, there was blackness and I don't remember any sound. Then there was a sound, but I don't feel like I noticed it. Then suddenly there were two sounds. I remember suddenly being aware of something for the first time ever. I was aware that there were two sounds. I'm sure that what I was aware of were the two sounds of my Mother's and my own heartbeats. I didn't know that one came from me and one came from someone else. But I was aware that they were distinct from one another. It was a first awareness that there were distinctions.

If a time passed after that I had no sense of it. But then all at once there was a point of light in my imagination. It was just there. Then below it there was an image of a flat surface. I'd never seen anything before. I'm sure I wasn't really seeing anything then, it was a vision. Other lights appeared above the surface. It was like a night sky over a still ocean. The other lights began to revolve around the first and still brightest one, like the stars revolve around the pole star. The stationary light became brighter and a filament passed from it to the surface. For a moment a kind of ball appeared there, as if floating. I thought the ball was me. It was the first memory I had of having a sense of being. I was the ball, the light had made me.

Then, the stationary light moved downward to the "horizon" and appeared to move below it. As it did, the other lights continued revolving around it and moved in unison with it. After doing this, the original image was restored and the movement downward repeated. It repeated once or twice more. Finally I had in my mind the notion that not only could the light move, but so could I. I could somehow follow it. No sooner did I have the idea that I could follow the light downward, then I felt movement. I was aware of moving muscles, and changing position. I felt that I was twisting about and diving at the same time. The idea of movement and the movement happened at the same time. I have a sense that I was both causing the motion and all at the same time being propelled by an external cause.

Exactly then there was a sound, which I couldn't interpret at the time. But I could remember it phonetically and later I could interpret it. It was English and by the time I was 3 I knew enough to know the words used. "John -- I think the baby just turned over."

In all this I still had very little sense of time. The movements had happened once and for all, there was no idea that there was time between them. Even the beats didn't seem to beat in time. But then I noticed that they were closer and farther, and closer and farther. They would match and then separate. I saw a point of light again. The heartbeats became more and more matched, taking longer and longer to converge and diverge, and simultaneously the point spread out into a line segment.

As soon as the line seemed to stretch out horizontally forever the heartbeats synchronized.

After this all hell broke loose. There were loud voices. Yelling. There was pushing. I was pushing. I didn't know why at first. Then I saw a light and I decided that it was the light I was pushing for.

I don't remember any trauma. The idea that nobody would remember their own birth because it would be too unbearable doesn't fit with me. I don't remember it being bad. I remember it being thrilling. It was an adventure.

At least it was until the doctor held me. I was afraid being held by that man. He smelled wrong. I think I was predisposed to fear anything that smelled like a man at the moment of birth.

The birthing room was a blur otherwise. Bright but no details. The first details I remember were of something that looked like a typical viewing room. I was laid on a crib. As I laid there I happened to see a wall clock in front and above me. I took it for a face and was immediately afraid. My eyes strayed from it and I didn't know how to look back where I had seen it. So I had to search the whole wall for the clock again. Gradually I was able to find it, lose it, and find it again. I did this over and over, and the clock didn't attack me. So I came to trust the clock and decided it was there to protect me. I think I briefly thought of it as Mother.

Then a nurse appeared and I was confused again.