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 to record 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 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 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.