Devens Loses Its Charm

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that may have happened as late as the Spring of 1957 before I became 8 years old. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I think it was in the Spring of '57, that, after a series of disputes with friends, who then became former friends, I lost interest in talking to people altogether for a time. Instead I just wandered aimlessly about Fort Devens all day long avoiding other children. Some of the time I daydreamed, some of the time I just walked and enjoyed the rhythm of my steps.

To this day I have the ability to do nothing and be alone and enjoy it. Anitra is amazed at my gift for sitting and vegetating.

The ability to be alone and happy just being is very rare, in my experience. I find most people are terrified of extended periods of solitude. It's really three gifts combined. 1) I can entertain myself with my own thoughts, 2) I can "peace out" and vegetate, and 3) I'm not afraid of being alone.

One of my greatest fears is imprisonment. If I were sure that any jail time I experienced would be in solitude, I wouldn't be afraid at all. It's the thought of being locked up with other people that freaks me out.

Anyway, I'm not asocial, in spite of all that. Just because I don't feel a need for human company doesn't mean I turn away from it whenever it shows up. So when I ran into a bunch of kids on Detrobian Street, up the hill from my house on Chancellorsville, who expressed an interest in being friends with me, I figured, what the heck.

The heck was, that after hanging out with these guys (3 or 4 of them) for a while and getting along fine, we were joined by a friend of theirs who asked my name. When I told him he said, "Hey, I've heard of you! You're the half-brain!"

It turned out that his father was one of the doctors who treated me at the base infirmary when I jumped/fell off the jungle gym, before I was sent to Maryland. His father told him of X-rays that showed the extent of previous brain damage. Whatever the father said, his son took away the idea that I was only operating with half a brain.

The reality was that about a third of the surface of my cortex was destroyed when I was hit by the car in Hawaii. But there's more to the brain than surface. Anyway, it happened early enough that I'd recovered.

But I couldn't explain that to this kid, who was now cheerfully telling all his friends that I was a half-brain, his father the doctor said so. I wouldn't mind so much now, but at age 7 it was unbearable.

After that got going, I didn't want to live in Fort Devens anymore.

Opportunity and Temptation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damage Assessment

The GP didn't find anything wrong because he was looking for the wrong things. He was seeing if I knew my name, or if I knew it had been Thursday, 1953. He wasn't looking for my other personality.

Alaka'i was still MIA the second day and Kona was scared and lost. It felt like, well, loneliness. I felt loneliness.

But it wasn't until the second day after my birthday that the most serious symptom of brain-damage revealed itself. It was something that the GP was unlikely to have noticed.

A cat appeared from the woods. That was a common occurrence at the House in Shirley. Our neighbors were half a mile or more away, but that was nothing to their rat-catchers. The cats roamed far and wide looking for rodents and other cats.

I called Mother out of the house and asked her what it was. She said, "You know what it is, honey, it's a cat."

I didn't remember knowing that it was called "cat". But that wasn't the serious symptom. OK, so I "forgot" the word for cat. Not a biggy. Relearn it, move on.

But an hour or so later another cat came by. I said to my Mother, "What's that?"

"I just told you when the last one came by. It's a cat."

"The other one was cat. What's this one?"

My Mother just shook her head and returned inside. But I was shaken up by the whole incident. I knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was right away. It took another week and more incidents of the same nature for me to work out what had happened.

It was only a couple of years ago that I read about research that proved that the human brain processes names and words differently. That's what I discovered for myself, the hard way. My ability to absorb words was affected but I could still learn names. New words could only be understood as names.

What was really weird about it was that I could remember what it was like before. I could remember being able to use a word like "cat" to stand for cats in general. I knew that the sound that you make when you say "cat" is meant to be a general term for all creatures of a certain class. But I couldn't use the sound that way. I could only use it to stand for one particular cat. I could only use it as a name.