Video Find of the Day
I used to hate this kind of singing. But then, I used to hate onions. Now, a day without onions is like a day without hot peppers. We grow and change.
Nā Palapalai
Showing posts with label hawaii. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hawaii. Show all posts
Friday, November 14, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Train Hula
Video Find of the DayHula in honor of Queen Lili'uokalani, Hawai'i's last monarch. It's specifically about a train ride she enjoyed. I like that we get a view of the singer for once. Most of these videos focus exclusively on the dancers. Colonial period hula about colonial period life, from a time of cultural revival.
Included is "Lanakila Ke Ka Ahi Ali'i" = "Lanakila, The Royal Train." The video title gives the name of the group performing, who are led by singer Ray Fonseca.
Halau Hula 'O Kahikilaulani Kahiko
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
They Couldn't Handle The Truth
[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", immediately after appearing to try to kill myself by jumping head-first off a jungle gym. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
I woke up groggy in some sort of hospital room. When a nurse came into view I asked her where I was. She told me. I think it was the Fort Devens infirmary again. The important thing to me was, it wasn't any heaven. It hadn't worked. I screamed and cried and tried to bang my head against the wall, and the nurse gave me a shot.
My next memory is of a room of my own faced with two doctors. Again, I asked where I was. This time the answer was a shock. I was in a military hospital in Maryland. I was told I was flown to it.
The two doctors wouldn't answer any more questions. From then on they were going to ask the questions. "Why did you want to kill yourself?"
I told them I didn't really want to kill myself, I just wanted to go to Hawaii. That didn't please them. They said it didn't make sense. I said, too bad, it's true. I was getting an attitude. I was in no mood to show respect to a couple of know-it-all haoles, even if they were doctors.
[Above: A studio photo of me taken just before my call to Alta triggered the chain of events that got me to Maryland. I think there was some attitude there to start with. Subsequent events enhanced the attitude. Not the 1st picture I put here. The 1st was from age 5. Attitude there, too.]
Their answer to my attitude was to give me another shot. But this one wasn't a tranquilizer like the one in Fort Devens. It was sodium pentathol. They were going to make me tell the truth by means of science!
The drug broke down my resistance, and made me compliant. So when they asked again, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I told them the truth. "I wanted to go to Hawaii."
They were ready to pull their hair out at that point. Then one of them got the bright idea to ask, "OK, why did you want to go to Hawaii?"
"My parents tried to kill me. My Mother tried to kill me. My Mother does bad things to me." I started to go into details. They cut me off, and left the room. That's when i noticed that the room had a window and my parents were sitting in a room on the other side of it. The doctors consulted with my parents for a minute. Then they came back in.
"You know what you said isn't true. What's the real reason you wanted to go to Hawaii?"
Being told that I lied didn't make sense to me. I hadn't. The only way I could interpret what they said to me was that they didn't want to hear that truth.
I was still under the influence of the sodium pentathol. I had to be compliant. But that didn't reall mean that I had to tell them the truth. It meant that I had to tell them what I thought they wanted me to tell them. When I thought that what they wanted was the truth, I told them the truth. But now I saw they didn't want the truth. So I strained to imagine what it is they wanted.
I came up with music. I told them I wanted to go to Hawaii for the music.
This led to a weird discussion, mostly between the two doctors, about how they could deal with my "compulsion". The gist of the debate, as I understood it, was that they could either get rid of all my compulsions, with a major lobotomy, or they could do a minor excision and just get rid of my Hawaiian memories. it was clear to me that it was best if I could get them to do the minor thing, versus the major.
So when one of the doctors asked me what it was about music that made me want to go to Hawaii I said, "It's just that I remember the Hawaiian music, and it reminds me of Hawaii, and I want to go there."
He said, "Well, what if you couldn't remember the Hawaiian music. Do you think you'd want to go there then?"
"Oh no, sir. Then it wouldn't matter to me."
I fell asleep after that, for I don't know how long. When I awoke again, I couldn't move my head. The doctors were there again, plus nurses. After they talked to me for a minute, there was a sound of power equipment, like a saw or a drill, and I realized I was being operated on.
I had a vague feeling that my head was being touched. They said, we're going to move an electrode around and we just need you to tell us what you're seeing or remembering or feeling.
I was prompted for my feelings and thoughts every few seconds. I kept experiencing snatches of music, but they didn't have anything to do with Hawaii. Finally though I heard a Hawaiian drum chant. I told them. They said good, that's what we'll burn.
There was no indication that anything was happening. I don't remember a frying or zapping sound. They just said, "There, it's done."
Over 30 years later I talked about what happened to a psychiatrist. He said the story was impossible because those techniques weren't in use in 1956. The sodium pentathol was possible, but the method of brain probing to stimulate and pinpoint memories was not available then.
Well, I think my psychiatrist was full of shit. What he didn't take into account was that this was a military hospital. In fact it may not have been an actual working hospital but a military medical research facility. The military doesn't make all of its research public. These, in particular, would have been kept secret, on national security grounds. (I was very likely at the Walter Reed Medical Research Institute in Silver Spring.) He did not take into account the likelihood that my Father had knowledge of the availability of such procedures through his position in army intelligence.
The method wasn't all that precise either. It got rid of most but not all of the Hawaiian musical memories. It missed some. But it also erased some other non-Hawaiian memories. Remember that I could whistle like a bird? I couldn't whistle at all again after the surgery, for 35 years.
It was criminal. All they had to do was get me away from my parents. Would it have hurt them to spare me the surgery and send me to a Hawaiian orphanage? But at least it wasn't a fill frontal lobotomy.
I woke up groggy in some sort of hospital room. When a nurse came into view I asked her where I was. She told me. I think it was the Fort Devens infirmary again. The important thing to me was, it wasn't any heaven. It hadn't worked. I screamed and cried and tried to bang my head against the wall, and the nurse gave me a shot.
My next memory is of a room of my own faced with two doctors. Again, I asked where I was. This time the answer was a shock. I was in a military hospital in Maryland. I was told I was flown to it.
The two doctors wouldn't answer any more questions. From then on they were going to ask the questions. "Why did you want to kill yourself?"
I told them I didn't really want to kill myself, I just wanted to go to Hawaii. That didn't please them. They said it didn't make sense. I said, too bad, it's true. I was getting an attitude. I was in no mood to show respect to a couple of know-it-all haoles, even if they were doctors.
[Above: A studio photo of me taken just before my call to Alta triggered the chain of events that got me to Maryland. I think there was some attitude there to start with. Subsequent events enhanced the attitude. Not the 1st picture I put here. The 1st was from age 5. Attitude there, too.]Their answer to my attitude was to give me another shot. But this one wasn't a tranquilizer like the one in Fort Devens. It was sodium pentathol. They were going to make me tell the truth by means of science!
The drug broke down my resistance, and made me compliant. So when they asked again, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I told them the truth. "I wanted to go to Hawaii."
They were ready to pull their hair out at that point. Then one of them got the bright idea to ask, "OK, why did you want to go to Hawaii?"
"My parents tried to kill me. My Mother tried to kill me. My Mother does bad things to me." I started to go into details. They cut me off, and left the room. That's when i noticed that the room had a window and my parents were sitting in a room on the other side of it. The doctors consulted with my parents for a minute. Then they came back in.
"You know what you said isn't true. What's the real reason you wanted to go to Hawaii?"
Being told that I lied didn't make sense to me. I hadn't. The only way I could interpret what they said to me was that they didn't want to hear that truth.
I was still under the influence of the sodium pentathol. I had to be compliant. But that didn't reall mean that I had to tell them the truth. It meant that I had to tell them what I thought they wanted me to tell them. When I thought that what they wanted was the truth, I told them the truth. But now I saw they didn't want the truth. So I strained to imagine what it is they wanted.
I came up with music. I told them I wanted to go to Hawaii for the music.
This led to a weird discussion, mostly between the two doctors, about how they could deal with my "compulsion". The gist of the debate, as I understood it, was that they could either get rid of all my compulsions, with a major lobotomy, or they could do a minor excision and just get rid of my Hawaiian memories. it was clear to me that it was best if I could get them to do the minor thing, versus the major.
So when one of the doctors asked me what it was about music that made me want to go to Hawaii I said, "It's just that I remember the Hawaiian music, and it reminds me of Hawaii, and I want to go there."
He said, "Well, what if you couldn't remember the Hawaiian music. Do you think you'd want to go there then?"
"Oh no, sir. Then it wouldn't matter to me."
I fell asleep after that, for I don't know how long. When I awoke again, I couldn't move my head. The doctors were there again, plus nurses. After they talked to me for a minute, there was a sound of power equipment, like a saw or a drill, and I realized I was being operated on.
I had a vague feeling that my head was being touched. They said, we're going to move an electrode around and we just need you to tell us what you're seeing or remembering or feeling.
I was prompted for my feelings and thoughts every few seconds. I kept experiencing snatches of music, but they didn't have anything to do with Hawaii. Finally though I heard a Hawaiian drum chant. I told them. They said good, that's what we'll burn.
There was no indication that anything was happening. I don't remember a frying or zapping sound. They just said, "There, it's done."
Over 30 years later I talked about what happened to a psychiatrist. He said the story was impossible because those techniques weren't in use in 1956. The sodium pentathol was possible, but the method of brain probing to stimulate and pinpoint memories was not available then.
Well, I think my psychiatrist was full of shit. What he didn't take into account was that this was a military hospital. In fact it may not have been an actual working hospital but a military medical research facility. The military doesn't make all of its research public. These, in particular, would have been kept secret, on national security grounds. (I was very likely at the Walter Reed Medical Research Institute in Silver Spring.) He did not take into account the likelihood that my Father had knowledge of the availability of such procedures through his position in army intelligence.
The method wasn't all that precise either. It got rid of most but not all of the Hawaiian musical memories. It missed some. But it also erased some other non-Hawaiian memories. Remember that I could whistle like a bird? I couldn't whistle at all again after the surgery, for 35 years.
It was criminal. All they had to do was get me away from my parents. Would it have hurt them to spare me the surgery and send me to a Hawaiian orphanage? But at least it wasn't a fill frontal lobotomy.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Escape Attempt
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.
I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.
Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.
So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.
As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.
I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.
I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"
So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.
Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.
The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.
I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.
Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.
So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.
As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.
I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.
But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.
I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"
So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.
Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Recap + Continuation
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.
It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.
After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.
So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.
Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.
I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.
That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.
I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!
So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.
Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.
Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.
Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."
The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.
The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.
It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.
It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.
After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.
So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.
Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.
I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.
That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.
I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!
So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.
Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.
Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.
Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."
The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.
The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.
Monday, October 29, 2007
An Unmentionable Is Mentioned
A dramatic chain of events occurred sometime in the last two or three months of 1st grade. I'm sure of the order of the sequence because each event triggers events following it, as a chain reaction. But I'm not sure of the time of the beginning. Maybe as I relate the sequence now in writing for the first time something will occur to me that will date one event and consequently all the others.
The first event that stands out happened in class. A guest speaker came to class to present slides of a recent trip to Hawaii. Among the slides were pictures of a mock ancient Hawaiian village. One of the scenes showed a small hut. The speaker said she didn't know what the function of the hut was in an ancient village.
Ordinarily my classroom persona was that of Kona, while Alex/Alaka'i only observed. But when the question was raised about the hut Alex suddenly took over and stood up and announced, "I know what the hut was for. It was for the women, for when they bled."
You see, the same question had come up in my conversations with Lani and Lono. I had described a mock village and they recognized it as such. I had described a number of things that I had seen when I was 5 or 6 months old, when my parents carried me around a mock village in their arms. They told me what they thought I had seen, based on the descriptions I gave them. [See Godhood: The Downside, posted June 28, '07]
They told me not to repeat the answer about the hut to anyone else because non-Hawaiians are uncomfortable hearing about such things as women bleeding, it's kapu for them, even when they know it happens. But I had forgotten that warning in the more than 3 years since I'd seen them.
The warning was spot on. As soon as I said, "It was for the women when they bled," the guest turned pale and said, "What are you talking about?" in a angry raised voice. As Alex, I clarified the matter, "You know: you're a women. The women go there for their monthly bleeding."
All hell broke loose. The other kids probably didn't know what the discussion was about. I doubt any of the 6 year old girls had any knowledge of menstruation yet. But the teacher and the guest both reacted as if what I had said had been a graphic description of it for all the kids to hear, when actually I didn't say anything that would have been meaningful to anyone who didn't already know what menstruation was.
They screamed at me, calling me horrible and evil. I ran out the door of the class, down the hall, and ran out of the school, with the full intention of never going back.
I ran straight away from the exit for a while, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure no one was following me. When I was sure I wasn't being followed I rested a while and thought about what happened. By then I had remembered the warning, and I concluded that the warning was necessary because White People are all sick in their heads.
It's sick to scream at a child for revealing a fact you already know. Kapu or not. Besides, kapu , even Hawaiian kapu, are sick and stupid in general.
My parents were called and told I had run away from school. They drove around base looking for me for an hour before spotting me walking near the base headquarters.
My father didn't know what to make of the whole incident. He asked, "How did you get that idea about the huts?" I told him my friends told me about it. He finally told me that I had to learn not to say everything that comes into my head, "Think about the consequences." I don't think that lesson made a big impression on me.
But when my Mother got me alone she started quizzing me. "That happened before your first birthday! What else do you remember? What do you remember about your first birthday? Tell me!"
I had inadvertently given the secret of my early memories away. She now had reason to believe that I remembered their attempt to kill me when I was one.
The first event that stands out happened in class. A guest speaker came to class to present slides of a recent trip to Hawaii. Among the slides were pictures of a mock ancient Hawaiian village. One of the scenes showed a small hut. The speaker said she didn't know what the function of the hut was in an ancient village.
Ordinarily my classroom persona was that of Kona, while Alex/Alaka'i only observed. But when the question was raised about the hut Alex suddenly took over and stood up and announced, "I know what the hut was for. It was for the women, for when they bled."
You see, the same question had come up in my conversations with Lani and Lono. I had described a mock village and they recognized it as such. I had described a number of things that I had seen when I was 5 or 6 months old, when my parents carried me around a mock village in their arms. They told me what they thought I had seen, based on the descriptions I gave them. [See Godhood: The Downside, posted June 28, '07]
They told me not to repeat the answer about the hut to anyone else because non-Hawaiians are uncomfortable hearing about such things as women bleeding, it's kapu for them, even when they know it happens. But I had forgotten that warning in the more than 3 years since I'd seen them.
The warning was spot on. As soon as I said, "It was for the women when they bled," the guest turned pale and said, "What are you talking about?" in a angry raised voice. As Alex, I clarified the matter, "You know: you're a women. The women go there for their monthly bleeding."
All hell broke loose. The other kids probably didn't know what the discussion was about. I doubt any of the 6 year old girls had any knowledge of menstruation yet. But the teacher and the guest both reacted as if what I had said had been a graphic description of it for all the kids to hear, when actually I didn't say anything that would have been meaningful to anyone who didn't already know what menstruation was.
They screamed at me, calling me horrible and evil. I ran out the door of the class, down the hall, and ran out of the school, with the full intention of never going back.
I ran straight away from the exit for a while, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure no one was following me. When I was sure I wasn't being followed I rested a while and thought about what happened. By then I had remembered the warning, and I concluded that the warning was necessary because White People are all sick in their heads.
It's sick to scream at a child for revealing a fact you already know. Kapu or not. Besides, kapu , even Hawaiian kapu, are sick and stupid in general.
My parents were called and told I had run away from school. They drove around base looking for me for an hour before spotting me walking near the base headquarters.
My father didn't know what to make of the whole incident. He asked, "How did you get that idea about the huts?" I told him my friends told me about it. He finally told me that I had to learn not to say everything that comes into my head, "Think about the consequences." I don't think that lesson made a big impression on me.
But when my Mother got me alone she started quizzing me. "That happened before your first birthday! What else do you remember? What do you remember about your first birthday? Tell me!"
I had inadvertently given the secret of my early memories away. She now had reason to believe that I remembered their attempt to kill me when I was one.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Omega
When I tell people I lived three memorable years in Hawaii they often ask me how I liked the beach and the palm trees and the sand. I was in Schofield Barracks most of the time, which, as I've said, looks like a low-income suburban housing project. It's situated almost at the center of O'ahu, miles from any of the beaches. There was very little that would seem exotic to a lower forty-eighter, apart from the beautiful hills in the distance.
The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.
I'll describe my first birthday in detail.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.
As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.
I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.
Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.
When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.
My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)
My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.
Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.
That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.
My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.
At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.
He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.
For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"
When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."
She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.
About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"
That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.
At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.
My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.
After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.
By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.
My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.
My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.
I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.
As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."
My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.
**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]
The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.
On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.
The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.
After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?
So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"
What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.
The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.
I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.
Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.
The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.
It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.
But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.
My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.
I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!
My Mother almost fainted.
Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.
By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.
When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.
What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.
That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.
[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]
The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.
I'll describe my first birthday in detail.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.
As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.
I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.
Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.
When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.
My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)
My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.
Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.
That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.
My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.
At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.
He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.
For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"
When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."
She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.
About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"
That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.
At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.
My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.
After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.
By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.
My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.
My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.
I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.
As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."
My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.
**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]
The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.
On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.
The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.
After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?
So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"
What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.
The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.
I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.
Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.
The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.
It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.
But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.
My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.
I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!
My Mother almost fainted.
Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.
By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.
When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.
What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.
That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.
[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Red Bird
Two weeks after my first Christmas, around a week into January 1950, my Father had to go to Korea. The Korean War hadn't started yet but it was already a hot spot in the Cold War. My Father was apparently assigned to a cryptanalysis unit that was trying to decipher coded messages in the field to and from all the parties. I say apparently, because he took his oath of secrecy seriously and never told me or my Mother what he actually did there, except that he was in a tent typing a lot and got shot at after the war finally did break out. The sniper missed my Dad but shot out the light bulb that was hanging inches away over his head.
At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.
At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.
My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.
[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]
All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.
Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.
As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.
At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.
At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.
My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.
[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]
All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.
Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.
As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Early Music Memories
My parents brought me to Hawaii sometime around my 4th or 5th month. There was time for them to set up house in Schofield Barracks, ahead of my Father's ASA assignment in Korea. There was even time for some sight-seeing. My memories are mostly a jumble. But a few things stand out.
For one thing, there was a record player, from which there came sounds of interest. I didn't know what the sounds meant at the time, but I eventually found out. Bing Crosby was my parents' favorite. This wasn't one of the records we had in 1949, but it came to be my own all-time favorite not much later, and it gives the flavor of Crosby's singing for those too young to know who he was.
Then there was a trip to what must have been a mock ancient Hawaiian village. During our visit my Father carried me on his shoulders so I could see over a crowd. Some performers sang and danced to a Hawaiian chant. Two years later I recited the chant from memory to my Hawaiian friends. Here is a clear modern recording of the first half, which is the half they discussed, before getting into an argument over one of the lines (the last line you hear), by Halau Hula Ka No'Eau. It is the song of King David Kalakaua that begins Kaulilua I Ke Anu O Wai`ale`ale.
After that I had a long-lasting prejudice against the record player music. It wasn't that the sounds were bad, but there were no people in the record player. At the Hawaiian village there had been people.
For one thing, there was a record player, from which there came sounds of interest. I didn't know what the sounds meant at the time, but I eventually found out. Bing Crosby was my parents' favorite. This wasn't one of the records we had in 1949, but it came to be my own all-time favorite not much later, and it gives the flavor of Crosby's singing for those too young to know who he was.
Then there was a trip to what must have been a mock ancient Hawaiian village. During our visit my Father carried me on his shoulders so I could see over a crowd. Some performers sang and danced to a Hawaiian chant. Two years later I recited the chant from memory to my Hawaiian friends. Here is a clear modern recording of the first half, which is the half they discussed, before getting into an argument over one of the lines (the last line you hear), by Halau Hula Ka No'Eau. It is the song of King David Kalakaua that begins Kaulilua I Ke Anu O Wai`ale`ale.
After that I had a long-lasting prejudice against the record player music. It wasn't that the sounds were bad, but there were no people in the record player. At the Hawaiian village there had been people.
Friday, April 27, 2007
A Swimming Time
I forgot to say it, but I was born in, of all places, South Carolina. My Army Father was stationed there at the time. Within about two weeks he was transfered to the D.C. area and for the next thirty or so years I didn't come any closer to the Deep South than the northernmost edge of Arkansas. Think of the burden that's been on me. "Where were you born, Man?" "South Carolina." "Oh. So you're Southern." "No, I'm not." "No? How could you be born there and not be from there, Dude?" "I don't know, maybe I'm a fucking walking contradiction of logic and a violation of the fucking space-time continuum. I'm not Southern. How can you be so stupid and still utter English words, walk around, and breathe?" Etc.
Once we were in Washington D.C., my parents hooked up with some old friends who became my Godparents. Here's my Godfather on our right talking with my parents while my Mother holds me. Check out the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the background. I grew up with those. I was still writing "humour" until my forties.
The tension in my Mother's face was not unusual. Here's another creepy shot of my Mother holding me.
We were in D.C. a few months before going to Hawaii. I only have one memory now that I'm sure belongs to that time. My Mother and I are in a shallow wading pool. I'm put in the pool somehow, and she calls me to her. I remember dog-paddling to her. This is significant, because she told me years later that the only time she ever saw me swimming was before we went to Hawaii, before I was 6 months old. After that I became terrified of the water (we'll see why later.)
Once we were in Washington D.C., my parents hooked up with some old friends who became my Godparents. Here's my Godfather on our right talking with my parents while my Mother holds me. Check out the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the background. I grew up with those. I was still writing "humour" until my forties.
The tension in my Mother's face was not unusual. Here's another creepy shot of my Mother holding me.
We were in D.C. a few months before going to Hawaii. I only have one memory now that I'm sure belongs to that time. My Mother and I are in a shallow wading pool. I'm put in the pool somehow, and she calls me to her. I remember dog-paddling to her. This is significant, because she told me years later that the only time she ever saw me swimming was before we went to Hawaii, before I was 6 months old. After that I became terrified of the water (we'll see why later.)
Friday, September 1, 1995
Art in Balance
[This is one of several Real Change articles I'm back-posting in addition to columns. A correction has been made to the original article. I realized sometime after this appeared that I had confused Betty White with [Margaret!] Whiting for obvious reasons. I've made the correction to the text set off in brackets. I'm not sure about the date of publication. It was around 9/95 anyway. Remember that back in the future StreetLife Gallery is gone so don't go there expecting to find it.]
Art in Balance
Wes Browning's Images for the God
Introduction
Wes Browning came to Street Life Gallery several years ago during a period when mental illness had forced him from a job as a university professor to sleeping in cars and on public couches.
The 46-year-old artist is now a valued member of both the Street Life Gallery and our own Editorial Committee. He is the featured artist at the Street Life this month, and his colorful acrylic wonders may be viewed at 2301 2nd Ave. Call the Gallery at (206) XXX-XXXX for hours or information on how to donate supplies or volunteer.
I'd intended to write a story on Wes for this issue, but as he shared his history with me over lunch last month, it became clear that all I really needed to do was run the tape and get out of the way. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the story he told. -Timothy Harris
It's hard to believe now that it happened. I was only two years old. I remember it so well now. The memory hasn't changed much in my head. It's very stable.
I remember the guy sitting there, while his brother beat on sticks and chanted. Well, they both chanted. But his brother was doing the drumming. And he would literally go into a trance while he carved his little wooden figures. And they were sort of like what I do now.
The basic shape is that of an animal, but there would be all of this geometric ornamentation around the outside. Once he'd get the basic shape, he'd add all this ornamentation, and that's when he'd start getting into this trance.
Sometimes he'd talk about what he was doing and how it was important to let the god take over, because the art's not really for you. It's for the god. The idea is to transcend yourself and create something that's not really a human vision at all. It's another way of seeing what you're seeing that sets up communication between you and the spirit world, or the god.
As I come to remember that whole way of looking at art, it's as if I remember, "Oh, yeah, that's what I've been trying to do.' It sank in at some level, but I didn't remember where I got the idea.
Sometimes when I'm working, I don't have any idea of what I'm doing. I know how to work the brush, but the actual lines that come up I hardly think about. They just happen. It's sort of like the vision is coming from another channel. That's the way like it. That's why I gravitate to that style.
It goes back to the Hawaiian experience, which becomes more and more the motivation. I didn't remember that experience very well until recently, in 1991, when I broke through in my therapy remembering all the things that happened to me.
Lani and Lono
The brothers were Lani and Lono, which were the names of the sky god and the harvest god. I can remember them explaining what their names meant.
They were non-identical twins, and were from Ni`ihau, which was like a private reservation to preserve native culture. It's the westernmost inhabited island of Hawaii. People could only live there by invitation of the natives already there, and it was called the Forbidden Island. You couldn't go there.
They had jobs as civilian maintenance workers at Schoffield Barracks. It's a normal arrangement at army bases outside of the U.S. to have civilian workers trimming the hedges and doing the lawns and stuff. These guys had a route they would work that included a recreation center about five blocks from where I lived.
Meanwhile, whenever my father was away, my mother would neglect me and was a real pain to be around. She wouldn't feed me and would get mad about anything and start hitting on me, so I left.
I'd wander off, beginning the year I turned two. Some older friends I'd played with started going to school, so I went looking for the school. I didn't know what a school was, but I knew they were there. Then I found out that I could beg for food off the neighborhood housewives. So that reinforced the practice and I started doing it everyday.
I had a little route I worked out, and it got wider and wider. I kept branching out, and finally, at two years and two months, I was doing about twenty blocks a day on this route. And everybody thought my mother was the most horrible person on the planet for letting me do it. But army bases being what they are, everybody kept their mouth shut.
One day, I came across these guys. The first thing he said to me was in Hawaiian, and then he translated right away. "Who's little offspring are you?" I didn't understand. I had trouble with English from a head injury from when my parents ran over me. But it sounded really good, and he had a neat smile on his face, so I followed them around.
I heard them talking among themselves and it was really pretty, and so I first got hooked up with them by following them around just to listen to that. And then after about a month I started talking to them in Hawaiian, and they were naturally very surprised.
I didn't speak English until about six months after that. I had trouble with consonants, and they were easier in Hawaiian. I got Hawaiian first, and then English as a second language.
At first I followed them around at work, until they put stop to that because I was getting in their way too much. So I started seeing them every time they had their lunch break, a nice, long, hour one.
I learned to tell time well enough to get there when their hour started. And after that I'd go away and watch them from a distance. They used to sing while they worked and that was pretty cool. I'd watch them sing and learn the songs.
Just before my third birthday I started to speak English. I'd learned to translate back and forth and that was my big breakthrough. I would talk to them in Hawaiian, but after a while they made me speak to them in English, because they were afraid that I was neglecting the English.
They thought they would get in trouble too, for letting me learn Hawaiian from them. The situation in those days was that there was a lot of bigotry; more so than there is now. Native Hawaiians were really distrusted. If anything had gone wrong, their explanation of what happened would of not been believed. They would have been in serious trouble and lost their jobs, at least. Maybe ended up in jail or something. So I'm sure they were really concerned to not do anything to get in trouble.
They were also afraid of teaching me too much about their beliefs. One of them was a non-christian, a traditional Hawaiian, and was really afraid of telling me anything about it because if it got to my parents there'd be an investigation and the military police would come down on them. Eventually, Lani did it anyway, but without letting his brother know.
They carved at work on their lunch break. Since I only saw them there it was isolated from everything else. They were 18 when I discovered them, and 19 when I left Schoffield. My mother actually met Lani the day we left. He didn't speak English, though Lono did. So I translated back and forth. It was a fairly long exchange. I can still remember the content of that conversation.
Lani told my mother that at 3 1/2 I was speaking Hawaiian very well, and was ready for school, except for one thing: I wasn't very good with numbers. I didn't know at the time that he was talking about grammatical numbers. Hawaiian, for example, has a lot of different ways to say `they,' and I wasn't getting it. So I thought I had to learn numbers in order to make them proud if I should ever come back and see them again.
[Margaret] [Whiting] to the Rescue
Back in the states I lived most of the time in Massachusetts at Fort Devens, though there was a little time as well in Taiwan and in Seattle. I really got into math, but still was doing art, though my mother tried to beat that out of me. She'd say she "wasn't going to have a basket weaver" and have me doing something where I couldn't support her in her old age.
When I was seven years old she caught me drawing some Hawaiian designs and chanting. I still remembered the chants then. I would never speak Hawaiian around her because we had this rule that I wasn't supposed to speak Hawaiian at home. I didn't want to get beat up.
She made me draw while she burned the back of my hand with a cigarette. Until then I was ambidextrous, but after that I couldn't draw or write with my left hand. Then my penmanship got really bad. Until then It was great, and she asked why, and I said, `Well, you fixed it so I can't write with my left hand anymore,' and she said. "You were left handed?!" She was left handed, and my father was left handed, so you would have thought she would have figured that out.
Soon after that, the [[Margaret] Whiting] incident happened. We went to Taiwan right after the chanting incident. They had a USO show around Christmas time, and the place was this mountain-top U.S. Chinese electronic surveillance installation, to spy on the `Reds.'. So my mother and I were blindfolded as we were driven up there in a staff car.
[Margaret] [Whiting] was the main act. She was an actor and stand-up comedienne at the time. Because my father was in charge of the base, she sat next to him, and I sat across from her at the banquet table and got to make friends during the dinner.
After the dinner I yanked on her dress and asked to talk to her in private. We went outside of the tent and I begged her to kidnap me, and she said, `No, that wouldn't be good.' She said they'd just come and take me away from her and have her arrested.
I hadn't thought of that before, and could see the point, so I started crying. I felt like this was my last hope. I'd already tried to get a whole bunch of my relatives to kidnap me, and gas station attendants and things like that. And finally I met somebody who was really nice, and really pretty, whose heart was in the right place, and she wouldn't do it, and even had a good reason not to that I could generalize to other people, so I started crying.
She asked me why I wanted to do this, and I told her some of the stories, and she started giving me advice. She asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I said I hadn't decided, but either wanted to be an artist or do something with numbers. She said, `Stick with the numbers. They'll probably like that better and they'll leave you alone. And when you grow up, you can do whatever you want.'
Then she taught me this joke. One of those things where you ask a question, like `I'm twice as old as my brother, and my brother is seven,' and so on. And she said, `Just remember the answer is 39.' We went back out there and she got a crowd together with my parents among them and said `This kid's really bright. Listen to this.' and she does the riddle, all about what's her age, and I say '39,' and it's a joke since she's not really that old, and my parents are impressed.
We snowed them. And all the way home they're, `Wow, we didn't know you were so good at math. You're like a genius.' It worked. The verbal abuse kept up, and my mother still beat me up once in a while, but this thing she had about hitting me in the head a lot stopped. She didn't want to damage the goods. It was her meal ticket for her old age.
Mental Illness
I decided to become a mathematician when I was 14. I'd spend three or four hours a day studying my own stuff after my other homework. I was kind of obsessed with it. It has that trance thing going for it. You can lose yourself in that too. In a bad family it was kind of like a drug for me.
I got a doctorate at Cornell, and taught evening classes at the U here while I was on leave writing my thesis. I was invited to Swiss Polytechnic for a year. I came back and was supposed to do two years at Rutgers, but the mental illness was starting by then.
I started having problems with post traumatic stress. My father died just before the thesis was approved and that triggered massive panic attacks. I started having anxiety attacks every time I tried to do math, so I wasn't really good for research anymore.
After one year I quit Rutgers. I came back to Seattle and taught at community colleges, and did some more evening division. I liked the older people, but not the regular college-aged students. The anxiety got worse and worse. I taught at St. Martins a year, and during that year started having visions. Those were the worst one. Apocalyptic visions, like from Revelations.
I was getting sick from the stress of teaching. They weren't very happy with my performance because I wasn't really into it, and when they told me I wasn't going to be coming back the next year. I immediately began to look for something else.
A cab driver had been shot and killed at Seward Park, so there was an opening, and I figured no one else would probably want that job and went and applied. There were about 10 others, but they hired us all. I lost money driving cab, but had money and could afford it. The marriage fell apart soon after that, and I became homeless. It was a very cold winter.
Just before that, I went to a career councilor who was from the Caribbean, and she kept saying, you know, there's something strange about the way you express yourself and I'd like to hypnotize you, and she did and she got this Hawaiian character out of me. So she found out about all this stuff before I did.
It happens it situations like that pretty regularly. I had a split personality. And the Hawaiian speaking and English personality weren't really the same. It was the Hawaiian personality that mostly took the beatings. The Hawaiian personality was dominant at that point. So there was some work to be done.
She sent me to a therapist, who I've been seeing since then, November of '83. In '87 after a scary accident, I quit driving, and went on mental disability, which is something she'd been trying to get me to do. So I could afford therapy, and that led to the breakthrough I '91, where I remembered everything.
After that the two personalities started to join. So far as I can tell, they're integrated now. But there were three days when the other personality took over.
I went to the half-price bookstore in the U-District, and was looking through the foreign books, and there was this pocket traveler Hawaiian dictionary. And there was this word, `hele,' which is to go. I used to use it all the time. I saw that and remembered saying it to my mother.
And I found more words, and remembered. That's when memories started breaking through and within three or four days this personality switch happened.
This other personality took over, and for three days ran around and fixed me up with things. Like a phone; I hadn't been able to get a phone up until then, but this other guy could get a phone. This other guy hooked me up with a psychiatrist to discuss the new developments. It was a scary time.
There was this fear of being overwhelmed by the unknown. I was working late at night as a janitor and was terrified. After that I started seeing the therapist again pretty frequently and worked a plan out. Doing art has really helped.
Art and Integration
I started doing art in about '84, or thinking seriously about it. I was having what I now know were flashback related visions and had a lot of visual imagery impinging on me and I wanted to express some of that to the world. This was the main motivation, relating what I was going through.
I'd been doing drawing and things all the time since I was a kid, but that's when I got serious with it. Just before I ended up being homeless and the marriage broke up.
After doing abstract art all those years and feeling like a talentless fool I deliberately taught myself to draw from life. Since I was living in a cab, and my own car which wasn't working, the '69 Rambler, I'd draw windshield wipers, and microphones and cords and clipboards for practice.
I went through this period where I was doing pen and ink drawings all the time in black and white. It was all consciously with the idea of getting out of it eventually. I just wanted to convince myself I could do it. I tried watercolors and didn't really like it, and started with acrylics in '89 and I liked them a lot.
I did a series of realistic paintings with the idea I'd move into more abstract work. The style I have now is what I've really always wanted to do. It balances realism and abstract to the point where I want it to be. For me it's just right.
I had this weird thing about the U-district and Bellevue then, not being able to stand being away from them, and after the breakthrough that subsided. There are places there that resembled the neighborhood in Schoffield barracks, and were reverberating. That area of the base looked like a suburban village.
As I began to realize that it lost its hold on me and I could begin to leave it. Michael Howell offered to ride the bus to the Gallery with me, and talked me through a trip downtown. I started coming to the homeless art gallery on a regular basis.
It gave me a place where, first of all, that merging of the personalities could happen. You can't just do that without interacting with people. You have to let them come out and express themselves.
Also, the art does that too. The struggle to get the realism and abstract balance is also a struggle between my two personalities' way of expressing themselves together. The Gallery is a sort of a practice area, more than anything else.
It's also a sort of a place where I can do for other people what those Hawaiian guys did for me. They gave me a place to retire everyday where I could be a human being and not be afraid. I can see how important that is to somebody. So it gives me a good feeling about my life now and what I'm doing.
Art in Balance
Wes Browning's Images for the God
Introduction
Wes Browning came to Street Life Gallery several years ago during a period when mental illness had forced him from a job as a university professor to sleeping in cars and on public couches.
The 46-year-old artist is now a valued member of both the Street Life Gallery and our own Editorial Committee. He is the featured artist at the Street Life this month, and his colorful acrylic wonders may be viewed at 2301 2nd Ave. Call the Gallery at (206) XXX-XXXX for hours or information on how to donate supplies or volunteer.
I'd intended to write a story on Wes for this issue, but as he shared his history with me over lunch last month, it became clear that all I really needed to do was run the tape and get out of the way. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the story he told. -Timothy Harris
It's hard to believe now that it happened. I was only two years old. I remember it so well now. The memory hasn't changed much in my head. It's very stable.
I remember the guy sitting there, while his brother beat on sticks and chanted. Well, they both chanted. But his brother was doing the drumming. And he would literally go into a trance while he carved his little wooden figures. And they were sort of like what I do now.
The basic shape is that of an animal, but there would be all of this geometric ornamentation around the outside. Once he'd get the basic shape, he'd add all this ornamentation, and that's when he'd start getting into this trance.
Sometimes he'd talk about what he was doing and how it was important to let the god take over, because the art's not really for you. It's for the god. The idea is to transcend yourself and create something that's not really a human vision at all. It's another way of seeing what you're seeing that sets up communication between you and the spirit world, or the god.
As I come to remember that whole way of looking at art, it's as if I remember, "Oh, yeah, that's what I've been trying to do.' It sank in at some level, but I didn't remember where I got the idea.
Sometimes when I'm working, I don't have any idea of what I'm doing. I know how to work the brush, but the actual lines that come up I hardly think about. They just happen. It's sort of like the vision is coming from another channel. That's the way like it. That's why I gravitate to that style.
It goes back to the Hawaiian experience, which becomes more and more the motivation. I didn't remember that experience very well until recently, in 1991, when I broke through in my therapy remembering all the things that happened to me.
Lani and Lono
The brothers were Lani and Lono, which were the names of the sky god and the harvest god. I can remember them explaining what their names meant.
They were non-identical twins, and were from Ni`ihau, which was like a private reservation to preserve native culture. It's the westernmost inhabited island of Hawaii. People could only live there by invitation of the natives already there, and it was called the Forbidden Island. You couldn't go there.
They had jobs as civilian maintenance workers at Schoffield Barracks. It's a normal arrangement at army bases outside of the U.S. to have civilian workers trimming the hedges and doing the lawns and stuff. These guys had a route they would work that included a recreation center about five blocks from where I lived.
Meanwhile, whenever my father was away, my mother would neglect me and was a real pain to be around. She wouldn't feed me and would get mad about anything and start hitting on me, so I left.
I'd wander off, beginning the year I turned two. Some older friends I'd played with started going to school, so I went looking for the school. I didn't know what a school was, but I knew they were there. Then I found out that I could beg for food off the neighborhood housewives. So that reinforced the practice and I started doing it everyday.
I had a little route I worked out, and it got wider and wider. I kept branching out, and finally, at two years and two months, I was doing about twenty blocks a day on this route. And everybody thought my mother was the most horrible person on the planet for letting me do it. But army bases being what they are, everybody kept their mouth shut.
One day, I came across these guys. The first thing he said to me was in Hawaiian, and then he translated right away. "Who's little offspring are you?" I didn't understand. I had trouble with English from a head injury from when my parents ran over me. But it sounded really good, and he had a neat smile on his face, so I followed them around.
I heard them talking among themselves and it was really pretty, and so I first got hooked up with them by following them around just to listen to that. And then after about a month I started talking to them in Hawaiian, and they were naturally very surprised.
I didn't speak English until about six months after that. I had trouble with consonants, and they were easier in Hawaiian. I got Hawaiian first, and then English as a second language.
At first I followed them around at work, until they put stop to that because I was getting in their way too much. So I started seeing them every time they had their lunch break, a nice, long, hour one.
I learned to tell time well enough to get there when their hour started. And after that I'd go away and watch them from a distance. They used to sing while they worked and that was pretty cool. I'd watch them sing and learn the songs.
Just before my third birthday I started to speak English. I'd learned to translate back and forth and that was my big breakthrough. I would talk to them in Hawaiian, but after a while they made me speak to them in English, because they were afraid that I was neglecting the English.
They thought they would get in trouble too, for letting me learn Hawaiian from them. The situation in those days was that there was a lot of bigotry; more so than there is now. Native Hawaiians were really distrusted. If anything had gone wrong, their explanation of what happened would of not been believed. They would have been in serious trouble and lost their jobs, at least. Maybe ended up in jail or something. So I'm sure they were really concerned to not do anything to get in trouble.
They were also afraid of teaching me too much about their beliefs. One of them was a non-christian, a traditional Hawaiian, and was really afraid of telling me anything about it because if it got to my parents there'd be an investigation and the military police would come down on them. Eventually, Lani did it anyway, but without letting his brother know.
They carved at work on their lunch break. Since I only saw them there it was isolated from everything else. They were 18 when I discovered them, and 19 when I left Schoffield. My mother actually met Lani the day we left. He didn't speak English, though Lono did. So I translated back and forth. It was a fairly long exchange. I can still remember the content of that conversation.
Lani told my mother that at 3 1/2 I was speaking Hawaiian very well, and was ready for school, except for one thing: I wasn't very good with numbers. I didn't know at the time that he was talking about grammatical numbers. Hawaiian, for example, has a lot of different ways to say `they,' and I wasn't getting it. So I thought I had to learn numbers in order to make them proud if I should ever come back and see them again.
[Margaret] [Whiting] to the Rescue
Back in the states I lived most of the time in Massachusetts at Fort Devens, though there was a little time as well in Taiwan and in Seattle. I really got into math, but still was doing art, though my mother tried to beat that out of me. She'd say she "wasn't going to have a basket weaver" and have me doing something where I couldn't support her in her old age.
When I was seven years old she caught me drawing some Hawaiian designs and chanting. I still remembered the chants then. I would never speak Hawaiian around her because we had this rule that I wasn't supposed to speak Hawaiian at home. I didn't want to get beat up.
She made me draw while she burned the back of my hand with a cigarette. Until then I was ambidextrous, but after that I couldn't draw or write with my left hand. Then my penmanship got really bad. Until then It was great, and she asked why, and I said, `Well, you fixed it so I can't write with my left hand anymore,' and she said. "You were left handed?!" She was left handed, and my father was left handed, so you would have thought she would have figured that out.
Soon after that, the [[Margaret] Whiting] incident happened. We went to Taiwan right after the chanting incident. They had a USO show around Christmas time, and the place was this mountain-top U.S. Chinese electronic surveillance installation, to spy on the `Reds.'. So my mother and I were blindfolded as we were driven up there in a staff car.
[Margaret] [Whiting] was the main act. She was an actor and stand-up comedienne at the time. Because my father was in charge of the base, she sat next to him, and I sat across from her at the banquet table and got to make friends during the dinner.
After the dinner I yanked on her dress and asked to talk to her in private. We went outside of the tent and I begged her to kidnap me, and she said, `No, that wouldn't be good.' She said they'd just come and take me away from her and have her arrested.
I hadn't thought of that before, and could see the point, so I started crying. I felt like this was my last hope. I'd already tried to get a whole bunch of my relatives to kidnap me, and gas station attendants and things like that. And finally I met somebody who was really nice, and really pretty, whose heart was in the right place, and she wouldn't do it, and even had a good reason not to that I could generalize to other people, so I started crying.
She asked me why I wanted to do this, and I told her some of the stories, and she started giving me advice. She asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I said I hadn't decided, but either wanted to be an artist or do something with numbers. She said, `Stick with the numbers. They'll probably like that better and they'll leave you alone. And when you grow up, you can do whatever you want.'
Then she taught me this joke. One of those things where you ask a question, like `I'm twice as old as my brother, and my brother is seven,' and so on. And she said, `Just remember the answer is 39.' We went back out there and she got a crowd together with my parents among them and said `This kid's really bright. Listen to this.' and she does the riddle, all about what's her age, and I say '39,' and it's a joke since she's not really that old, and my parents are impressed.
We snowed them. And all the way home they're, `Wow, we didn't know you were so good at math. You're like a genius.' It worked. The verbal abuse kept up, and my mother still beat me up once in a while, but this thing she had about hitting me in the head a lot stopped. She didn't want to damage the goods. It was her meal ticket for her old age.
Mental Illness
I decided to become a mathematician when I was 14. I'd spend three or four hours a day studying my own stuff after my other homework. I was kind of obsessed with it. It has that trance thing going for it. You can lose yourself in that too. In a bad family it was kind of like a drug for me.
I got a doctorate at Cornell, and taught evening classes at the U here while I was on leave writing my thesis. I was invited to Swiss Polytechnic for a year. I came back and was supposed to do two years at Rutgers, but the mental illness was starting by then.
I started having problems with post traumatic stress. My father died just before the thesis was approved and that triggered massive panic attacks. I started having anxiety attacks every time I tried to do math, so I wasn't really good for research anymore.
After one year I quit Rutgers. I came back to Seattle and taught at community colleges, and did some more evening division. I liked the older people, but not the regular college-aged students. The anxiety got worse and worse. I taught at St. Martins a year, and during that year started having visions. Those were the worst one. Apocalyptic visions, like from Revelations.
I was getting sick from the stress of teaching. They weren't very happy with my performance because I wasn't really into it, and when they told me I wasn't going to be coming back the next year. I immediately began to look for something else.
A cab driver had been shot and killed at Seward Park, so there was an opening, and I figured no one else would probably want that job and went and applied. There were about 10 others, but they hired us all. I lost money driving cab, but had money and could afford it. The marriage fell apart soon after that, and I became homeless. It was a very cold winter.
Just before that, I went to a career councilor who was from the Caribbean, and she kept saying, you know, there's something strange about the way you express yourself and I'd like to hypnotize you, and she did and she got this Hawaiian character out of me. So she found out about all this stuff before I did.
It happens it situations like that pretty regularly. I had a split personality. And the Hawaiian speaking and English personality weren't really the same. It was the Hawaiian personality that mostly took the beatings. The Hawaiian personality was dominant at that point. So there was some work to be done.
She sent me to a therapist, who I've been seeing since then, November of '83. In '87 after a scary accident, I quit driving, and went on mental disability, which is something she'd been trying to get me to do. So I could afford therapy, and that led to the breakthrough I '91, where I remembered everything.
After that the two personalities started to join. So far as I can tell, they're integrated now. But there were three days when the other personality took over.
I went to the half-price bookstore in the U-District, and was looking through the foreign books, and there was this pocket traveler Hawaiian dictionary. And there was this word, `hele,' which is to go. I used to use it all the time. I saw that and remembered saying it to my mother.
And I found more words, and remembered. That's when memories started breaking through and within three or four days this personality switch happened.
This other personality took over, and for three days ran around and fixed me up with things. Like a phone; I hadn't been able to get a phone up until then, but this other guy could get a phone. This other guy hooked me up with a psychiatrist to discuss the new developments. It was a scary time.
There was this fear of being overwhelmed by the unknown. I was working late at night as a janitor and was terrified. After that I started seeing the therapist again pretty frequently and worked a plan out. Doing art has really helped.
Art and Integration
I started doing art in about '84, or thinking seriously about it. I was having what I now know were flashback related visions and had a lot of visual imagery impinging on me and I wanted to express some of that to the world. This was the main motivation, relating what I was going through.
I'd been doing drawing and things all the time since I was a kid, but that's when I got serious with it. Just before I ended up being homeless and the marriage broke up.
After doing abstract art all those years and feeling like a talentless fool I deliberately taught myself to draw from life. Since I was living in a cab, and my own car which wasn't working, the '69 Rambler, I'd draw windshield wipers, and microphones and cords and clipboards for practice.
I went through this period where I was doing pen and ink drawings all the time in black and white. It was all consciously with the idea of getting out of it eventually. I just wanted to convince myself I could do it. I tried watercolors and didn't really like it, and started with acrylics in '89 and I liked them a lot.
I did a series of realistic paintings with the idea I'd move into more abstract work. The style I have now is what I've really always wanted to do. It balances realism and abstract to the point where I want it to be. For me it's just right.
I had this weird thing about the U-district and Bellevue then, not being able to stand being away from them, and after the breakthrough that subsided. There are places there that resembled the neighborhood in Schoffield barracks, and were reverberating. That area of the base looked like a suburban village.
As I began to realize that it lost its hold on me and I could begin to leave it. Michael Howell offered to ride the bus to the Gallery with me, and talked me through a trip downtown. I started coming to the homeless art gallery on a regular basis.
It gave me a place where, first of all, that merging of the personalities could happen. You can't just do that without interacting with people. You have to let them come out and express themselves.
Also, the art does that too. The struggle to get the realism and abstract balance is also a struggle between my two personalities' way of expressing themselves together. The Gallery is a sort of a practice area, more than anything else.
It's also a sort of a place where I can do for other people what those Hawaiian guys did for me. They gave me a place to retire everyday where I could be a human being and not be afraid. I can see how important that is to somebody. So it gives me a good feeling about my life now and what I'm doing.
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