Payback

My Mother was pregnant again. You couldn't tell by looking at her; she wasn't big in the belly yet. My clue was my Father continually telling me to not bother her because she's pregnant.

I could hear them talking at night, when I was supposed to be going to sleep. They talked about how the new baby was a chance to start over and do everything right this time. The new baby won't be damaged. The new baby will be everything Wesley was supposed to be.

I wasn't supposed to play with Jackson again after we were caught sneaking into houses. I was ordered to stay at home or in the yard. For about a week I hung out at home trying to be nice to my Mother and staying out of her way.

I was in deep pain. I was isolated. I felt rejected by everyone. I couldn't imagine killing myself, but I thought of what I could imagine. I thought that when the good baby came to replace me, I would go away. I pictured a hole in the ground, somewhere a long way off, and sitting in it, and never coming out.

My Mother was as cruel as ever. When my father was at work she would regularly lock me in my room. The rapes weren't as frequent as when my Father was in Korea, but still happened.

One day, I think it was in the middle of May, 1952, Jackson found me in our back yard playing by myself, and told me he had an idea of something fun to do, and I should come along. I knew I could only get in trouble by leaving with him, but I thought it didn't matter because I was treated like dirt no matter whether I was good or not. Besides, I'd be leaving permanently to live in dirt, so it would all be over soon.

So I went with him. He took me to a house that had a crawl-space beneath it that was gated and padlocked. The gate consisted of wooden slats. We could see what looked like toys to us through the slats. Jackson talked me into helping him rip away slats so we could take the toys out. So he had escalated his activities to breaking in to places, and he wasn't so concerned anymore about leaving evidence. I thought he was probably in a bad mood too.

When we got the toys out, Jackson recognized them as forming a croquet set. I didn't know what that meant, so he told me I was stupid. Then we left, with the croquet set strewn all over the lawn.

We went into some woods. He talked to me about how mean his parents were. So I opened up to him and shared my feelings about my parents and how they hated me an wanted me dead. He said he didn't blame them, I was a stupid shit, and to prove it he defecated in front of me, and picked up some of his shit and smeared it on me. Then he left.

At that moment I had my first remembered fugue experience. A fugue experience is a period in which you must have been active but you can't recall being conscious during it. It's like sleep-walking, only you weren't asleep to begin with. It's often seen in people who have experienced trauma.

This first fugue experience lasted long enough for me to strip and smear my whole body with feces. When I came out of the fugue I was confused for a second, not knowing how I got that way. Then I had an idea that it had a purpose.

The woods I was in were very close to our backyard, I just had to go down a small hill and across an alley.

When I got to the backyard I started to think that my idea of what to do was no good, and I tried to get the garden hose out to clean myself off. But before I could do it my Mother came out of the house and caught me. She demanded to know what I was doing, and I didn't have any answer but the one I'd already thought of. I said it in Hawaiian first, and then I translated it for her.

"I made a present for Mommy!"

A Loose End in Time

I need to interrupt the flow of the memoir's narrative, to pick up a neglected thread.

During my second and early part of my third years my sense of time was rather non-linear. Every night I would go over the day's events in my head. Those would be in a neat linear order for me. But different days were disconnected. Looking back on it all I have to use incidental clues, later information, and reason to figure out times. For example, schools started after Labor Day throughout the U.S. and its more populous territories. Therefore, the start of school coincided with early September.

Another example is my Mother's second pregnancy. I remember wondering why her belly was sticking out. She regularly took me in to the bathroom to have me shower with her, so I saw her naked often and I could touch the belly. One of those intimate moments stands out in my mind because she used it as an opportunity to urinate on me.

As vivid as that memory is, it has, in itself, no place in time. It's like the snapshots of my family album that were once attached to pages but have since come loose, so I just tuck them with each other between some blank pages at the end, or keep them in an envelope, in a jumble.

Still, I'm able to pin it down a little. I know she wasn't too visibly pregnant when I was released from Tripler Medical Center, because I have pictures from that day. And I know she was pregnant a third time. I know that third pregnancy ended in miscarriage about a month before my third birthday, after time started getting linear for me. I know in fact that the third was a different pregnancy from the second one, just because the second went to term.

I know that the second pregnancy ended with a birth. I wasn't there for the birth, of course. I don't even remember anything at all said about it afterward, by either of my parents, for several years. All I knew at the time was, she went to the hospital with a big belly and came home without.

The earliest memory I have hearing the birth discussed was when my Mother was abusing me at age six or seven and taunted me by telling me that my brother Robert was better than me. When I asked about him, she told me he was the one who died because he was born without anything below the waist, so he wasn't dirty like me.

The main way I can place the time is by using the fact that my Mother wouldn't let my Father photograph her appearing pregnant. I recall a trip to the beach around the time the little girls had started taking care of me. The picture below, which shows me getting annoyed at one of my girlfriends, and about to whack her head with my shovel, may have been taken on that trip to the beach. My Mother isn't in any of the pictures accompanying this one. My memory is that my Mother was extremely pregnant on at least one trip to the beach. So I think the birth of Robert occurred in the summer, maybe July or August of 1951. Before the Quest began.


[Below: Getting tired of the goddamned papparazzi.]