Tag: trauma

A New Religion

I grew up in a big Catholic family with twenty-three first cousins but by the time I was in eighth grade half my aunts and uncles were divorced. My mom remarried and my stepfather, who was an ordained Methodist minister, turned out to be psycho. My mom threw him out of our house soon after my thirteenth birthday, but the two-year marriage had left me quite damaged. (I am summarizing for people who might not have read my synoptic “From Boom to Bust” thread.) I discovered a new world view in the book, Dune, and found myself embracing humanism. I have talked about reading a lot of sci-fi and philosophy. What I haven’t mentioned much is the television show Star Trek.

Star Trek was airing in prime time when I was six and seven years old. I mentioned sitting with my dad in the big easy chair watching it with him, being terrified yet fascinated. By the time I was thirteen the show was in syndication. We would get home from school and be on our own for several hours before my mom got home from work. I would watch an episode of Star Trek almost every day. Eventually I had seen every episode multiple times. Two of my best friends were also into it: Chuck and Alan. (I have already mentioned both of them. Chuck and I started out in beginning band together in eighth grade, having been friends since kindergarten. Alan was the airplane nerd from the Bay Area whose mother was the school librarian.) Chuck and I were obsessed with the show. We bought and read books about it, including the making of the series and the science upon which it was based. Chuck’s dad was an architect and we both had taken drafting in eighth grade. We set about designing our own starships, drawing up detailed floor plans and doing our best to sketch the shapes of the ships. We got into philosophical arguments about specific episodes (we would rarely agree on anything).

We were all somewhat secretive about it. You have to understand: back in those days Star Trek was just this campy, weird show that had been on for only two seasons. The entirety of the Star Trek “universe” was just some re-runs on afternoon TV. People who were really into it were considered weird nerds. It wasn’t something to brag about. But actually it was a bold and innovative concept which with the potential to become a new religion. Instead of ancient myths involving warring tribes in the Middle East, we are given a mythical future, wherein mankind has overcome our barbaric past by means of science and reason. On the bridge of the Enterprise we have, in addition to the All American Hero captain Kirk, a black woman, a Russian, an Asian, and an Alien working side by side. In 1967, in the middle of the war in Vietnam and the nuclear standoff with the USSR, this was a shocking vision of the future, almost too much to hope for. I grew up doing bomb drills in school. We all figured we might be wiped out in an atomic holocaust at any moment. Star Trek offered a vision of hope for the human future. It wasn’t mere entertainment: it was philosophical speculation of the best kind.

One day in high school this guy who had recently moved to our town from the Bay Area appeared on campus wearing a Star Fleet shirt and Vulcan ears. Everybody was talking about it and laughing. “Have you seen ‘Spock’ yet?” I had to admit he looked pretty good: he even had the haircut. It turns out my friend Alan was hanging out with him. Alan and I never hung out at school together. I would go to his house for sleep-overs and such, but I don’t think anyone really knew we were friends. I’m not sure why, but it felt like something I wanted to keep secret. Anyway, he called me one day and asked if I wanted to go to Sacramento to a Star Trek meeting. I had no idea there were such things, but I said yes. The three of us, Alan, “Spock” and I carpooled over to a lecture hall at Sac State where the meeting was held. There were mostly grownups there. I was considered pretty weird by most of the students at my high school, but even I was saying to myself, “Man, these people are really nerdy.” And the atmosphere! It was very serious, as if we were in church. There was mention of Star Trek conventions, which sounded amazing. But the room got very quiet when someone who had recently returned from a meeting with an affiliated Star Trek club in Los Angeles gave us all an electrifying update. There were talks — just talks at this point — about the potential for a Star Trek movie. Word was that most of the original cast had signed on to the idea, and there was funding and studio interest as well. It was likely to be a full-fledged feature film! Holy cow! I sensed the tension mounting in the room as people were afraid to hope yet were exuberant at the thought of it. You may be laughing now, but seriously, for Star Trek aficionados it was a first glimmering of the glorious future to come in the following decades.

My love of Star Trek was a secret I shared with just two special friends, but perhaps it showed up with my band friends whenever I rolled out my Spock impression. While Captain Kirk resonated with my heart, especially reminding me of myself in elementary school, Spock represented what I was striving to become during my teen years. Having emerged from puberty being prone to emotional hysteria, Spock’s disciplined dedication to the principles of logic captured my own struggle to use my awakening mind to override my turbulent emotions. I amused myself endlessly trying to craft Spock-ish phraseology. I remember one time during band rehearsal when Tana turned to me and said, “Ooh, I love that harmony.” I responded with, “I agree: the nodal interference in the overlapping wave forms produced by the oscillating columns of air does produce an effect that is most pleasing to the ear.” She looked at me like I was nuts, then burst into laughter.

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A Dark Winter

My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. She works with all kinds of kids and knows a lot about neurology. She tells me I have “sensory issues” and she could have helped me with them as a child. Actually, she says she could help me with them now, if I were willing. I’m thinking about it. What I do know is that my hypersensitivity as a child really impacted my life in both positive and negative ways. Take music, for example. I hear things in music that others don’t, like bees see colors that are beyond what our eyes can process. The positive side of this is that I am a good musician. The down side is that I can’t filter it out. Just the other day I was in the grocery store to pick up three items. Several times I had to stop and gather my thoughts, because I lost track of where I was and what I was there for. It’s not dementia. It was the fucking music that was playing in the background. It’s always been a problem for me. I’m supposed to be choosing a loaf of bread and all I can think about is the fact that they opted to use trombone for that musical phrase. Add narrow aisles and lots of people and we have all the ingredients for a psychological breakdown. I avoid stores and other crowded places. I have been to one or two big rock concerts in my life. The only way I survived was by allowing myself to break from reality and float in a borderline dream state. Utterly overwhelming and horrible. Even when it was Springsteen. If it hadn’t been for the beer and weed I would probably have made a break for it like I did at the haunted house. I have never understood how “normal” people can enjoy the things they do.

I went with a buddy to just one high school dance when I was in tenth grade. As you would guess, it was nightmarish. I tried to “dance” one dance, but the sight of all the other kids having such a great time as I wondered where the exits were made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t understand how guys got the courage to ask a girl to dance, much less on a date. My lame attempts with Trisha and Tana stand out in my memory because I had finally developed enough self-confidence to make a move, but the humiliation and remorse sent me reeling back into my cave. It’s important to note that all this was happening in the immediate aftermath of John the Cat’s death. And while I do recall sobbing myself to sleep one night soon after the tragedy, they were bitter tears and it didn’t help. I mentioned earlier that John kept the nightmares away. Now they were back, and it was brutal. I mean the content of the nightmares was often brutal. The worst involved coming upon a cat that looked like John and seeing that it was mortally injured. As it cried out in pain I knew the only thing to do was end its misery. So I grabbed a shovel to do the deed, but you know how in dreams sometimes it’s like you’re moving through molasses. I tried, but while each blow made things worse, the cat wouldn’t die. Being torn between horror and frustration caused me to wake up. I have had variations of that nightmare many times since. Other nightmares involved fist fights, again where I could barely move, or finding myself on a battlefield with bullets and bombs flying, stark naked with nowhere to run. Or being chased by a demon and, my escape being blocked, forced to turn and confront the monster only to see that — as if to mock me — it was wearing the face of Walt, twisted snarl and all.

All this talk of nightmares and dissociative states of mind brings up a crucial memory. I was seven years old, I think. We were camping in the redwoods. In the middle of the night I had a nightmare. In my dream I am wandering around the campground in the dark, barefoot and lost. Then there is a bear, which sees me and begins pursuit. I’m trying to run away but — molasses of course. I see a camper trailer up ahead and I make a bee line for the door. I feel the bear right behind me as I grab the handle of the screen door and try to turn the knob. It’s locked. I’m dead. So I snap awake, only to find myself standing exactly where I was in the dream. But now I’m awake and I can see that there is no bear. Completely freaked out, I begin banging on the door and screaming. Some old guy comes to the door saying, “What is it?” He opens the door and sees me, knows I must be lost. I had been sleepwalking again. He was kind and reassuring as he helped me back to our tent about fifty feet away. I found my sleeping bag and went back to sleep, my family completely unaware of the incident.

I told that story to illustrate what it feels like whenever I am triggered and begin to dissociate: panic is near and it’s hard to discern what is real and what is exaggerated by my imagination. If it’s a physical threat I might react violently before I even think. If it’s some kind of emergency my mind will snap into a hyper-alert state, completely depersonalized, as if some other grownup has taken over and I am just a spectator. If I am overwhelmed by sadness and grief, I simply lose track of myself entirely. It’s like a fugue state, but I still know who and where I am. Have you ever walked into a room and just stood there because you forgot why you were there? For me it’s like I have forgotten who I am and why am am alive — why anybody would want to be alive. I am completely detached from all feelings and motivations. Other times I am debilitated by strong emotions, but I can’t bring to mind any particular reason why I would be having them: the connection between the emotions and their source has been ruptured.

I remember one time when I was thirteen, not long after Walt left. For no apparent reason I decided to leave the house without my glasses on. That means the whole world would be a blur and I wouldn’t feel safe at all. But I just wandered down the street, then over to the next block where a busy street cut through the center of town. It was a residential neighborhood with nice houses, but there was plenty of traffic. I wondered what would happen if I just laid down on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street, like I was passed out. Would anybody notice or care? If so, I would pretend to be unresponsive. So I did it. Lying in the sun feeling the cool grass against my cheek, I listened as cars whizzed by, letting go. Giving up. Refusing to go on with anything. A car pulled up. I heard the door close followed by footsteps. High heeled shoes? A lady’s voice: “Young man, are you ok? What’s wrong?” I refused to move, feigned sleep. She touched my shoulder, “Are you all right? Do you need help?” I suddenly felt bad for her. She was so kind and concerned! I opened my eyes and saw a nicely-dressed, conservative-looking woman with gray hair looking at me with a worried expression. I said something like, “I must have fallen asleep.” She probably thought I was drunk or on something. If she knew the truth, that this was a cry for help, I don’t know what she would have done. I desperately wished she could just take me with her, away, anywhere. Give me a new life. Sheepishly, I stood up, brushed myself off and headed home. I never mentioned this little experiment to anyone or reflected upon it much, but it felt like I was wanting to end my life, psychologically, but unwilling to inflict any violence on myself to achieve it.

John’s death left me empty and numb. Unsurprisingly, the dark and cold of December have always been devastating to my mood. I listened to music and read books. I couldn’t feel my own emotions so I immersed myself in the emotions of others. I read short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, a gothic romance “My Cousin Rachel” by Daphne du Maurier, “A Bridge Too Far” by Cornelius Ryan, and — at my sister’s suggestion — “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin. My crush on Trisha became obsessive and I began talking about it with my therapist. I told him I was having trouble wanting to live. I was going through the motions of my very busy life and doing my best to mask the existential crisis I was in. There was a bright spot, though. Trisha wanted to audition for the part of Ado Annie in the Spring musical, “Oklahoma!” and she asked me to help her rehearse it. We met several times in a practice room at school. I played, she sang, I coached. She could really belt out a tune! I felt there was no way she wouldn’t get the part and I am afraid she might have been convinced by my enthusiasm, biased though it was. But she didn’t get the part. Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered how good she was, she wouldn’t have gotten the part. Our drama director, my dad’s old friend and comedy partner, casted the leads before he even picked the plays: the auditions were just perfunctory. Or maybe a good opportunity for kids to practice auditioning, but the die was already cast. My hopes of a rekindling with her were dashed when she seemed to withdraw from me in shame. I felt like I had let her down.

January came and rehearsals began for the show. I was the rehearsal pianist. In my ten-part thread I wrote about how busy my schedule was at that point: jazz band before school, symphonic and marching bands in the morning, jazz ensemble during lunch, music theory last period. After school I would ride my bike across town to play the piano for voice lessons, then back to school for musical theater rehearsal. It was brutal, but it was also addictive. Whenever I was playing an instrument it forced my attention to a focus. My breathing was regulated, the time was structured, and my nerves were soothed by the sounds. Music was my medicine, and I think it saved my life. It also provided a ready-made social life. My brother Dan, a year older than me, had been mostly invisible at school. But his friend, Kit, had been cast as Will the cowboy (the lead) and he convinced my brother to try out. Turns out my brother could really dance! All told, there were about one hundred and fifty people involved in the production when you count cast, crew, and musicians. It was the first time my brother and I had overlapping social circles, and the first time many of my friends learned that I even had an older brother. When we both starting going to cast parties a whole new dimension opened up in my life.

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Embarrassing Stories

I realize that the last two posts made me look pretty gay. While I proudly claim the label “queer” for myself, I have sometimes been told that bisexuals don’t really exist. Contrary to popular opinion and some very flawed studies, bisexuals are real. I have debated about telling the following stories, but I feel that it is necessary to set the stage for the following post (A Dark Winter). Alcoholism involves a physical addiction but is often fueled by emotional and spiritual deficits. To recover I had to come to recognize that I was “soul sick.” My soul sickness began before my addiction developed. Even after I knew it was bad for me I continued to drink because it was the only medicine I had that assuaged the deep anguish I felt. Now I will place myself on the autopsy table for a forensic investigation into some of the underlying conditions that amplified my disease. I hope my honesty makes up for the bad impressions you will get from my behavior.

When I was in sixth grade I was pretty uninhibited, often playing the role of clown in class, and very active on the playground. I teased and flirted with the most popular girls in class because I didn’t see why not: I was a boss. I remember hanging out with Lisa and Katie at Lisa’s house on a few afternoons. There was quite a bit of off-color humor, as you would expect with eleven-year-olds. That year for Halloween our town put on a haunted house. There was this old mansion on the edge of town that was in the process of being restored by the historical society. It was made available for the purpose and I suppose a lot of work was put into it. These days it’s not unusual for organizations to put together such things, but at the time it was very new. Everyone was excited to go, and a group of us including some of my siblings went together. I clearly remember going through the first two rooms, the horror displays, the jump scares, the arms reaching out from hidden places to grab at you as you passed. At a certain point something weird happened in my brain. I remember feeling disoriented and dissociated. Suddenly my legs were moving in a new direction without any accompanying thought. I suppose my prefrontal cortex switched off and the animal parts of my brain took over. I somehow got past the workers who were shouting, “Hey, kid, you can’t go that way!” and evaded capture. In serpentine fashion I darted through across three rooms and found an exit. Once out in the safety of the cool night air I took a deep breath, relishing my return to consciousness. When my group came out a few minutes later they were saying, “Where were you? We lost track of you and didn’t know what happened.” I was ashamed of the fact that I had panicked, but was also a little bit proud of my daring escape. Their security was weak. Perhaps they didn’t anticipate any of their victims making a break for it.

Over the summer leading into seventh grade I got a girlfriend, Kelly. It began with playground flirtation. I remember being at my dad’s house for a couple weeks after that and thinking of her obsessively. I was lost in fantasy and imagined her thinking of me too. I sensed the potential of — what? I didn’t even know. But when I got back in town, saw her again, and learned that indeed she had been thinking of me the whole time I was gone it was pure elation. This was my first experience of someone I really liked liking me back. That Fall we were “boyfriend and girlfriend,” which really meant that we continued to spend time goofing off on the playground at her condominium complex and talking a lot. I believe we spoke on the phone as well. One day in October she said to me, come over here, there is something I want to give you. We went away from the playground to another courtyard. “What?” I asked. “Come over here,” she said, leading me into a recessed doorway. I stood with my back against someone’s door as she turned. Smiling, she placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Close your eyes.” I did, still clueless. All at once I was awash in the sweetest sensation: her soft lips planting one careful kiss on mine. I was overwhelmed. I did not reciprocate, but I could think of very little else for the next few days. But I guess with what was going on at home I somehow couldn’t go any further with her and I cut things off suddenly. For decades I regretted the hurt and confusion she must have felt at me breaking up with her for no apparent reason, but it was a bit like my escape from the haunted house. I couldn’t have told you why I did it. After that I became increasingly shy and inhibited about my crushes.

One of the themes of this blog, a main theme actually, is the dangerous destructive potential of low self-esteem. I think my parents were misguided on this subject. Perhaps as a mix of Catholicism and Twelve-step ideas, I was taught that pride was a sin, humility a virtue, and that “ego deflation at depth” was good spiritual medicine. Whenever my parents perceived that I was getting “too full of myself” they would tear me down verbally. Of course, with Walt it was physical too. Today I understand that self-esteem is different than pride. “Pride” exists as a poor substitute for self-esteem, often activated in response to accusations or insults. It’s natural. Being called “queer” in a derogatory context made me militant in my denials. I finally developed some real self-esteem in my fifties, thanks to going back and finishing my undergraduate degree, and also meeting the love of my life during that time. Her humorous yet loving acceptance of my foibles has helped me to accept that, while utterly unique and weird, I am just like everybody else in that I deserve love and happiness just by virtue of the fact that I exist. I don’t have to “earn” it — it’s a birthright. That, my friends, is self-esteem. My parents weren’t given anything approaching unconditional love growing up. They worked hard to prove that they were of value in the world, but somehow never seemed to really believe they had succeeded. As a result they were very good people, but deeply insecure nevertheless. In my teen years I was plagued by the same sense of inadequacy and it permeated my awkward attempts to gain notoriety through my musical activities.

On with the next story! I met Tana when I was in tenth grade (she was a year older). I sat next to her in marching band class as she played tenor sax and I played baritone sax. Tana was very intelligent and we joked around a lot. She was unusually close to her mom and was active in her church. She was tall and thin, and to be honest, I didn’t find her physically attractive at all. But I loved our friendly banter and I relished how our friendship grew over that year. Enter Trisha. The first Star Wars movie was released over the following summer and made quite an impact. The fact that the music stood out enough to make the album a hit made it all the more popular with us band nerds. That Fall (now I was in eleventh grade) a new girl showed up in band playing French horn. She had recently moved up from L.A., had tacky dyed blonde hair, a curvy body and a cute face. Most sensationally, she had a bubbly-yet-nerdy personality that made her the focus of attention for me and my male friends. We couldn’t get enough of her! I had seen Star Wars in the theater once or twice. She told us she had seen it a dozen times and she knew people who had over a hundred viewings under their belts. She talked a lot about how amazing L.A. was, and hungrily soaked up all the attention she was getting. In a small town she was suddenly a big fish.

After seventh grade my “romantic life” had devolved into fantasy-driven, super-secret, excruciating crushes from a distance. With the girls I was friends with I could joke around easily, but when I developed a crush on someone I became quite shy. Trish was a little different because we were part of a friend group (comprised of her and a bunch of guys who lusted after her), so while my crush was secret (barely, I guess), I was able to be my usual boisterous self. We all had a lot of fun that fall. The marching band had been fundraising for a year to make a trip to the Mother Goose Parade in El Cajon, down in San Diego County. That meant travelling by air, which I had never done. The parade was scheduled for the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We were playing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz, and the band director’s concept was for us to come to attention, play about eight bars of “Over the Rainbow” while standing still, then start marching to the upbeat popular song from The Wiz. Cool! But we didn’t have an arrangement of Over the Rainbow. The director asked me if I could take this piano arrangement by George Shearing and score it for marching band, writing out all the parts. I could do that! I gained even more notoriety from that accomplishment, as not too many high school juniors could have done it without help. My “ego” was growing.

I hadn’t had anything to drink since the infamous champagne incident before ninth grade, but some of the guys I knew from Jazz Ensemble were partiers. They invited me to go for a drive with them one evening and we cruised Main Street, drank beer, and smoked a joint. I was not used to this form of male companionship. They asked me if I liked any girls (no doubt they had heard the rumors about me liking boys). I said, “Yeah, I think Trisha is really hot.” They started shouting things like, “Yeah! You should bone her!” I was pretty uncomfortable with that attitude, as I already knew her well enough to know she was not that type, appearances perhaps to the contrary. She had no sexual experience. But I felt the peer pressure to make some kind of move in her direction. As the trip to San Diego neared, I somehow mustered the courage to call her. I told her I really liked her, thought we would be good together, and asked her if she wanted to hang out with me at the San Diego Zoo, which was planned as part of the trip. She said yes! I was euphoric for about three days as I kept our arrangement secret from the rest of the guys. I was lost in a world of fantasy that included walking around holding hands, maybe sneaking a kiss in front of the giraffes. The night before we were to leave on the trip I received a phone call. She said she was worried that maybe I wanted to go off alone with her, which would probably alienate the other guys and mess up the friend group dynamic. I learned she had actually been a chubby misfit in L.A., had lost weight and dyed her hair over the summer, and was making a new start of things. She told me she had worked hard to develop an outgoing personality to build up a social circle and didn’t want to ruin it.

If I could travel back in time as my sixty-two-year-old self and talk to sixteen-year-old me I would say, “Dude, you got this. She likes you. She wants to go out with you, but she doesn’t want to ruin the trip for the other guys and destroy what she has built. She’s opening up to you. Just play it cool on the trip knowing that you are going to start dating afterwards. Make a plan to go see a movie with her.” But I was an insecure dork, and I felt myself spiraling into despair. I told her I understood, but once on the airplane I couldn’t bring myself to try to sit near her or speak to her, even. I sulked the whole way. She seemed hurt and confused. My mom would have derisively told me to get off my pity pot. Ugh. The trip turned out to be very fun anyway, but I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I was not good enough for her. On the flight back I sat next to Tana. We had been good friends for over a year but she knew nothing about my failed attempt to get something started with Trisha. After take-off I suddenly, without really thinking about it, put my arm around her. She accepted it, and we sort of cuddled the whole way back. I was weirdly gratified when I saw that Trisha had noticed us before quickly turning away. Revenge? What a dick, though. Arriving back in town, Tana took me aside and said that us being a thing was probably a bad idea. She was right, but it was a second blow to my pride.

I never apologized to either of them. The common denominator in all of these stories is that under certain stressful circumstances I would act or react in ways I couldn’t control or even explain. Apologizing or salvaging the situations in some graceful way was simply not within my capabilities at the time. Not long after that weekend Tana’s mother died suddenly. I’m sure it turned her whole world upside down. The following semester she was like a different person: she had ditched the horn-rimmed glasses for contacts, lightened and styled her hair, wore make-up, and now had a stylish wardrobe. Soon she was dating one of the most popular guys in the senior class and became part of the “in” crowd, partying a lot. We never really spoke again.

As for Trisha, our friendship was rekindled when I helped her rehearse a number to audition for the Spring musical. Judging from what she wrote in my yearbook the following year we must have become good friends by the time I graduated, but I am sure the San Diego incident was never mentioned again.

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From Boom to Bust (Part 4)

I have talked about my frequent sleep disturbances in the form of nightmares, but I should also mention that I often sleepwalked as well. We camped all the way up and down the west coast, as far as British Columbia in the north as far as Carpinteria to the south. At the far end of one of these adventures we visited my dad’s extended family in Riverside. During that stay my mother remembered me sleepwalking into their room, urinating in the corner, then curling up to sleep in an open suitcase. I also wet the bed until I was seven. Exasperated, my parents decided one time to humiliate me by putting me in a cloth diaper with plastic pants. I vividly remember the embarrassment and discomfort of the tight elastic and the fear of getting poked by the safety pins as they struggled to secure the diaper while I squirmed in resistance. I think it actually worked though: I finally stopped peeing the bed.

A month before my seventh birthday I came home for lunch looking forward to a nice toasted-cheese sandwich and some Campbell’s tomato soup, only to find my mother seated at the big round dining table, sobbing with her tear-stained face in her hands. “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. I had never seen her like this. She looked up at me and said, despairing, “They shot Robert Kennedy! They’re assassinating all of our leaders.” Only two months earlier our family had reeled from the blow of Martin Luther King being killed. He was a hero to us. Now this. At six years old I had no words. I just tried to absorb the horror. It was bad enough seeing the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles on the news every night. It did seem the world was coming apart. I also recall her saying on more than one occasion, “Heaven forbid Ronald Reagan ever be elected president: he will call up the National Guard and end democracy.” This was way back in the 1960s when Reagan was still Governor of California. She knew all about the rightwing conspiracies that were already afoot; the white panic over civil rights and the militarism that permeated our culture. It certainly shaped my worldview and created a fatalistic sense of anxiety about the future. And let’s not even talk about the overarching sense of dread the Cold War induced.

Later that summer we found out that my father had received a Rockefeller fellowship, which meant he would be going to Bellingham, Washington for two years to get his master’s degree. I felt his absence keenly. Long-distance phone calls were very expensive and thus few and far between, but he did mail us tape-recorded messages regularly. We would gather around the reel-to-reel tape recorder in his now empty study to listen, then we each had a turn recording a message of our own to be mailed to him in return. It was fun, but it was a poor substitute for actually hanging out with him.

My mother decided that with my father gone, I might benefit from being enrolled in the Catholic school that my older siblings had been attending. I had been thriving socially at the public elementary school half a block from our house. I was very popular with the kids and teachers alike. I liked it being so close. Now I had to ride my bike half a mile to the Catholic school where I didn’t know anyone. It did not go well. My teacher was the notorious Sister Anne Joachim (pronounced “Joke ’em”), a tiny old Irish nun with a thick accent who was known for brandishing a wooden rod. Everyone but me seemed to know she was no longer allowed to actually strike the kids with it. I’m sure I visibly flinched whenever she slapped a ruler on the corner of my desk. She would yell, “Gawk, you idiot!” whenever I failed to instantly name the capitol of a state. Flash cards were the worst. We were supposed to memorize our multiplication tables up to thirteen. I was trying to learn them, but my brain would freeze whenever I was confronted with a flash card, and whereas I was considered the smartest kid in class at the public school, I now felt like a complete moron and was treated as such. The bullying from the altar boy clique was unbearable. I felt like I had been sentenced to a gulag.

Even boys a year younger learned they could pick on me at recess and get away with it. My mom was a devout Catholic and had taught me to be Christlike, turning the other cheek and choosing non-violence. So I took it, trying to rise above it all. But one day on the playground I hit my limit. This one second grader (I was in third) just kept after me, endlessly taunting. A switch flipped in my brain. I lost all restraint, deciding it was time to beat his brains in. I tried to grab his jacket, intending to hold onto him with my left hand and beat his face with my right fist until he was dead. But he slipped out of my grasp and ran away. I went after him. I was always among the three fastest boys at my old school and I was sure I could catch this twerp, but he kept getting away. Round and round the blacktop we went, other kids scurrying to avoid us. I summoned one last sprint to catch him on a curve, but I ended up facedown in a large puddle. Everyone was screaming and laughing at me, and the last thing I remember was looking up to see my eldest sister a few feet away looking at me, then turning away in disgust. I had hit bottom.

A day or two later my mom told me that she was pulling me out of that school and re-enrolling me in my beloved public school! I was confused but elated. After months of silently staring out the window of the classroom, watching the clouds move outside while daydreaming I was on an old wooden sailing vessel on the high seas, I was going to be back in my element with my old friends. (Years later I found out from my eldest sister, who had been thirteen at the time, that she had had a talk with my mom that night, advising her to get me out of there. Bless her!) I will never forget the moment the principal brought me into the third grade classroom. The teacher (who I didn’t know yet) stood me before the class and said, “Kids, we have a new student joining our class today, his name is…” Before she could even finish three boys literally jumped over a table and ran towards me yelling, “Kirk!” The king had returned from exile!

Unfortunately, the damage was done. Years later, in psychotherapy at the age of thirteen, the two topics we centered on initially were the pants-down spankings and the Catholic school. But by then there was so much more going on.

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