Christianity For Dummies

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bath Time

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

I've slowed down on these memoirs lately because I'm entering territory that's less comfortable.

After my Mother and I moved back into the garage my Grandmother's house on Beacon Hill, there was an immediate escalation in the rapes and other forms of sexual abuse. I don't want to describe it all. But one incident might stand for several.

My Grandmother was in poor health. I didn't know it at the time, but she had already had a number of minor strokes. Actually, someone might have told me that, but it wouldn't have meant anything to me, because I didn't know what a stroke was. If I thought about it, I probably envisioned a fainting spell that would be over in a minute and have no lasting effect, so long as you didn't concuss yourself when you fell.

Sometime that summer she went to the hospital. The impression I was given was it was nothing special and she'd be back in a week or so, but meanwhile my Mother and I could house-sit.

So I slept on the couch in the living room while my Mother slept in a room that served as a guest bedroom.

My Mother was still forcing herself on me during baths. Most of the times the rapes were done under the cover of cleaning me. I had to be cleaned inside, too, she said.

But having the house to ourselves seemed to make my Mother want to be more overt. Maybe it was knowing that the noises I made would be less likely heard outside.

She walked in on me during a bath wearing only a bathrobe and threw it open and ordered me to fondle her genitals. That was impossible for me. I just froze. So she lost her temper and raped me anally for a long time. It was clearly not cleaning this time; it was punishment for disobeying her.

The rape continued so long that I disassociated. I had a kind of out of body experience. I returned to awareness to discover that I was losing control of my bodily functions.

When I did, my Mother became angrier than ever and started spanking me hard and that only made it worse.

I screamed so hard I lost my breath and choked for air, and then screamed more.

Then she said, "You clean it up."

Major Magician

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very Bad Night, Part II

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

The house was quiet for about half an hour. I was still upset from all the screaming, and was lying awake in bed with the lights off, when I heard my Mother coming up the stairs, and then she opened the door to my room and asked me if I was awake. I tried pretending I was asleep, but she knew I wasn't and told me to get up and come to her bedroom.

On the way I could look over the railing and see my Father passed out on the floor of the living room.

In the bedroom my Mother first had me help her out of the dress she fought so hard to get into hours earlier. Then she told me she wanted me to lie down with her to keep her company. For a few minutes we just lay there, hugging each other, nothing else happening. I was still in my pajamas, she was in her underwear.

Then she insisted that it would be better if we both took our clothes off. I didn't see how it would be better at all, but she insisted she needed to be closer, to help her get over what she'd been through that night. I still resisted; she got me to agree finally by offering to turn the lights out right away.

So we got naked, she turned out the lights, and for a few minutes we were in bed hugging in the dark. Then she began fondling me and telling me she wanted me.

That was totally absurd. I was 8 and a half. Sure, I had been over-sexed following the first major head injury, but that effect had run its course at least three years before. Not to mention that I didn't know what intercourse was.

When she realized that I wasn't going to be physically able to have intercourse with her she acted as though it were a tragedy for me. her attitude was "You poor thing, I'll have to do something for you." It didn't make any sense to me. Just seconds before she was the one with the sexual need. Now I was supposed to be in need. It was so confusing I didn't know what to say.

She got out of bed, grabbed a swirled tapered candle off her dresser, and said, "I'll take care of you in the bathroom."

In the bathroom she pushed me down on my hands and knees and raped me with the candle.

It hurt and I begged her to stop. She laughed and kept at it. When I continued to cry and beg, she eventually became angry. "I know it doesn't hurt. Stop being a crybaby"

Finally she let me go and I ran to my bedroom and the imagined security of my own bed. She let me lie there in the dark by myself long enough for her to smoke a cigarette. Then she popped her head in and said, angrily, "I know it didn't hurt, you filthy liar." And she left, slamming the door.

It had hurt. It still hurt then. I didn't lie.

Very Bad Night, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude, With Zipper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Class Runs

[Below: There will be no pictures for this post. You are welcome.]

[Date & Place: The 3rd or 4th week of November 1957, a few hundred miles west of North America.]

After a day of puking and running around with Diana, I was starting to feel well again. That night I developed the worst diarrhea of my life. Again, the deity hated me. It lasted three days. I was afraid to leave the cabin.

By the third day it was getting clear it wasn't getting better, I was getting dehydrated, and I needed medical care. My Mother took me to the ship's doctor.

She did what she would always do when I saw a doctor: hang in the office, ignoring hints from the doctor that he and I could continue without her. He told her he would have to do a rectal exam, and she just sat there. He finally told her she had to wait outside. She started to freak out. She said, "I have to be here! I don't know what you're going to do! This is my baby!"

He said, "You don't have to worry; the nurse will be with me the whole time."

She still wouldn't leave, so he took her arm and pushed her out the door and slammed it.

It was easy for me to figure out what was really happening. Mom thought that during the rectal exam I might say something like, "That's just like Mommy does it." She wasn't trying to protect me, she was looking out for herself. She relied on being there to be able to ad lib a dismissal of anything I said that might incriminate her.

The doctor found a cyst that was causing the diarrhea. I had to use some medicated suppositories for the next few days. They worked great and I was out and about within 24 hours.

Playground-Citizen Wesley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total crock.

Agony, Ecstasy, & Bears

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Going Away Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bar-bar-a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cigarette Torture

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

I only spent a few boring days at Mina's house. Mina lived in a row house in Maryland, near Rock Creek. I was actually glad to see my parents, when they finally came to get me, just to be going some place that had books.

By the time I was back in Fort Devens, there was only a week left of 1st grade. It ended without further incident. I still have my report card. It shows the number of days I was absent each quintile of the school year except the last. For the last quintile that space is left blank. I believe I missed more than a month.

With the end of school I was still recovering from my injuries. The bandages came off my head first. My wrist continued to have to be in a sling for at least two more weeks.

One day, after some sexual abuse by my Mother, Alex told Kona how he could be summoned in an emergency. He said to just think of a certain line from an old Hawaiian song. It was one of the few lines that I could still remember after the surgery. It was a line which loosely translated meant, "please transport me to heaven."

A day or two later, as Kona, I sat down at the coffee table in the Sun Porch with paper and pencils and called Alex and asked him to sing for me, and help me draw. I needed help because he had to enable me to use the left hand. Ordinarily Kona drew with my right and Alex wrote with my left. Basically Kona needed Alex to allow Kona to guide his "writing" of pictures, and wanted Alex to sing along.

It was a meditative session, following the instructions in meditation that I remembered Lani and Lono giving me. I started with a seed drawing of a symbol representing a target state. My target was integration. The seed was two vertical lines joined by three parallel horizontal syzygies. I drew around it while chanting. I knew the chant was all wrong, but I hoped the magic would work anyway.

My Mother crept up on me, catching me in the act of chanting. She screamed at me. "How many times have we had to tell you not to use Hawaiian in the house!"

She demanded to know what I was drawing. I told her they were sleeping mat designs. She said she wasn't going to allow me to waste my life making sleeping mats or basket weaving "like useless ignorant natives." I had to get an education and a career, so she wouldn't have to support me forever.

Then she said, "I know what would put you in your place." She got a large envelope from her bedroom and threatened to show me the contents. She said there was an X-ray in it that would show me why she was so sure I was "on my way to being a basket-weaver." I didn't know what she was talking about at the time. It wasn't until I was almost 35 that I saw the X-ray she referred to. It was an X-ray taken upon my admission to Tripler Medical Center on my first birthday. It showed the extent of the brain damage I suffered that day.

She decided not to show me the X-ray. Instead, she suddenly shifted gears as she noticed that I was holding my pencil in my left hand. She said, "Show me how you've been drawing." When I drew a little with my left, she said, "So! You've switched personalities. Let's see, you used the left hand, that means the artist is in the right side of your head."

So she took me to the Play Deck and banged the right side of my head repeatedly on the brick wall there. The idea was to kill "the artist personality." She tried to do it so as not to leave any marks. After a while, she decided that wouldn't work. "If I don't do it hard enough to leave a mark I won't kill it either." So she brought me back to the Sun Porch and stuck the pencil back in my left hand and told me to draw. As soon as I drew a little she grabbed my left hand and burned the back of it with her cigarette.

When I stopped screaming, she said, "Draw some more." She threatened to beat me if I didn't. When I did, she burn the back of my left hand, being careful to burn it at the exact same place.

After that even threats wouldn't get me to draw for her. So every minute or so she took my hand with the pencil in it and forced it to draw a line, then burned the same spot.

She spent about half an hour at this, using up at least three cigarettes. Finally she said, "Are you going to use your left hand any more?" I told her I wouldn't. She said, "Good, maybe that personality won't get its way anymore."

Two or three months later I came home with a note from my teacher saying my penmanship had become terrible. My Mother said, "Why is your penmanship so bad suddenly? All through first grade you got high marks for penmanship. Your writing was beautiful."

I said, "Don't you remember? You made me stop using my left hand. That was the hand I was using to write with."

"No!" she said, "You were using it to draw with that day! That's what I remember. The artist was using the left hand!"

"I was only using it to draw then because I couldn't use my right hand, remember? It was in a sling."

"So what are you saying, you wrote with your left hand?'

"Sure. You didn't ever notice?"

She hadn't cared enough to notice before. Both my Mother and my Father wrote left-handed. My mother switched hands according to task, just like I did. She wrote with her left, used scissors with her right. But she couldn't be bothered to notice any of that, until she could see in it a justification for torture.

Torture and Retaliation

[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.]

After my first phone call, the long-distance collect call for help to my Aunt Alta, 400 miles away in Washington DC, I felt wonderful. I had done what needed to be done. Help was on its way. In two weeks Alta would be there and, maybe with the help of the police, I'd be taken away to safety. I played happily on the play deck off my bedroom.

In the late afternoon my Father left for some reason. He may have had extra work at the office, or he may have had a night out with the guys. In those days he still played poker or bridge occasionally while my Mother stayed home. I don't remember the reason, I just know he took off for several hours.

When he was gone my Mother found me and cheerfully told me she had a special treat for me. She led me to the bathroom between the Sun Porch and her bedroom, the Master Bathroom. I happened to note the time on a wall clock just before we entered. I also saw the clock on the way out. The special treat lasted an hour and a half.

It consisted of repeated enemas. After each one I had to hold it in or be beaten. I'd get beaten after awhile, because I couldn't hold it in forever. Or I could, so there'd be another. Either way, there'd be another, with the same rules.

[Right: Torturers and child molesters look like this.]

After the fourth or fifth time, I was screaming for her to please stop. She said, "I'll stop when you tell me why I'm doing it. You know why I'm doing this. I want you to tell me why."

It was an hour and a half of torture in every sense of the word. I had to confess a "crime". I wasn't told what the crime was that I was supposed to have committed. In the meantime the torture continued.

I never knew what to confess until my Mother let it be known that she had gotten "a very interesting phone call from Aunt Alta."

While I'd been playing by myself on the play deck, my Mother had received a call from Alta. "WHO DO YOU THINK SHE SAID CALLED HER THIS MORNING?"

I confessed that I called her. That didn't help. There was a long round of screaming and more enemas and beatings. "SHE TOLD ME WHAT YOU SAID TO HER! NOW YOU'RE GOING TO SAY IT TO ME!"

I tried to tell her what I said to Alta. I just wanted it to be over. I don't know what I admitted. I don't think it really mattered. I think she stopped when she did just because she tired of it.

During the torture Kona became aware of the watching of Alex. After she let me go and I crawled into bed, we felt reunited. United against my Mother, and against Alta.

My First Phone Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Hideousness

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened when I was 6, 1955-56. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My Mother's nocturnal visits continued. I'd estimate there were around four or five of those a month. Sometimes, as Alex, I would get up after one of the nocturnal rapes and go to sneak out of the house, to find my Father passed out on the living room floor. I'd go back to my bedroom for fear of encountering him when I returned.

One day they did catch me trying to sneak back in at dawn. I expected trouble, but I tried the obvious lie, telling them I'd only let myself out an hour earlier. Rather than the truth, that I'd been out since 1 AM. I was surprised when they bought it. They were prepared to believe that they hadn't noticed my leaving. They knew they weren't all that observant. I learned I could exploit their knowledge of their own weaknesses.

One form of inappropriate contact that increased was the way my Mother rewarded me. Other kids got cookies or candy for rewards, and grew up with eating disorders. I got my bottom petted and grew up sexually confused.

One time there was a drunken party in the Sun Porch, with twenty or more officers and their wives packed in, and it was my bedtime. I was able to undress myself by then and get into pajamas by myself. I came in to see my Mother in my pajamas and told her I was ready to be tucked in. She said she was too drunk to get up and go to my bedroom, and then she turned me around and pulled my pajama bottoms down in front of everyone at the party and pet me. Everyone in front of me dropped jaws seeing this, and I was too young and clueless to know why. I thought they were disgusted by my body. I had no idea that they were shocked by my Mother's behavior. I went to bed thinking I was hideously deformed. No one said anything to my Mother about it, that I could hear.

Another ongoing inappropriate practice was the genital fondling. My Mother continued to insist that I needed my genitals fondled on a regular basis, about once every three days, in order to keep me healthy. How she arrived at three days I don't know, but all the evidence points to that as being how often she herself liked to have sex, so she was probably projecting her desires on to me.

The fondling didn't bother me at the time, and I in fact liked it. She even got me to remind her whenever she missed a session. One time I had just gotten up and was still in my pajamas when I remembered it had been four days since the last fondling. I told her as she was vacuuming the Sun Porch, and she cheerfully stopped and took care of my "need."

If the object really was to eliminate my need for sex she did it all wrong. She always stopped a half minute or so after I began to show signs of arousal, saying that was enough. The effect wasn't to produce any relief but to tease me and make me think about sex constantly.

That's in fact what I did. I spent hours every day day dreaming about rolling around naked with girls my own age. My plan to kiss all of the girls in first grade was supposed to be stage one of a prolonged systematic plan to get a room full of girls to take all their clothes off, form a pile, and let me dive in. A lot of this day dreaming was probably driven by my desire to distance my sexual desires from my Mother, by diverting them elsewhere.

One other form of sexual molestation that I did NOT enjoy started up that year.

My Mother claimed to have a bad headache one afternoon. School was out that day but my Father was at work. The weather was bad so I had to be indoors. She told me she would reward me if I played quietly by myself for three hours. At the end of three hours she had me go with her to her bedroom for a "special" reward. The reward started out the normal reward. She took my pants down and petted my rear. Then she gave me enemas. Not one but many, so many that I lost count.

At first they would just be uncomfortable and embarrassing. But after the fourth or fifth enema I'd have involuntary physical/sexual responses that I couldn't interpret at that age, that were terrifying to me. As they continued they became more extreme and I became delirious and lost control of my bladder, at which point my Mother screamed and beat me, as if it were MY fault.

It was just the first time she resorted to multiple enemas. She used it later sometimes to get herself off on my responses and my distress, other times simply as a torture technique, as she began to at least acknowledge that I hated it.

I'm sure most people would understand how the enema sessions could have been traumatic for me and therefore fueled my later symptoms of PTSD. Actually though, the inappropriate touching that DIDN'T cause severe trauma at the time has been harder to deal with over the years.

Most public discussion of PTSD misses the key point that trauma can be delayed as well as the reactions to it. It's possible for an event to be meaningless to the child to be meaningful and disturbing to the adult who remembers it, and that later disturbance can result in the stress disorder.

Even though I believed it was totally wrong for a mother to fondle her son's genitals when I was 20, It wasn't until I was 35 that it suddenly occurred to me, while I was talking about it to a therapist, that it was wrong when my Mother did it to me, too. Before that, it was just a general rule that I'd never applied to her. I hadn't repressed any memories of it, I had just walled off the part my mind that knew it was a betrayal, because I couldn't face that conscious awareness of that much betrayal.

Whereas I had by then been well used to facing the betrayals represented by the enemas. That was old by then.

Road Trip I

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abuse Goes On

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

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

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

Dinners were therefore unbearable.

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

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

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

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

Adultery

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

I had trouble sleeping because of the noise.

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid stupid owl clock.

Christmas, 1954

At the end of 1954 I was severely depressed. If I were 5 years old and that depressed now I'd probably be put on Wellbutrin, instead of being 58, and on Wellbutrin. In those days you didn't treat kids' depressions by giving them pills, you treated them by telling them it's their own fault they're depressed. You were depressed because deep down inside you hated Jesus, or because you were too lazy to be cheerful ("Don't you know smiling uses fewer muscles and takes more work than frowning?"), or because you were trying to put something over on people. "You don't want to play with the other kids and have fun, because you're selfish." This was just about the time that the term "maladjusted" came into vogue. I wasn't maladjusted yet, but that was only because I hadn't yet been diagnosed.

For my own part I blamed the depression on the move and missing the House in Shirley. I especially missed the old retired farmer who owned the house and took care of me periodically.

That's my best explanation for the fact that as Christmas neared I wanted a farm. That, and Roy Rogers had a farm. And I believed at the time that both my Grandfathers had farms. It turned out not quite true about Grandfather Browning, but he did raise fruit and vegetables, chickens, and rabbits.

I couldn't have a real farm. But the Christmas Wish-Book, i.e. the Sears catalog, had pictures of plastic farm sets with plastic sheep and cows and horses and farm house and fences to play with.

My parents were freaked out by my single-minded insistence that a farm was all I wanted. They took me to a store Santa in Worcester in the hopes he could squeeze out other clues. The Santa, who scared the daylights out of me, said, "If you're going to have a farm aren't you going to need a wagon to haul your supplies around?" I nodded yes in the hopes he would be satisfied and let me go. He did, thankfully.

My Father later complained about all the trouble he took setting up the farm under the tree for me to find Christmas morning, only to have me lose interest in the set within an hour.

My two favorite presents were the red Radio Flyer Wagon, which replaced the red Dixie Junior Wagon I'd had that got left behind in Hawaii, and an easel one of my aunts gave me. The easel had a scroll of butcher paper that was about two feet wide and I don't know how long. Fifty feet? A hundred feet? All I know is it took me months to use it up.

Every day I'd set the easel up in front of the TV. As commercials came on I would write down the words that flashed on the screen. I learned to spell a great many new words that way, and was able to add them to my vocabulary. Colgate and Palmolive were two of my favorite new words. I also drew pictures in crayon on the easel, sometimes inspired by the pictures on TV, sometimes not.


For several months the red wagon followed behind me from room to room and went outside with me wherever I went. I haven't been able to find a picture of it. The one I had featured a zig-zag design on the side, instead of the framing ornaments of the one pictured above. It hauled toys, always including the precious muddy tennis ball, and it hauled George, the invisible ghost. George liked to go for rides.

My Father was done with photography but my Mother insisted that it was time I be photographed, so right after Christmas a professional photographer was hired to do it. The guy they hired did house calls. He set up a portable curtain in our living room. He got on my bad side by asking me right off what I wanted to be when I grew up. I despised adults who started off with that question. The underlying premise was, you're not worth anything now, how are you going to rectify that? I shocked my parents by announcing for the first time that I wanted to be a fireman.

My Mother said, "WHAT?! Just the day before Christmas all you wanted in the world was to be a farmer. Before that you wanted to be a cowboy. Where did fireman come from?" "I want to help people." "God help us all," she said.

I then found out that the whole reason the photographer asked was so he could guess which props he should pull out of the case he dragged in. He heard "cowboy" so he pulled out the cowboy props, a toy horse, toy pistols, and cowboy chaps. The scar from the first birthday head injury was prominent at this age, but you can't see it because the photographer was explicitly instructed to airbrush it out. He forced me to say cheese against my will. What's wrong with people these days, that everybody has to be smiling in pictures. Where did that addiction to a graphic lie come from? My great-grandparents never had to smile for their pictures. Why don't I get to be myself?

Charles

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around late Autumn, 1954, when I was 5. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My first best friend at Fort Devens was a kid my age named Charles. Charles lived in another of the multiplexes on Chancellorsville. His was three or four buildings east. He was so disturbed he made me look like a rock of sanity.

One of the things I'd gotten as a present for either the previous Christmas or my birthday was a set of Lincoln Logs. If you don't know what they are, don't sweat it. It's enough to know they were made of wood, they interlocked, and you built stuff out of them. Like Legos. Only the pieces were bigger and less fun. You were supposed to make log cabins. I think the idea was to teach millions of kids the skills needed to become presidents and know how to free slaves. We don't have enough people like that.

Charles had a weird need to eat wood. His parents asked my parents to have me take pencils away from him, or he would eat the wood and leave only the graphite. It was a pain watching him all the time.

One day when he was over he disappeared, and I thought he had decided to go home without telling me. After an hour playing by myself in my room I heard a sound like rats were nosing around in my closet. I opened the closet door and found Charles had been sitting on the floor in the dark chewing on Lincoln Logs, surrounded by sawdust. He'd chewed his way through a third of the set.

Later I was invited to his house. I found out Charles had a teenage big brother who treated him like dirt. I found out that Charles' parents put Charles down constantly, even in front of me, and told him he'd never be as good as his older brother.

My Mother tried to molest Charles. This is the most direct evidence I have that my Mother was an indiscriminate child molester. She announced that I needed a bath, and suggested to Charles that he might want a bath, too. When he didn't answer, she just pushed us both into the bathroom and said, "It'll be fun." She took my clothes off first to convince him it was OK. He let her take his off.

Then she fondled my genitals and let Charles see how much I enjoyed it, and said, "Don't you want me to do this for you, Charles?"

Charles was afraid, and made it very clear he didn't want that. His Mother didn't touch him that way. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I had been told all mothers did it.

She then tried to get Charles interested in anal stimulation, by showing him that doing it to me didn't kill me.

I'm always amazed when I think of the risks she seemed to take. Charles could have gone straight home and reported all of this. I would have backed him up in an investigation. But somehow my Mother was able to psyche out the kid and figure out that he wouldn't tell anyone what happened.