Fetid Dog Love

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

My last two months in Taipei were tinted with fear, as I heard more and more rumors of Mainland China's plan to either invade or bomb Taiwan. I've written about this already, out of sequence, in A Cacophonous Nudge. It was right about the same time as the solar eclipse in mid-April that my father told my Mother and I that we wouldn't be staying with him for much longer. The Army was shipping out large numbers of dependents to get them out of harm's way.

Our departure was set for the middle of May. I would miss the last couple of weeks of school. Ordinarily I wouldn't have minded, but the next thing I knew our class was having a spelling bee as part of a school-wide contest, and I won, and the teacher said I did so well I might easily win the whole contest. The 1st prize would be a pair of binoculars. Oh, man, I wanted those binoculars. Stupid Army Brat life, I thought. Every time something good comes along, you have to move away, I thought.

My Mother and I were booked on a great-circle flight to Seattle by way of Anchorage.

Up to this time in my life I was lukewarm toward the dog, Koko. He didn't particularly care one way or another about me either. But a funny thing happened when they said we couldn't afford to take him back to the States with us. All of the sudden I couldn't take it. It wasn't like they were going to put him down or sell him for meat. They arranged for the the magician and his wife to keep him. But I broke down into tears in front of them and hugged the dog and told my parents they were horrible, and I couldn't stand to lose him.

I didn't know at the time what came over me. Now I get it. Enough other over-reactions of that sort have happened since. I had experienced too much neglect and emotional abandonment from my parents. Their plan to abandon Koko recalled it all.

My Father made it up to me by buying me a pair of binoculars. He figured, better buy them in Taiwan at the low prices there, than pay two or three times as much back home.

The flight seemed to take days. The stop at the Anchorage airport was notable only in the fact that it was snowing in May.

My Mother and I wound up back in Seattle living in the garage behind my Grandmother's house again. We were there maybe one week at most when we got word that Koko would be arriving by freight plane at Boeing field in a couple of days. Having seen my emotional outburst over losing Koko, the magician and his wife decided to spend their own money to reunite us.

We were driven to the airport by one of my cousins. Koko was delivered in a box with holes for breathing. One whiff, and I began to regret I'd made such a scene back in Taipei. He reeked of his own feces and urine, not having been let out of the box for the whole trip. We took him home and did all the things people will recommend, baths with shampoo, baths of milk, baths of tomato juice. We shaved him completely, and tried it all over again. Nothing worked. That was one stinky dog. He lived more than 8 years after that and we never got rid of the smell.

Still, I thought of him more as a brother from then on. My parents hadn't succeeded in getting rid of him either.

Major Magician

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USNS ED Patrick

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

In the morning, my Mother and I (and Koko, the dog -- I keep forgetting to mention him!) were taken to the Port of San Francisco. We boarded the troop transport ship USNS E.D. Patrick. This was jokingly referred to as a "boat" by crew, but it looked like a giant cruise-liner to inexperienced me.

The ship was a combination passenger and cargo ship that operated between the West Coast of America and Asia from about 1950 to the late 60s. Koko was our cargo. He had to go into a traveling box and reside in it in a sheltered cargo area on an aft deck. We would have to walk him in the cargo area several times a day during the trip.

Look at me! I just said "aft"! This was the trip where I learned to say "I'm going up the ladder" instead of "I'm going upstairs". I learned to say "decks" not "floors".

After the ship set out into San Francisco Bay we all had to line up on one of the lower decks and receive instructions on putting on life jackets. We endured a test of the ships emergency sirens while we approached the Golden Gate Bridge. Then we could take the jackets off, they were collected and with the horn blaring we passed under the bridge. Trés Jungian. The auspicious beginning!

About an hour out to sea, when land was no longer visible, I was puking. I puked on deck. A sailor led me to the rail and invited me to puke into the ocean in the future. I immediately did so. He said, "stay there, I'll get you something for that." While he was gone I puked a couple more times into the Pacific. He came back with a big bag of saltine crackers and a glass of lemonade. I spent several hours sitting near the rail, eating saltines and sipping lemonade, and periodically puking.

I was still puking about once every half hour or so when a girl came up alongside me and asked me my name. She was about my age, sandy blond, and cute. I told her "Wesley" and she asked what it meant. I said I didn't think it meant anything, it was just the name of some guy who lived a long time ago and is dead now. She said, "Well, my name is Diana. Diana is the goddess of the hunt."

I said, "What sort of hunt?" She said, "All kinds. Deer, maybe. Or people." She smiled. I realized at that moment that my newest girlfriend had found me. Then I puked again, and she said, "You'll get over that soon, don't worry."

Who, me, worry?

Road Trip I

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loose End: Koko Returns

I'm guilty of thinking of only myself. My memoirs, me, me, me. I forgot to tell you what happened to Koko.

You might recall that Koko is the presumably half Schnauzer, half Springer Spaniel that was ostensibly a 1951 Christmas present to me, but really was Dad's dog. On my 4th birthday my Mother scared him off, and he ran away, after he freaked her out by lapping up my blood.

He came back a week later, before Alaka'i returned. He appeared out of the tall grass in front of the house as my parents and I happened to be outside and he sauntered up with a big sheepish-looking grin.

I would have interpreted the grin as a sign that he came to realize that being fed daily beat foraging, and a desire to kiss up to us and get reinstated as the family dog.

My Father interpreted the grin as proof that Koko got laid.

Later, we heard that a family about a mile away was trying to get rid of some mongrel puppies born to their bitch. Dad said that cinched it, good old Koko got some action and knocked that bitch up.

That came to be Dad's public story of that time. Whenever we had guests over, and the subject of the dog came up, as it always did even if Dad had to force it up, Dad would tell the guests how he didn't believe in fixing male dogs, it's inhumane. Then he would say, beaming proudly, "Sure, there was that time that he ran off for a week and we found out later that he knocked up a neighbor bitch, but all of us men got to sow some wild oats, am I right?"

My Mother called it Dad's vicarious adventure. I asked what "vicarious" meant. She said, "You'll understand when you're older," so I thought it was dirty.

Never a mention of the real reason Koko ran off. When the neighbors with the female dog asked if our dog could be the sire, my parents said he'd been in the house or under leash the whole time.

Ā Hui Hou Aku

After Lani gave me the whistle I remembered Kona and showed it to him. Is that confusing enough? Here's how it worked. I was there with my Mother, so in my mind, Kona was with me, instead of back at home. I had been Alaka'i while speaking and translating Hawaiian. But Kona was there and he would want to see the whistle, so I let him. Which made Kona take over from Alaka'i.

While the Kona personality was playing with the whistle Lani actually spoke with my Mother in broken English for a bit. I didn't catch it all but noticed when he asked about my little brother. My Mother said there is no little brother, there's just him, pointing to me. I looked up at her as Alaka'i again and said, "That's not true, little brother is right here. See? He's playing with the whistle." And I switched back and blew into the whistle.

My Mother laughed and said he's just talking about an imaginary friend he made up. But Lani, who had heard me talking about a little brother for a long time in earnest, looked worried.

Then he crouched down to my level and said, "Who am I speaking to now?" in Hawaiian.

I said, "Alaka'i."

He said, "I had hoped you'd make your last visit alone. I was going to take you away someplace safe from them. Now I'll never see you again. I'll never have another chance."

"I'll come back," I said.

He said, "No. You won't be able to."

Then a tear down from his eye. He said, "Even if you come back, I won't be here. I can't stand the thought that you'll never escape. I'm going to go away. Please don't look for me."

My Mother interrupted. She told me we were going to be in big trouble when we got back to my Father, for being so late. The sooner we got back, the better it would be.

The thought that I really might not see Lani again made me think of uku.

Uku is the law of reciprocity. If someone gives something to you, whether it's good or bad, you have to give them something in return of equal value, to keep the universe in balance. I thought I was obligated to give Lani something that was as important as the whistle he gave me. Ordinarily I could wait and do it later, but not if I'd never see him again.

So I picked up the ball and held it out to him, and told him he had to take it.

My Mother said, "You can't give him that, that was from your Father. Your Father will be upset."

I said, "Daddy will know I had to give it to Lani." I had a higher opinion of my Father's good judgment than was justified by my experiences with him.

Lani tried to refuse it. He said that uku didn't apply to a hō'ano'ano gift.

I should have listened to him about that. He was right, of course. The hō'ano'ano giving was completely outside of uku. But I couldn't see that in the short time that I had.

Finally, I talked Lani into taking the ball, and we said goodbyes. "Ā hui hou aku" -- until we meet again. Then he waved for a minute as my Mother, and the dog and I walked back home.

The last I saw of him, he appeared to hang his head in sadness, and turn away.

Bloody Vision

After hearing about my parent's attempt to kill me on my first birthday, Lani and Lono conferred together about me, about what they could do about my parents. They talked about it that day, and the next. They couldn't think of anything that wouldn't put me in danger.

There was no such thing as Child Protection Services then. All they could do was report what they had heard me say to the authorities. But the authorities wouldn't be able to act on it, because it would be a toddler's word against his parents. I'd be left with my parents, who would now know that I was accusing them.

Worse, they were in danger. They were 18-year-old men seeing a child every day. The authorities would consider that strange and were likely to suspect undue influence, if nothing else.

Around this time they told me a changeling story about a boy abused by his parents. The gods take the boy away and replace him with one of their own children, who punishes the parents. I told my friends I identified with the changeling. They warned me against thinking that way. They said you don't want to be that loved by the gods, it only brings trouble.

I thought about that. I said it looked like the gods loved the original me too much.

The thought that I could bring grief to my parents, especially my Mother, motivated me to want to learn English faster. The dog Koko was present for a breakthrough.

I was sitting around in the front yard when troops marched past. Their boots hitting the pavement reminded me of English. Then I thought of a nearby stream, and it reminded me of Hawaiian. It seemed at that moment that I could never speak English fluently. But then the dog ambled by. I had a sudden vision of Koko "Blood" being chopped up into a dozen bloody pieces. Then the pieces are reassembled to make a new animal shape. It's still dead and bloody, but I imagined life moving into it, and a new dog getting up and walking off.

Immediately after that vision I found myself able to think in English finally. Could the vision have caused the breakthrough, or was it just a sign of it happening?

Bloody Dog

As I've said before my first word was "Daddy", prompted by my Mother saying, "tell Daddy who your present [the shit] is for!"

After my parents were both dead I found an old album they had of me. It was called Baby's Album, or something similar and equally obvious. The album had ready-made entries for "Baby's first smile", "Baby's first steps", etc., with room for snapshots where appropriate, and blank lines to be filled in with dates and other details.

The entry for "Baby's first word" had originally been "Daddy", but was later struck through and replaced by "shit" in the kind of bad handwriting my Mother had after she came down with arthritis in the Seventies. So maybe she remembered it a little differently. But clearly our memories aren't significantly different.

A few hours later I parroted "Goodbye Daddy" from memory. Then I went to the hospital and didn't speak a single word again until sometime toward the end of November, 1951. I don't remember what I said now, but I remember Lani and Lono placing it in time for me, and saying I had told them they had forgotten to do some one of their chores. It was an entire sentence in Hawaiian.

Things moved quickly after that, and already by December I was carrying on simple conversations with them, entirely in Hawaiian. It would be several months yet before I spoke any English again. But, unlike my insensitive parents, Lono was alert to the fact that I understand a lot of English, and so he alternated Hawaiian and English with me. Lani spoke only Hawaiian.

After I began speaking Hawaiian, Lani began to warm to me. One of the earliest conversations I remember was one I had with Lono when Lani had to leave us for a few minutes. He told me Lani had been keeping his distance because he had suffered too much from the loss of a younger brother. The discussion took some time because I didn't know what a younger brother was.

I still thought Hawaiian and English were one language and every night after going over the day's events and conversations in my head I would try to make English sounds in the hope of extending my speech to that part of "Hawaiian". I deliberately babbled, with the conscious goal of mastering the consonants and consonant combinations.

That was the main problem. Hawaiian has 7 consonants plus a breath stop: h, k, l, m, n, p, w, '.

The brain injury affected my speech motor control. I could whistle like a bird but I couldn't say hard g when I wanted to. Double consonants like gr and bl were even worse. So I worked on making those sounds constantly whenever I was alone. I recall sessions that went "tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, dok, gok, tok, kok, tok, kok, dok, dok, dok, dok, dok, ..." on and on like that, until I fell asleep.

Speaking of "dok", we got a dog right about this time. He was nominally a Christmas present to me. My Father, who was back from Korea in time for the gifting, was sure that the dog was half Springer Spaniel and half Miniature Schnauzer. He named him Koko Head after the Hawaiian promontory east of the more famous Diamond Head. It was a common name that all the haole would give any pet that had dark fur on its head. Get it? "Koko": sounds like "Cocoa"!

But I already knew "koko" to mean "blood" in Hawaiian. I didn't like the idea of naming something with sharp teeth "Blood". I was very suspicious of this "gift", as you can see for yourself. This is the best picture my Father ever took, in my opinion.