Chapter
2
Early
Signs of Future Disabilities
On
a beautiful Fall Saturday night in the year 1932, my mother and father met
in one of those head over heels, magical experiences in which Cupid strikes
the heart, loins and head all at once. As
falling in love usually goes, Cupid’s arrows struck in that order, and the
arrow of love piercing the head was undoubtedly the smallest of the three,
but just big enough to throw any semblance of reasoning right out the window.
This fateful meeting that reduced them into smitten young teenagers happened
in Lynn, Massachusetts. My father was 22 and my mother was 19. Having been introduced to one another by one
of my mother’s sisters, the mystique of the introduction could only be bolstered
by the cool crispness of the early evening air that was fragranced by the
sweet scent of burning leaves in the rustic New England neighborhood. These kinds of early autumn evenings with their
characteristic medium dew point levels, barring no recent rainfall, could
truly create such an intoxicating outdoor environment with its hypnotic gentle
breezes that could only and relax every muscle fiber in your body while fueling
the loving spirit, depending on how close you were to the burning leaves. My father was taking a much-needed break from his demanding tobacco
sales job in Worcester, Massachusetts, deciding to visit his father in Lynn.
At that time, my father’s dad, my grandfather whom I never met, was
the manager of a boisterous men’s club that sported a large dance hall and
a bar with plenty of moonshine.
Actually, the wicked concoction of
moonshine, the cursed substance that was condemned to hell by the righteous
Prohibitionists of the pro-temperance era, was to be the salvation of my existence.
My maternal grandfather had spent one year in prison for being unlucky
enough to be nabbed by Federal authorities for smuggling moonshine through
the Canadian border, most likely through the paraphernalia of his trade as
an undertaker. In the bootlegger’s art, heavy wooden coffins not only bore
the bodies of loved ones to grief-stricken mourners lining the perimeters
of newly dug gravesites, but, within the secretive velvet linings of these
same coffins, they bore the illegal spirits that would uplift many a saddened
mourner and more. The humiliation for my self-righteous grandmother
undoubtedly being too much to bear, my mother’s family fled to Lynn, Massachusetts
more likely to escape the community gossip than their stated reason of desiring
to follow their eldest daughter who had enrolled in nursing school in Lynn
Hospital, the same hospital where I would be born about fifteen years later.
When I had unwittingly stumbled upon this tabooed tidbit of underground
family information about 52 years later at the age of 37 on March 14, 1984,
I had mixed emotions. On the one hand,
I got hot under the collar about the pretentious high standards embraced by
my mother’s side of the family, an attitude that would literally drive all
the men to drink with frustration simply because these carrot in front of
the donkey expectancies could never be met.
However, I also reasoned with a twisted irony,
if my blessed grandpa had not been nabbed by one of Elliot Ness’s comrades,
most likely the family never would have moved to Lynn and I simply would be
another goose egg in the Universe.
On
that October evening of my parents’ initial encounter, time lost its measure
and nightfall surrealistically drifted into pre-dawn with just a shadow of
pink to announce the imminent sunrise. Oblivious to anything except each other,
the sweetened fixation undoubtedly augmented by adrenaline and moonshine,
my mom and dad danced the night away. Emotions between them definitely ran
high that night. However, the high
energy of human emotions spewing forth from the limbic portion of the human
brain can be dangerous if unbridled by cerebral reasoning of the rational
human mind coupled with rigid social norms. It was this
very unbridled passion, I believe, that led to their eventual tragedy, a tragedy
I very much shared, leaving me with a excruciating sense of betrayal, as if
Cupid had become the Devil himself, turning his arrows of ecstasy into spears
of agony.
My
mother and father had to wait four long years before they could exchange nuptial
vows in 1936, the delay of the marriage being unavoidable due to the economical
nightmare created by the 1929 collapse of the stock market which led to the Great Depression years. One of the upsides of the Great Depression which
peaked in 1933, particularly if one’s political position is more to the left,
is that Franklin D. Roosevelt emerged as a strong four-term President, a President
who put a screeching halt to fraud in the stock market with the creation of
the Securities and Exchange Commission, a President who curbed skyrocketing
prices by advocating vehemently for anti-trust laws, a President who put food
on the table and a roof over the heads of millions through the creation of
New Deal policies and programs that would dump tons of money into the national
economy. Social Security was born in
this era, but perhaps more important for my father, the Civil Service system
that landed many government jobs for millions was also created, my father
being the fortunate recipient of one of these jobs. President Roosevelt also was the major player
in World War II, whom many refer to as ‘The Last Good War’, but my father
was excused from that victorious war against evil not only because of his
age ( being born in 1909, he was 33 when Pearl Harbor was attacked ), but,
more significantly, because he had a child to support when Roosevelt finally
was able to convince Congress and the nation that we had to enter the war
in 1942, a war that broke out three years earlier when Hitler invaded Poland.
Although
my parents were married on a beautiful Spring day in May, 1936, they were
able to hold off having a child, Suzanne, until March, 1942, nearly four months
after Congress declared war on Japan. Although
difficult financial times, including nationwide rationing, was the reason for the delay of child rearing, I suspect that, my father
being a non-practicing Catholic and my mother Protestant, sexual practices
such as condoms and coitus interruptus, considered
liberal in those post-Victorian days, contributed to the delay as well.
My brother, Mark, was born in April, 1944, two months before the Allied
invasion in Normandy. Another planned marriage, two beautiful children,
my parents’ marriage continued to appear as if orchestrated by Dr. Benjamin
Spock. I was the only baby boomer,
having been born on January 17, 1947. Modesty
aside for descriptive purposes, I could see from baby photos that I was a
beautiful baby as well and this opinion was echoed by many others who saw
the same baby photos that hung prominently above my parents’ bed. However, unlike my sister and brother, I was
not healthy, but this unfortunate fact wouldn’t be evident until several months
later. I also learned much later from
my mother around 1975 that I was not planned either. As the 70s was the age of relaxed family planning
and abortion laws, I chuckled loudly in the presence of my 12 year nephew,
another unplanned child, when provided with this piece of background information
about my birth, but my stomach was in knots.
The
first hint of anything being wrong with my physical development was my mother
started noticing about a few months after my grand entry into the world that
I would not turn to face her whenever she came into my bedroom. Watching me staring transfixed at the wall while
sitting up in my crib and not turning to face her, she immediately began wondering
if I had some problem hearing or, perhaps, I was just very independent.
It would soon be obvious that she was right on both counts.
Soon
after their wedding with no children to worry about, my father, a 1929 Wakefield,
Massachusetts High School graduate and outstanding athlete ( He was captain and quarterback of
the football team while being named to the All-Scholastic team in basebal.
), quit his job in tobacco sales and landed himself a secure civil service
position with the Post Office in the City of Lynn. Their wedding seemed to
launch off a model marriage, not only my mom being very pretty and my dad
quite handsome, but, as a couple, were the apple of many people’s eyes for
their accomplishments as well as their gregariousness. Their wedding photo could easily have been a
magazine cover photo. Not only did
they have the security of his job, but the security of my mom’s relatively
well to do parents, my maternal grandfather making a big chunk of his money
as a seasoned businessman, his bootlegging years finally paying off despite
a year’s incarceration and other failed ventures of questionable nature that
included the acquisition of a schooner
that transported who knows what between New Bedford, Massachusetts and the
Cape Verdes islands.
But,
of course, being no such thing as a model marriage, there were problems at
the outset of theirs. As most stormy
marriages go, the fundamental, underlying cause of the problems were an inability
to intimately communicate on a genuine, negotiating basis as a functionally working
couple. The dead give-aways to these power
struggles between my parents as well as many, if not most modern Western couples
of the post-Industrial era, were relentless episodes of bitter, repetitious
arguments over routine matters of daily living, resulting for the most part
in fruitless attempts to dominate one another to create a personal illusion
of control, therefore peace, in their lives. Without a doubt, however, underlying
as their communication breakdown may have been, it was equally and absolutely
clear that the major overt symptom of their marital commitment destined to
annihilate their pledge of ‘ ‘til death do us part’ was alcohol abuse, a family
tragedy shared and caused by both my father and mother. Although the cause of my father’s problem drinking
was attributed to both of my parents, I am quick to point out that neither
was to be blamed. While this may sound
like a contradictory statement, blaming someone for certain behaviors has
the connotation of intention to do harm to oneself and/or others whereas cause
implies that underlying factors beyond conscious awareness may be a significant
part of this same destructive behavior. I
am also quick to point out that, especially in hindsight, I viewed my father
as a problem drinker, not a classic, hard-core alcoholic. What spares him from the latter classification
is that he was able to function quite well in his family and masculine roles.
He was a hard worker, often working two jobs totaling twelve hours
a day, and he was basically a loving father and husband with an incredible
sense of humor. Looking back, however, the real tragedy of my
parents was that they perceived the problem drinking as the cause of their
marital dissolution and did not see the drinking as a symptom. It would be some thirty years later that professional
advances in the studies of addictive disorders pioneered by the mental health
community had come to realize that alcoholism and problem drinking was not
the result of one factor alone implying that the cure was simply will power.
Rather, experts in the alcoholism and substance abuse field had uncovered
what many of them had always suspected. Through
careful, empirical research studies featuring randomly selected control groups
and sophisticated statistical methods, as well as objective observations of
problem behaviors in clinical settings, these experts learned that alcoholism,
problem drinking and other addictive disorders was a multi-factorial problem
and had to be treated as such if there were to be real success in treatment. Thus, the cause of alcohol problems that makes
the lives of millions of Americans and billions internationally so miserable
has its roots in social, psychological and biological factors. Words such as co-dependency, dysfunctional and
enabling became commonplace, implying that other significant people in the
alcohol troubled person’s life were encouraging the very behavior they claimed
to abhor. Advances in professional
understanding of alcohol problems were equally emphatic about the fact while
people in the outside world may be highly encouraging of the destructive behavior,
they are not to blame. This very fine,
often invisible line between encouragement and blame is still one of the greatest
challenges in alcohol treatment today. Nevertheless, the basic tragedy in my parents’
marital struggles was the shared viewpoint that alcoholism was the cause of
their marital breakdown. But, to me,
the real tragedy is that my parent’s were not lucky enough to be born
in the age of alcohol enlightenment. As
tragic as this pre-mature existence that precludes cultural and scientific
advances, I also take this tragedy in stride, shrugging it off as part of
life, for it is far less tragic than myself being born into an era where genetic
cures and prosthetic treatment for deafness and blindness are so frustratingly
close, yet so far you could pull your hair out by huge clumps.
As
my mother a bit too innocently would recall later, she was not aware of my
father having any type of problem with alcohol prior to their marriage during
their courtship, nor did she seem to be concerned about his drinking for their
first four years of marriage. In fact,
she had on different occasions had recalled, with a conspiratorial grin, the
hell raising times they would have at the Speakeasies during their courtship.
But all was not fun and games for my mother.
She became increasingly uneasy when she began admitting to herself
that my dad had trouble holding his liquor. Much later when I was about 19
and we were traveling to a family gathering, a gathering in which we had to
leave my father behind as he was so intoxicated, my mother painfully recalled,
tears streaming down her face leaving huge streaks on her freshly applied
make up, the incident in which it was obvious that my father did indeed have
a problem with the bottle, in essence, a problem that put him on his private
road to hell. Speaking between muffled sobs, my mother recollected,
as if the event happened just the day
before, the beautiful spring Sunday my mother, father, a free-spirited, hard
drinking uncle and aunt took a leisurely
stroll on the countryside roads. My mother reported that she was pregnant with
my brother, so the year had to be 1943 while the great war featuring its nighttime
blackouts, food and gas rationing and promising economy was still raging.
Being in the later months of her pregnancy, my mother claimed fatigue
and asked if she could be excused from walking much further.
My father flew into an uncharacteristic rage, and declared with a string
of epithets and curses that would have embarrassed a drunken sailor, that
he was continuing this fucking walk with my uncle whether she liked it or
not. Moreover, he announced in a way that my mother
never saw before, he was sick and tired of never having any fun, it seemed
as if all he ever did these past few years was work, come home, go to bed
and off to work again. My mother never
saw this mood swing before. It frightened
her terribly. She had heard of Dr.
Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde type personality changes with people battling the bottle,
but was it really happening to her own husband?
Frightened, she left the foursome without a word, seeking refuge in the familiarity of her home, a home in the central
district of Lynn abutting Flax Pond that cost $25 a month to rent and was
on the border of being declared unfit for human habitation. Despite these modest conditions for the Hubbard
family, the house on Bowler Street that would be condemned and torn down eight
years later was a sanctuary of security for the family, offering, as homes
do, shelter from hardship as well as offering an atmosphere
for love and laughter. On this particular
late Sunday afternoon, the rickety old house boasting its many rat traps loaded
with cheese was shelter from a single hardship, a husband with an alcohol
problem who was very possibly on a binge and could very well come home in
a drunken rage. My dad returned about
five hours later, but my mom didn’t have to worry about the rage anymore.
He was so drunk, he could barely walk and he was totally incoherent.
That was one thing my mother never worried about, she stated with a
semblance of relief to my brother and I on the way to the family gathering
that winter afternoon in 1967, shortly before my brother was to leave for
Vietnam, my father never was physically abusive to her.
She had quipped that he never had laid a finger on her, adding sardonically
that they might have been better off if he had because that would have forced
her to leave him. My brother and I
exchanged uneasy glances, reading each other’s minds with silent recognition
that things could have been a lot worse. Little did we
realize that the worse was yet to come.
In fact, it would get much much worse, the
family drama would escalate to a level of violence that neither of us could
have thought possible in our wildest dreams.
My dad’s bouts with the bottle continued.
What made the problem difficult to cope with was its unpredictable
pattern. He would be fine until, without warning, he
would go on a two to three day binge. I
am careful when I say without warning, however, because something must have
happened to trigger his drinking episodes. It is impossible, of course, for
children in families to see what’s really going on between their parents,
in the bedroom or outside of it. I
did suspect there were some sexual problems between my parents. They were friendly enough to one another when
the battle wasn’t on, and there was plenty of humor between them, but, in
retrospect, the humor seemed sarcastic and dry, as if there were some underlying
resentment between them. But what really
tipped one off about their likely sexual problems were the books I would find
in my parents’ bedroom. The books were
obviously my mother’s, as she had more time to read during her years as a
housewife. One book that really caught
my attention was titled ‘The Power of Sexual Surrender’, a book written by
a female doctor which was about treating sexual frigidity. When I first discovered the book at around the
age of ten, it was a great turn-on for a kid getting ready to sprout his gonads,
but years later, I would reflect on that book and put two and two together.
Nevertheless, my father’s drinking would usually occur on weekends, often
going two to three months without drinking.
Except for a day or two here and there, he never missed a day of work. In fact, his job performance was outstanding,
eventually getting promoted to Superintendent of the busy East Lynn Post Office,
a major branch of the city’s postal network.
As
a youngster I did not really witness my father drinking nor did I really sense
that an alcohol problem existed. Perhaps
I was just too young to notice, or did not have true understanding of what
alcohol problems were. For all I knew, if he had a beer or a cocktail,
that was just normal behavior, something all parents did. After all, that was what I thought of both my
parents’ smoking habits. I just never
paid any attention to it, except when the smell really bothered me while eating
meals. One day, I did ask my dad why
people smoke, and I was surprised at his dismissive response, a slight wave
of his hand while replying with the three words “just a habit”. He then successfully changed the subject.
I
just paid no notice to his drinking until, that is, one evening when I was
about six. Without the usual warning
of hearing my father’s car entering the unpaved driveway that abutted our
red, six room Cape Cod home on Woodland Avenue, a newly developing street
in which we were the second new home on this street on the fringes of Lynn
Woods, the largest inner-city forest in the continental United States, I suddenly
heard my father come into the house through the back door that was adjacent
to the driveway. Being slightly taken aback and even slightly annoyed from
the interruption of one of my favorite Sunday evening television shows, Rin
Tin Tin, I looked out the window which provided a view of the driveway. My father’s car wasn’t there. Someone must have dropped him off.
I
turned around in the padded armchair that was the best seat in the house for
watching TV, especially for someone like me who was very hard of hearing.
I saw my dad standing next to the dining room table that lined the picture
window that gave a panoramic view of the forest in the back of our house. My father was just standing there. I was so stunned by his demeanor that even the
loud blaring of the television seemed to fade out. It wasn’t his standing that seemed odd, it was
just the fact that he remained standing there not facing anything nor doing
anything, and his rigid body seemed to even be wavering a bit. What in the world I thought, how can he be standing
there and not doing anything? My dad
was always a bundle of energy, he was always doing something, unless he was
taking one of his naps on the living room sofa. Something’s weird here, I
continued to think, my skin beginning to feel as if it were crawling. I got
up from the chair, apprehensively went to the dining room to greet him and
what I encountered threw me on my small heels. He finally sat down on one
of the dining room chairs, but was slightly slumped over, cradling his head
in one hand. When I asked him what
he was doing, and if he was all right, he slowly lifted his head and cast
an eerie, glassy gaze directly at me and slowly began to smile in a strange,
creepy way, a way I had never seen him smile before. My parents wouldn’t let me watch horror movies
at that young age, but I must have guessed that this was one of those scary
faces in horror movies that my sister and brother would talk about once in
a while during breakfast the day after the movie.
My dad ever so slowly raised his head
that revealed red eyes. Why were his
eyes so red? Had he hurt himself?
And wat was that awful smell coming from his mouth? While standing
there in a frozen posture and staring at him transfixed, he finally spoke.
In a nearly unintelligible manner he slurred, "Yeah, I'm all right,
but you're not gonna be when I'm done with ya."
Without warning, he reached out and
grabbed me and began dragging me upstairs into one of the bedrooms. Feeling confused and somewhat scared since I
was not sure if he was playing some kind of game, I bellowed, "Dad, what
are you doing?"
When we reached the upstairs bedroom,
he picked me up and threw me down a little too hard onto the mattress and
jumped on top of me like a wrestler who is trying to pin his opponent down.
This being so unlike the father that I used to feel so comfortable
with, the same father whom I would eagerly await to listen to stories every
night after supper lying by his side, I had no idea what to make of what was
happening at that moment and began screaming, "Dad, stop it--you're scaring
me!" My mounting panic only escalated
his eerie laughter, but now he was making some very strange babbling sounds,
almost if he were gargling with mouthwash - but he wasn’t gargling with mouthwash.
By this time, I was in a full blown panic. After about half an hour,
which seemed like an eternity, my sister and brother finally came out of nowhere,
charging into the bedroom to my rescue. My sister, eleven years old and still
in elementary school, and my brother, two years younger, demanded with quivering
bravado that my father stop his foolishness.
Couldn’t my dad see, they screamed in a sarcastic protest that almost
betrayed their underlying nervousness, that he was hurting me while scaring
me out of my wits at the same time? My
father did suddenly stop, stared down at me with glazed, red eyes and asked
with slurred speech, "Were you really scared?
Aw, I was only foolin' around, I didn't mean to hurt you."
By then I was totally confused,
still scared, and not knowing who to turn to for help, since this was the guy I
usually did turn to for help, for any sense of safety in this awesome
world. My mother returned somewhat later
that evening, having been most likely visiting with her mother. I heard her loudly scolding and chastising my
father who had probably passed out at
this time, then gave me a warm hug and told me not to pay much attention to him
when he acted like that, but she never really did explain what had happened to
him.
It was only a short time after that,
perhaps a year or so later, that I learned what getting drunk meant. My father was walking from the kitchen into
the TV room, carrying a glass of beer.
Being simultaneously thirsty and wanting to emulate my male role model,
I asked him if I could have a sip, he flashed a big grin and said, "Sure,
son, go ahead, have a big sip."
My brother who was sitting nearby
intervened by shouting, "Don't, Brian, you'll get drunk."
I did take a small sip, and then
turned to my brother and asked him what getting drunk meant. "It's when you drink beer and other
stuff like it, the beer goes to your head and makes you act a little crazy and
goofy, kind of like the way Dad did the night he dragged you up into the
bedroom and was scaring you."
So that's what happened to him, I thought
to myself, putting some of the pieces together with a slight sense of relief
at being able to understand what had happened, but also not really sure if
I liked the understanding of what getting drunk meant.
"Why do people want to get
drunk?" I asked my big brother with
total curiosity.
With moral overtones, especially for
a ten-year-old kid he responded, "Because they're jerks and probably want
to show off."
These drinking episodes were few and
far between, not happening too often during my preteen years. But when they
did happen there was a good deal of consternation in the house, filling it
with screaming voices usually from my mother and father. Later my sister and then my brother learned
how to jump in, taking my mother's side and joining the attack on my father
usually with repeated declarations that he was nothing but a no-good drunk,
and he didn't care about his family or himself.
I did not pay too much attention to these incidents, fleetingly thinking
that they were perhaps no real big deal. This kind of weird behavior probably
happened in all families.
I suddenly started paying more
attention, however, when one Sunday evening right in the middle of my favorite
TV movie, The Wizard of Oz, my father
arrived home. Once again, his entrance
through the rear door was sudden and without warning, the sudden slam of the
door now beginning to elicit a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. Again, someone must have dropped him
off. I was learning that hearing the
family car pulling into the driveway was a reassuring sound of safety, that
things were OK because he didn’t have to be dropped off because he was not in
that mysterious state of drunkenness.
Simply speaking, when the car pulled into the driveway, my stomach would
relax and I could go back to watching Howdy-Doody.
However,
on this special Wizard-of-Oz Sunday night, after his chilling entrance, he
began staggering so heavily he could hardly walk. Somehow, he nearly made his way through the
living room and was bearing towards the front hallway where the staircase
lead to the upstairs bathroom. He was
near the front of the living room and, unfortunately, right next to me as
I was perched in my customary favorite TV chair when all of a sudden he began
to vomit near my feet, a happening so ghastly that it set my brother off screaming,
, "Mom, Mom, he's throwing up all over the floor!" So contradictory to the magic of OZ with its
luminescent colors of the Yellow Brick Road and beautiful voice of Judy Garland
singing ‘Over The Rainbow’ was this gruesome spectacle, that, years later,
I would have thought the scene was straight from Steven King, almost like
the scene from Carrie in which the radiant, beaming Carrie had a bucket of
pig’s blood poured on her head while receiving her roses for being selected
as the queen of the senior prom.
Being scared and disgusted at the same
time, I ran to get out of the living room to run to the safety of the kitchen,
but in doing so I miscalculated my step and slid in the vomit, nearly falling
face first in the disgusting stuff. For a long moment, my world seemed to
be frozen, the gaiety of Oz confusingly lapsing into the horror of watching
my everyday, protective father change into such an uncontrollable mess. For
a six year old kid, it was just too much, the nauseating stench of alcohol
and vomit, bile and regurgitated stomach contents mixed together, the gross
sight of my father trying to block the vomit emerging from his wide open mouth
by holding both hands to his mouth. This,
of course, only worsened his balance and, to this day, I have no idea how
he was able to prevent himself from falling into his self-induced mess. The only thing I could think of to do was flee
to the safety of my bedroom and that is exactly what I did, panic and all.
A
few days later while visiting one of my cousins, my aunt and uncle asked me if
I had watched The wonderful Wizard of Oz
the other night. I sheepishly replied to them that I started the movie I had
waited weeks for, but I had to bring my fun to an abrupt end at the part where
Dorothy and the Scarecrow were joyfully skipping down the Yellow Brick Road
because my father suddenly got sick for some strange reason, as evidenced by
his slipping on a yellowish pine floor.
The polarity of viewing my father slipping and Dorothy skipping was just
too much for my young stomach and mind to handle. It was weird, I had told them, it wasn’t as
if he had the 24 hour grippe or something.
While innocently reporting the evening’s fiasco, I saw my aunt and uncle
stare at each other in such a typical way that signaled to me that they knew
something that I didn’t know.
*
* * *
It was later in the evening near the
end of June, 1954, the gentle breeze providing relief from the unusually hot
day. The most prominent feature of
Mother Nature, however, was that it was well after sunset and quite dark out,
but I didn’t pay much notice to this darkness because this is the way it always
was. Besides, I assumed that it was
just as dark for everyone else and I never heard anyone mention a word about
darkness, no one certainly ever complained about it. I did wonder from time to time why they thought
the moon made things brighter, that old man in the moon certainly never brightened
anything up for me, especially those blasted curbstones on streets wide enough
to have sidewalks. My childhood logic held up for Verdmont Avenue, the street
we were walking on this breezy June night.
I
was eight at the time and my brother Mark eleven. We were walking home from the
local neighborhood store where I had just purchased one of my favorite treats,
a Fudgicle, which I was eagerly licking right down to the stick. I didn't know what Mark spent his dime on and
I could have cared less. Lynn,
Massachusetts, a world wide leader in shoe and leather manufacturing, had its
quieter suburban sections immediately to the northeast of the more affluent
town of Lynnfield. Turning off the main
street, Lynnfield Street, my brother and I began walking up Verdmont Avenue, a
road lined with middle-class, well-kept homes.
It was a relatively quiet street, and there was really no danger from
traffic, since one could easily get out of the way to the safety of the
sidewalk if a car did happen to approach.
Walking in the middle of the street
as I always did so I could easily find the glare of the next oncoming
streetlight, I suddenly heard my brother shout to me, "Brian, get over on
the sidewalk before you get hit by a car."
Nearly scared out of my wits by Mark's
bloodcurdling yell, I anxiously looked around, but I could not see my brother
even though I knew he was nearby. This
feeling of being somewhat lost gave me no real concern, however, since I thought
that everyone saw the world the same way I did. I just figured it would be
a matter of time until my brother would come into view under a streetlight,
or a bright porch light from one of the houses lining the street.
But this was the first time I heard my brother hassling me about the
street. Why? Was I walking too close to the middle of the
street?
"Brian," my bossy brother
yelled again, "I said get over here on the sidewalk!
Cars might come around the corner and you won't be able to see them."
I struggled to find my brother but I
still could not see him, yet I knew he was nearby.
"Brian," he yelled
again. "Get over here."
At that point my nervousness really
escalated as I sensed my brother's anxiety and I finally managed to blurt
out, "Where are you, Mark?"
"Over here," he screamed,
his volume increasing. I couldn’t
believe how loud he was yelling. What
the devil had gotten into him?
I still could not see him, I could
sense that his voice was coming from my right.
I started moving in that direction, when suddenly I tripped on a curbstone
I never saw, luckily regaining my balance at the last second.
"What are you trying to
prove?" he demanded.
I still could not see him and once
again yelled, "Mark, where are you?"
"I am right here," and he
touched me, more of a slight blow to my undeveloped chest with his closed fist
actually.
He was standing two feet away from
me and I could not see him. Becoming
confused by the fact that I could not see him and yet I knew he could see me, I
bewilderingly searched for an explanation.
How can he see me when there's no light around here at all? I was genuinely curious since it was very
dark out. I still assumed everyone in
the world could see the world just the same way I saw it at night and that
there was nothing to see if there was no light, just total blackness.
"You can't see me at all?"
he bellowed loudly with disbelief.
"Are you playing some of your attention-getting games
again?"
I knew what he was talking
about. One-half year earlier due to a
condition that proclaimed me as "hard of hearing," I was the
recipient of a shiny new hearing aid, a gift I accepted from my parents with
feelings of pride, mixed with an uncomfortable twist of embarrassment. My pride resulted from my improved ability to
hear but even more so from all the attention I was getting from wearing
it. There were some highly embarrassing
moments using my new hearing aid, however, especially when the battery died
right in the middle of a school day, and I did not have a spare in my pocket.
"No, Mark, I mean it," I
said with desperation, "I really can't see you."
"Can you see me at all
now?" he asked, moving closer to me.
"No, where are you?" I
asked.
"You mean you really can't see
me at all?" he haltingly asked,
this time with genuine sincerity. Even I could hear his voice trembling a
bit.
"Mark, I'm not kidding, where
are you?" I asked, a little scared now.
Regaining his composure, he became
the bossy big brother again, most likely to deal with his own rising fear.
"How come you can go to the store by yourself, if you can't see the
sidewalks?"
"I just follow the street
lights home, isn't that what everyone does?"
"That's dangerous," he
wailed, "You could get hurt that way if you don't use the sidewalks."
I had not been hurt in all eight years
of my life yet, and I proceeded home the way I always did. In fact, several cars did come down the road
and, I was really getting pissed off, not only because of his flip know-it-all
attitude, but also because all the commotion had made me forget the Fudgesicle I was eating, which by now had all but melted away.
I stepped out of the road to let cars pass by, never using the sidewalk.
Screw you, big brother, I thought to myself.
Ten minutes later, approaching our
red Cape Cod house, my brother was a good distance in front of me. Evidently
unable to contain his confusion, he ran into the house. As I got closer to my home, I could hear my
brother talking excitedly to both my mother and father.
"He can't see, I'm telling you, he
couldn't see me at all when I was on the sidewalk. I asked him to come up beside me, but he
couldn't find me." He said in desperation.
When I finally stepped through the
doorway, I saw both my parents stare at
me with concern in their eyes. My mother especially had that typical worried
look. Not even realizing I had a vision
problem, my clear straightaway sight revealed to me that her own eyes were
misting.
"Brian, honey, couldn't you
find your brother when he was calling for you?" asked my mom.
"Yes, of course I saw
him," I responded defiantly, but meaning only when he was under a
streetlight.
"He's lying," wailed my
brother. "I'm telling you he couldn't see me."
"Come out here, Brian," my
father commanded leading me to the doorway.
He walked down the narrow path leading from our house to the street, a
path that I could discern only by the feeling of concrete under my rubber-soled
sneakers. But again this is what I
thought everyone did - they feel the paths under their feet.
"Can you see me now,
Brian?" my father asked.
I could, but only when I was staring
into the direction of a distant street light that provided a dim silhouette
around his upper body.
"Yes," I said excitedly
and I pointed accurately into the direction that he was standing.
A few seconds had lapsed, then I
heard the question again. "How
about now, Brian?"
And this time I could tell from his
voice he was now behind me. Now I would
have to turn with my back to the distant street light.
"You're right there, aren't
you?" I asked with uncertainty pointing my finger straight in the
direction of the path.
"No, I'm not. I'm up here in the grass. Can you see me?"
"I think so," I responded,
with a feebleness that I knew would give away the lie. There was a long pause before my father
finally spoke again.
"It's really not a big
deal," he said with a reassuring effort that rang hollow even to an eight
year old kid. "Most people have
trouble seeing at night."
Although I could tell something was
not quite right, my inability to pick up on what the worried expression on his
face when we were back in the brightly lit kitchen really meant, the look that
made a feeble effort to hide his troubling concern, turned out to be one of
many mixed messages that set the stage for denial of the reality of my
plummeting eyesight and hearing.
That frightening night walk on Verdmont Avenue seemed to be pretty much forgotten by all
until another chilling episode occurred several months later. I was visiting
my maternal grandmother with my mother. Other aunts, uncles and cousins were
visiting as well. My grandmother lived
only a couple of blocks from where we lived, her house being located right
on busy Lynnfield Street, and all her children ( my mother and her four sisters
) lived within a quarter mile radius of this stately house perched on a high
bank overlooking Lynnfield Street. It
was another warm summer evening. After
the visit, which was a weekly ritual of boisterous gossip about family matters,
my mother and I left my grandmother's house, and we were accompanied by one
of my aunts. As we were approaching
the concrete steps that descended to the sidewalk of busy Lynnfield Street
from the concrete path that circled my grandmother’s house, I struggled to
find the top step.
As I was sliding my right foot
around the concrete path leading to the top step, so I could feel it emerge
under my foot, I heard my mother shrill in semi-desperation to my aunt,
"See what he's doing. He can't see those steps. He's dragging his foot to find that top
step!"
"Why do you think he's doing
that?" responded my aunt, a registered nurse, eight years older than my
mother.
When I heard that question I
wondered with annoyance, why the hell did she think I was doing this, I was
looking for that stupid top step and what the hell does everybody else do. I thought better of expressing that sentiment
however, not only for fear of disapproval, but, ironically, I was slowly
realizing that I was enjoying the special attention I was getting.
"I'm telling you, he can't see
those steps," repeated my mother with exasperation. If it hadn’t been dark, I am quite certain
that I would have seen tears in her eyes.
In later years, I would witness these tears many times, not only from my
mother, but my father as well. "He
can't see anything when it's dark out."
"What do you think causes this,
lack of vitamin A or something?" asked my aunt.
It was soon after this that I was taken
to a local eye doctor, an ophthalmologist, by my parents. The doctor patiently listened as my parents
explained to him that I seemed not to be able to see a thing at night, but
I could see adequately during the day. The
doctor examined my eyes by looking into them, had me look at a chart on the
wall and then abruptly explained to my parents that there was no such thing
as night blindness, that I was either not paying attention or looking for
special attention.
My parents protested, declaring that
it was impossible for me to be faking so accurately. In desperation my mother
finally point blank asked the pompous, overweight ophthalmologist, who was
avoiding eye contact by nervously dragging on a cigarette, why could I see
at night when there is light, but if there wasn’t any light such as a streetlight,
why was I obviously lost? In response
to this straightforwardness that was aimed at the almighty doctor of the ‘50s,
the doc softened his expression, returned my mother’s gaze and wearily shrugged
his shoulders.
This
unforgettable initial encounter with the local eye doctor set the stage for
many other encounters about my vision, some dispassionate, some compassionate,
but always emotionally draining. Whether
the heated exchanges were between my parents and doctors, between my parents
and friends, or between my parents and relatives, I would retreat somewhere
in the background and confusingly observe these emotionally-charged dialogues
with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I wondered what to make of all of this,
did doom lay ahead? On the other hand, I was simultaneously basking in the
attention that was suddenly backwashing on me. Reverting to the other side
of the coin, however, the fact that I didn’t have to do anything to get this
unsolicited attention definitely made me uneasy. The bottom line? I was very confused.
Perhaps
the greatest source of the confusion to my eight year old mind was the fact
that not being able to see my hand in front of me at night did not seem to
be any big deal. After all, I could
do just about anything else other kids my age could do.
Well, yeah, I was wearing a weird looking hearing aid with that stupid
wire hanging out of my ear, but that meant I could hear as well as other kids. Didn’t it? Even
if I couldn’t hear quite as well as other kids, I could skate, ski, play football
and baseball, in fact, I could do these things better than most kids my age.
Really, what was the big deal? As far as my night vision problem went,
it wasn't as if anything had been taken away from me. With wavering bravado,
my perspective as an eight year old was that I did not have to give anything
up. I just figured that I would simply keep doing things the way I had always
done them.. Simply put, I didn't feel like anything got
worse for me or anything had been taken away from me.
I
just didn’t know if I could go through another ordeal like I had been through
a year earlier. Although my hearing
didn’t really seem all that bad to me, I almost felt forced to wear a hearing
aid by my parents and that nice guy at Lynn Woods School who kept testing
my hearing with headphones like the ones I saw in John Wayne movies attached
to that funny looking box. It took
me a while to get over my self-consciousness,
I felt as if I looked like someone from a ‘Tomorrow-land’ segment on
the Sunday night Walt Disney program. I admitted to myself that I kind of
liked the special attention, but, more and more,
I was getting a bit tired of it as well.
It seemed as if everyone was arguing whether I could really hear something
or not or whether I was trying to get special privileges in school. I was really mad about that one. I really tried
hard in school. I didn’t want my cousins
or friends to be any smarter than me. I
was getting good marks, was in the first reading group and, to top it all
off, was winning all the spelling bees. Why
was I always hearing people accuse me of not listening when I knew damn well
I was?
I succeeded in blotting the night vision
problem from my young mind, but only temporarily. A year or so after the upsetting Verdmont Avenue episode with my brother, my parents and I
were returning home after closing Hubbard’s Variety, a small convenience store
my parents had just purchased. This
time it was a crisp autumn night. It
was very dark, but there was intermittent illumination emitting from various
sources on busy Chestnut Street including car headlights, street lights and
businesses that were still open. We
were traveling in the family car, a 1957 smart looking Rambler station wagon,
powder blue with wooden side panels and, most important to my parents, it
got twenty miles to the gallon. Without
warning, my father began drilling me with questions about what I could see. He began asking me if I could see a gas station
sign across the street, if I could see that large man walking down the sidewalk,
or if I could see the dog on the other side of the street. On the darker portions of the street, I wasn't
at all sure if I was answering these questions accurately. I was not the only
one dealing with uncertainty, however. It became obvious even to me that my
father was so caught up in his worry that he didn’t realize that he was telegraphing the accurate
responses to the questions he was asking.
Rather than open-endedly and objectively
asking me what I saw across the street, he would ask me, for example, if I saw the dog across the street. He must
have picked up on this, however, because a couple of times he asked me to
identify something such as the kind of hat a man was wearing or what color
a certain house was. He never told
me whether I was responding accurately. But
I did notice, with a sudden chill, that there were some long pauses by my
father and during this entire interrogation, my mother was very silent. After these uncomfortable pauses, my father
reverted back to signaling the correct answers to his makeshift ophthalmological
questions. I wondered if he was signaling
the answers in a feeble effort to reassure me or to reassure himself and his
wife, the mother of this young boy who might have a serious problem.
Did they know something I didn’t know?
Finally
my father said in mock assurance, "Well, I'm sure you'll probably be
able to drive someday, but you probably won't be able to drive at night .
. .”
I cut my father off. "What do you mean I probably will be able to drive? Of course I'll be able to drive just like anyone else."
I
protested. After a few moments of absolute
silence barring the steady whining of the Rambler, I hesitantly added,
"Won't I?"
It was at that very moment that the
reality alarmingly set in: somehow I was
different, and in some ways this would mean I might not be able to do things
just like everyone else did. Suddenly, I
felt nervous and scared, with a queasy feeling growing in my stomach. For the first time in my life, panic began
surging over me, but I managed to brush it aside immediately. Although this developing defense mechanism of
denial was slowly emerging and was only in an embryonic stage, it would
eventually mature to become a well-formed giant in my life.
My father, in a consoling effort, responded
quickly, "Maybe you will be able to drive at night, but so what if you
can't? After all, more than likely
you'll have a wife or someone that can drive you at night." He went on,
boasting to me he had girlfriends driving
him all around when he was younger. I
felt my mom nudge him in the ribs with her elbow when he was, I was certain,
about to give me the juicy details of one of his former girlfriends.
After hearing my dad chuckle, I probed him with questions of my own,
urging him to give me more details. He didn’t answer, though, as my mother’s
elbow was most likely in position for another jab, only this time more painful,
should he answer. At least this short-circuited my emerging panic
over my inability to see at night.
But
this diverging strategy rang hollow to me. I sensed that something was being
withheld from me. What really made me feel helpless was that I didn’t have
a clue of how to deal with this withholding.
Sure, there were lots of things that my parents didn’t tell me, that’s
why bedrooms have doors on them, but, darn, this was important and it was
about me. I knew something just wasn’t quite right, and
this queasy sense of the unknown only made the discomforting anxiety that much more pervasive. Besides I didn't want a wife to drive me around.
The man is supposed to do the driving.
Magically,
I found a way to make this intense nervousness disappear. I just wouldn’t think about any possible
problem with my eyes. I spent a lot of
time struggling about my hearing problem, I couldn’t do it all over again with
my eyes. I had put so much effort in
explaining to my pals what a hearing aid was and why my ear bled when I got
whacked in my right ear that contained the hearing aid mold, I just couldn’t go
through any more of this stuff again. So
I just wouldn’t think about it. I told
myself to just forget about it and pretend the fact that I couldn't see at
night didn't exist. If I absolutely had
to think about it because of an unavoidable
situation such as a burnt out street light, I would simply stumble to the next
streetlight somehow and simply reason to myself that this is a fact of my
life. To get home or anywhere else I
wanted to go, I just had to follow the streetlights, no big deal. Everybody needs some light, I just might need
a little more. My increasing comfort
with the psychological defense mechanisms of denial and rationalization, all
too unknowingly, was a comfort that was burgeoning into the major demon of my
life. But what choice did I have? How in the world could an impressionable ten
year old kid who already had to deal with poor hearing that required an ugly
hearing aid, even when playing sports, deal with failing eyesight as well?
*
* * * ****************************************
Shortly after my entrance to the world
on January 17, 1947, it was obvious that I had a real problem with my ability to hear. As my Dad, who had a really great sense of humor,
used to say, once I got the stuff into the ol’
noggin it was definitely there pretty much for good, but the problem was getting
the stuff there between the ears. It
was around the time I was an eleven year old sixth grader at Lynn Woods Elementary
School that my mother first told me that she first became aware of my hearing
problem when I was an infant. Almost
immediately after I was born, she would walk into my room where I would be
either lying down staring off into space or crawling around and, did not turn
to face her as she entered the room. This snubbing of my Mom even happened
when she had a loud warm greeting for me, which had to be a dead giveaway
to my poor hearing because my Mom really could have a loud voice.
She also had a beautiful voice, proving it by winning the high school
public speaking contest at Bangor, Maine High School. I always kept that medal
she won on top of my dresser, proudly showing it off to any of my pals who
cared to look and ask what the medal was for.
By the age of three or four, I still
was not talking except for a few basic words that were nearly incomprehensible
to others, and my parents thought that the pediatrician would shed light on
the language problem. It is interesting
to note, however, that somehow I always found a way to let others know what
I needed. Most of my friends to this
day tell me, usually amidst loud laughter , that they do not doubt this proven
fact one bit.
Unfortunately,
there was little known about hearing problems in the early 1950s, especially
by lower to middle class parents living in the suburbs. There was no mainstreaming of ‘special needs’
students into the regular classroom, as The Education of the Handicapped Act
wasn’t passed into Federal legislation until 1975. Disabled students or learning disabled students
were typically segregated into special classes or even special schools.
Of course, these special arrangements were well out of the line of
sight and well out of earshot for the other students.
This separist attitude typically spread into
the community, leaving these different children lonely and isolated, often
from their own brothers and sisters. Of course, rich parents could find their ways
to expensive specialists, even in far off distances. This was the case for Helen Keller who was fortunate
enough to land in Alexander Graham Bell’s office near Washington, D.C., a
great distance from her home state of Alabama.
It eventually became apparent to my
pediatrician that there was a problem when I wasn’t talking at the age of three
years and six months. He instructed my
parents to take me to a local specialist, whom they presumed was some type of
ear doctor. He wasn’t an ear doctor, nor
was he even an ear, nose and throat doctor, rather, he was a neurologist. After this mysterious doctor examined me for
a few minutes, he matter of factly informed my
parents that the problem was most likely psychiatric and he wanted them to take
me to yet another specialist. This doctor came right out and told my parents
that my inability, or refusal, to talk was emotionally based. In other words, my parents thought, the
pompous doc thought I was crazy. Both of
my parents, but especially my mother, vigorously shook their heads in total
protest.
It was years later when I would learn how my mother
and father sat in the car outside the doctor's office in the parking lot in
total frustration, my mother weeping nearly uncontrollably, loudly repeating
to my father, "He's not crazy, he just can't hear."
.
The
doctors tried to convince my parents to order a mental and psychiatric evaluation,
but they would hear nothing of it. It
was with that conviction that my mother, proclaiming herself a self-trained
speech therapist, began teaching me words, their enunciation and their meaning. Thus, if I was signaling for something with
a word chosen from my own vocabulary such as ‘wa-wa’ or ‘thoup’
intending to mean water or ‘soup’, my mother would instantly stop in the middle
of whatever she was doing, such as peeling the onions for the incredible fish
chowder she used to make and march
right smack over to wherever I was
standing, usually having a crap eating
grin on my innocent little face. She would then stand ceremoniously right smack
in front of me, tightly grabbing and turning my chin to have direct eye contact
with her pretty face bearing a serious, but reassuring expression, and would
loudly repeat, "No, no, Bri Honey Pie, watch
my lips. The word is wa-ter, wa-terr." After
several attempts, sometimes many attempts, the correct pronunciation and enunciation
would, as if by magic, come flowing forth from my lips. During these impromptu, makeshift speech training
tutorials, whenever I would finally
repeat a word to my mother's liking, she would respond to me warmly, "That's
it!" and give me a big hug.
My
mother told me years later, that the first time she witnessed me making my
first correct pronunciation of a word, the word happening to be water, it
indeed seem like a miracle. When she
saw Patty Duke portray Helen Keller in ‘The Miracle Worker’ especially the
scene of the miracle of Ann Bancroft, playing Ann Sullivan, becoming aware
that Helen understood what water was, she told me that a flood of memories
came back to her. The difference was
that I understood what water was, I just didn’t know how to say it. But there were a lot of things that I didn’t
understand because I couldn’t hear many things in life, whether material things
or abstract concepts, being identified. As
my hearing was so poor, any auditory associations that I made with things
in life were inaccurate in varying degrees, so my mother was determined to
not only make sure that I understood what something was, but to make sure
that I communicated that something accurately.
Neither
of us would ever quit. One particularly
challenging word for both of us was the word ‘chicken’. One evening while frying her famous Mother Hubbard’s
fried chicken, She finally got fed up with me pronouncing chicken either like
‘jicken’ or shicken’. This particular training session lasted a bit
more than usual and she forgot about the chicken
on the stove. Both of us got one whiff
of the impending disaster and I screamed, Mom, the jicken
is burning!”. She didn’t really require my budding skill as a volunteer fireman
because she had a nose too. She jumped
up from her kneeling position and leaped to the stove, but only long enough
to turn the gas burner off. Teaching
me to speak was much more important to her, and she didn’t care if the rest
of the family was going to complain about the burnt chicken. That night, my brother moaned, after looking
at the black chicken, about what difference it made how I said ‘jicken’ or ‘shicken’ as long as
I knew what it was. My mother let him
have it, screeching to him how would he like it if he told his friends in
school that he was having ‘jicken’ for dinner. The rhetorical question struck a very humorous
chord, the entire family cracking up in hearty laughter, everyone, that is,
except me as I didn’t hear the conversation and I could have cared less.
For me to understand anything at all, I had to give my fullest concentration.
My mother’s fried chicken was one of my favorite suppers, even if it
was burnt, so the conversation about the importance of good enunciation sailed
right over my young head.
Now
that my mother was having successes with her home-based speech classes, my
father also got into the act. He wasn’t
as diligent as my mother as he was working at the post office for the major
part of the day. However, whenever
he had a chance, he would put in his two cents worth. The most significant memory of his role as assistant speech therapist was
when he was still half asleep, lying in bed, the bedroom door closed. As most kids, I would get up at the crack of
dawn, throw my clothes on and run downstairs.
My brother and I shared the same bedroom with neatly constructed bed
frames featuring black, antiquated oxen collars, twin beds that were designed
and constructed by my father. If by
chance I should find my brother’s bed empty, I would run down the stairs shouting
“Where is she, where is she?”, using the incorrect feminine pronoun to identify
my brother. As my parents’ bedroom
was located at the foot of the stairs, my father, of course, would hear this. Being a typical sexist before the advent of
female liberation, I guess he didn’t appreciate hearing any man, young or
old, being referred to as a ‘she’. Thus,
I would get this ear-splitting correction from my mother’s sidekick in speech
pathology.
“He-e-e,
Brian, the word is he-e-e”, he roared. The
first time I heard this correction, I was stunned, stopping dead in my tracks.
Although I had the sense not to do this, I poked my head into my parents’
bedroom.
“What
did you say?” I asked with genuine curiosity
“He-e-e,
not she-e-e” He said in a loudness that undoubtedly could be heard over the
entire neighborhood. I almost told
him that he shouldn’t yell so loudly as it was Sunday, but then I thought
the better of it. Part of the reason
I was caught off guard was the way he dragged out the ‘e-e-e’ sound, dragging
it out like the wind roaring through the forest.
I even wondered if he may be sick or in awful pain, the way he got
when he had kidney stones. I finally
caught on, realizing that he was trying to teach me something very important. I gave it a shot. I noticed that when my father made this fascinating
sound, his mouth a different movement and his tongue didn’t seem to get in
the way. He was making this King Kong
sound almost as if he were coughing, the air rushing out of his lungs as if
he were hacking an extended cough, only he wasn’t coughing. After a few struggled attempts, I got it out,
imitating my dad with a near-perfect “He-e-e, like that?” waiting for my reward
of approval.
“Atta boy, atta boy, that’s it” he
loudly shot back, his face all smiles. Then
off I went, scrambling for the kitchen to find my brother, all the while
wondering what the big deal was, who cares if my brother is a ‘he’ or a ‘she’,
they sound so much alike.