CHAPTER SEVEN

In which the outside world first contacts my inner voice

 

Never let it be said that my kind and wonderful Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Hit, didn’t try her best to give me a good start toward what might have been a perfectly normal and award-winning school life as, say, a Track Star, or President of the Student Body, or even Valedictorian of my Graduating Class.  But alas, after her best and most valiant attempts to prepare me for a life amidst the thronging masses, I must admit that she failed to get to first base.

Unfortunately, no one was fooled by my utter and absolute silence, my refusal to pee in public rest rooms which resulted in my having to ride home in wet trousers every day, my insistence on wearing only long-sleeve shirts, or my complete inability to play with my classmates; despite this obviously superficial and staged semblance of social inadequacy, it was apparent to everybody that I was really a capable and essentially normal young man.  If it hadn’t been for this terrible error in judgment on their part, I might have gone to live with others like myself, where I would have been perfectly happy knowing that I was really Peter Pan lost in Never-Neverland, waiting for the first choo-choo train back to where I belonged.  But as luck would have it—and I’ve never had much of that—Mrs. Hit was finally forced by the end of the school year to give up and admit that I had passed Kindergarten, implying that I was to be deemed a socially acceptable human being, and so she had to turn me over to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Dose.

Beginning what was to become a long-standing tradition in my school career, Mrs. Dose sent me home with perfect straight-A report cards in everything except going to the bathroom, speaking, and the other surface blemishes noted above.  My Mama never did accept my firm belief that I should not bother with school, and as a matter of fact she didn’t even want to talk about it.  She did, however, question me daily upon my return home, as to whether or not I had talked in school that day, while ordering me out of my wet trousers.  The only talking I did for Mrs. Dose was in reaction to my fear of not making the grade.  During reading time, when it was my turn to read aloud from the book, I was forced to compromise on my ideals:  I would whisper my reading passage in her ear.  Not only did I succeed in this miracle; my selfless act of heroism also produced the bonus miracle of a first grade class in which you could have heard a pin drop, as every ear strained for the muted clickings and clackings of my tongue.  I learned to read very quickly and without error, in order to get the ordeal over with real fast, and to avoid the possibility of being corrected.

Grandma Wrathburn would have been proud.

After two years of schooling, I had learned to whisper!

This tremendous improvement in my social development encouraged my Mama and my Daddy to invest in weekly Play Therapy sessions, which took place every Saturday in Grand Junction, Colorado, during the summer between first and second grades.  Rather than waste money on a baby-sitter for my brother and my sisters, my Mama and my Daddy piled all us kids into the family station wagon and drove us to Grand Junction, which was at least a million miles away and was also the hottest city north of Phoenix.  There my happy siblings would sit in the lobby, paralyzed with joy at their grand opportunity to give up their Saturdays for the cause of poor Maxwell’s betterment, and watch in altruistic self-sacrifice as their summer vacation escaped their greedy little paws.  First we would arrive early enough to prevent any possibility of getting there late, and during this waiting time I would become totally mesmerized by the map of Never-Neverland on the waiting room wall, though try as I might, I was unable to memorize its features well enough to find that magical home for lost boys, despite four ensuing decades of searching for it.  Then Dirk and Mo and Glenda  would wait faithfully while I braved the interior of Mrs. Marion Jacobson’s child therapy office, and when I came out my Mama and my Daddy would disappear in there themselves, only to emerge some interminable time later with no memory of what had been said in that room, so they could drive us back through the summer swelter to finish each other off at home.

Play Therapy is a twisted practice based on the assumption that a screwed-up little kid, if offered complete freedom in a safe environment, with no rules or meddling that aren’t absolutely necessary, and lots of toys that remind him of his family and his fantasy idols, will eventually puke up whatever is bothering him that is making him a social disaster.  The therapist’s main function is to be there when the kid starts puking, and to respond with things like, “Daddy’s a little broken dolly,” and “Mama and Granny are getting on that nice spaceship!” and whatever agreeable ditties she can come up with to affirm that the child knows and feels exactly what is really going on around him.  The child’s response to experiencing such simple and non-judgmental acknowledgment for possibly the first time in his life is to feel something vibrating in the center of his forehead, and hopefully to follow that sensation as it leads him in a somewhat different direction than the one in which he had been going.

What I’m trying to say is this:  unbeknownst to my Mama and my Daddy, Mrs. Jacobson had a secret trap door in the floor of her office under the rug, and after about three sessions of proving to me that I was not going to get in trouble for refusing to play or to speak to her, she pulled up that rug and the trap door flew open and wouldn’t you know it, there stood my demon!  Grinning like a jack-o-lantern, he slipped a Tinker Bell puppet over my hand, and Tinker Bell began swooshing around the room uncontrollably, and my fellow Americans, I cannot tell a lie, I cannot remember one single solitary iota of what happened in that room after my demon and Tinker Bell took over throughout that entire summer, until the day that Mrs. Jacobson thanked me for spending my summer with her, and wished me luck in the second grade.

It wasn’t until I was 19½ years old, after I had written several long letters to my Mama and my Daddy asking them what was wrong with me and why I had gone off to big people school and turned the experience into my own personal Death March through Hell, that my Mama and Daddy came and got me in their car and took me and my stuff home and told me what happened to me that summer when they were taking me to play with Mrs. Jacobson, Tinker Bell, and my demon.  It was revealed to me on that long nighttime ride that I had become a three-year old again during the play therapy days when I was seven, and had to be fed and clothed and taught how to talk big seven-year-old talk all over again, and my brother and my sisters became exceedingly jealous because it was as if there was nothing left over for them after my Mama and my Daddy got done with feeding me and clothing me and goochy-gooing me all over again.  And it was also revealed to me for the first time on that night that me and my Daddy and my cousin Dale were not on my Grandma Wrathburn’s Most Favorite Male People list, and that my Mama and my Daddy and my Grandma Wrathburn had once had a forty-five-minute long screaming argument about whether I should be allowed to stand on a chair and watch my naked little brother Dirk get bathed on the kitchen table, and that Dirk had once taken sick and caused me to become my Grandma Wrathburn’s torture victim and prisoner for two weeks.

I was mystified and elated all at the same time by this first-time-ever revelation of all this hot-spicy information, and highly gratitudinous to discover that in order to get my Mama and my Daddy to tell me the truth about my own teeny-weeny little life, all I had to do was to smoke massive amounts of marijuana for a whole year until I practically flunked out of school, and all but had a mental breakdown.  Well, live and learn, at least finally at the age of 19½ I figured out how to get my Mama and my Daddy to spill their beans.  And once my Daddy got started telling me my own secrets, he couldn’t stop, because as soon as my Mama was snoring in the back seat—and he checked a couple of times to make sure she was really asleep—he felt compelled to shove his own dirty little secrets down my throat too.  That’s when he told me about how he had to live with remembering all these years what his high school music teacher had made him do the summer after he graduated from the 12th grade, on the pretense of giving him a job on his farm.

But going back to the story at hand, it was with not only fear and loathing but also a newfound and compelling sense of curiosity that I sat down in my desk on the first day of the second grade with one and only one question in my mind:  will I talk when it comes to be my turn?

My new second-grade teacher, Mrs. Handsome, was forcing us to tell our names out loud, each in turn, and as the fuse burnt ever shorter, the bomb in my chest started vibrating and pushing its way up my throat, and when it was no longer deniable that it was going to be my turn to talk next, up it came in a tiny little squeak that my schoolmates—who were all holding their breath with anticipation and practically standing up in their chairs—could all hear in the other back corner of the room:

“Maxwell Zdaemon.”

After that big deal got done, things went from being like living hell on Earth to being merely intolerable, and I am eternally grateful to Mrs. Marion Jacobson for knowing how to make that happen.