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.

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.

The Going Away Party

In spite of having the hots for a couple of dozen girls and several age-inappropriate women, I still kept myself chaste for my wife-to-be Kathy. We saw each other frequently while I was in first grade, not so often in second, but maybe every other week. Then there was a month or so I didn't get a chance to see her, and my parents kept saying it will be soon.

When "soon" finally happened, I was told we were on our way to Kathy's going away party. Her Father was retiring from the Army and they would be leaving Fort Devens for good.

This was an outcome I was totally unprepared for. I was already more than 7 years into being an army brat, but the rootlessness of it hadn't really sunk in, because we'd only had the one major move from Hawaii to Massachusetts. The move from the House in Shirley onto base didn't count, because Devens was where the friends were in either case. In spite of countless kids coming and going at school, it never occurred to me that Kathy or I would be one of the ones going. Or that we wouldn't be going at the same time, or in the same direction. Kathy was going to Alaska, for freak's sake. Alaska! How would I get to Alaska?

But the going away thing was a PARTY. Not a funeral. Kathy was happy to be having a party, and who was I to spoil it by crying over the fact that I might never see her again? So I pretended I was OK.

I didn't have much choice anyway, because for almost the entire party I had no opportunity to be alone with her anyway. There were several families there and close to twenty kids, most of whom I didn't know. And there were party games.

I don't remember ever having had to participate in party games before. Certainly not these kind of party games. The games I was expected to play all triggered what i now recognize as PTSD symptoms, the earliest I can recall.

First, there was dunking for apples. This was out of the question. I simply could not get my head into that water. Some kids tried to pull me to the tub. I screamed as if I was being murdered, or as if my Mother were holding my face under a faucet.

Then there was Spin the bottle. The version we played involved going into a closet to kiss or whatever. When the bottle pointed at me I had a full blown panic attack. I couldn't face a closet either.

But the worst was Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Donkey. I got as far as letting them put the blindfold on and spinning me around. I could deal with wandering around the room with the tail in my hand while kids laughed at me when I went the wrong way. But when I finally found the wall, the idea that I was supposed to pin the tail to the donkey's butt suddenly took on a significance it wasn't supposed to have, and I burst out into tears.

My Mother was watching. When I took the blindfold off I saw her with a smirk on her face. She knew what the problem was. She thought it was funny.

Toward the end of the party I finally got about ten minutes alone with Kathy, and got to tell her I wished I could go with her. Then we left, and I never saw her again.

Escape Attempt

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.

I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.

Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.

So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.

As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.

I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.

But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.

I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"

So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.

I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.

Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.

Soldier Like Me

[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 I opened my eyes again I found myself lying in a bed with a tubes stuck in me. I thought I was under attack again. I screamed and lurched up and yanked the IV out. A nurse ran over and held me down, while another one gave me a shot. Probably a sedative.

The next time I woke up a doctor was looming over me telling me everything was going to be alright and asking me to please leave the IV and catheter in place, as I'd need them for a while.

He told me I was in the Fort Devens Infirmary. He asked me how I got there. I thought that was a stupid question. "I don't know, maybe the MPs carried me."

He said, "No, I mean, what happened that got you beat up? Who did this to you?"

I described Scarface to him. I told him how sorry I was that I hit him but he made me mad when he hit me with the rock. The doctor asked me where I hit him and I told him I got him in the nose.

At that he smiled and congratulated me! He told me Scarface was in fact in a bed at the opposite end of the same children's ward recovering from his broken nose. "We've been hoping for something like this. We believed he has sent dozens of patients to us, but we never had proof it was him, because the victims were all afraid to tell us who did it."

I got the damage assessment. A broken rib, a punctured stomach (hence the vomiting of blood), a sprained right wrist, which I got when I punched Scarface, and my skull had been fractured, again. I had been lying unconscious in the hospital bed for 3 days.

The doctor couldn't believe it at first when I told him where the fight had taken place. It was too far from the gate where I had collapsed. I had to explain to him how I had to make that march to seal the truce which my winning earned me. It took a while for the doctor to grasp what I was telling him.

When it finally sank in, he was simultaneously in awe and horrified. "If the MPs had found you a minute later you probably would have died from blood loss. You should have come straight here." He pointed out that the infirmary was on the way. I kept saying the peace was more important, and he said, "Well see."

But when my parents came to see me a little later the doctor was beaming about it. He told them that I may have single-handedly brought an end to the turf battles in the area. He made it sound like I had freed Paris.

My Father was happier with me than he had been in years. He told me I'd make a good soldier. I said maybe that would be what I would do when I grew up. He said, "Sure, you can be a soldier just like me."

When I heard the words, "just like me" I had a flash-back to my first birthday, and my Father coming home from Korea to throw me head-first to the sidewalk and drive over me. I burst into tears, shouting, "No, no, no,..." over and over again.

My Father said to my Mother, "What did I say wrong now?"

She said, "You should know -- look what kind of soldier you've been. Don't you remember? He does. He doesn't want to be that kind of soldier."

My Father ordered her to shut up. They began sniping at each other. The nurses had them leave so I could rest.

Fighting For Peace

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I didn't want to lead the peace party to the Puerto Rican neighborhood. I wanted someone else to do it. I found out very fast, like within half an hour, that wouldn't work. As I went about trying to persuade different groups of kids that they should join in the cause I was told that they wouldn't do it unless I was the leader, and then they wouldn't do it unless I beat their little group's leader in a fair fight.

I should explain that a little better. All over the Anglo neighborhoods of Fort Devens the kids formed small groups. You couldn't really call them gangs. Packs might be a better description. Each pack had 5 to 10 kids and they all had a clear leader. And as I tried to draw each such pack into the truce plan, I was told by each they would join if and only if I fought their leader and won.

This was the most insane, crazy, stupid, idiotic crap I'd ever heard from anyone outside of my own insane parents. I wanted to lead a peace army. To get followers I had to fight people? Stupid.

I pointed out to these morons that I was not yet 7 and a lot of these leaders were between 9 and 11. They said if I didn't beat them in a fair fight they wouldn't join. I said how could it be fair, if I'm up against someone 4 years older and almost twice as big? They said, well..., we'll let you pick the rules of the fight.

So I said, OK, clean wrestling, no punching. And that's what I did. I went from one pack to another, drawing each into my cause, by defeating leader after leader in wrestling matches. Altogether I fought enough leaders successfully that I gathered up about 55 followers. That means I probably had to win about 7 or 8 of these wrestling matches. I remember one in particular was won against a big 11 year-old. I'll call him Jim. Jim became my second in command.

Jim tried to analyze my ability to win all those wrestling matches. He noticed that I would start each match as if I was right-handed, and then surprise my opponent with ambidexterity.

In fact, I was ambidextrous. Ordinarily I divided tasks up by hand. I used my right to draw and to use scissors; I used my left hand to write and keep time with songs. But in the excitement of the fights and with both Alex (who preferred the left) and Kona (who preferred the right) active and alert, the two could be integrated and at the same time independent. My opponents probably felt like they were wrestling two of me.

But I thought I had another good explanation. I told Jim that because the cause was peace, God was on my side. Jim repeated the view, already stated many times, that I was crazy.

I was crazy, but after two hours and 7 or 8 wrestling matches I had a peace army of 55 kids aged 6 to 11, and all but one was marching with me to the Puerto Rican neighborhood to offer terms of truce. The other one was already hurrying on ahead to take the news of our march to the Puerto Ricans in advance. He'd been sent half an hour earlier, so they they could know we were coming and could meet us on the boundary of their territory with an equivalent group of their own.

There was no point, I thought, in negotiating with just the first stray Puerto Rican we might encounter. We needed to talk to as many as possible. The idea was to negotiate a truce with all of them.

In hindsight that may have been a poor decision on my part.

The march took about 40 minutes. It ended near the Devens sports arena, not far from the housing area where most of the Puerto Ricans lived. Their "equivalent group" had 75 members. We were outnumbered by 20.

Fort Devens Messiah

I said my Mother tortured me by enema for an hour and a half on a Saturday. I don't really know. It's my best guess. So I don't really know if the events of the next day happened on a Sunday. I'm not even sure it happened in the Spring of 1956.

On the other hand, my memory of the events of that alleged Sunday are very, very, clear. For four or five hours, I became a messiah, a warrior of peace, sent from God.

I woke up that morning calm and whole. Alex, AKA Alaka'i, He Who Points The Way, was joined with Kona, The Calm Side, within me. I was a centaur. For this I could thank my Mother and the previous night's torture.

It was, coincidentally, a very good day. The sky was clear. It was warm. It was the first day in months that could be described as having short-sleeves weather.

Consequently, there were lots of children outside, playing in the green marching fields and wide lawns of Fort Devens. I was out among them by 9 or 10 that morning.

Because there were so many kids I'd never seen before that day, I made a few new friends before the news arrived. The news: someone came running up to tell everyone that so-and-so, who I never heard of, was in the hospital, because he'd crossed into the Spics' neighborhood, and they'd broke his arm. It was, I was told, only the latest of a series of violent attacks by one side or another in turf wars between Anglos and Hispanics on base.

I had to ask what Spics were. I'd never heard the word before. I was told they were Puerto Ricans. I asked, "What are Puerto Ricans?" I was told they were Spanish-speaking people who lived on an island. "What island?" They said, Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean.

I was from an island in the Pacific. OK, no, I was born in South Carolina. But my soul was an island soul, my 'aumakua was an island bird, my color was an island color. I thought that I could talk to these Puerto Ricans as a fellow islander.

I had studied Jesus. I had been a Hawaiian Messiah. I knew what Utu was. I could ask the question "What would Kū do?"

Jesus would have fought for peace. So I would fight for peace.

I started telling everyone that we had to go to the Spics and tell them that we wanted peace. We would offer them a deal: they could have free passage through Anglo neighborhoods, and in return, we would have free passage through theirs. Mutual freedom of movement would be the immediate reward, the carrot. Peace would be the long-term reward.

I was told by one of my new friends that I was crazy. There was no way I could lead a party of Anglos to present a truce to the Spics. I said, maybe Jesus was crazy. He said sure, maybe, "He was crucified, you know."

That decided it for me. This would be my crucifixion. Somehow, I would lead the Anglo kids to present a truce to the Puerto Ricans, that very day, or I would be hung to die, or both.

Belated Clarification

1956 rolled in with my first grades ever. I was a disgrace. In one single grading I forever proved I would never be the student my Father had been. Did I tell you he got all As and never missed a day of school, with a plaque to prove it, in all 12 grades? With my first grade report the pressure was off to duplicate that accomplishment, and we were all about picking up the pieces and making the best of the shambles that were going to be my life.

The Federal school system, Fort Devens branch, graded on a numerical scale, 1-5, 1 being the best, 5 being the worst. So the goal would have been straight 1s. I got a 1 in only one subject, penmanship. We had two other academic subjects that were graded. In both "Reading and Literature" and Arithmetic, I got 2s, the equivalent of Bs. We were also graded in Effort, for which I got a 2, and Conduct, where I got a gentleman's 3. Probably, having belonged to a gang was not helpful in the Conduct area.

The Literature that the report card referred to, by the way, concentrated on the Dick and Jane classics. In retrospect what seems most odd was that although all the characters were white, the setting was urban. Our books were from before WWII and there were only urban settings and farm settings. There were no suburbs in our outdated reading materials. I remember one story was all about the kids sending messages back and forth over a clothesline hung between pulleys over the inner court of a tenement building. I had never seen a building like that, and had to have it described it detail.

[Below right: In spite of living in a city in the Great Depression, Dick and Jane and friends still always had plenty of greenery and the occasional white picket fence behind them.]

My Mother was very upset when she saw the report card. I should have got 1s in reading and arithmetic. She said, "Why aren't you learning anything?"

I said I'd been learning a lot.

"So why aren't didn't you get better grades?"

'You want me to get good grades?"

"At least in arithmetic! It's your best subject!"

"Why didn't you say so before?"

Nobody had ever told me before that the goal was to get good grades. All they'd said was that I was supposed to use school as an opportunity to learn.

Since there was so very little to learn anyway in the syllabus, the new instructions made more sense. I was just a little miffed that they took so long clarifying this point.

I Join A Gang

First grade in Fort Devens happened at a school on base. Unlike the kindergarten, the grade school had a large playground and a gym. I believe there were 4 classrooms, two for first grade, two for second grade. It was a federal school. Children in higher grades were sent to a public school off base, in Ayer.

Of course, I was a baby boomer. There were always too many of us, all through my education, in public school, and in college. So there were too many of us when we all appeared for the first day to be sorted out. All the new incoming pupils had to mass in the playground area with parents or guardians and wait to be processed and given temporary assignments to classrooms. I think I had my first experience of agoraphobia that day. The crowd was overwhelming.

Initially my future wife-to-be Kathy and I were assigned to the same first grade class. Our teacher was named Parent. I thought that was weird. She was a nice woman.

The first few days were spent impressing upon us the importance of a test coming up and cluing us in to the testing procedure. There was multiple choice practice, so we got used to that sort of thing. Then there was a long test, or actually a sequence of tests. It was in fact an IQ test.

We weren't allowed to know the raw scores, but on the basis of the scores some of the kids were offered placement one year ahead, in the second grade. Kathy and I both were granted that opportunity to skip first grade, on account of acing the IQ test.

Kathy's parents went for it. My parents decided that I needed to stay back in the first grade with children my own age, because that would be better in terms of getting me properly "socialized."

So after one week Kathy and I were split up. It was probably for the best. During that first week we spent every free minute we had smooching and hugging, and completely disregarding anybody who had a problem with it, including Miss or Mrs. Parent. And we were still able to get together on the playground during recesses.

Because we were army brats the students that finished the year were not those who started it. Families moved away and were replaced by others all year round. I'd estimate about 10 left, and about 10 replaced them.

There were other kinds of attrition. At least one girl died of pneumonia. At least one boy was suspended for bad conduct. His name was Dave. That bad boy was my best buddy.

Dave organized a schoolyard gang. His peeps ran the playground. They stole lunches from the dorky kids. They made fun of the creeps and freaks. They ran from one end of the playground to the other, every lunch and recess, threatening anyone with whippings who didn't acknowledge their ruler-ship .

But Dave was not a bad kid. If you accepted his ascendancy you could be his friend and he would protect you.

Remember, I couldn't tie my own shoes yet. I also couldn't dress and undress myself. That was still the case. In the classroom Miss or Mrs. Parent and her assistants could take care of the shoelaces. Miss or Mrs. Parent also made special trips to the bathroom with me to help me.

Dave's first reaction to that was to decide I was a retard. He could tie his own shoes and he didn't need special help going to the bathroom. But when I told him I wanted to join his gang he only asked me if I would be loyal and obedient. When I said yes I was accepted, with all my flaws, and Dave personally took care of my shoelaces on the playground.

So I socialized very well, didn't I? The social landscape was harsh, but could be worked!

I Become Racist

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened late July or early August, 1955, after my 6th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

After Bible School there was a period of great summer childhood, with nothing particular to do day after sunny balmy day on an army base surrounded by ten acres of well kept lawn and isolated trees, except to run around barefoot trying to make friends with the other kids that would have it, and meanwhile watching clouds glide over the whole thing.

Oh, yeah, and the Davy Crockett craze was in full swing, so I had to have a coonskin cap. There was a lot of Injun killing involved. Nobody wanted to be the Injun that got killed, so we had to all take turns at it.

Now that's odd, because I was accustomed to thinking of myself as white on the outside but red on the inside. Hawaiian Natives, I don't remember if I already mentioned it but I should have, may look golden skinned to the white folk, but in their own minds they're red. Injuns, on the other hand, were always red, in everyone's book. So why would I mind being an Injun?

Well, it's obvious isn't it? Injuns were a fictitious and/or historic race that were always the bad guys on TV and in movies. They only existed to me as villains.

That's not racism. That's just innocence. I got out of that mindset as soon as I got to know real Native Americans.

But one day I had an experience that made a real racist out of me. I was wandering around by myself and I encountered a Black kid my age. I had seen Blacks before. There were Black girls in my Kindergarten class. But I could not believe how black this kid was.

I'd been taught not to stare at people who look different from me. So I didn't say anything about how black the kid was. We introduced ourselves to each other as kids do (Hi! My name's Wes! What's yours? I think he said Jackson), and then we found some game we both liked to play, and it was cool.

After an hour or so my new Black friend said he wanted me to meet his Mom and Dad and his brothers and sisters.

I should have said, this was a Sunday afternoon. Fort Devens had a strict rule that no one should drop in on anyone's house on Sundays, and no one should invite anyone over. The idea was, people who needed a day of rest from socializing wouldn't get it, by being too nice to not invite people over. The base commanding general himself ordered that people stay out of each others houses on Sundays, for there own good.

It was a very good rule, as was proved in the breaking of it. I went to my new friend's house precisely for the reason that the rule was devised, namely, to not hurt the inviter's feelings. Besides, Jackson already broke the rule by asking me, so I didn't break it first.

So we waded into Jackson's living room. They were all as black as he is! There were tons of them! It was like the Mother Nest!

Nobody said anything about the No Sunday Socializing Rule. I enjoyed talking to Jackson's parents. They were nice fun people. I was really happy to meet such good friends.

Later, when I got home I told my Mother I found a new friend, and he was really, really, black, and he took me to meet his family and...

And she said, "AND YOU WENT? HAVEN'T I TOLD YOU NEVER TO DO THAT?"

I thought she was being a little crazy. So I didn't argue with her. I just nodded and said, yes Mommy, I shouldn't have gone to see them. I knew I broke the Sunday Rule. I promised never to do it again.

The next morning I woke up with crease marks all over my chest. You know how when you sleep on wrinkly sheets you get crease marks all over where the wrinkles were? I had that. Only I'd never noticed having it before.

Suddenly it dawned on me! That's why my Mother got so over the top about me breaking the Sunday Rule! It wasn't the breaking of the Sunday Rule that had her upset, it was that they were black!

It's contagious!

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 Cardinal

Fort Devens, as I've said, lies between Shirley and Ayer, Massachusetts. It's 35 miles East by Northeast from Boston as the crow flies along a line that passes Somerville, then Lexington, and then goes straight over Concord. Actually the base lies a little south of a straight line between Shirley and Ayer so although Shirley and Ayer lie in Middlesex County, Fort Devens sits over in Worcester County.

It's part of the Massachusetts Coastal Lowlands. The local roads wind around rounded hills and weave between small lakes and ponds, the occasional swamp, and countless small streams. To a Seattleite, the area is distinguished by having weather. When it rains, it pours. When it snows, it blizzards. They clear the roads with snow plows there. And every winter, from the first snowfall on, there is snow on the ground until well after the groundhog sees his shadow. By March it's filthy gray dirty snow. There's patches of it everywhere on base, surrounded by thawed areas where brown grass is recovering and trying to turn green again.

The Spring rains of March or April finally melt all the dirty snow. One day in 1955, in March or April, a long rainy period, lasting days, during which I was stuck in the house with my Mother attracting molestation and beatings, there was a sunny day and I could go play outside.

Before the rains the dirty snow had been all around, and all the grass was brown. On that day, when I walked out the front door, I was confronted by paradise by comparison, a fresh Eden of green covered by blue skies and billowing cottony clouds.

One minute out the front door, as I stood and gaped at the transformed environment, a male cardinal landed on a branch of a low bush, four feet in front of me. After a short pause he burst into song. Then there was another pause, and he flew off as abruptly as he came.

When he landed on that branch, I was transformed. I recognized that color. I had seen a red bird just that distance before, singing. Not that red bird, and not that song, but the similarity was enough that it woke my soul up and the green became ten times as green, and the red of the bird became fiery and everything in my view glowed.

The cardinal is also my 'aumakua, I found out. The depression eased.

New Home

Sometime in the Fall of 1954 it was our turn to get on base housing. We were assigned a unit in a quadruplex, the fifth of five on Chancellorsville street, which faced out onto a beautiful green marching field having an area of about 8 football fields. We weren't on an overgrown abandoned farm anymore we were on a well-maintained clean military campus.

The officers' quarters and the administration and ASA training buildings were built in the same Colonial Revival style that's found on most US military bases built in the period between world wars.

Our quadruplex had two units on the first floor and two on the second floor. Our unit was the westernmost unit on the second floor. The living room and my parents bedroom looked out over the main street, Chancellorsville, and the marching field. That side was officially the front of the house. The kitchen, and the main bathroom, looked out the back at a service alley and across it, a wooded area, with mostly birch trees. My bedroom would also have looked out on the service alley, but attached to my room was an airy covered porch, screened on three sides. It became a deluxe play room, where I could be indoors but feel outdoors. My parents completely left it to me.

They had their own play room: another covered porch had been attached to the far end of the house with three entrances. You could get there from my room, from the main hall down the middle of the unit, or from a small bathroom that was connected to my parents' bedroom. This porch may have originally been open on three sides like my play area, but someone had decided to build windows, so it became a sunny second living room. My parents treated it as a party room and family retreat. It was the place they invited their best friends, keeping the mere acquaintances to the formal living room.

The Sun Porch, as we called it (as opposed to the Play Porch) got all the Hawaiian furniture which now came out of storage, so it took on a tropical look.

Fort Devens covered more than two square miles. It was decommissioned in the 90s. The old wooden structures like the Kindergarten building were all torn down, but most of the brick buildings were kept to form the Devens Community Center. The map below is based on a current satellite image, and only shows about a third of the total area of the base.


Some of the street names have changed. Chancellorsville became Elm. What is called Walnut Street on the map was called Detrobian Street in 1954. On the other hand Sherman and MacArthur Avenues were called the same back then, so not all the names have changed, maybe not the majority of them. Between MacArthur and El Caney, almost none of the structures were wooden, so nearly all the buildings in that part of the map are as they were then. One notable exception is the nursery which was a wooden structure on the west side of Sherman Avenue.

Another change, not having to do with the structures, is that the golf course appears to have shrunk. Formerly the golf course had fairways on either side of the marching field. Once I caddied for my Father and a golfing partner, and remember how, as we finished the holes to the west of Sherman Avenue, we had to walk across the marching field with the clubs to get to the final holes.

I've marked a building at the top as "Devens grade school." It actually only had first and second grades. I believe it had a total of 160 to 170 children in four classrooms, two to a grade. South and a little west of that, and up a slight hill you can't see in this view, I've marked a complex as the ASA School where my Father taught. I'm guessing slightly. It may have had other functions. Somewhere on the end of the base was the enlisted men's barracks, either in that complex or further east. Or the school may have been further east. I'm more sure about base headquarters which was a much smaller building on the other side of Sherman Ave.

Next door to the alleged ASA School, across a parking lot, was the main Fort Devens theater. It was one of the first new places I visited on base once we settled in, as my parents dumped me off for an all-day cartoon marathon. I got to know it very well, and would never confuse it with a school or barracks. Saturday matinee double features for kids were a dime!

The Devens Nursery

The first year that I lived with my parents at the House in Shirley I very rarely was taken anywhere else except to be babysat by our retired landlord. My Mother walked me to his house roughly twice a week and I stayed with him and his wife for two or three hours, almost always outside. Other than that I can remember only about a dozen trips during that year to Fort Devens. An average of one a month.

There were trips to the commissary and the PX (post exchange.) I was never allowed to go in with my parents to either one. They left me to wait in the car. That would be the trip. A fifteen or twenty minute ride to the commissary, wait in the car an hour with Koko, 5 minutes to the PX, wait in the car an hour with Koko, a fifteen or twenty minute ride home, done.

There were also trips to the Devens Nursery. I considered the Devens Nursery a new kind of Hell on Earth, different from the ones I'd got used to.

I was still going through the re-toilet training the first time I was taken there. My parents really didn't want to be seen in public with a diapered 4 year-old. They waited as long as they could stand it. But they had to go out for an evening dance, and the old retired farmer didn't want to take care of me evenings. So, not knowing any alternative, they took me to the Nursery, wearing pants over diapers. They brought extras and told the staff my problem and begged them to change me as needed. Then they left, telling me they were going to a party, but they'd be back in a "couple of hours."

I could tell time by then. I also knew a couple meant two, not eight.

They dropped me off at around seven. The institutional clock on the wall said I was still there at just before three in the AM. My parents were liars.

It was my first encounter with a mass of disinterested children, ever. The Devens Nursery was a one-story wooden structure just west of Headquarters, across the road from a big marching field. Once inside there was an administrative counter with staff desks to the left and a big room to the right where the children could be distracted with toys indoors. Beyond the big room was a hallway past bathrooms, janitorial closets and such, which eventually came to a door that opened to a yard that was corraled with the building on one side and a five foot high chain-link fence on the other three sides.

While it was still light out, all of us temporarily abandoned kids (there were at most about forty of us) were marched out to the corral and sat at picnic tables and fed graham crackers with milk. Then we were forced to nap against our wills. As it got darker, we were brought in, and made to play with toys, even though there weren't enough toys to go around. This meant that those of us who weren't bullies got to see the toys hogged by those that were, for a couple of hours, occasionally being threatened with bodily harm if we objected to the status quo.

At some point in all of this I had to go. There was an embarrassing "special" trip to a staff bathroom so one of the women in attendance could change me privately. The other kids figured out what was going on, and I couldn't talk to any of them after that.

Then we were all told it was bedtime. Curtains were set up and children were given wool army blankets and assigned to cots. It was actually long past bedtime by then for most of us. I think the staff put bedtime off as long as possible because it was a pain. Nobody wants to go to bed when they've been abandoned. You're afraid that if you drop off to sleep you'll miss the moment of your rescue. They'll come, but they won't see you because you'll be under covers somewhere, so they'll say, "must have run off," and forget about you. There was a lot of screaming and crying.

With all the rape and beatings, the concussion and all, you're probably wondering why I wanted my parents to rescue me. The truth is, they fed me, and they were the evil I knew. Very little in my experience led me to believe that my parents were unusual. To me, good parents would have been unusual, and I didn't know where any were or how to get any that I found to take me away.

They did rescue me, to take me back to the House in Shirley. Trips like that made me appreciate the isolation of that house. I didn't miss being around other children so much thanks to the occasional overdose.

The Black Snake

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

It was late Spring 1953 when my parents and I arrived in Massachusetts. I recall an arrival through the gates of Fort Devens while it was still light, and a stop somewhere on base to check in briefly. Then we were back in the car driving for miles. I didn't understand. If that was our destination, why weren't we staying there?

Of course, there's never housing on base right away. There's always a waiting list. We had to find a motel to stay at while looking for a house to lease until on-base housing materialized.

Fort Devens lies between two towns, Ayer to the East Northeast, and Shirley to the West. Neither was very large. Ayer may have had a population of 3,000 then. Shirley was smaller. I don't believe either town had a motel in those days. But if there were they had no vacancies that night, and we ended up near Clinton, about 12 miles away.

We stayed there a week or two, with no place for me to go and nothing, literally nothing and nobody to play with. Then one day my parents loaded me and everything else in the car, and I thought maybe were we giving up and driving back to Hawaii. I asked if that was what was happening. My father yelled at me. He said I was an idiot, and told me to shut up and never ask him a stupid question ever again. Especially while he's driving.

We ended up on a beautiful country highway, with a forested hill to our left and farm land with occasional lines of woods leading away from the highway to the right. I now know we were traveling west on Leominster Road away from Shirley toward Leominster, and the lines of woods followed streams leading from culverts. A couple of miles from the town the road itself was lined with trees. We turned right and north into a driveway. The driveway bent softly right just until the highway was lost behind us in the trees, then it turned back north.

It was a private 800 yard driveway to a two-story cinder-block farmhouse for a farm that was no longer being cultivated. The owner, the farmer who had worked the land, was by then retired. He was there when we arrived to hand over the keys. Later I learned that he lived in another farmhouse on the other side of the highway beyond where we turned in, altogether a quarter mile away. Our next nearest neighbors were a half mile away, the other direction.

The house faced west to the driveway. There were woods behind it, and overgrown grass stretched out before it. It had a flat roof. We found out later just how shabbily built it was (the first time it rained). To my parents it probably looked like a dump. To me it looked like a palace on the edge of a mysterious forest in a magical kingdom.

As the farmer left us, my Mother strode toward the front door to be the first to go in. I was right beside her, having already inched to it while the adults talked. Just as she stepped onto the first of two steps up the porch a shiny sleek four-foot black racer shot up from bushes from the left, onto the porch in front of her, and darted across her path and off to our right.

My Mother screamed bloody murder. I squealed with utter delight. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous and so purely alive. Pure concentrated life poured over the porch of that house! The place WAS magical!