Two: Circumstances Beyond My Control

My earliest memories are of pain, doctor's house calls in the middle of the night, a flash associated with an orthopedic clinic, major bouts with sore throats and fevers, someone throwing my red Radio Flyer wagon into Reedy Creek that ran next to our street...not stuff that the family photographs record. Those visual images are not ones I actually recall. I was told what was happening during those moments by my mother who, I assume, took most of the photos. I never recall a single instance of my father taking a photograph. The pain was associated with my leg. I was born with a club foot. A week after my birth, and every week thereafter for eighteen months, my leg was cast in plaster and then bound in an iron brace to force my foot to turn out. Thankfully, I don't remember most of this: I have a flash of a woman receiving a paraffin treatment in a clinic; I was told that I kicked a hole through the rails of my crib and into the drywall of my nursery; and I have a distinct recollection when we moved out of my first house of going through to see if we'd left anything behind. At the top of my bedroom closet was the ugly brace--red metal and leather straps--and my father smiling down at me and saying, "Well, we won't be needing this anymore, will we, Gary?" I wasn't born "perfect." Few of us are. I'm not sure that my parents necessarily made anything BIG out of it but I was made conscious of it when I began to experience pain walking around the age of six. I was taken out of my adorable Buster Browns (look, Mom, they can x-ray your feet in the store!) and placed in "corrective" shoes...ugly, ugly, UGLY...although they didn't become a conscious problem until kids at recess asked me where my sneakers were.

I suffered from sore throats from early childhood until puberty. I didn't know why and neither did my mother. The doctors wouldn't recommend a tonsillectomy because, they said, the tonsils "weren't diseased." I wonder, however, if some of these instances weren't related to my father. It's no more than a suspicion and I shudder when I even think of it. I'll get there in due time. The memory banks are such a pastiche. Piecing the fragments can be frustrating.

I was precocious and into everything. My mother loved to tell stories of me running (even with the cast!) out of doors naked as the day I was born; drinking an entire bottle of Trivasol vitamins because I liked the taste; smashing eggs on my head to make shampoo--well, you get the picture. Supposedly, it was my father who placed the first stuffed animal in my crib. I include this detail because the animal toys played a significant role later on. When I got into a "big boy" full-sized bed and the terrors were seeming to become nightly visitors, I'd use them to construct a barrier down the middle of the bed to protect me from the "bad side" from where the nightmares invariably came. Of the more complete memories that are wholly mine, I distinctly remember climbing into my parents' bed on a Sunday morning to read the comic pages while my father read the rest of his paper and had his morning coffee. Pretty much until she was incapacitated by cancer, mom always got up before dad to prepare his coffee and get his paper. Dad slept in the nude. I can still feel the warmth of his body against mine. That should be a good feeling...one of attachment that only a parent may share with a child. But on this particular morning, in addition to the comics and the paper, I can see one or more men's magazines, something I'd recognize today in a flea market as "pulp fiction" titled STAG or Male sporting bound women in torn blouses with "evil" Nazi officers strutting about, and all I can feel is his penis, wet, against my buttocks. A therapist once told me that one of my greatest problems with recall and giving voice to some of what happened to me was that the incidents occurred when I didn't even have the language to describe what was done to me. In my mind, it didn't (and today, it often still doesn't) make sense to me.

In my own chronological recollection, the nightmares didn't begin until we moved from Kingsport to Bristol. Only twenty-five miles, but in the Fifties and in Appalachia I suppose when you moved that distance from family, it was like journeying to the moon. We returned regularly to Kingsport every Sunday to visit my grandmother and dad's brothers and sister. We moved into an apartment complex. We weren't there very long before mom snatched me up and we flew to Belgium to meet here family. But sometime before that, in our first of two apartments in the complex, I began to develop fears--screaming-Mimi-get-everyone-up-in-the-middle-of-night-won't-go-back-into-THAT-BED!--nightmares that were expressed in animal imagery. During therapy, I brought myself to the point where I could draw what I recalled. The earliest I call "Tiger in my bed." I'll scan the image and paste it into the blog. If you can imagine sensing as you slumber the warmth of a large, furry body beside you, licking you with a sandpapery tongue, opening your eyes in the dark and becoming aware that this animal mounting you, will harm you, will eat you, no amount of "sh-shussh" and stroking will get you to shut up. YOU'D SCREAM AND STRUGGLE! And when I "came to" my father was standing by my bed in his boxers. Mom was out in the hallway asking, "What's wrong? What's the matter?" Those questions would be asked of me from the time I was three until I was ten the night my father "cut me off." There was nothing wrong with me but I began then to believe that what was happening to me was MY FAULT.

I've written what I can stand for one sitting. I ask your patience.