A Sidewalk Feature Takes Me Back

 When Anitra and I walk home from the Real Change office, we regularly meet this, one of my favorite Seattle landmarks. That's the headquarters of the Seattle Fire Department, viewed from the Main St side, looking east toward Second Avenue. From this angle it looks like a joke. Someone decided to split the sidewalk into a high sidewalk and a low sidewalk. So, for fun, when we approach I like to nudge Anitra toward one or the other. Say I nudge her to the high sidewalk. Then I take the other one at the last minute. And see if she breaks into an impromptu travesty of Loch Lomond.

If we look at it from further out, we realize that it's really a wheelchair-ramp to an unmarked blue-green door of the Fire Department.

It happens I remember that the door used to be marked as the entrance to a public restroom, that is now no longer accessible. I always find it locked now. But that's not the triggered memory that I'm talking about in the title. The game I play with Anitra reminds me of an obsession I had when I was 6 or 7 years old

I was caught up with the idea that I had a trajectory. As a body in motion I leave a track. If I pass through an opening, and then later, upon return, choose not to pass through that opening in the reverse direction, then I have wound my trajectory around one side of that opening. In the case of the wheel-chair ramp, if I take the high side going east, and take the low side coming back west, altogether I will have wound my trajectory once counter-clockwise around the railing.

Imagine I was leaving a string behind me, everywhere.  One long, long, string, like the drag line of spider, all the way back to the hospital room in Greenville General where I was born, where it would be anchored. Every time I were to wind it around an obstacle, it would be that much harder to pull the string straight, if I ever wanted to.

That's exactly what I imagined when I was 6 or 7, and it horrified me then, that I might be in that fix. Not to be able to straighten out my life path! It would be like being caught in a trap, ready to be devoured by some monster. I wouldn't be able to run freely, my string radiating freely, pivoting around South Carolina.

Fifteen years later I was an undergraduate discovering my own personal proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (which says that complex polynomials factor completely) and my proof ended up being the winding number proof. It's an approach that derives the theorem by studying the way polynomials map circles in the complex plane to curves, with particular attention to the number of times the curves wind around zero. Discovering that proof drew me further into the mathematics of properties of space that stay the same when you straighten wrinkles, and so I ended up being a topologist. But my original fascination with the subject was rooted in fear of being trapped in a tangle.

I'm now utterly over that childhood fear. I still imagine the drag line behind my life trajectory. The difference is now I love the tangles. Now I deliberately wind myself around things. If you see me walking down the street and I weave first right then left around various sidewalk signs, light posts, and such, you'll know that's what I'm doing. I'm tangling myself in everything, because I've figured out who the monster is, and I'm quite happy with being devoured by her.

Dinophilia

I'm not quite sure how it happened but by the end of 1956 I was dinosaur crazy. It was probably a convergence of influences. There was a Life book of Natural History that I'd earlier got as a birthday present from Uncle Fred. That had reproductions of the panorama that I now know is a 110 foot long mural at Yale's Peabody Museum called Age of Reptiles, by Rudolph Zallinger, who was born in Irkutsk, Siberia, of Austrian and Polish parents, lived in Manchuria, then lived in Seattle, graduated from Seattle's Queen Anne High School, ended up at Yale, and painted the mural while studying art there. The internet is awesome.

A 1970 US postage stamp honored the mural (right).

Another influence was Disney's Fantasia. I never saw the whole movie until I got to graduate school but bits of it wound up on TV, including the setting of evolution up to the end of the dinosaurs to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Then there was Alley Oop, who was big in the 50s. What kid wouldn't want to ride a dinosaur? The comic strip character eventually got a stamp of his own in '95.

I'm not sure, but I might have also encountered Turok, Son of Stone, 18th Century American comic book Indian lost among honkers in some weird time-displaced cavern the size of Rhode island.

Anyway, the result was that I needed dinosaurs for Christmas, 1956. They would be necessary, so that I might have them. They would be plastic, of course, because the real dinosaurs all died out, as we all know, 65 million years ago, but they would have to mine. I had to have a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a Brontosaur, a Triceratops, and a Stegosaurus, at the very least.

I think Freud called it the Latent Stage. I wasn't entirely there yet but I was on the precipice. It would improve my grades eventually, for a while. With girls, it's usually ponies.

Scene From "O Drakos"

Video Find of the Day

Meanwhile, in Greece. From "O Drakos" a film noir classic of 1956. The customer with the glasses and vest resembles a criminal so he's a hunted man. What appeals to me about this scene is the contrast between the singer and the drummer/dancer. There are two main attractions in the world, I think. There's the attraction to light and energy and exuberance and consuming excess, thrills and spills, and there's the attraction to dark and sleep and annihilation, safety and comfort. And it's a really good idea not to rush to either.

Margarita Papageorgiou - O Ilisos (1956)

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.

Never Shake a 7 Year-Old

One incident in November of 1956 put Mrs. Graves on the top of my Worst Teachers Ever list.

School started at 7;30 AM, if I remember right. But for some reason the buses never got us there much later than 7, so there was always a wait. The school building was locked until time for classes to start, so we all had to wait outside in the cold.

The day before there had been an early snowfall, but the falling snow turned to rain overnight, and the snow on the ground turned to slush. So school wasn't called, the buses ran, and we all ended up standing around in two or three inches of slush outside the school.

The routine was, at a first bell we were required to form two lines. The line on the right facing the school consisted of boys. the line on the left consisted of girls. At the second bell 5 minutes late the teacher was supposed to appear and march the two files into the school.

On this day she was late. We we literally left out in the cold. Everybody was getting restless. Kids were rocking back and forth and up and down on their toes, trying to stay warm. I jumped in the air. When I landed on slush the slush flew out from my boots and some hit a girl in the leg.

She said, "Hey! You got slush on me!" and she retaliated by stamping her foot at me, getting slush on my leg.

Well, being of the nature I am, I thought that was funny, and I stamped back at her.

Turns out slush-stamping is really hard to aim. I only wanted to get the one girl back again, and I did, but I also got two or three others standing next to her. Now those two retaliated. And their aim was no better than mine, so in addition to splashing slush on me they got slush on half a dozen other boys in line with me.

It was a classic illustration of runaway positive feedback. Within 20 seconds almost all the kids in both lines were splashing slush at each other and everybody's legs were covered with dirty gray slush. I was laughing my head off.

Then Mrs, Graves appeared. She saw the mess and screamed, "WHICH ONE OF YOU STARTED THIS!" Everybody became quiet except me. I couldn't stop laughing.

She stood directly in front of me, grabbed my shoulders, and said, "YOU STARTED THIS DIDN'T YOU?"

As soon as I said yes she started shaking me violently. Even my own sadistic Mother never shook me like that. She shook me so hard I thought my neck was going to snap. While she did it she shrieked stuff , but I couldn't absorb any of it. I don't know what she said. She was shaking me so hard my brain stopped working.

They say, NEVER SHAKE A BABY. That should also apply to seven year olds. NEVER SHAKE A SEVEN YEAR-OLD.

Life's Little Lessons

I remember a string of little lessons that whacked me around the beginning of second grade. None of them were major life events, like attempted murder or gang warfare, but each little lesson taught me that my reality and my world view were alien to others.

I often underwent fugue states in those days. I would be walking along and suddenly find myself two blocks further down the road with no memory of the intervening walking. Some of these hiccups in consciousness turned out later to be Alex slipping in and out. But some of them never got any explanation. It wasn't until I was ready to start 3rd grade that I really began to experience consciousness as a continuous state, and came to expect it to remain so.

Somehow, it never even occurred to me that other people didn't experience disconnected consciousness the way I did. The lesson that made it clear to me happened one day when I went to visit my friend Charles, the wood eater. I was outside the door to his house when I entered a fugue state. I regained consciousness in the kitchen of Charles's house. In front of me was a very pissed off Charles's Dad, who was demanding to know how I got in. I told him the truth. I didn't know how I got in. One minute I was outside, the next minute I was inside.

Charles's Dad said that was a crock. I had to know how I got in. I was lying, he said. He called my parents, who had to come and get me. He treated me like a criminal while we waited for them to come. He told me and my parents that if it ever happened again he'd call the MPs.

Another lesson was the Marble Game. I had loads of marbles because my Father would buy small bags of 10 or a dozen for me now and then, and they added up. I never played marbles though. I didn't know how.

A new kid I got to know told me he'd show me how to play marbles. So I got my marbles out and he played marbles with me. It was one of those deals where every time I thought I was getting the hang of it a new rule would be announced, and I'd find out I'd gone out-of-bounds, or gone upsies or downsies, or some idiotic thing, and another marble would go to the other kid's side.

Finally my mother said my guest had to go, it was time for dinner. I started collecting up my marbles, and my marble instructor said, "Hey, what are you doing? I won those!"

Through events like that I learned that boys are from Mars, girls are from Venus, and I'm from Earth, where we don't expect people to read minds. How was I supposed to know we were playing for the marbles? He never said so! I screamed foul so loud he thought he was going to get in trouble, and ran off.

[Below: After that I couldn't be interested in games of marbles, but I still appreciate the art of it. Photo by Sam Fentress, see larger version.]

Then there was the rabbit incident. The rabbit was a half-inch plastic representation of a rabbit meant for a charm bracelet, which I had found somewhere and adopted. I carried it loose in my pocket and took it out from time to time and talked to it. His name was "Rabbit." He may have been related in my mind to Crusader Rabbit. Or not. But he was definitely one small increment away from imaginary friend toward real friend, by virtue of having a physical presence, albeit tiny and inanimate.

A kid named Roger started hanging with me. I thought of him as Roger Silver Dollar, because his hair was mostly light brown but he had a patch of silver hair the size and shape of a silver dollar on the back of his head. Roger was very pushy and domineering. I actually felt sorry for him, because it seemed to me that his urgent need to have his way all the time was sad. He wasted a lot of his own energy getting other people in line. I tried to help by humoring him, and always doing things his way.

I drew the line at Rabbit however. He said Rabbit was stupid. He said Rabbit wasn't real and doesn't really talk to me, so I should get rid of him. I said I didn't care if he was real, I still liked him. Roger said you can't like something that isn't real. I said that must be wrong, because I do.

Finally one day when I took Rabbit out to look at him, Roger snatched him out of my hand and threw him down a sewer drain.

I was in such tears over it, my Mother called Roger's Mother to demand an apology. Instead of saying she was sorry, Roger's Mother said he had done me a favor. It was just a piece of plastic, she said. I needed to be made to be realistic.

So I learned that there are human beings who detest imagination so much that they will destroy anything that gets its life from it.

These people called themselves Christian. Roger told me Jesus was the True Son of God, and he wasn't dead, but was resurrected, and he talked to him every night when he said his prayers. He knew Jesus was real because the Bible told him so.

It occurred to me there'd be no hope of retaliating by shoving Jesus down a sewer drain, 'cause he'd just come back up after three days in the sewer. The Christians have got their imaginary friend rigged so you can't hang him, drown him, or shoot him.

Too bad. Invulnerability is stunting.

Helen & Mrs. Graves

Second grade was in a new room, with a new teacher, Mrs. Graves. I will never forget Mrs. Graves. She started the new year out by taking me aside and letting me know "in no uncertain terms" that she would tolerate none of my "shenanigans." My reputation had preceded me.

[Left: Not Mrs. Graves, but a close facsimile.]

The class as a whole was warned against horseplay. One of her very strong rules was that boys do not hit girls. I said, "What if the girls hit me?"

This was not a rhetorical question. Soon after school started I found myself being regularly being kicked in the shins by a brunette with pronounced bangs and a wide face named Helen. She thought she was being seductive, I think.

Mrs. Graves answer to that was, "You're a boy. You should be able to take care of yourself."

I still, to this day, don't know what she thought that was supposed to mean.

Does it mean that if I were a girl, I'd be incapable of taking care of myself, I'd have to have someone leading me about the nose all day long, helping me walk, breath, and sit up, and wiping my drool away?

I don't think so.

Did she mean that because I was a boy that I could prevent girls from kicking me in the shins by using my "Boy Shakti" to lay them out sideways and upside-down until they cried for their Mommas?

I don't think so.

One possibility that occurred to me was that "Boys don't cry" and that therefore, if I am a real boy, getting kicked in the shins by Helen wouldn't matter to me, because he who doesn't cry doesn't suffer.

[Left: Not Helen, but a close facsimile.]

That idea was impossible, because I couldn't believe that even Mrs. Graves was that fucked up in the head.

So what was it? You tell me. I still don't get it. Someone's kicking me in the shins. I'm not allowed to hit back, and when I ask for help, I'm told, "Boys can take care of themselves." Catch 22, 23, 24, and 25. You're a boy, you get kicked in the shins, shut up, fuck off.

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.

Fortuna Hates Me

The rest of the '56 summer was relatively uneventful. I had what I thought was an odd vision a couple of weeks after my mother made me stop using my left hand. I was looking at a scene outside. A van with some writing on the side was passing by. As I watched, the entire scene appeared to reflect through a vertical line down the middle of my view. The van had been moving to my right. Now it was moving to my left. The writing was reversed and now unreadable. Then, suddenly the writing appeared readable.

The strange thing about this memory is that I have no recollection of the scene returning to normal. I don't remember the reflection being reversed. I only remember becoming used to the new way. Maybe it switched back and I didn't notice. Or maybe it never switched back.

About that time the sling came off and my wrist was healed enough for me to engage in tree climbing. Tree climbing was one of my great loves and I couldn't wait to get back to it.

Across the street from our back door was a clearing with some birch and fir trees. I picked a fir tree to climb and got out on a branch that was about five feet off the ground. I was hanging from it like a sloth and inched my way out the branch.

Don't ever do that. I thought the branch would droop gradually as I moved out. Instead, it dropped suddenly, all at once, when I reached some critical point. It dropped the back of my head onto a waiting rock. My head snapped forward slamming my upper jaw onto my lower, and my two front teeth broke off.

They were baby teeth and I could expect new teeth to grow in. But with all the other crap that had happened it was too much. It was like the time mumps were followed by chicken pox followed by mumps again. I felt like I was specifically being targeted by nature and the gods for attack.

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.

Juju Keeps Me Alive

[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.]

I must have been in the military hospital for some time to heal up from the surgery, but I don't remember any of it. I think I was heavily drugged most of the time. My next memory was waking up in a house with a baby-sitter.

That's what she told me she was. I found myself in a stroller, of all things. It must have been an XXL stroller. My head was still bandaged. My arm was still in a sling. I was still not in Hawaiian heaven.

I told the teenage girl who was taking care of me that I wanted to die. I hadn't wanted to die before. I'd wanted to go to Hawaiian heaven alive if possible. But now I'd given up all hope of getting there alive. I wanted to die as soon as possible.

She said the idea was horrible. So I backed it up by describing my parents. I didn't leave anything out. I even told her of my Mother's rapes of me. She cried and asked me what I wanted.

I was near the entrance of the house. I saw that there were stairs outside. I asked where the stairs went. She said they go down to the street. "How far?" "A long way down."

I said, "Please, push me."

I think I may have had to argue a bit with her about it, but in the end she did it. She agreed that my life was so wretched I should have the right to die if I wanted to, and she pushed the stroller with me in it out the front door and down the stairs to the street.

As the stroller bounced down the stairs, I couldn't help laughing. It was such a fun ride. When I hit the sidewalk the stroller took a big bounce and overturned, spilling me on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street.

Instead of being dead I was alive and laughing uncontrollably. I wanted to go at it again. The baby-sitter came running down after me and, seeing me laughing, started laughing herself. The whole thing was just absurd. I realized then that I couldn't die. Somehow, I wouldn't be allowed to die.

Just then, my Aunt Mina walked up. She said, "What's going on here? Why are you lying on the grass?"

[Left: Aunt Mina was another sister of my Mother, along with Alta. She's seen here holding me during an early visit to the DC area, several years before the event being described in this post.]

The baby-sitter started railing at her, telling her what a horrible Mother she was, and how she wouldn't ever work for her again. She thought Mina was my Mother.

Mina lived in Maryland. So my parents had got her to take care of me after the operation.

She told the baby-sitter she wouldn't pay her after what she'd done. The sitter, still thinking Mina was my Mother, stomped off, saying she didn't want Mina's filthy money.

I barely absorbed the exchange. I was dizzy with the thought that even if I tried I couldn't kill myself. Something wanted me alive.

Nice Guitar You Got There

Video Find of the Day

Everybody on the playground was quoting this song when I was 6 going on 7. The song was recorded late 1955, the movie came out March, 1956.

"I don't know. It isn't Boogey. It isn't Jive. It isn't Swing. It's kind of all of them." "Hey, Sister! What do you call that exercise you're getting?" "It's Rock and Roll, Brother, and we're rockin' tonight!

Swing Dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets (1956) [See You Later Alligator from the movie Rock Around The Clock]

They Couldn't Handle The Truth

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7", immediately after appearing to try to kill myself by jumping head-first off a jungle gym. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I woke up groggy in some sort of hospital room. When a nurse came into view I asked her where I was. She told me. I think it was the Fort Devens infirmary again. The important thing to me was, it wasn't any heaven. It hadn't worked. I screamed and cried and tried to bang my head against the wall, and the nurse gave me a shot.

My next memory is of a room of my own faced with two doctors. Again, I asked where I was. This time the answer was a shock. I was in a military hospital in Maryland. I was told I was flown to it.

The two doctors wouldn't answer any more questions. From then on they were going to ask the questions. "Why did you want to kill yourself?"

I told them I didn't really want to kill myself, I just wanted to go to Hawaii. That didn't please them. They said it didn't make sense. I said, too bad, it's true. I was getting an attitude. I was in no mood to show respect to a couple of know-it-all haoles, even if they were doctors.

[Above: A studio photo of me taken just before my call to Alta triggered the chain of events that got me to Maryland. I think there was some attitude there to start with. Subsequent events enhanced the attitude. Not the 1st picture I put here. The 1st was from age 5. Attitude there, too.]

Their answer to my attitude was to give me another shot. But this one wasn't a tranquilizer like the one in Fort Devens. It was sodium pentathol. They were going to make me tell the truth by means of science!

The drug broke down my resistance, and made me compliant. So when they asked again, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I told them the truth. "I wanted to go to Hawaii."

They were ready to pull their hair out at that point. Then one of them got the bright idea to ask, "OK, why did you want to go to Hawaii?"

"My parents tried to kill me. My Mother tried to kill me. My Mother does bad things to me." I started to go into details. They cut me off, and left the room. That's when i noticed that the room had a window and my parents were sitting in a room on the other side of it. The doctors consulted with my parents for a minute. Then they came back in.

"You know what you said isn't true. What's the real reason you wanted to go to Hawaii?"

Being told that I lied didn't make sense to me. I hadn't. The only way I could interpret what they said to me was that they didn't want to hear that truth.

I was still under the influence of the sodium pentathol. I had to be compliant. But that didn't reall mean that I had to tell them the truth. It meant that I had to tell them what I thought they wanted me to tell them. When I thought that what they wanted was the truth, I told them the truth. But now I saw they didn't want the truth. So I strained to imagine what it is they wanted.

I came up with music. I told them I wanted to go to Hawaii for the music.

This led to a weird discussion, mostly between the two doctors, about how they could deal with my "compulsion". The gist of the debate, as I understood it, was that they could either get rid of all my compulsions, with a major lobotomy, or they could do a minor excision and just get rid of my Hawaiian memories. it was clear to me that it was best if I could get them to do the minor thing, versus the major.

So when one of the doctors asked me what it was about music that made me want to go to Hawaii I said, "It's just that I remember the Hawaiian music, and it reminds me of Hawaii, and I want to go there."

He said, "Well, what if you couldn't remember the Hawaiian music. Do you think you'd want to go there then?"

"Oh no, sir. Then it wouldn't matter to me."

I fell asleep after that, for I don't know how long. When I awoke again, I couldn't move my head. The doctors were there again, plus nurses. After they talked to me for a minute, there was a sound of power equipment, like a saw or a drill, and I realized I was being operated on.

I had a vague feeling that my head was being touched. They said, we're going to move an electrode around and we just need you to tell us what you're seeing or remembering or feeling.

I was prompted for my feelings and thoughts every few seconds. I kept experiencing snatches of music, but they didn't have anything to do with Hawaii. Finally though I heard a Hawaiian drum chant. I told them. They said good, that's what we'll burn.

There was no indication that anything was happening. I don't remember a frying or zapping sound. They just said, "There, it's done."

Over 30 years later I talked about what happened to a psychiatrist. He said the story was impossible because those techniques weren't in use in 1956. The sodium pentathol was possible, but the method of brain probing to stimulate and pinpoint memories was not available then.

Well, I think my psychiatrist was full of shit. What he didn't take into account was that this was a military hospital. In fact it may not have been an actual working hospital but a military medical research facility. The military doesn't make all of its research public. These, in particular, would have been kept secret, on national security grounds. (I was very likely at the Walter Reed Medical Research Institute in Silver Spring.) He did not take into account the likelihood that my Father had knowledge of the availability of such procedures through his position in army intelligence.

The method wasn't all that precise either. It got rid of most but not all of the Hawaiian musical memories. It missed some. But it also erased some other non-Hawaiian memories. Remember that I could whistle like a bird? I couldn't whistle at all again after the surgery, for 35 years.

It was criminal. All they had to do was get me away from my parents. Would it have hurt them to spare me the surgery and send me to a Hawaiian orphanage? But at least it wasn't a fill frontal lobotomy.

Escape Attempt

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

The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.

I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.

Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.

So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.

As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.

I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.

But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.

I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"

So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.

I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.

Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.

Recap + Continuation

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

It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.

It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.

After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.

So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.

Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.

I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.

That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.

I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!

So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.

Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.

Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.

Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."

The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.

The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.

Nagual?

We're talking 1956. So the word Nagual did not have its New Age connotation influenced by Carlos Castañeda, of either a spiritual leader or a shaman. It was a word used to refer to people who had powerful animal companions, or who were sorcerers, or who were vampires, or some of each.

Let's jump ahead to 1962. I'm in the 8th grade, in a Spanish class at Asa Mercer Junior High on Beacon Hill in Seattle. Our teacher has just had us read a passage from a book that refers to naguals. She stops to ask the rhetorical question, "Has anyone here heard of naguals before?"

Having not thought about it for 7 years, never having looked it up, nevertheless I found myself standing up suddenly as if pushed from below and I blurt out, "Yes. I have."

"Really? Alright, what is a nagual?" She said it with a smirk, sure I was going to be way off.

The rest of the class laughed when I said, "I don't know."

"Well, great, I guess all you did was hear the word then, and you saw that as an opportunity to stretch your legs..."

"They said I was a white nagual." The laughter was louder.

"Well," she said, "You're definitely white." Kids laughed so loud they were falling off their chairs.

The exchange was great for the class. What it taught me was that I should look it up finally. What I got was that a white nagual would be one of the evil demons likely to want to suck your blood or eat your heart out. And it's not an idea seen in Puerto Rico so much. The "Puerto Ricans" of Fort Devens had been Hispanics of many cultures. The Anglos had just referred to them all as Puerto Ricans out of general ignorance, which was passed on to me.

Ignorance can be a cultural artifact.

[Below: Hatman could be a nagual.]

Soldier Like Me

[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.]

When I opened my eyes again I found myself lying in a bed with a tubes stuck in me. I thought I was under attack again. I screamed and lurched up and yanked the IV out. A nurse ran over and held me down, while another one gave me a shot. Probably a sedative.

The next time I woke up a doctor was looming over me telling me everything was going to be alright and asking me to please leave the IV and catheter in place, as I'd need them for a while.

He told me I was in the Fort Devens Infirmary. He asked me how I got there. I thought that was a stupid question. "I don't know, maybe the MPs carried me."

He said, "No, I mean, what happened that got you beat up? Who did this to you?"

I described Scarface to him. I told him how sorry I was that I hit him but he made me mad when he hit me with the rock. The doctor asked me where I hit him and I told him I got him in the nose.

At that he smiled and congratulated me! He told me Scarface was in fact in a bed at the opposite end of the same children's ward recovering from his broken nose. "We've been hoping for something like this. We believed he has sent dozens of patients to us, but we never had proof it was him, because the victims were all afraid to tell us who did it."

I got the damage assessment. A broken rib, a punctured stomach (hence the vomiting of blood), a sprained right wrist, which I got when I punched Scarface, and my skull had been fractured, again. I had been lying unconscious in the hospital bed for 3 days.

The doctor couldn't believe it at first when I told him where the fight had taken place. It was too far from the gate where I had collapsed. I had to explain to him how I had to make that march to seal the truce which my winning earned me. It took a while for the doctor to grasp what I was telling him.

When it finally sank in, he was simultaneously in awe and horrified. "If the MPs had found you a minute later you probably would have died from blood loss. You should have come straight here." He pointed out that the infirmary was on the way. I kept saying the peace was more important, and he said, "Well see."

But when my parents came to see me a little later the doctor was beaming about it. He told them that I may have single-handedly brought an end to the turf battles in the area. He made it sound like I had freed Paris.

My Father was happier with me than he had been in years. He told me I'd make a good soldier. I said maybe that would be what I would do when I grew up. He said, "Sure, you can be a soldier just like me."

When I heard the words, "just like me" I had a flash-back to my first birthday, and my Father coming home from Korea to throw me head-first to the sidewalk and drive over me. I burst into tears, shouting, "No, no, no,..." over and over again.

My Father said to my Mother, "What did I say wrong now?"

She said, "You should know -- look what kind of soldier you've been. Don't you remember? He does. He doesn't want to be that kind of soldier."

My Father ordered her to shut up. They began sniping at each other. The nurses had them leave so I could rest.

Victory

[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.]

Scarface kicked me repeatedly in the stomach while his four friends held my arms and legs. Finally the two that had been holding my legs let go and walked away, and I slumped to the ground. While I lay there, Scarface examined the scar on my right forehead, smiled, and picked up a large rock almost the size of a canteloupe and brought it down on my forehead.

I passed out for a second or two. When I woke up I was seeing double. Scarface was standing with his back to me laughing with his remaining two buddies, I stood up with difficulty. The others didn't say anything to Scarface, just stared with looks of amazement. The first Scarface knew that I was back on my feet was when I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to look and I punched him in the face as hard as I could.

He'd made me mad when he hit me with the rock. I didn't appreciate that. So I used my fist for the first and only time.

He screamed, clutching his nose. Blood was gushing out between his fingers. He started bawling and ran off. I waited for the other two to move in on me but they just looked at each other in stunned amazement. I told them I wanted to walk safely through their neighborhood. One said he'd join me, while the other would go and spread the news that I had beaten Scarface.

Jim, who had been watching from a safe distance, came over and told me I had to go to the infirmary. I refused. I had a march to do yet.

Jim and the two Hispanics and I began walking through the "Puerto Rican" neighborhood. It was the housing area closest to the southwest gate that led to the town of Shirley. In my condition the march probably took half an hour. For most of the way Jim supported me. Every few hundred yards I had to stop to vomit up blood. Jim told me I looked as white as a sheet.

All along the way kids who had gotten the news about how the fight ended watched form their yards as I passed by. Some congratulated me, but some others crossed themselves and said things like 'Mira! Nagual!" or "Nagual Blanco!"

Finally I reached a rise in sight of the Shirley gate. At that point the others left me to make the last 100 yards my self, for fear they would have to explain my condition to the MPs guarding the gate. I walked slowly toward the MPs, trying to remain erect and act normal, but when I was about 20 feet from them I collapsed.

Peace Takes Some Hits

[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.]

I was elected both the leader and the spokesman of the Anglos, while the spokesman for the "Puerto Ricans" was different from their leader. Their leader was a boy that I guessed was 11 or 12, who had a two-inch scar on one side of his face. I was told he got cut by a knife in a fight. It reminded me of the scar on my forehead. It added to the feeling I had that there was no reason for hostility between us.

Scarface didn't talk to me. He had his own right-hand man do it. My guy Jim stood at my side and whispered ideas to me.

The negotiations for peace were a total disaster. I tried to sell the idea that we weren't that different, and peace would be to our mutual advantage. We could move safely in their neighborhood, they could move safely in ours. The notion that we were more alike than different was met with ridicule. As for a promise of safe passage through our neighborhood, the spokesman's answer was simply, "Why would we want to walk among you people? You stink."

Hearing that filled my followers with anger. Some fool said something on the order of "Oh yeah, well so's your mother!" and within seconds a shouting match broke out around me. While I tried to get things back under control, someone else said, "Let's settle things once and for all." The Hispanic spokesman said, "Fine. Not here. Behind the sports arena." They wanted a place out of sight from passing traffic.

So the next thing I know I'm following behind as 130 kids migrate to the back of the sports arena. A circle is formed and Jim squares off with Scarface's spokesman and they have a one-on-one fist fight.

That was the start of what ended up being somewhere around 2 hours of one-on-one fighting. At all times there was one Hispanic and one Anglo inside the circle punching each other. When either one couldn't take it anymore, he was replaced by another from his side. It was like a giant tag-team boxing match.

Gradually kids who got worn out left on both sides. For every Anglo that left, a "Puerto Rican" left, and vice versa, until there were 25 "Puerto Ricans" to 5 Anglos. At that point the "Puerto Ricans" started to act like they'd won, so 3 or 4 began to leave for each one of ours.

All this time I tried to stop the thing, telling everyone they were being crazy. Nobody listened. (A lot like when I write my columns now. How many times have I said the Iraq war was a mistake? I've lost count.)

Jim was the first Anglo to fight and the last to quit, before me. When he finally gave up I was left facing Scarface and 4 of his buddies.

I tried again to negotiate. They called me a coward, and while Scarface stepped back one of the other 4 charged me. I surprised him by throwing him to the ground rather than boxing him. I wanted to use self-defense only. I didn't want to punch anyone.

I just wore the kid out, giving him nothing to do. Then I wore out another one. It looked like I would wear them all out one by one, when Scarface stepped in and shouted some orders to the others. he told them to hold me.

At first two of them held my arms while Scarface tried to hit me, but he couldn't get close enough because I kept kicking at him. So He ordered the other two to hang on to my legs.

With four guys holding my extremities, it was safe for Scarface to get close enough to beat me up.

Fighting For Peace

[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.]

I didn't want to lead the peace party to the Puerto Rican neighborhood. I wanted someone else to do it. I found out very fast, like within half an hour, that wouldn't work. As I went about trying to persuade different groups of kids that they should join in the cause I was told that they wouldn't do it unless I was the leader, and then they wouldn't do it unless I beat their little group's leader in a fair fight.

I should explain that a little better. All over the Anglo neighborhoods of Fort Devens the kids formed small groups. You couldn't really call them gangs. Packs might be a better description. Each pack had 5 to 10 kids and they all had a clear leader. And as I tried to draw each such pack into the truce plan, I was told by each they would join if and only if I fought their leader and won.

This was the most insane, crazy, stupid, idiotic crap I'd ever heard from anyone outside of my own insane parents. I wanted to lead a peace army. To get followers I had to fight people? Stupid.

I pointed out to these morons that I was not yet 7 and a lot of these leaders were between 9 and 11. They said if I didn't beat them in a fair fight they wouldn't join. I said how could it be fair, if I'm up against someone 4 years older and almost twice as big? They said, well..., we'll let you pick the rules of the fight.

So I said, OK, clean wrestling, no punching. And that's what I did. I went from one pack to another, drawing each into my cause, by defeating leader after leader in wrestling matches. Altogether I fought enough leaders successfully that I gathered up about 55 followers. That means I probably had to win about 7 or 8 of these wrestling matches. I remember one in particular was won against a big 11 year-old. I'll call him Jim. Jim became my second in command.

Jim tried to analyze my ability to win all those wrestling matches. He noticed that I would start each match as if I was right-handed, and then surprise my opponent with ambidexterity.

In fact, I was ambidextrous. Ordinarily I divided tasks up by hand. I used my right to draw and to use scissors; I used my left hand to write and keep time with songs. But in the excitement of the fights and with both Alex (who preferred the left) and Kona (who preferred the right) active and alert, the two could be integrated and at the same time independent. My opponents probably felt like they were wrestling two of me.

But I thought I had another good explanation. I told Jim that because the cause was peace, God was on my side. Jim repeated the view, already stated many times, that I was crazy.

I was crazy, but after two hours and 7 or 8 wrestling matches I had a peace army of 55 kids aged 6 to 11, and all but one was marching with me to the Puerto Rican neighborhood to offer terms of truce. The other one was already hurrying on ahead to take the news of our march to the Puerto Ricans in advance. He'd been sent half an hour earlier, so they they could know we were coming and could meet us on the boundary of their territory with an equivalent group of their own.

There was no point, I thought, in negotiating with just the first stray Puerto Rican we might encounter. We needed to talk to as many as possible. The idea was to negotiate a truce with all of them.

In hindsight that may have been a poor decision on my part.

The march took about 40 minutes. It ended near the Devens sports arena, not far from the housing area where most of the Puerto Ricans lived. Their "equivalent group" had 75 members. We were outnumbered by 20.