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.

Breaking Horses

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened a month to six weeks following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Generally my parents tried to keep my loss of bodily function a secret from the public, because they were afraid people would ask too many questions and piece together a cause. Also my Father was ashamed of me. He wanted to have a son he could brag about the way he could brag about the dog. I was too young to be out sowing wild oats, but couldn't I at least be throwing a football around all day? The loss of my bodily functions was a crushing blow to his ego.

My Father's brush with manslaughter charges on my 4th birthday had a dramatic effect on him. He no longer would strike me. He never hit me again for as long as he lived. He also never hugged me or held my hand. For many years we had no more than incidental physical contact. Accidental bumping in narrow hallways, the hands accidentally brushing one another as the salt got passed, things like that. The most physical contact I ever had with him after my 4th birthday occurred much later when I was strong enough to be enlisted by Mother to help her move him to bed, when he was passed out from drinking.


But it wasn't all good. Just as he stopped beating me, he ramped up the verbal abuse.

At the time it didn't make any sense to me, but I get it now. He was so afraid of what he might do to me, and incidentally to his life and career, that he wanted to push me as far away as possible. He started referring to me as my Mother's son regularly. He called me an idiot and yelled at me for making the slightest noise to drive me out of his company. It was designed to reduce the likelihood of contact.

My need to have new words spelled for me, so that I could have ready-made "pictures" of them, was initially a small source of pride for my father. He wanted to be a writer and he wanted me to share his aspirations. He could brag that I was only four and already becoming a good reader. But that only lasted until the demands for spellings got on his nerves. Then he began to say, "Why can't your son learn to spell it later? I told him the word, I told him what it means, why does he have to know how it's spelled right this instant? Your son is an idiot!"

My parents had guests over just one time at Shirley during the period I was in diapers. As I've said, I don't think they wanted anyone over, but a certain amount of socializing is required in the Army. I was horrified to learn that the couple would be bringing a child my age. My parents treated my condition as shameful, and I knew from my experience at the nursery that children my age would laugh at me because of it.

My parents consoled me by telling me, ""It will be all right, she's only a girl. She won't be mean about it like a boy would. She might even feel sorry for you." As if that were my goal in life now. As if my life would be complete if little girls my age would only feel sorry for me.

The visitors were, if I remember the rank correctly, a Major and his wife and a cute little blond girl with curly hair.

My hyper-sex drive, from the injury at age 1, had subsided. I'm not really sure I ever got to normal though, because I have no way to know what normal would have been. So I don't know if the fact that I was sexually attracted to the girl was typical of a 4 year-old. My guess is no, or no, not that much, but I would also guess that my high level of libido wasn't due to head injuries any longer, but a psychological or neurological consequence of the rapes.


It often happens that children who are sexually abused engage in overt sexual acting out, and some of that might be due to increased libido. Besides the psychological impact, constant sexual stimulation can alter the body chemistry, affect hormones, and change the activity of the brain.

Some child rape victims, a very small percent, turn around and rape other children. I wasn't part of that minority. The idea of doing to others anything like what my Mother did to me sickened me. My reaction to being sexually aroused by the little girl was to offer her a tour of my outdoor pacing route, just so I could talk to her and bask in her presence. I showed her the ruins of the old house that was torn down. I showed her the woods.

She was in fact sorry for me. it was just another disappointment, no big deal.

As we were finishing the tour my Father brought our guests out and set empty cans along one wall of the ruins, and he and the Major engaged in target practice while the wives and us kids looked on. Then we all went inside and the adults had drinks.

At no time did the Major or his wife comment about the fact I was in diapers. They were too terribly polite to avoid the embarrassing subject. Instead the Major complimented me on how well behaved I was.


My Father took this as an opportunity to brag about his child-raising skills. He said, "I'm of the school that says you don't coddle children. You have to raise a kid the way you break in a horse. You have to do whatever it takes to break his spirit. He has to know who's the boss. It's you or him."

All I could think of while he was giving this speech was the blood spurting out of my head over a month before and the sight of him driving off. I didn't fully get the references to horses. I asked my Mother later and she explained to me how horses were prepared for saddling.

Even before I got that explanation I knew that my Father wasn't going to be breaking my spirit, whatever it meant.

Somehow, I was going to break his.