Category Archives: HIstory of trauma

A Flying Dog

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In addition to not being able to afford it, we didn’t have air-conditioning as a point of pride.  True, we lived 40 miles inland, and it could get hot but it was dry heat, as we would say over and over, and not that wet stuff like back in SC where you never stopped feeling damp and you’d get heat rashes in odd places.

But we were sitting around in the front room sort of suffering through the heat together on a dreary Sunday afternoon.  The old lady was flopped on the sofa per usual reading the newspaper and the old man was sitting on this sitting place he had made that jutted out from around the fireplace firebox. The family dog, sitting right next to him on the cool brick, began to yip.  This unfortunate dog was a mix of Chihuahua and rat terrier; it was short haired and had a huge dick.

The old man told the fucking dog to shut up.  But it kept yipping at something out in the front yard or maybe up on the street.  That dog made us insane with its high pitched yipping.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the old man, looking straight ahead, take out his cigarette lighter, flip it open and ignite it right next to the yipping dog’s asshole.  There was a sort of pregnant pause as the nerves sent their messages to the dog’s brain.

Man, did that dog jump.  Arching out over the living room floor, it landed more on its chest than its front legs, slid on the hardwood floor and banged into the wall.

 Nobody said a word or blinked an eye.  The old lady looked over her newspaper, shook it out, and went back to reading.  The old man was dead pan.

“Man,” I said, “did you see that.  Did you see that arch!  I thought the damn thing was going to fly.”

 The old southern attitude towards animals is somewhat different than that of the civilized Californian.  My uncle likes to joke, “Want to see something funny?  Tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over a clothesline.  But if you want to see something really funny tie two cats tails together and throw them over a goat.”  And in Huck Finn, Twain records the bored town folk on a hot afternoon pouring gas on dogs and setting the afire.

 There’s was no TV back then so you had to make do with whatever entertainment material was at hand.

The Scissors Incident

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 While the old man gave up whacking me with coat hangers and broom handles when I was in Junior High, he did not entirely give up all forms of physical harassment and/or intimidation.  He developed what I call the bull rush; he would lower his head like a bull and rush me.  No hands were involved, just his shoulder.  He would lower it and slam into my chest knocking me backwards, sometimes into the wall.

On one occasion, I must have said something—it was always a matter of my saying something, not doing something like burning down the house—and as he rushed me my mother, in a rather calm voice actually, said clearly so my father was sure to hear, “Look out, Bill.  He has a pair of scissors.”

 The old man drew up abruptly because, sure enough, I had a pair of scissors in my hand.  I clicked the scissors together a couple of times, looked him in the eye, and headed on down the corridor.  I felt sort of cold inside.

What had my mother been getting at with her warning?  I thought a great deal at that time about killing both of my parents, so perhaps, I reasoned, she was alerting Bill to the fact that I was holding a potential weapon that under the duress of the moment I might wield in an intentional manner.  Or perhaps she was just warning Bill that some accident might occur because I had a pair of scissors in my hand.

I have wondered about this incident and still feel a bit cold when I think of it because, I believe, of its Oedipal Implications.  She, the mother whom the male child wishes to possess as his own, had not warned me, her suitor, as it were, but him, Bill, her husband.  I had apparently failed to conquer the father in her affections in spite of all the efforts I had made to win her over to my side.  I had tried hard in this direction because of her apparently universal misery and also because she was the stick that stirred the drink.  She was the one who usually incited my father against me; she was, as it were, his co-conspirator in my increasingly paranoid universe.

 Penis equals scissors.

Scissors cut off penis.

 I can’t figure it out; it’s too complicated.  I know years later, when I asked a young woman had she really ever felt the urge to murder someone and she said yes, I thought I had found my soul mate.

My Love Is My Weight

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My brothers to the South, who have put in the most time tending our Parental Units in their ongoing decay, wanted the brothers to the North to transport our mother to the memorial service for our defunct dad.  We were happy to do it but troubled because our mother has a game leg and weighs a good bit.  We didn’t know if we could get her in one of our cars or not.  We made various jokes about perhaps needing a hoist or a fork lift…

I should read the psychoanalyst who wrote about body armor.  Our mother has relatively little weight in the upper area and below the waist she expands enormously both to the sides and to the rear.  When she had the stroke that gave her the game leg, she was in a rest up place, hospital sort of place; and well, we wanted her to stay there while the rest of us gathered for a so-called holiday meeting at my parent’s house.  I swear I had talked the social worker into not letting her out.

 But there she was having manipulated the doctors some how and having roped my nephew in going to get her.  They had a Ford Bronco at that time, and my mother was suspended up there some distance from the ground.  We set up the wheelchair by the door and tried to lower her into it.  I will never forget the look of horror on my nephew’s face when for a second, as I tried to pry lose her game leg which had gotten stuck, her weigh shifted entirely to him.  But thank goodness we had placed the wheelchair well and wham she landed in it.

Later in the miserable evening, I am minding my own business when I hear, “Nick! Nick! Nick!”  My father is yelling for me for no apparent reason just like back in the good old days.  He is in the bathroom.  When I opened the door I see him more or less seated on the floor, his head sticking up above my mother’s buttocks which are pinning him to the floor.  Apparently, he had been trying to get her on the toilet and her weight had unfortunately shifted.  He is cursing up a storm, “Goddammotherfunckingsonofabitch,” over and over.

Fortunately my mother had some strength in her arms; correcting the situation wasn’t a matter of lifting all that dead weight but merely a matter of shifting it so it would tip in the other direction.  I applied myself directly to the naked expanse of her buttocks, her drawers having been previously dropped in anticipation of relieving herself.  I must say I had never seen her buttocks so up close and personal before.  Looking left and right all I could see it seemed was mountainous buttock.

 I succeeded in my effort.  She momentarily stood up and swung herself on the pot with a crash. I left with my father still on the floor cursing.

 A Kodak moment from hell, I suppose.

The MMPP

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As part of my war to stay out of the draft, I tried to prove I was insane.  This was not that difficult, since I nearly was, but I needed documentation.  One could go to the LA draft board howling like crazed banshee and they would still take you.  So I took the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Profile, at that time the most used instrument for determining degrees of nuts-ness.

I have cheated on few tests, but I did on this one, not to pass it, but to make sure I failed. I answered yes to a few questions that I really didn’t believe.  I didn’t find the results entirely satisfactory.  They said a) I had massive reading defect b) I was malingering c) I was a danger to myself and others and then went on grimly for two single spaced pages explaining why.

I have a theory that about three quarters of the population is functionally insane and the rest holding on by the skin of their teeth.  Without the diverse forms of insanity society would cease to move; it is fueled however by diverse pathologies.  Sadists become Generals, and Police men, and Surgeons.

I think everybody should be required to take the MMPP. But of course the test is set up to create a normal person; if every body who took the test turned out insane then the test would lack “scientific validity.”

As I remember the test had questions like:

Do you feel that people are watching you?  (Yes, of course, why do you ask?)

Do you cross the street rather than speak to a person you know.  (Why certainly, that’s what streets are made for).

Do you examine? Study? Or eat? Your feces after taking a dump. Or: all of the above.

Do you believe in the Second Coming of Christ?

Do you believe the End is “at hand,” “somewhat close by,” in the “distant future.”

I wonder if the MMPP people have dropped the question about the Second Coming? Or maybe they have changed its value from an indication of insanity to an indication of sanity.  Because if they haven’t a large portion of the population and of persons now running the government, have a) a massive reading defect b) are malingering or c) are a danger to themselves and others.