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.

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.

Fort Devens Messiah

I said my Mother tortured me by enema for an hour and a half on a Saturday. I don't really know. It's my best guess. So I don't really know if the events of the next day happened on a Sunday. I'm not even sure it happened in the Spring of 1956.

On the other hand, my memory of the events of that alleged Sunday are very, very, clear. For four or five hours, I became a messiah, a warrior of peace, sent from God.

I woke up that morning calm and whole. Alex, AKA Alaka'i, He Who Points The Way, was joined with Kona, The Calm Side, within me. I was a centaur. For this I could thank my Mother and the previous night's torture.

It was, coincidentally, a very good day. The sky was clear. It was warm. It was the first day in months that could be described as having short-sleeves weather.

Consequently, there were lots of children outside, playing in the green marching fields and wide lawns of Fort Devens. I was out among them by 9 or 10 that morning.

Because there were so many kids I'd never seen before that day, I made a few new friends before the news arrived. The news: someone came running up to tell everyone that so-and-so, who I never heard of, was in the hospital, because he'd crossed into the Spics' neighborhood, and they'd broke his arm. It was, I was told, only the latest of a series of violent attacks by one side or another in turf wars between Anglos and Hispanics on base.

I had to ask what Spics were. I'd never heard the word before. I was told they were Puerto Ricans. I asked, "What are Puerto Ricans?" I was told they were Spanish-speaking people who lived on an island. "What island?" They said, Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean.

I was from an island in the Pacific. OK, no, I was born in South Carolina. But my soul was an island soul, my 'aumakua was an island bird, my color was an island color. I thought that I could talk to these Puerto Ricans as a fellow islander.

I had studied Jesus. I had been a Hawaiian Messiah. I knew what Utu was. I could ask the question "What would Kū do?"

Jesus would have fought for peace. So I would fight for peace.

I started telling everyone that we had to go to the Spics and tell them that we wanted peace. We would offer them a deal: they could have free passage through Anglo neighborhoods, and in return, we would have free passage through theirs. Mutual freedom of movement would be the immediate reward, the carrot. Peace would be the long-term reward.

I was told by one of my new friends that I was crazy. There was no way I could lead a party of Anglos to present a truce to the Spics. I said, maybe Jesus was crazy. He said sure, maybe, "He was crucified, you know."

That decided it for me. This would be my crucifixion. Somehow, I would lead the Anglo kids to present a truce to the Puerto Ricans, that very day, or I would be hung to die, or both.

An Unmentionable Is Mentioned

A dramatic chain of events occurred sometime in the last two or three months of 1st grade. I'm sure of the order of the sequence because each event triggers events following it, as a chain reaction. But I'm not sure of the time of the beginning. Maybe as I relate the sequence now in writing for the first time something will occur to me that will date one event and consequently all the others.

The first event that stands out happened in class. A guest speaker came to class to present slides of a recent trip to Hawaii. Among the slides were pictures of a mock ancient Hawaiian village. One of the scenes showed a small hut. The speaker said she didn't know what the function of the hut was in an ancient village.

Ordinarily my classroom persona was that of Kona, while Alex/Alaka'i only observed. But when the question was raised about the hut Alex suddenly took over and stood up and announced, "I know what the hut was for. It was for the women, for when they bled."

You see, the same question had come up in my conversations with Lani and Lono. I had described a mock village and they recognized it as such. I had described a number of things that I had seen when I was 5 or 6 months old, when my parents carried me around a mock village in their arms. They told me what they thought I had seen, based on the descriptions I gave them. [See Godhood: The Downside, posted June 28, '07]

They told me not to repeat the answer about the hut to anyone else because non-Hawaiians are uncomfortable hearing about such things as women bleeding, it's kapu for them, even when they know it happens. But I had forgotten that warning in the more than 3 years since I'd seen them.

The warning was spot on. As soon as I said, "It was for the women when they bled," the guest turned pale and said, "What are you talking about?" in a angry raised voice. As Alex, I clarified the matter, "You know: you're a women. The women go there for their monthly bleeding."

All hell broke loose. The other kids probably didn't know what the discussion was about. I doubt any of the 6 year old girls had any knowledge of menstruation yet. But the teacher and the guest both reacted as if what I had said had been a graphic description of it for all the kids to hear, when actually I didn't say anything that would have been meaningful to anyone who didn't already know what menstruation was.

They screamed at me, calling me horrible and evil. I ran out the door of the class, down the hall, and ran out of the school, with the full intention of never going back.

I ran straight away from the exit for a while, looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure no one was following me. When I was sure I wasn't being followed I rested a while and thought about what happened. By then I had remembered the warning, and I concluded that the warning was necessary because White People are all sick in their heads.

It's sick to scream at a child for revealing a fact you already know. Kapu or not. Besides, kapu , even Hawaiian kapu, are sick and stupid in general.

My parents were called and told I had run away from school. They drove around base looking for me for an hour before spotting me walking near the base headquarters.

My father didn't know what to make of the whole incident. He asked, "How did you get that idea about the huts?" I told him my friends told me about it. He finally told me that I had to learn not to say everything that comes into my head, "Think about the consequences." I don't think that lesson made a big impression on me.

But when my Mother got me alone she started quizzing me. "That happened before your first birthday! What else do you remember? What do you remember about your first birthday? Tell me!"

I had inadvertently given the secret of my early memories away. She now had reason to believe that I remembered their attempt to kill me when I was one.

Topper Influence

When Alex stopped manifesting to Kona, Kona filled the gap with his own imaginary friend. I think that's pretty cool, when you consider that Kona began life as an imaginary friend of Alex. So I didn't just have imaginary friends when I was a kid, my imaginary friends had imaginary friends of their own!

The imaginary friend's name was George, and he was an invisible ghost.

The idea for George was lifted whole from the TV show Topper. Topper was a half-hour comedy that ran for two years from Fall '53 to Fall '55, and was shown in repeats for ages after. It was based on movies that had been based on books. The TV set up was that a wealthy handsome and fashionable but whacky young couple George and Marion Kerby [pictured] are buried by an avalanche, along with an alcoholic St. Bernard named Neil, while skiing in the Alps. Staid down-to-earth sophisticated bank vice-president Cosmo Topper (played by Leo G Carroll) and his not-too-bright wife Henrietta buy the Kerby estate in Los Angeles. Just as they are moving in, George, Marion, and Neil, return home as ghosts to haunt their old digs. For some reason Cosmo Topper is the only one who can see or hear the ghosts, but the ghosts can manage to move furniture and appliances, which they do a lot, because they're party animals. Laughter ensues when Topper finds out that if he tells people what is causing all the activity, they think he is crazy, and the premise was you can't have a crazy man in charge of other people's money, so his job would be on the line, and he still had the mortgage to pay.

Plus, Topper was a straight up tee-totaller, while the Kerbys were cocktail lushes and smokers. So Topper had to keep after them to hide the booze and cigarettes.

The whole thing was designed to appeal to me. You had people who were drunks just like my own parents, but they were fun drunks. They didn't yell and hit. They just joked around and had a good time. They were mischievous but not mean. Just like me!

Marion Kerby was yet another hotty I had an age-inappropriate crush on. It was a little disappointing to learn that the actors, Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys, who played the Kerbys, were married in real life. As my Mother said of that, "It explains the chemistry." I wanted to be Robert Sterling and have it so good.

Then, too, there was the fact that for quite a while (close to two years) whenever anything was spilled or knocked over, George had something to do with it. "How did the lamp get broken?" "George did it, Mommy," was how it would go.

This didn't go over well with everybody. My Mother was surprisingly cool about it. She'd say, "Tell George to be more careful." My Dad would scream and sputter and fume, "I won't stand for any son of mine making up fibs!" "He's not fibbing, dear, he's using his imagination."

Abducted by Aliens?

I was slow making friends on base. A pattern emerged that continued throughout childhood. I'd have one or two good friends to spend one or at most two hours a day. The rest of the time I would retreat into solitude, if allowed.

A typical such retreat would be a long walk for hours around the area of the officers' quarters. I must have looked as depressed as I felt, because other children I passed would often tell me I should smile.

This is one of my huge pet peeves. Whether I smile or not is not subject to requests. Requests are not even welcome. My smile is a sign of my mood and if I'm sad so be it. Anybody that doesn't like that has my permission to make up for it by stapling the corners of their own mouths to the backs of their heads.

Another way I spent alone-time was play in a muddy area near the Officers' Club. For some reason, none of the other children wanted to join me in the mud. The mud was in a very shallow depression with poor drainage. I engaged in earthworks and pie-making. It was very soothing.

Another very soothing activity was tennis ball bouncing in the Play Porch. The wall of the porch against the rest of the building was brick. I had a tennis ball I'd found way back in Hawaii, in the clay mud near where I regularly met Lani and Lono. The tennis ball was permanently stained red from the clay, and smelled like the soil that saved my life on my 1st birthday. Kona/Wesley would bounce the ball repeatedly against the brick wall and catch it, while Alex chanted. I entered a kind of trance state doing this. An outside observer might have thought I was autistic.

Apart from those sessions, Alex and Kona/Wesley began to grow apart. A time-share style of integration began, in which Kona/Wesley would control most of the day, and Alex would control at night. I would go to sleep as Kona. I would wake up around 1 or 2 AM as Alex. Alex would wait until my parents were asleep and snoring. It was especially important that my Mother was snoring, because if she was still awake she might want to make a nocturnal visit to my room, and I had to be there, or I'd be in huge trouble.

When my parents were both asleep, Alex would get up and wander, often sneaking out of the house to explore the base until dawn.

Alex was much more the explorer, and his wanderings at night took him two or three times as far as Kona's day wanderings.

One time, as Alex, I was in some woods on a dark moonless night, unable to see my own feet. I was inching along, when for some reason I had a fainting spell. I woke up as Kona. As Kona, I didn't know what Alex was doing. I didn't know what I was doing in the middle of dark woods at night. I didn't know how to get out of there. I panicked and ran though the bushes getting scraped by branches I couldn't see. I fell down two or three times before coming out of the woods into a clearing I recognized.

As Alex wasn't speaking to Kona during this period the incident remained a mystery for more than a year. I would have suspected an alien abduction, but I hadn't yet heard of such things, so I was stuck with notions of Leprechauns or mischievous-but-not-totally-evil boogey men.

Punctuated Routines

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened from September, 1953, to March, 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The next six months at the House in Shirley, through Fall and most of Winter, were mostly uneventful. Or the events of one day were like the events of every other day with only a few exceptions.

I spent much of the time in a dream-like state, similar to the dream-state I experienced walking around Schofield Barracks when I was two and a half. Alex sang chants while Kona played, for hours each day. Indoors, because the weather turned cold.

The play was mainly ritual enactment, over and over again, of the Primary Rotating Dramatic Triangle. I'd have three stuffed toys. One would be the Villain. One would be the Victim. The Villain would attack the Victim. The third would be the Rescuer and saved the Victim. But in saving the Victim, the Rescuer would get carried away, and overdo it. So the old Rescuer would be the new Villain. The old Villain would be the new Victim. The old Victim would then become angry, and assume the role of Rescuer, and save the new Victim that had just before been his/her attacker. The triangle would have rotated 120 degrees. Then, the new Rescuer would overdo it, and the roles would rotate another 120 degrees. And then another.


Each rotation would take about ten minutes. All would go on mechanically, without comments, accompanied by Hawaiian chants. If a psychologist had got a chance to watch it I bet I would have been a famous case study. If I'd been filmed, I could have seen myself in Psych 101 doing that, with a voiceover telling me what a clear case of whatever it was my problem would be called. Maybe they'd have made up a special name for it. If the psychologist's name was Robert G Bozo, my behavior would have been called Bozo Disorder, or Bozo Syndrome.

That accounted for about 8 hours a day. There were a few other routines. My Mother taught me new words every day for a while. Then, out of the blue, I told her I wanted to learn numbers, too. She liked that. It made a lot of points with her. So she started me on counting, then adding, then subtracting.

One of the ways I practiced my counting was to count up the number of Hawaiian chants Alex could still remember at that time. Of the songs remembered in their entirety, the count was 12. One dozen exactly. I also remembered enough fragments of songs that I could guess that I had forgotten about an equal number. That inventory is what I'm drawing on when I say that I probably knew two dozen songs at one time.

My Mother let up on the rapes during this period. She made it a daily practice to fondle me to keep me from fondling myself. That was statutory rape, but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even interpret the genital fondling as sexual. I regarded it as physical maintenance, just like what she said it was. I hope people don't misunderstand that as an endorsement of her behavior. Just because it didn't bother me at the time doesn't mean it was justifiable. Later on, as I learned more about sex, I understood how I had been exploited by her, and the subsequent pain of betrayal has been very severe. I've been in therapy for over 20 years, and the hardest parts of my Mother's treatment of me to deal with has been the parts that caused the least distress at the time.

She still raped me anally, but it happened less often. I could avoid much of it by avoiding her. She would be set off by irritation and stress. My presence could add to that. I could prevent an incident by not adding to her irritation.

One day she broke from routine by dragging me around the house and raping me in every room. She was mildly angry, and mildly drunk. She told me the purpose of it was to show me that she was the boss of me everywhere in the house. It was her way of telling me that there were no safe places.

Another break in the routine: My, and Koko's, first big snow. We had a Massachusetts blizzard around the end of November. It was a lot of fun for both of us. Dad swore a lot, having to dig the car out of a foot and a half of snow, chain it, drive it the 800 feet to the highway, only to find that the plows had left an 8 foot wall of snow at the entrance of our driveway when they cleared the highway. He came up with some sort of theory to the effect that the transportation department had no right to do that, and screamed it at my Mother and me for hours.

Then there was an odd excursion to Fort Devens. My parents went to an officer's Christmas party, and left me with a simultaneous children's party that was held at the enlisted men's gym. There were a hundred or more children there, all left there by their parents for the same reason as me, so their parents could go to the same officer's party.

They started with a Punch and Judy puppet show, something like this video. I thought the violence was sickening. Too close to home?



Then there was a magic show, in which a women volunteered to have her head put in a box so that the magician could pretend to make her head vanish. It was obviously a trick of mirrors, but to me it was sick anyway to think that making someone's head disappear was a worthy activity.

Then there was a couple of hours of cartoons. I had never seen cartoons before and, again, I was grossed out by the violence. I was amazed that the other kids laughed and enjoyed it.

Normal Life As Two People

My Mother was very happy to have Alex back. The bodily dysfunction problem went away instantly with his return. Less work for her. She was so happy she probably tolerated his Hawaiian singing more than ever. I was now allowed to sing Hawaiian chants any time my Father was gone, so long as I didn't do it with her in the room.

The other rule was, no mention of Alex. I was to call myself "Wesley" no matter who I thought I was, not only with my Father. I think she was afraid of letting me get used to it, for fear that I'd do it in front of my Father and he'd go ballistic.

As Kona, I really appreciated the Hawaiian chants. My Mother was never much interested in music or radio talk, so she never played the radio or the record player when my Father was at work. So the weeks without Alex were filled with long hours of silence.

I should say something more here about the separation between Kona and Alex. When Alex was in full control, Kona would shut down, and have no memory of what happened. From Kona's point of view it would be like a ambulatory blackout. He'd wake up to discover having done things while unconscious. When Kona was in full control Alex might loss consciousness or might not, but either way, when Alex was back in control, he knew everything that happened.

It wasn't always necessary for one or the other to be in clear control. So, for example, when Kona was playing with his toys, Alex could be singing. Alex's use of the vocal equipment didn't require complete control.

When Alex wanted to sing Kona would feel a momentary choking sensation, first, as the control of the throat changed over. It was unpleasant but brief. When it was done, Kona could go about his playing and a song would come out of his mouth, sung by Alex. Sometimes Alex would also take over just the left hand and slap the floor for a drum accompaniment.

I suppose that sounds creepy to a lot of people, but it was just life as normal to me when I was 4.

"I'm Alex"

While the summer weather held out my Mother saved diapers as she had done when I was two, by putting me outdoors wearing shoes and socks and a shirt and nothing else. But this time, the isolation of the House in Shirley led to outdoor rapes also. She was very lucky to never have been caught. It was risky for her to rape me outdoors because even if she could rely on my Father coming home from work at only the scheduled time, she couldn't assume that no one else would ever drive up. There was a sign that said "No Solicitors" at the entrance to the driveway, but I remember salesmen driving in anyway, claiming they missed it.

When Fall came there were still a few warm days. That was the first time I heard the expression "Indian Summer". The Massachusetts countryside was red and gold wherever the pine trees didn't dominate but it was still warm enough to walk about half naked. So I was outside wandering around without any pants on when Alaka'i came back again.

Alaka'i was now Alex to Kona. Kona had forgotten the Hawaiian name. Alex said he had "rested" and was able to take care of Little Brother Kona again. The first order of business was to put us in pants. The question came, "Why aren't we wearing pants?" and before Kona could answer, Alex knew, because he could read Kona's memories.

Alex hadn't realized that by going away, or becoming asleep, he would be taking the bodily functions with him. But he was sure that shouldn't be a problem anymore.
We went to my Mother and announced to her that we wouldn't need the diapers anymore.

She said, "How do you know that?"

I said, "Alex is back again."

"Really? How do you know Alex is back?"

"I'm Alex."

All Day Rapes

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Some posts specifically relate instances of sexual abuse conducted by my Mother. I am talking about it because I am tired of being silent about it. People need to know that things like this happen. Today I'm relating events that happened 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.]

Of course my Mother was furious that I couldn't control my bodily functions. There was a long screaming interrogation which ended with me telling her what I understood of it, which was just that Alex (my Mother's name for Alaka'i) had gone away and left me. She asked, "Why did he go away?" and I said, "Because you tried to kill him."

That made her more angry. She started to say that it wasn't Alex she wanted dead, it was me. It was the first time I remember her making the distinction. As time went on she would be more clear about. She still believed that I had a dual personality, but she also believed that if she were clever about it she could kill one of the personalities while leaving the other one alive.

The idea that she could do that was based on a naive interpretation of the psychiatrists' assertion that the right and left sides of the brain had slightly different functions. This was years before Psychology Today and before popular articles asking "Are You Right Brained, Or Are You Left Brained" trotted out split-brain studies as evidence that the two halves could operate independently, and before Roger Sperry convinced us that the hemispheres specialized more than a little. My Mother was quite capable of coming up with the notion of independently functioning hemispheres simply on the basis of being told that the different sides specialize differently, a fact which was related to her by the doctors who treated me on my 1st birthday.

[Below: A video describing later split-brain studies. My Mother thought my hemispheres operated separately without the need for any severing of brain connections.]



My Mother thought, all she had to do was figure out which hemisphere Alex lived in, and kill the other one.

My Mother preferred Alex to Kona because Alex was aggressive. Kona was originally created to be passive, precisely because aggressive Alex/Alaka'i could not avoid sparking my Mother's temper by lashing back against her cruel behavior. But my Mother preferred Alex to Kona, even though Kona didn't cause her to lose her temper as much, because she believed that Alex would be more likely to be able to make money for her.

The fact that as soon as Alex was "gone" I had to be toilet trained all over again confirmed her theory that aggressive Alex was the competent side of me and that Kona would have to be taken care of forever.

Finally she demanded to know what happened to the Hawaiian. I told her what Alex told me, it was lost when she held the pillow to my face.

She hit the roof. Instead of accepting her own responsibility for having caused the loss, she shrieked at me for having the gall to try to make her feel guilty. She said the Hawaiian wasn't lost by what she did, but because the wrong personality had died. It was my fault, for not having died as Kona instead of as Alex. She yelled at me as if I were the coffee table and I had maliciously stubbed her toe.

There was an afternoon of rapes and beatings. The beatings were to the buttocks so the black and blue marks wouldn't show when my Father got home. By then she had got the cloth diapers out of storage and put me in them.

My Mother told my Father none of what I told her. She said my loss of function was a delayed symptom of the concussion he gave him. Dad's reaction was first to deny that he had anything to do with it and to say there had to be something wrong with "her" son, and then to get drunk and pass out in the living room.

In the immediate weeks that followed my Mother came up with a new way to sexually abuse me. Up to this time the rapes were strictly either physical punishments or meant to aid her in her masturbations. Now she began to take a more deliberately psychological approach looking for ways to torture me with extreme humiliation and intimidation.

When she found that I couldn't tell her soon enough that a bowel movement was about to happen, she came up with the idea that she could check for herself when one was on it's way. She had me stand naked from the waist down on a high chair next to the dining room table. She put a jar of vaseline and rubber gloves on a shelf behind me. I had to remain standing that way all day long, so that I would be available for a rectal exam every half hour.

If the exam turned up fecal matter I'd be hauled to the training toilet and sit there until the bowel movement was done. If the exam turned up nothing she'd "reward" me for being clean with a rape lasting 5 minutes or so. Just long enough to induce wide-eyed fear and distress. Then she'd warn me not to get down while she went back to housework or reading or whatever she'd been doing, until the next exam.

The exams would start before noon and last until just before my Father was due to come home from the base around 5 PM. The dining room had a big picture window that looked out at the driveway. I remember how one day my Mother lost track of time and was raping me as my Father drove up. She got me back in diapers just in time as he walked in.

Good News, Bad News

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened 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.]

Alaka'i returned two weeks after my 4th birthday. The head injury hadn't killed him, but had weakened him. He said he was there for the prolonged rape, but couldn't intervene because he was too weak.

Then the bad news: Alaka'i couldn't find the Hawaiian anymore. He could remember having spoken it, he could remember all the conversations with Lani and Lono, just as I've been relating them. But he couldn't remember the Hawaiian.

I didn't lose my ability to speak Hawaiian over years of disuse. I lost it in one day by an act of attempted murder. I say attempted murder, because Alaka'i could remember Hawaiian up until my Mother, in her frustration at not being able to force me to speak Hawaiian, attempted to smother me. It was the asphyxiation, not the concussion, that erased the memory, as far as Alaka'i could tell.

Or, maybe it was the trauma. Alaka'i could still sing the songs but he wasn't sure what they meant anymore. I like to think the loss of the language was psychological and reversible. I've been hoping for that for 54 years, so I'd say the evidence is feeble.

Another loss was the eidetic memory. Alaka'i thought it was a lifting of a curse. "Now we can finally forget some of this." There was an hour or two when I sat outside under some pine trees and Alaka'i arranged visual memories in my head as if moving photographs around on a table. Some of the photographs were place on top, some were buried below. Those were the ones to forget, for now anyway.

Then Alaka'i said goodbye to Kona. He said he was going to leave Kona in charge. He wasn't going to try to go away physically this time. He was just going to go to sleep. Maybe forever.

For the next couple of hours, as Kona, I had to come to grips with the new losses. Alaka'i was gone. The Hawaiian was gone. Only Alaka'i could sing the songs then, so even the songs were gone.

Then I had an "accident," and discovered a horrible new reality. Alaka'i had been in control of my excretory functions!

Next: Mother has to toilet train all over again, and she's not happy about it.

Damage Assessment

The GP didn't find anything wrong because he was looking for the wrong things. He was seeing if I knew my name, or if I knew it had been Thursday, 1953. He wasn't looking for my other personality.

Alaka'i was still MIA the second day and Kona was scared and lost. It felt like, well, loneliness. I felt loneliness.

But it wasn't until the second day after my birthday that the most serious symptom of brain-damage revealed itself. It was something that the GP was unlikely to have noticed.

A cat appeared from the woods. That was a common occurrence at the House in Shirley. Our neighbors were half a mile or more away, but that was nothing to their rat-catchers. The cats roamed far and wide looking for rodents and other cats.

I called Mother out of the house and asked her what it was. She said, "You know what it is, honey, it's a cat."

I didn't remember knowing that it was called "cat". But that wasn't the serious symptom. OK, so I "forgot" the word for cat. Not a biggy. Relearn it, move on.

But an hour or so later another cat came by. I said to my Mother, "What's that?"

"I just told you when the last one came by. It's a cat."

"The other one was cat. What's this one?"

My Mother just shook her head and returned inside. But I was shaken up by the whole incident. I knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was right away. It took another week and more incidents of the same nature for me to work out what had happened.

It was only a couple of years ago that I read about research that proved that the human brain processes names and words differently. That's what I discovered for myself, the hard way. My ability to absorb words was affected but I could still learn names. New words could only be understood as names.

What was really weird about it was that I could remember what it was like before. I could remember being able to use a word like "cat" to stand for cats in general. I knew that the sound that you make when you say "cat" is meant to be a general term for all creatures of a certain class. But I couldn't use the sound that way. I could only use it to stand for one particular cat. I could only use it as a name.

No Escape

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the day of my fourth birthday, July 9, 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I regained consciousness on the porch. My Mother was talking to herself loudly and excitedly. She cursed my Father for driving off with the only car and ditching her with me. She cursed me for bleeding. She cursed me most for waking up. "Why doesn't he ever die?"

She said, "What am I going to do? If I take him inside he'll bleed all over everything! I don't want him bleeding all over everything!" This was the argument that prompted her to get rags from the kitchen and wrap my head with them. It would be nice to think that some mothering instinct was at work but it's very hard to say.

Once I was wrapped up she dragged me in to the kitchen. She complained that my rags were already soaked with blood. I was fading in and out. Sometimes she seemed distant. My vision occasionally blurred and doubled. My head was pounding. She took off the first set of rags, lifted me up and rinsed my head under the faucet, and then wrapped me in fresh rags.

By now, her running monologue was veering into a new subject: what sort of permanent damage might have been done. She started to say things like, "What if he can't speak anymore? What if he can't speak Hawaiian anymore? That was the only chance he had of being useful! What good would he be then?" She interrupted her conversation with herself to demand me to speak.

"Talk to me! Say something! Damn it, say something right now, or I'll take you and bury you in the woods out back right now!"

I managed to say something like, "I can talk, Mommy, I'm OK, don't worry about me."

She laughed and said, "You're the one who'd better be doing the worrying if you can't still speak Hawaiian!"

Then she took me by one arm and half dragged me and half made me walk up the stairs and around to the bathroom next to the master bedroom. She stripped me and made me stand in the tub, and began raping me anally with her fingers. She said, "I want to hear Hawaiian! Now!"

It always worked before. Whenever she raped me, Alaka'i would come to Kona's rescue. Kona never had to bear being raped. Alaka'i was the "older" personality. He was the one there for the first birthday. He was experienced with horror, so he would bear it and shield Kona from it. Then, he would curse my Mother out in Hawaiian, which she would think was beautiful because she didn't know one word he was saying. Maybe I get my xenomania from Mother. Everything is connected to everything else.

It didn't work this time. I was there as Kona. Alaka'i didn't arrive. That rape was my first as Kona. As Kona, I didn't speak Hawaiian.

It went on for a long time. I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe only half an hour. She raped me until after I lost control of my bladder and bowels. She washed me with water, then raped me some more. I would have spoken Hawaiian to make it stop if I could.

During the raping I became light-headed and felt my consciousness fading, only to be screamed at, "You're not going to faint on me!" and have cold water splashed in my face and up my nose. There was no escape.

Finally she gave up and took me in and laid me out on her bed. I was glad that the raping was over for the moment, but I was in a panic about Alaka'i. It suddenly occurred to me that when I was in the driveway and thought I was dying, it could be that just one of us was dying, and that the other one would have to go on without any help.

But my Mother's monologue was now all about killing me. Her speech was racing. She paced back and forth in front of me at the foot of the bed. She was saying that my Father was probably gone for good, and there was no way she was going to take care of me by herself. She discussed with herself, as if I wasn't in the room, how she could finish me without being charged with murder. The discussion was frantic and chopped, with different refrains mixed together, repeated over and over again.

"John was the one who punched him. He's the one they'll convict," was one refrain. Another was, "I can smash his head with a shovel, and bury him so far in the woods they'd never find where I did it." Another was, "I don't have to smash his head, if I bury him he'll die soon enough anyway. Just so long as the police can't hear him making noise when they come looking for him."

Finally she decided she wanted to "get it [my dying] over with." She said I'd be easier to bury that way. She took the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. As Kona, I felt relief again that I might be able to join Alaka'i in the ultimate escape. But I struggled anyway, because you can't help it. When someone's smothering you, the panic and fear and struggling just happens.

To Row to Hawaii

[Right: Proto-Wesley.]

The first visitor to the House in Shirley was an army officer who came to meet with my parents over drinks the day before my 4th birthday. The conversation started off on a subject I knew nothing about, mostly affairs at Fort Devens and goings on at ASA headquarters. But eventually they started talking about Hawaii. That got Alaka'i's attention, and he took over completely.

[Left: Vampire hunter Wesley.]

The talk meandered around about things to do with Hawaii that I didn't care about at the time, like fire dancers and hula girls. Then my Father mentioned that he picked up quite a lot of Hawaiian during his time there.

My Mother, who was getting mildly drunk by then, butted in and said, "He'll tell you what a great linguist he is, but the boy is the linguist. The boy is fluent."

My Father said, "Yeah, right. When I hear proof I'll believe it."

I kept quiet while they argued a while more like that. I'd learned there was no point in expressing my own opinion. But then my Father said, "I really wish I could learn more Hawaiian, it's a beautiful language. It's a shame there's no way I could continue studying it here." [Right: Ensign Wesley.]

As Alaka'i I said, "You can learn it here. Talk to me and I'll teach you. I'll teach you a lot better than you know now." I imagined that the practice would do me good, too.

[Left: General Wesley.]

That was not a diplomatic thing to say. My Father turned red, then he yelled at me and backhanded me across the face. Our guest protested that I had only been offering help, and my Father snapped at him, "You stay out of this! You don't know how much this kid hates me! He's deliberately insulting!"

That night Alaka'i made plans to return to Hawaii.

Now, that was unrealistic thinking. But I'm not sure it's fair to say my poor reality perception was evidence of psychosis. This is a 4 year-old we're talking about.

[Right: Her Wesley will save her.]

The idea was to follow the setting sun and walk due west until I arrived at the Pacific ocean, then look around and "borrow" a row boat or something and sail yet further west until I ran into Hawaii. I wasn't sure how I'd get the borrowed boat back to it's owner, but I thought maybe I could get Lani and Lono to help with that when I saw them again.

There was a misjudgment about how long the walk would take. I thought that by walking straight, instead of making a lot of detours the way we did when we drove east, I could do it in 3 weeks. I would live off berries along the way. I thought the rowing might take an hour or so.

Probably the biggest misjudgment concerned the fate of Kona if I carried out my plan. I thought Kona would be able to remain behind with my parents, so nobody would really miss Alaka'i. One Wesley is as good as any other to these cretins.

The biggest mistake Alaka'i made in planning this break was a mistake of a different kind, not to do with the practicality of the plan, but with the advisability of revealing it. I made the mistake of thinking that though my Father was a jerk, he was nevertheless entitled to know that Alaka'i was leaving and why.

I know better now. We learn by making mistakes.

[Above left: Maniacally-grinning Wesley.]

Rains Bleed

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

At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!

I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.

In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.

At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.

Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"

Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.

After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.

The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.

Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.

The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.

I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.

Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.

As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.

Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"

If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.

Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"

It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.

After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.

[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]

Ā Hui Hou Aku

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

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

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

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

I said, "Alaka'i."

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

"I'll come back," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pronoun Problems

At first, it was clear to me that Kona was me with a different personality. But that didn't last long. As it seemed that Kona stayed behind when I roamed away from the house, or anyway, he wasn't accessible when I was with Lani and Lono, the illusion was created that he had a separate physical existence. Since I was only just turning three, that illusion could overcome my limited experience with the world. I came to think of Kona as capable of splitting off from me.

The use of the word "me" gets problematic. At first, Kona is a creation of my imagination. He's an idea that has been allowed to take on a life of its own.

But people who have thought deeply about human existence carefully for thousands of years will tell you that we are all ideas that have been allowed to take life. All existence is illusion, right? This is part of what that means. The me that did the creating of Kona was a fiction to the same degree that Kona started out being.

Once Kona could be believed in, once the illusion was strong enough, Kona had as much right to be the "me" that the first imaginer had. I should say imagined imaginer. Alaka'i didn't really imagine Kona into existence. Kona came into existence by the same imagination that imagined Alaka'i into existence, and that imagination simply imagined that it was Alaka'i.

At any rate, it's admittedly a tangle, and I dealt with it at the time by using "me" relatively. "Me" was whoever I was at the time. There were 3 names. Alaka'i meant the original personality. Kona meant the new one. Wesley meant either one, depending on who was active.

By the way, my English was still not very good. I mostly pronounced words in accordance with Pidgin rules for changing English sounds into Hawaiian sounds. That means b and f become p, that s, t, d, z, zh, sh, ch, and j and g all become k and sometimes t, that r becomes l, and that vowels are inserted after consonants that don't already have them. So "Wesley" was actually "Wekali" to me, accent on the first syllable.

I still wouldn't use Wekali with Lani and Lono, because it meant nothing to me, except that my parents gave it to me, and I detested it.

That's not to say I detested all of my parents' gifts. My Father was by now in the habit of spending a small amount of each payday's check on cheap presents for me. There were jacks, marbles, toy cars, toy soldiers, pinwheels, balloons, and sometimes picture books. Not all bad. I learned that Fridays meant stuff.

As my birthday approached I kept asking if that Friday's stuff included the promised ball, only to be told that my birthday hadn't arrived. I didn't know calendars yet.

Keiki Kona

It was days after my Mother arrived home from the mental ward before she spoke to me. She was drunk a lot of the time. She kept in her bedroom. Finally she came out and I tried to say the nicest thing I could think of saying. I asked about the baby that was due.

I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.

Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.

She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"

Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"

Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.

In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.

I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?

So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.

Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.

To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.

I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.

So I called little brother Kona.

When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.