Speaking of Gun Control

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around spring, 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

So today, for the first time since the Bill of Rights was ratified, the Supreme Court said that, yes, it means individual citizens have a right to own guns, at least for home defense. As some of you may know, my views on gun control are insane. I not only oppose gun control, I think the government should give guns out to people who can't afford them. Poor people need self-defense, too. The constitution says people have a right to lawyers, and the courts have decided that means that if you're too poor to hire one, the government has to provide one. That's the way it should be with the right to bear arms. It doesn't make sense to tell me I can bear one, if I don't have one. And ammo. Make mine an Uzi, thank you.

I've never used a firearm. There's three reasons for that. One was the old student deferment, and the high draft lottery number. Another is the ongoing poverty, preventing me from purchasing one. The third has to do with my Father.

When my Dad came back from Taiwan in 1959, I wanted to patch up our relationship. From age six on I couldn't bring myself to initiate a conversation with him. It was extremely awkward, and I wanted to break out of it. What I felt I needed was for him to offer to do something with me that I could stand. For that to happen he needed have some minimal respect for me, enough to pay attention to what I was interested in, and propose we do something having to do with it.

He constantly struck out on this front. He suggested taking me fishing. I hated fishing. He suggested taking me to ball games. I hated ball games. I told him I wasn't interested, and he would throw up his hands and say, to my Mother, "I can't do anything with him. He hates everything."

One day he was driving me and the neighbor kids to a school event. He started to complain to them that I never liked to do anything. He said, "Like right now, I know that if I offered to take him to a firing range and teach him to use a rifle, he would turn me down."

I jumped at that. I said, "Would you do that?" He said he would. He was shocked that I finally found something we could do together that I was into.

If the offer had been to take me hunting, I would have turned it down flatly. I don't have any desire to kill my own meat. But I was fine with target practice. And at the time (I was 9) I hadn't ruled out the possibility that I might want to enlist some day. Wouldn't it be handy to already know how to use a weapon?

It never happened, of course. All the talk about, "He never wants to do anything," was just abuse. It wasn't really about what I wanted or what I rejected. It was about having an excuse to put me down.

For the next four or five years whenever he tried to use that line on me I said, "So, OK, when are you going to teach me how to use a rifle?" Each time he would grit his teeth, and say, "I've told you before. Soon." And then he'd change the subject.

Eventually, I got tired of that game.

Father's Day Post

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm going back to pick up on something that happened in Taiwan in 1958 to my Dad when I wasn't there. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My Father did some good things. Very little of the good things he did involved me, but I can appreciate them anyway. I've already talked (Dictatorship & Thievery) about how he blew the whistle on graft relating to the construction of the swimming pool at an enlisted men's club in Taipei.

I mentioned that my Father dealt then with the stress in part by going to bars after work. One such trip resulted in both his best moment and worst setback.

It happened after my Mother and I had left Taiwan. One evening my Father went with a fellow officer to a Taipei bar that was regularly frequented by servicemen. When they walked in to the place, they found a drunken US soldier causing a scene. My Father confronted him, telling him he had to leave the bar. The soldier not only refused to leave but became violent, took a swing, and my Father had MPs haul him out of there and taken to the brig.

It would have been no big deal, but it turned out it was a congressman's son. Worse, it turned out it was a congressman who took money from the construction company that was mishandling the swimming pool work. My Dad had stepped on a land mine.

He could have gotten out of it by backing off from the graft charges, and dropped charges against the congressman's spoiled brat of a son. But he stood his ground on both counts. The result was a bad review that meant a missed promotion.

The lost promotion crushed him. He had adopted the army as if it were a mother surrogate. He felt betrayed, and it added heavily to all the other bitterness he had about his life. Suddenly his turning away from a career in printing and journalism looked like a disastrous mistake.

But through it all he continued to declare his loyalty to the army, and he stood his ground on the principles. That was great.

It was too bad he treated me so badly I couldn't tell him then how great I thought it was.

Christianity For Dummies

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during from summer 1958 through winter 1959. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]


[Above: Some results of a "for dummies" image search. At least three of them are real books.]

After a couple of weeks my Grandmother returned to her house and my Mother and I went back to living in the garage. I turned 9. We lived there, just the two of us, from summer through fall and part of that winter, while my Father finished out his duty in Taiwan. There was a great deal of sexual abuse. It's difficult to estimate the number of rapes that I endured but there was at least one incident per week.

That fall I started 4th grade at the same Van Asselt Elementary school where I had started 3rd.

My social life was complicated by the fact that my two best friends were brothers living next door, one a year older and one a year younger, and the two of them didn't want to hang out with each other.

I tried to look for a girlfriend but ran smack into the "boys of that age don't like girls" mythology that is so entrenched in American culture. It's one of my biggest regrets in life that I caved into the peer pressure and not only stopped looking for a new girlfriend but pretended I didn't like girls to get by. The regret probably fueled a lot of my determination to not conform later.

The combination of sexual abuse and sporadic social isolation led to long bouts of day-dreaming. At that time most of the day-dreaming was the sort that everyone expects of a 9 year-old. I used the apricot tree in our back yard for a space ship, and flew it to Mars. The old decrepit tool shed, underneath which my Grandfather, when he was alive, raised chickens and rabbits, had a raised sheltered entrance big enough for two adults to stand on. It was my time machine.

Christmas was memorable because we had a plastic tree that stood about 14 inches tall on our coffee table. I loved it.

At school I tested high on math and was separated every day for an hour from my 4th grade class-mates so I could attend math period with a 5th grade class. I still complained of boredom, but was told flatly that I wouldn't be allowed to skip any further ahead, for now.

Throughout all this time I was attending weekly Sunday School classes. My Mother had been brought up Baptist but publicly converted to my Father's Episcopalianism. She kept up appearances by attending Trinity Episcopal on First Hill with my Father's other relations. The church had a Sunday School class that met in the basement at the same time as the service they all attended, so that us fidgety bored kids could be educated in the ways of God, and not disrupt mass.

Being an avid learner, I tried very hard to make what I was taught my own. I paid close attention to all the doctrine and tried to figure out how it could made sense to me.

I'm convinced converts never really believe what people born into a religion believe about it. This applied to my Mother, whose Baptist fatalism did not get replaced. It also applies to people we don't necessarily think of as converts. For instance, say some guy is raised as a Christian, then decides as an adult there is no God. We wouldn't say he was a convert, but he is willing a convert to atheism. It's been my observation of such people that no matter how confirmed they are in their atheism, they always bring to it most of the same metaphysical assumptions they had as Christians. They'll also bring a lot of the social mores and habits. If they come from a proselytizing tradition, they will still proselytize, for atheism now. If they were brought up Puritanical, they will still confuse serious with somber.

I began as a polytheist. I was prepared to drop that for Christian dogma, but I couldn't easily jettison the metaphysical underpinnings of polytheism. I tried anyway.

A turning point occurred soon after my Father came back from Taiwan. He came back some time around January of 1959. He still wasn't around all the time because he had to commute to and from Fort Lewis a lot.

One day while he was gone my Grandmother was sitting on her living room couch and talking to me, while my Mother was in the basement using Grandmother's washing machine. Grandma stopped talking in mid-sentence, in mid-word even. Her mouth was still open to pronounce the word she was saying, but the sound stopped. After a minute I panicked. I waved my hands in front of her face and shouted. She sat there like a statue. I was witnessing one of her strokes for the first time.

To be clear, I didn't know that this was another of a string of strokes. I hadn't witnessed the previous strokes, so I didn't know this was in any way the same.

I was afraid she was going to die. She already looked dead.

My Mother called an ambulance and Grandmother went back to the hospital.

That Sunday I insisted on attending Mass with my parents for the first time, because the mythology was that I needed to pray for my Grandmother to get well, and praying supposedly worked better in church.

I was aware of everybody around thinking I was cute, praying so hard for Grandma. The minister was told about it after the service and I overheard him remarking what a fine, pious, boy I was becoming.

A few days later Grandma had recovered and came back home, and I was sure my praying had helped bring that outcome about. I remarked to that effect to my parents. They just laughed, and said, "You know, it was the 6th or 7th stroke she's had. She lived through the others without your help."

It completely demolished the fragile hold I had on Christian mythology. I had to start all over trying to make sense of it with the new understanding that what I got told in the Sunday School classes was just the simplified Christianity for Dummies version.

Major Magician

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened February or March, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

After my Father returned from the Mountain we had a new friend visit. I have always thought of him as Major Magician. I can't remember his name. I called him that because he was an amateur magician, always ready to impress me with some trick. He carried cards and pieces of rope and handkerchiefs around. My favorites were the rope tricks. I think it was another hint of a nascent interest in topology. I cared less about the tricks themselves than the different kinds of knots he could show me.

We had another dog-related incident that showed the interesting consequences of living in a country where dog is on the menu. While entertaining Major Magician a Chinese man dropped by to deliver a package. Ordinarily we would take the package at the gate, but because we had a guest we just buzzed the delivery man in. The dog, Koko, went berserk.

Koko was the most laid back dog you ever saw. Until then. We couldn't figure out why he went nuts until Major Magician mentioned that Koko might have a good idea what our visitor has been eating lately.

Mind you, I have no problem with eating dog. I'd be willing to try it. I'm just saying, if you live in a country where it's customary, keep an eye on Fido. He could take it personally.

Major Magician was the first regular friend that my Father had in Taiwan that interacted with the rest of us. He and his wife lived on the opposite side of Taipei in a middle-class neighborhood dominated by walled pre-war Japanese-style housing.

We went to visit them one evening. It was a beautiful house. The adults gathered around a table in what looked like a meditating room. It was a bare room with a long sliding paper wall that separated it from the main living room, and had glass doors opening to a walled garden. Major & Mrs. Magician used it for a dining room, usually. This night they used it to play four-way strip poker with my parents.

I was supposed to nap on a couch in the other room, but somehow when your Mother is playing strip poker in the next room it's hard to sleep. Especially with all the giggling. I had to get up and ask for a glass of water. Sure enough, by the time I got there Mom had lost. She always lost. Which was weird, because I'm sure she was the best poker player.

We loved the Japanese-style house, and hated the Chinese-style house that we had been living in, that we didn't renew our 6 month lease on the latter, and moved into one of the houses in Major Magician's neighborhood.

Our new house was a one-story house on a narrow dirt road. We were one block North from a large expanse of rice paddies. I learned what rice paddies smell like up close. They smell just like water buffaloes, which smell like a cross between an outhouse and old gym shoes. Fortunately, the prevailing winds favored us.

Very Bad Night, Part I

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

During most of the six weeks my Father was at the Mountain my Mother subjected me to moderate but almost daily sexual abuse. It subsided as she began her preparations for the romantic evening to celebrate his return.

In spite of all the sexual abuse I knew next to nothing about sex, really. In fact I wouldn't have called anything my Mother did to me sexual at the time. Sex was something else. It was what Mommies and Daddies did in their bedrooms at night. I didn't know what that was, but I was sure my Mother missed it and that what she did to me was at least partly an inadequate substitute. It wasn't the real thing, it was a poor imitation.

My theory was that when people get to be really, really, grownup, like 13 or 14, they start to need this sex thing and have to have partners to help them with it (touching yourself makes you sick, Mommy said) and if the partners they get aren't around or they spend all their time being mad then they start hurting. And to fix the hurt they need to do things to their kids that are icky. But it's not their fault, it's nature's fault. Nature makes grownups sick.

[Below: The same person, before and after puberty. Note the "bedroom eyes" on the right.]

So I felt sorry for my Mother, and I was really hoping that when my Father came home and saw how pretty she was in that dress and saw what a great dinner she made for him and how nice she smelled, and how I said I loved him and then excused myself and didn't cause any trouble for the rest of the night, that he wouldn't shout or anything, and they'd end up in bed and have sex, whatever that is, and Mommy would be all better.

He was supposed to get home at 6 PM. He actually called at 6:30 or so to tell us he got delayed and wouldn't make it until 8 PM. So that was nice.

But after 8 he wasn't there, and he also wasn't there at 9, 10, and 11 PM. There were no more calls to apologize for being late.

I stayed up late with my Mother. It was a Friday so I didn't have to get up early the next morning. She cried off and on for hours. I said, maybe something bad happened to him. She said, "Sure." But she didn't bother making any emergency phone calls.

He came to the front gate at about Midnight. After my Mother unlocked the gate a couple of other officers walked him to the door of the house and put him in a chair. He was only able to stand with support.

He was supposed to come straight home after getting back to Taipei, but instead he spent 6 hours in bars with his buddies.

As he was brought in the door I said, "I love you Daddy," just like we rehearsed it. Then my Mother gave me a sign to get the hell up to my room. I listened from the top of the stairs.

The dinner had already been done away with. My Mother started out explaining that. Dad muttered something like, "That's nice." She then tried, "Do you want to go upstairs or do you want to have fun down here?"

He said, "Why don't you get me a beer?" About then, my Mother started screaming. I don't remember a lot of what she screamed. Then she broke out into sobbing, and she said, "You don't love me anymore." Then she screamed at him some more. Then there was more sobbing.

It went on for about an hour. There were sounds of dishes being smashed. By the time it was over I had retreated to my room for real and was trying to deny that anything important was happening.

Interlude, With Zipper

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

My Father went back to the Mountain in the first or second week of January, 1958. While he was gone my Mother took advantage of connections with other military families and American ex-patriots nearby so we could get around better, and so that I could be gotten out of her hair some of the time.

One of those ex-patriots was an old American man who spoke Chinese. I was turned over to this guy for hours on weekend afternoons. He lived nearby and agreed to meet me at the house and take me on long walks. He wore a threadbare old black suit and a black hat. I'll call him Mr. Dunn, he was thin as a rail. I'd guess he was in his 70s.

Mr. Dunn took me straight into the thick of the poor people's market near our house. He knew what was being sold at each stall and could answer questions about it. But he wouldn't buy anything except occasional fruit. When he did he haggled, and later told me, "If you don't argue the price down they'll just take advantage of you."

He took me further. The walks took us through many parks and a zoo. I think we walked several miles each time. There were street vendors and musicians. There were street magicians. I always dragged my feet as we passed by these, and Mr. Dunn always said, "They're just trying to get our money."

One such encounter made a lasting impression. A street vendor was selling glass prisms. He held one to my eyes so I could see the colors. I wanted one, but Mr. Dunn said no. The price was probably pennies American.

Well, it was his money, but I had to wonder why I was being shown all this if the purpose was just to walk on by.

I fared better at home when my Mother arranged for an older boy to come over to keep me company. He was about 11 years old, so 3 years older and not someone who'd usually want to spend time with me. He was there, if I remember right, because his parents made him come. It was the Christian thing to do. At first he resented it. But he started to enjoy his visits when he found out I liked math. It was something we had in common. He gladly tutored me.

I was supposed to be learning long division in school, but, as often happened, the technique was taught as a mechanical procedure. When I asked my friend to teach me long division, he began the same way. I told him I didn't want to know how to do it, I wanted to know why you did it that way. That led to a wonderful afternoon, in which the two of us worked out the reasons together.

My Father's extended stay at the Mountain was set to end on a Friday in February that happened to be both my Mother's birthday and their 10th anniversary.

As the date approached, my Mother began to lay plans for his return. I was supposed to eat early, before he arrived that afternoon. She was going to set up a romantic candlelight dinner, just for the two of them. She would be wearing her sexiest dress. I would have to greet my Father at the door, and tell him how much I missed him. But then, I was supposed to excuse myself and go to my bedroom and stay there no matter what I heard.

It was clear to me that my Mother was desperate. There was trouble in the marriage. Putting on this special dinner and wearing this dress and keeping me out of the way was going to make everything better.

Dad was supposed to arrive around 6 PM. My Mother worked on the dinner and getting dressed and made up just right the entire afternoon. I helped when I could. I remember standing on a chair to zip her into her man-killer dress. I liked zipping. The zipper is a really cool invention.

The USO Show, Part I

My Father came back to Taipei to take us to the Mountain for a USO show. Early in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday we set off. My Mother and I rode in the back seat of an Army staff car, while Dad rode in front with the driver.

It was my first trip outside of the city and the first hour or so was wonderful. I'd never seen anything like the Taiwan countryside. I still see images of it in my dreams. It wasn't only beautiful, it was strangely beautiful. One of the scenes that had a huge impact on me was the sight of a cliff, not far from Taipei, in which there were built homes. All you saw of the homes were massive doors reinforced crossing iron bars and barred windows. I was impressed by the adaption to the terrain.

It wasn't all cliffs and hills and mountains. We traveled for some time from town to town through a plain. The towns were generally dusty, impoverished, and bleak, but they seemed to me to be places that the people living there must care about.

As we reached hills the driver pulled the car over, and my Mother and I were blindfolded. We remained blindfolded for what seemed like an hour. The idea was that we wouldn't be able to tell the spies who captured us how to get to the Mountain base.

Finally we were allowed to see again. By then we were into mountains. There were miles and miles of winding roads past of terraced rice paddies. Then the roads snaked higher into rocky cliffs and the occasional temple or isolated dwelling that looked carved out of rock.

After those scenes the actual mountain base that my Father worked at was a let-down. When we got there we were on the top of a mountain alright, but it was an undramatic rounded mountain, so rounded that the top was almost flat. Flat enough that it had a small airfield. I had imagined pinnacles, or at least precipitous drops from an edge. There was just a gentle slope falling away from the top.

We got there early enough that we had a few hours to kill before the show. My Father took me to the quonset hut where he worked at a desk and introduced me to his staff.

There was a bookshelf near the entrance to his office that was filled from top to bottom with Ace Doubles. It was the science-fiction stash of one of Dad's subordinates. I had not been introduced to written science fiction up to this time. I poured over the covers oohing and ahhing over bug-eyed monsters abducting leggy women while being zapped by guys in sleek spacesuits. Even after I was told that there were never half naked women in the stories, I was still sure I wanted to check them out. It was another way science hooked me.

Playground-Citizen Wesley

Soon after we moved in to the garage in Seattle my Father came back from a day at Fort Lewis to tell us his orders. He would be sent overseas, to Taiwan, AKA Formosa, Nationalist China, The Republic of China. He would administer some Army program there. He wouldn't say what the program would involve, except to say he didn't expect war to break out at any time, and that probably he would only be gone for 6 to 8 months.

That seemed like a long time to me and the thought of not seeing him for so long stirred anxiety in me without my knowing why. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized that as ineffective as my Father had been at protecting me from my Mother, I persisted in feeling that he was a protector, simply because he was my Father. It was an irrational hope that, once believed, rationally might be lost.

The anxiety amplified my native caution. I became fearful of anything uncertain. I was already religiously skeptical. Now I began to question everything. I questioned gravity, 2 + 2 = 4, the dark of night, and every single word my teacher said.

A milepost in technology occurred. Sputnik was launched into orbit on Oct 4, 1957. We watched what we all were told at the time was the flashing satellite orbiting over Seattle that evening. Recently I read that it was actually the final booster stage. The papers carrying the news dredged up a 1920 New York Times editorial that scoffed at Robert Goddard's dream of sending rockets into space, saying Goddard ""does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react." The newspapers had fun with this new and most dramatic proof that the editors of the New York Times had been full of it. The lesson I took from it was, everything has to be tested and proved. Nothing can be taken for granted.

My Father thought my Mother and I would remain in Seattle the whole time he was in Taiwan. But a week or two before he left for the Far East in mid-October he learned that the Army would send us a month later on a slow boat to [Nationalist] China.

I was taken to Fort Lewis and given half a dozen vaccinations for diseases I never heard of.

I don't recall any more than the low level sexual abuse that month, just fondling every few days. Maybe my Mother was too preoccupied with thoughts of the overseas adventure ahead.

While we waited for our turn to cross the ocean, Halloween happened, and I had a Seattle-style trauma.

Seattle was much less uptight in 1957 than it is today, fifty years later. But there were signs of things to come. One of the signs was a city-wide ban on children's masks at Halloween. It had been decided that masks with eye-holes obstructed vision too much. Children could be hit with cars.

OK, so I would not wear my cool Zorro costume on the sidewalks. I would only wear it on the school grounds, WHERE THERE ARE NO CARS, during the MANDATORY (for the sake of our "HEALTHY SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT") school Halloween march.

Well, guess what the teachers said? The LAW is the LAW. No masks. But it's a Zorro costume, there has to be a mask. "No problem, the march isn't for a couple of hours, WE'LL MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY NEW COSTUME THAT WILL BE LEGAL AND YOU'LL LOVE IT."

They made me a slapped-together paper and cloth clown costume. They wouldn't stop at that, they made me submit to grease-paint. "You'll see, it will be great!"

It was horrible. I was transformed against my will into a stupid clown. The other kids made cruel jokes about it throughout. At home it took two hours to wash the grease-paint off. Wherever it had been my skin was red and sore for days. Turned out I was allergic to grease-paint. All to avoid getting hit by non-existent cars. Thank you uptight, we-know-best-what's-good-for-you-Seattle!

And then, a couple of weeks later, my Mother and I were riding a train to San Francisco where we would catch a Merchant Marine ship to the Orient.

Before we left I got a report card with no grades. It was called a "progress report". I was in a fucking grade-free experimental "progressive" program, it so happened. Since I'd only attended 9 weeks of school the only content of the report was the following paragraph:

"Wesley is a conscientious student, does his best at all times. He is a shy child, but is much more willing to participate in games, etc., than he was the first of the year. He reads with the high group, with good understanding of subject matter. His written work is neatly done. Wesley is a fine citizen on the playground, well liked by his classmates. We will all miss him."

Isn't it wonderful that just then, in those two months of 3rd grade I happened to start getting over my shyness?

Every damn school I went to I was "shy" when I got there, and I "started to get over it" after two or three months of brilliant teaching designed to foster good healthy extroversion.

Total crock.

Self-Identity

[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 Fall of 1957, after my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My new school was Van Asselt Elementary at Beacon and Myrtle. It's almost virtually unchanged from 1957. What's more, I was assigned to a class that met in the old building, which was the school building my Father attended when he was 8. What's still more than that, my teacher was one of his former elementary school teachers.

[Above: Van Asselt today, showing the 3-story old building that was the school when my Father attended. The long low building in front and to the right of that is a "modern" 1-story addition that was present in 1957. The other smaller structures are portables. We had those in '57 too. The only significant changes from the 50s are the trees in the foreground, part of the beautification of Beacon Avenue. Interesting that from the 20s to the 50s, all the change was to expand the school, while from the 50s to the next millennium, all the change was to pretty up the road passing it by.]

Army Brats regularly have the problem of having to reprove themselves over and over again at each new school and in each new neighborhood. But you usually don't have to prove yourself to people who have expectations based on who your parents are. This was a weird situation.

This is how I wrote about it a few years ago for a writing exercise. (I've brought up this incident before in these memoirs in A Tale of Two Parents I.)

Self-Identity

My father was stationed in Korea at the start of hostilities. He was part of an Army Intelligence team assigned to break the Chinese code. He was shot at, once. The sniper missed his heart but nailed his soul. When my father returned on my first birthday he took it out on me. I'd be dead today, except for the intercession of the memory of a certain red bird, which prompted a response from me that saved my life.

Speaking of red birds, I'm reminded of something that happened in the third grade.

The first day of class our teacher, Mrs. Haugen, took note of my name and asked if I was any relation to John Wesley Browning, who had been one of her students more than thirty years earlier. I said yes he's my father and then she went on and on and on in class about what a great student he had been and how if I was even half as bright as him I might be the best student in the class.

This was not complete hyperbole since my father got nothing but A's in all his classes in all his years of school from 1st grade through 12th; I know because I've seen the plaque the Seattle School District gave him in commemoration of the achievement. But my own school records showed C's and D's from the first two grades so there was no chance that I was going to get a plaque like that. And anyway I had already decided that I didn't want to be just like my father. There were things about him I didn't care for and if he got that way by being a perfect student then maybe being a perfect student wasn't worth it. So all in all I didn't appreciate the comparison, and in hindsight I think it might have shown.

A few days later Mrs. Haugen had given us all a reading test and based on the scores she assigned us new seats. She put the high scorers in the file furthest right, the next highest in the next file over, and so on. Then she told us that according to which file we were seated in we were Bluebirds, Robins, Finches, Sparrows, etc. As I had gotten one of the highest scores I was therefore going to be a Bluebird.

That was too much for me. I said, "I don't WANT to be a Bluebird!"

She laughed and said, "But you ARE a Bluebird. Bluebirds are the best and your score was ..."

"I don't care. I don't want to be a Bluebird, I want to be a Redbird."

"Well, we don't have Redbirds, the closest we have are Robins and you wouldn't want to be a Robin, Robins don't read as well as you do."

"I'd rather be a Robin than a Bluebird, at least they're a little bit red."

All through this the class had been laughing (except for the Robins, of course) and Mrs. Haugen had been grinning like I was playing a cute joke on her, but I meant it. If I was going to be a bird I was going to be a red one and that was that.

Then with mock seriousness she said, "You can be a Robin if you want but that means you'll have to sit with the other Robins and people won't know what a good reader you really are."

So I said OK and got up and picked up my books to move to the Robin's file and now everybody got quiet because it wasn't funny anymore.

Mrs. Haugen told me to sit back down where I was and there was a long silence, as she just stared at me as if she was trying to decide whether or not to call for the men in the white coats. But finally she smiled again and announced, "All-RIGHT class, we have Sparrows over here, and Finches in this file, ..., and over here on my left we have five Bluebirds and one VERY unique, STRONG-HEADED, Redbird."

Agony, Ecstasy, & Bears

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in 1957 after my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]


[Above: Your government doesn't want you to encourage this sort of behavior.]

By now I'd been driven back and forth across the country four times, three that I could remember. This trip, east to west, was to take a mostly northerly route, since we were traveling in late July and early August.

A side effect of the constant sexual abuse made the first half of the trip hideous. By now I had a phobia of detectable bowel movements. I needed to do my business stealthily. But how do you do it stealthily in a cheap motel with flimsy walls and both parents in the only other room?

In one week I got backed up like Kennedy International Thanksgiving Eve. My Mother noticed the lack of BM activity (being very alert to such things) and was starting to talk about trying to remember where in all our bags she had packed the enema apparatus.

At the same time, she let up on the sexual abuse, no doubt for the same reason I let up on the bowel movements. She didn't want anything she did to be heard. It spoiled her fun to keep me quiet during a rape. The whole point is to force a reaction. The more extreme the reaction, the more power the rapist feels he/she has. If she couldn't make me cry or scream for fear that my Father would intervene, why bother?

It was a full ten days before we arrived at Guy & Zenobia's house in Springfield. As usual we were put up there.

You may remember that Zenobia was my Mother's best friend and Guy and Zenobia were so attached to us I called them Uncle and Aunt. Their house was big enough that I could feel I had enough privacy, if only I wasn't now so backed up that I was almost terminally constipated.

Fortunately we were there long enough for me to work it out myself without having to beg for an artificial assist. Three days after our arrival I had two weeks worth of bowel movement. I felt lighter by the equivalent of a bowling ball.

The rest of the trip veered north to take us through the South Dakota Badlands, Wyoming, Yellowstone, and Idaho. I still had the BM problem but was saved again at Yellowstone when we rented a cabin with a detached outhouse.

My first memorable trip east to west 2 years earlier had made me aware of the beauty of the Southwest and exposed me to Navajo and Hopi art. This trip I fell in love with the Western Plains and the Rockies.

At Yellowstone we were surrounded by bears all the time. Back then the rangers went to much less trouble than they do now to keep people from feeding the bears. Consequently bears swarmed all the cars lined up at the entrances. You had to drive through at a stop and go crawl as cars in front of you stopped to toss food out to attract bears. Everybody had to have a picture of a bear leaning over their car, begging for more. It was both disgusting and thrilling. Too bad it was wrong.

On The Road Again

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during June and July 1957 around my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Just as school ended I found out that I would be leaving Fort Devens. My Father had orders to report to Fort Lewis to prepare for an overseas assignment. We didn't know what the overseas assignment would be. If my Father knew he wouldn't tell my Mother or me. He was very good at keeping secrets secret, even from family.

I assumed at the time that we would just pile in the car the next day and go, but it turns out that life is full of waiting and preparing and other grownup crap. For one thing we had to line up storage for most of the furniture, because we weren't going to have any place to put it where we were going.

We got a "new" car. It was a used Pontiac station wagon with the classic trim. It may not be PC to say it, but I loved having Mr. Pontiac on the hood pointing our way with his face. My Father thought a station wagon made more sense for hauling a lot of junk across country.

I spent a lot of time alone that summer. The taunting had driven me to isolation, which wasn't a bad place for me to be. There was definitely some ongoing sexual abuse at the time but nothing that stands out as singularly traumatic. That may sound strange but that's the way it can be. Sometimes sexual abuse is like getting hit with a sledge hammer, full of violence and trauma, and other times it's more like a steady dripping poison that eats away at the nerves.

Two weeks before we were due to leave the weather took a turn toward hot and humid. It was the most horrible hot and humid I remember as a child, even worst than Hawaii's hot humid season. What made it worse was the mosquitos. Fort Devens neighbors several swamps and marshes. Mosquitoes were thick.

I remember a Wednesday noon vividly. It was just a day or two before our departure. The movers had come and loaded up everything that was going into storage so the house was almost bare. To escape the heat I sat on a bare floor wearing only shorts looking out a screen door. In spite of the screen there was a cloud of mosquitoes inside eating me alive.

I know it was Wednesday noon because the weekly air raid siren went off to remind me that the Soviets could bomb the US with nukes any time they wanted. I wondered what the point of the siren would be. Should we all run out in the streets and moon the approaching bombers?

I thought a good H-bomb would at least get rid of the mosquitoes. Might be worth it.

There was no going away party for me. The going away was the party.

Bar-bar-a

[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 summer of 1956, after 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.]

Late in the summer the people in the unit downstairs, whom I didn't care for, moved out, and were replaced by a new family that had a gorgeous redheaded daughter my age. Her name was Bar-bar-a, a name that trips off the tongue like a dachshund. What's a dachshund doing in my simile? I just remembered they had a dachshund.

The name Barbara, as you probably know already, comes from ancient Greek, meaning "speaker of a ridiculous language (i.e. almost any language other than Greek)." Barbara told me this herself. For some reason, I found her explanation of her name extremely hot. I devoted a lot of time to her, and to her dachshund, to learn more wonderful facts of any nature that she might know.

One of the things that she knew was how to whistle. I tried to learn how to whistle from her, but her instructions, "put your lips together and blow," didn't work for me. It was very frustrating. I wanted to whistle along with her. We would have that much in common. From that small start, who knows?

[Left: This picture of Lauren Bacall will have to do the work of a photo of Bar-bar-a.]

In desperation I asked my Mother to teach me to whistle. My Father was in the room at the time, and said, "What? You shouldn't need anyone teaching you how to whistle! You whistle great! You've been whistling since you were a baby!"

I said, "I don't know how to whistle. What gave you that idea?"

He said, "Don't give me that nonsense. You can whistle like a bird. I've heard you do it a million times!" He was starting to lose it.

My Mother jumped in and said, "Dear, don't you remember? The operation?"

"What about the operation? What does that have to do with it?"

"They got rid of the Hawaiian music, dear. Did you think that was all that would go away? He can't remember how to whistle."

My Father got a pained look on his face. Seeing that, my Mother laughed at him and said, "You always wanted him to be like you. Now he's like you. You can't be a musician because of what happened to you. Now you've made him just like you."

"Shut up! You agreed to it, too!"

"But I knew what I was agreeing to," she said.

Cigarette Torture

[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.

My First Phone Call

[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.]

My clever plan worked. I started writing about the very bad chain of events, and the sheer act of writing about it broke the stupidity-lock that was preventing me from recalling the timing of the events.

I forgot about Spring vacations. My 1st grade school broke for Spring vacation. The next event in the chain happened around the third week of March.

My Mother was being especially sadistic because I had demonstrated an ability to recall things that happened to me even before I was one year old. Rape/tortures increased in frequency and severity. I was ready to do something desperate to get out of the situation.

I got the idea to try and get help from Aunt Alta.

Looking back on my childhood I am often pleased at how stupid the ideas I had then were. It would really annoy me now were I to have had amazingly brilliant ideas all the time as a kid. No one wants to be one-upped by their own 6-year old self. I'm glad that I was so ignorant when I was 6. It's because of that I've been able to show so much improvement over time.

Not only did I not know Aunt Alta very well, having only met her a few times when she came to visit during holidays, but she was my Aunt because she was the sister of the woman abusing me. So she was emotionally involved, and altogether the wrong person to seek out if the goal was sanctuary. Of course, the goal WAS sanctuary. I was not looking for her to use her influence to change my Mother's behavior. A plan like that wouldn't have occurred to me at 6 going-on 7. I didn't get that sophisticated until I was 9 or 10.

To ask her for help was a trick, because we lived in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and she lived at the time in Washington, DC. Her phone number was in a flip-up record book on the table where the phone sat, but it wasn't a direct-dial number. Direct Distance Dialing, using area codes to call without the use of operators, began earlier than 1956, but people weren't using it much by then. If my parents knew the area code for Washington DC, they didn't bother with it, being satisfied to do things the way they always had. My Father actually would say Direct Dialing was "idiotic" -- there's no reason anyone should have to use numbers that long.

["1-206-725-5555" -- idiotic. "PA5-5555" -- silly. "Parkway 5, 5555" -- too many numbers. "Myrtle, could you connect me to Gertrude, please? You, know, Gertrude across the street from me? Thanks." -- genius.]

Fortunately my parents had taught me how to use a phone in case there was ever an emergency. There was one emergency number in those days. You dialed "0". An "operator" answered. She took care of it.

So one Saturday morning while my parents were out shopping I called the operator and told her I needed to talk to my Aunt Alta in Washington DC. It was my first phone call, ever.

I didn't know what a collect call was. I just gave the operator Alta's local number and said I wanted to talk to her. The operator asked how old I was, and I said 6 going-on 7. She said, "Do you have permission from your parents to make this call?" I said no. She said, "Well, then I shouldn't let you put the call through, until you get permission."

I wasn't prepared for that. I thought the operator was just supposed to put the call through. I thought phones were entirely a prepaid service. I didn't know each long distance call added to the bill. I broke down in tears and told her I couldn't get permission from my parents, that's why I had to make the call. I had to get away from my parents.

The operator said, "Why do you have to get away from your parents?" So I started to tell her. I told her my parents had wanted to kill me. I told her that my Mother had tried to smother me with a pillow two years earlier. The operator was concerned but said, "But that was a long time ago, right?" They're not hurting you now, are they?"

So I was forced to try to describe the recent abuse, which was mostly rape and verbal abuse.

No matter how severe verbal abuse is, no one thinks much of it until you act it out for them. Over the years I got really good at acting out my Father's verbal abuse, and I can now do it pretty well. When I do it now, it scares people, and they get it. But as a 6 year-old I didn't have the skill, the voice, and the sheer size to pull off an impression of my Father's abusive verbal attacks.

So that left the rapes. I was forced to find words to describe anal rape, over the phone, to a complete stranger, when the only vocabulary I had consisted of words that were forbidden to me.

As luck would have it the operator was well-suited for her line of work. She was a good listener. Through the tears and my casting around for safe words she finally said, "Oh my God, I'll put you through collect right away."

Alta was reached and she accepted the charges. Now that I was finally talking to her I had to do it all over again. I had to tell her what was wrong and why she should come and take me away from my parents. She wasn't a total stranger, but, really, I knew her mainly as the Aunt who gave me shirts five times a year. I thought she would help because she was said to be a "Good Christian."

[Left: I had seen the family album many times by then, and had often seen this picture of Alta holding me in 1949. She looks happy to have me.]

I went through pretty much the same ordeal I went through with the operator. Like the operator she wanted to discount old news. Maybe neither of them believed I could have reliable memories that old. So I had to describe the rapes. Alta wasn't as good a listener as the operator, and I ended up spelling it out more. I told her my Mother was feeling inside me and making me hurt.

Finally, she said she was planning to come to visit soon anyway, she could just move her trip up. She asked me if I could manage for the two weeks it would take her to get there. I said yes, and she said, "Then it's settled. I'll come in two weeks, and I'll take care of everything. You don't have to worry about a thing."

Yep, she'd take care of everything. I was pretty psyched. Everything was going to be Hunky-Frikkin'-Dory.

Of Teachers, Social Workers, Etc.

[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.]

When my parents got me to tell them that I wasn't eating my lunches because bullies were taking them away from me, the solution was for Dad to give me a talk about how I had to be a man and stand up to the bullies, and how when he did that when he was my age he smeared them all over the place, and that was the end of that.

I actually had enough faith in the godhood of my immediate paternal ancestor that I tried what he said try. The next time three bullies walked up to me at lunch and said I had to give my lunch to them, I said no. So they ganged up on me. A teacher broke it up. Incredibly, the fact that it was 3 on 1 meant nothing to the teacher. I got the line, "I don't care who started it." My parents were called again. The fact that the others were stealing my lunch meant nothing to the teachers. They said I should have handled it without fighting. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that teachers are a special class of human, one that never heard of truth or justice. I now know that they are not so special. For example, most social workers employed by social service agencies can also be so described.

The Swimming Lesson

I don't remember when my Father was promoted to Major, but I know it was while we lived on base at Fort Devens, and I know it happened before the end of summer 1955, because of the swimming class incident.

Periodically I would try to find ways to patch things up with my Father. The usual plan was to ask that he teach me something I knew he wanted me to know anyway. I knew he wanted me to be able to swim, so I asked him to teach me. Actually I didn't ask him directly, but I asked my Mother to pass the request along.

In August 1955 my parents told me to get in the car and my Father said, "We're going to teach you how to swim." He said it just like that. WE will teach you. Not somebody will teach you.

They drove me to a small lake nearby called Robbins Pond. We could have walked there in fifteen minutes. The lake was/is shaped roughly like a strawberry viewed on its side and about 1000 feet across the long way. At the big end of the strawberry there were facilities for swimmers, including a bathhouse, and a diving platform. I knew I was being screwed again when we drove up and I saw a couple dozen other boys within two or three years of my age.

I was taken into the bathhouse and changed into swimming trunks I didn't know I had. There had been some real planning behind this operation. Then I was taken out and handed over to Private so-and-so, who dutifully saluted my Father, who had made a point of being in uniform so the kid would know he was responsible for a Major's son. The Private didn't really seem to care, the salute was just a formality.

Ever since my Mother had held my head under the faucet back in Schofield Barracks (The Screaming) I had a fear of submersion. I was terrified of drowning. So the only way I could be motivated to put that fear aside and ask to be taught to swim was with the understanding that it would help me patch things up with my Father. If that wasn't going to happen, suddenly there was no motivation. All I had left was panic, with no reward for getting through it.

But my parents drove off and left me there, so it looked like there was no way out.

The instruction began with "getting us used to the water." Our instructor had all but one of the kids stand in shallow water up to the tops of their feet. Then the remaining boy crawled from behind through the others' legs and took a place at the front, and the boy that was last crawled through to the front, and so on. When everyone had crawled through, the whole line was moved to deeper water, so the water was now to everyone's knees.

I made it through those rounds by more or less "cheating." I wouldn't have called it that. I would have called it "not drowning." But the Private said it was cheating to hold my head out of the water the whole time. I was supposed to get my face in it. That was the point of the exercise. I thought he was supposed to help me with that, instead of just order me to do it, so i could find out I couldn't.

The third round he had everybody stand in waist deep water and front to back so in order to pass between all the legs it was necessary to stay under the entire way. I refused.

The Private ordered me to do it. I said no. I wasn't putting my head in the water. I could drown. Most of the other kids laughed at me, although a few tried to help by offering advice. "Pinch your nose." "Dunk your head quick the first time, then do it longer." The Private just got pissed. He probably was thinking, "Oh great, the one kid I can't teach and it has to be an arrogant Major's brat." He tried shouting at me.

One really great thing about having abusive parents is it really prepares you for abusive strangers. Some stranger starts screaming at you, and you think, what's this bonehead going to do to me my own parents haven't already done? I may have even laughed at the poor guy.

Finally he seemed to give up. The class continued without me. I sat it out on the beach thinking it was all over except for the ride home in disgrace.

Then the Private announced that it was time for the final exam of the day. This first of three or four classes was to end with a test of what we had learned, namely to confidently hold our heads under water for as long as we were told. I was made to line up with everyone else in waist deep water and he tested each of us one by one. When it was my turn he ordered me to put my head under. I refused. He ordered me again. I started to say no again, but as I was opening my mouth to say it, he grabbed my head and shoved me under. I took water in immediately because my mouth had been open.

I hadn't had a chance to take a breath. I struggled against him, but what could I do. I was six, he was a full grown man, and an athlete.

Just when i thought I couldn't hold my breath anymore, he raised my head up. As I gasped for breath he screamed something at me. Something like, "NOW YOU'RE GOING TO DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD!"

Then he shoved me back in, again as my mouth was open, trying to get air as fast as I could.

This time he held me down so long I couldn't hold my breath anymore. I released air and started swallowing water.

When he let me up the next time I twisted away from him and waded to the shore, where I fell on my knees and vomited up water.

That was the scene when my parents drove up. The Private couldn't have been in more trouble.

After that there was no more talk about me wanting to learn how to swim. I eventually overcame the phobia. I succeeded in holding my own head under water at age 21 and thereafter, without further assistance; thank everyone for all your patience.

Road Trip I

The Summer of 1955 was fairly eventful. The first big event was a trip by car across the country to Seattle and back. My father somehow arranged a month's vacation to start mid-June, right after Kindergarten ended. The four of us, my parents, Koko, and I, went in a new family car, a two-door dark blue DeSoto.

One item that was carried unpacked, accompanying me and Koko in the back, was a jigsaw puzzle map of the United States. My parents told me the itinerary. West to Springfield, Illinois, as fast as possible on major highways and turnpikes. Then a more leisurely pace, taking Route 66 to California and the West Coast highway north. Route 66 would pass through my mother's home town Strafford, and then take us into Springfield, Missouri, where we would visit my Mother's best friend Zenobia, and her husband Guy.


I set up the jigsaw puzzle map with all the states in except the ones we would pass through. Then as we entered each new state, I inserted that state's piece. That made it easy to fix in my mind where we'd been along the way.

On the fast leg of the trip there was little to see except when we pulled into a town to get gas. I never smelled so much gasoline and creosote as I did on that trip. It seemed like the whole country reeked of it. In those days it was more common to use creosote laden logs rather than concrete to edge parking lots. Gas was so cheap and people thought so little of the hazard its fumes posed that no one was careful not to spill it at the pump. And of course it was all full service so the spilled gas wasn't paid for by the guy who spilled it. To this day whenever I smell gas or creosote I think of that trip.

Speaking of noxious fumes, the most vivid single memory I have before we reached St. Louis was of a tire fire a few hundred yards from the highway near Akron. It made me wonder if Akron was named to sound like acrid.

I also remember several stops at Howard Johnson's. I was a finicky eater, usually refusing to eat anything at a restaurant but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then, in a Howard Johnson's, they got me to try the Howard Johnson's specialty, the breaded fried clams. I loved them. So my parents would stop at Howard Johnson's wherever they could.

I learned to sit directly behind my Father. If I sat behind my Mother he would look over his shoulder occasionally at me and if I was doing anything at all besides nothing he would yell, "What's going on back there? What are you doing?" If I sat behind him he would have to take my Mother's word for it that I wasn't getting into trouble.

We stayed with Guy and Zenobia for a couple of days. They were a wonderful pair.

He had been in the Navy when they married, probably right after WWII. So they'd been married close to ten years by then. Guy became an engineer for International Harvester. They'd tried to have children and failed for so long they'd given up. So now they had a clever Border Collie for a son.

They were fun loving but never mean-spirited. Zenobia wasn't interested in glamor the way my Mother was. They both had insatiable curiosities which showed in the fact that they had a bedroom-size room in the house devoted to nothing else but storing their back issues of National Geographic.

I started calling them Aunt Zenobia and Uncle Guy on this visit, and continued to think of them as family as long as they lived.

Whenever I've found good people like them, who can live so happily and gracefully, I've tried to figure out how they do it. In the case of Guy and Zenobia I'd credit wisdom, intelligence, humility, and each other.

[Above right: My Mother and Zenobia together in Missouri, in an undated photo.]

Abuse Goes On

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened early 1955 and on, when I was 5. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Whenever we moved my Mother would ease up on the sexual molestation. I never understood it when I was a child, but I have a theory now. I think that it was a combination of two things. The move itself would be a distraction. Also, the novel surroundings made for better sex with my Father, so she didn't think of using me.

When the novelty wore off at Fort Devens she began something new, the nocturnal visit. I've alluded to it already. My Father would begin drinking as soon as he got home. By the time dinner was ready he was screaming at people who weren't in the room. Anyone at work who offended him in any slight way would be the subject of a screeching tirade.

Dinners were therefore unbearable.

But I'll talk about that more later. The point is, by my 7 PM bedtime, Dad would often already be too drunk to do anything but scream. I would go to bed, and lie awake for hours hearing the yelling. Finally I'd hear sounds from the hall that told me it was over. My Father would stagger to bed, colliding with the walls. I'd hear my Mother undressing him, to occasional giggles. I'd hear her talk seductively to him. I'd hear him start snoring.

Soon after the snoring started, not every night, but maybe twice a week, my Mother would walk into my bedroom. When the moon was out I could see her and see that she was naked. Without a word she'd climb into bed and under the covers with me. If I said anything she'd put a hand over my mouth and shush me. She'd turn me so I was lying on my side with my back to her, and she'd reach around me, pull down my pajama bottoms and fondle my genitals.

When that would finally elicit the kind of sexual response she wanted, she raped me anally with one hand and masturbated with the other.

By the time she was done I would usually be crying, and she would get up and say, "Oh stop it, I didn't hurt you one bit." Then she would say, "If you don't stop right now, I'll give you something to really cry about."

The World Turns, Bites

Years after the fact my Mother told me that I missed almost half of Kindergarten due to childhood diseases. I remember being sick frequently but have no independent sense of how often. What I clearly remember is that none of it bothered me until the time I got mumps.

I remember having the measles. No problem. The doctor came with his black bag. The worst part of it was the stick in my mouth. I'd spend some time being nauseous, some time counting bumps, some time drawing, some time being delirious with fever, and then it was over. At no time would I feel like I was suffering. The disease wasn't an alien force invading my body. I didn't feel under attack. There was no sense of injustice.

It was still like that when I got the mumps on one side. I coasted through that. I also coasted through the chickenpox that I came down with the same day the mumps ended.

Then, I came down with mumps on the other side, the same day the chickenpox ended. That did it. Now, it was personal. The germs hated me. I broke down. Forever after, diseases were an assault. I've never been able to take them easy since.

I think it was soon after that triple whammy finally ended, in the late Spring of 1955, that there was a big ASA party out at a lake on base.

Mirror Lake was about fifty acres. An access road led to a bathing beach with restrooms, picnic tables, and BBQ grills. For the party a PA system was set up. Actually, anytime the ASA held an official party there was a PA system. The ASA did electronic surveillance. They were into it. They had the wires, they had the microphones, they could buy cheap speakers.

Boy, were they cheap. It was a little like listening to arrivals announced in a New York subway hub.

Nevertheless a lot of attention was paid to the speakers because when there weren't announcements pertinent to the party ("Three-legged races are about to start! Choose your partners!") they patched in a radio broadcast of a Boston Red Sox game.

I was intrigued by all the interest people had in it. My Father had watched some games on TV with interest, but I didn't know baseball was so popular. I hadn't assumed that my Father's interests matched those of the general public.

My Father noticed how intrigued I was. So he tried to make points with me by promising to take me to a game. The way he said it, "We'll go and watch the Red Sox win a game!"

The party started in the morning and lasted until dusk. My parents let me run and play in the shallow water for several hours without sun protection. Around 4 in the afternoon I started to burn. Within an hour I was in agony. My entire body from the waist up was on fire. It was a new way for nature to attack me.

The next two days half my skin peeled off. At one point a sheet of about a square foot of burnt skin came off my back all at once.

At least, through it all, I could look forward to that Red Sox game I was going to with my Dad. I didn't blame either him or my Mother for the burning, I blamed the sun and the Universe apart from us. That was the injustice. What had I done to hurt the Universe?

In retrospect it's surprising that the trip to Fenway Park ever happened. My Father tried to make points with me by promising to do other things later, and then never followed through. This, the baseball game promise, was an exception.

My Father and I went alone. Mother stayed home. That was awkward. I was no longer accustomed to speaking directly with him.


The tickets turned out to be so far up in the stands the diamond looked like the size of a postage stamp held a foot from my face. To see it at all I had to crane my neck from one side to the other, because a pillar blocked my view. I had to stand in my seat to look over people in front of me, a trick that didn't work any time they also stood, like whenever something was happening. I never saw a ball or a bat. The players looked like ants running around for no evident reason. The proof that anything ever happened was in the cheers of the crowd that was nearer who could see something, and announcements over the PA system. The announcements meant little, since no one, least of all my Father, had seen a need to explain the rules or the terminology to me. I was supposed to have been born with it wired into my neurons, or to have learned it in a Kindergarten that had no yard.

The high point of the game was getting a hot dog.

The Red Sox lost. Two weeks of being told, "We're going to see the Red Sox win a game" ended with, "Oh well. Next time will be better! I promise!"

There never was a next time. I refused to go again. To this day, I've never seen another baseball game. I can't bear the thought of spending three hours being reminded that all my Father's best efforts to bond with me could be summed up by his pointless BS, "We're going to go watch the Red Sox win a game!"

Adultery

One of those parties for Dad's career happened early on in 1955. There was top brass present, so the party stayed in the formal living room, and didn't migrate to the Sun Porch. The Sun porch was reserved for casual affairs.

I had trouble sleeping because of the noise.

OK, it wasn't only the noise. I hadn't mentioned it before, because it was such a minor thing, but I have to bring it up now. My parents put a weight driven clock in my room with an owl face that had eyes that looked right and left with each second.

I can't begin to describe how freaky that clock was. I've looked all over the place for a picture that comes close to depicting the horror of it, but found nothing that even approximates it. You're lying in bed and you hear tock tock tock tock tock tock tock tock tock and you look up tock tock tock tock and you see tock tock two eyes tock tock looking tock right looking tock left looking tock right looking tock left looking tock right looking tock left looking tock right looking tock left AND IT'S TOO FREAKY FOR WORDS IN ANY LANGUAGE. I begged them to get it out of my room and they laughed at how cute I was.

So I got up and got out of that room and away from the horrid freaky clock, and went in to the living room looking for someone who would console me.

No one was conscious. There were army officers all over the place, passed out. Including my Father. But my Mother was not there. If she had been, I probably would have shook her to wake her up, because when it came to Mom I could be a hard ass. Being raped regularly by someone can do that to you. Oh, she wants to sleep, does she? Well, she screws me, I'm going to screw her.

But she wasn't there. Where could she be? I went back into the hall, and put my ear up to the door of the master bedroom. There was laughing. There was giggling. It was my Mother's voice and a man's voice, and the man was not my Father. And then there was the pounding and the moaning that I recognized as the sound that meant "Do not open this door or you will get the beating of your life."

Stupid stupid owl clock.