By: Lee Gutkind When I drove up to the house, Daniel was walking toward me. I got out of the car and waited for him to approach. Even though he waved and flashed a quick smile, he seemed grim and befuddled. "What's wrong, Dan?" Daniel had been working at a rental property I owned, cleaning out the basement, a filthy job he savored. Nothing made Daniel happier than getting dirty, especially with a bunch of junk. Daniel had rummaged through trash for as long as I had known him, rescuing an array of worthless mechanical objects - manual typewriters, speedometers, radios, lamps, rusty tools, old motors. Keys of any size, type, or condition were his passion, as were locks, whether or not they corresponded to the keys. Sometimes he managed to clean or fix a derelict item of junk and sell it at a Sunday flea market, but usually Daniel was more interested in contemplating these items in the questionable safety of his room. When I put my hands on his shoulders, Daniel immediately began to whine like a frightened child. Tears were streaming down his face. "A man molested me." He reached down and began squeezing his buttocks. "Oh, it hurts," he wailed. "It hurts so bad back there." I walked him over to the steps leading to the house and sat him down on the stoop, uncertain how to respond. Ruffling his curly hair with my hand, I joked about how dirty he was and made a crack about his ears, which were unusually small. I could almost always get him to laugh by poking fun at his ears and pointing out that he was most handsome on Halloween when he wore a mask. In truth, Daniel was kind of weird looking. His head was small, like his ears, and he was short, but very heavy. When I met him he was twelve; he had been slender, a feather of a boy. But an interest in weight lifting, combined with a voracious appetite for starchy foods and secret doses of steroids, had bloated him considerably. Daniel poured out his story. He had worked in the basement for a half-hour or so, dragging out a mess of discarded timber, empty paint cans, and old furniture, then decided to take a five-minute walk to a nearby convenience store for a soda. There's a bank of pay phones on the corner beside the store, and as he was passing, a phone was ringing. Daniel answered. A male voice at the other end said he was waiting for Daniel and that he would kill him if he didn't do exactly what he was told. Suddenly, a car screeched to a halt at the curb. A man, unshaven, dressed in black trousers, black shirt, and black patent-leather shoes and waving a knife, ordered Daniel inside. Daniel complied. They drove across a corner, down a side street, and into an alley, whereupon the man led Daniel through a clump of bushes behind an abandoned building. Following orders, Daniel kissed the man on the lips, then, under threat of the knife, sand to his knees and performed oral sex. Finally, Daniel lay face down on the ground. He felt a sharp intrusive pain. The man entered him. Now Daniel was nearly hysterical. "He said he'd kill me if I told anyone. What am I going to do?" I could not answer his question, for I felt dumbfounded and conflicted. This incident had occurred in my neighborhood, an area in which I lived with my son, considered the safest in the city. Not that crime never occurred here, but such a brazen incident in the middle of a bright and busy Saturday afternoon was unlikely. Besides, there was Daniel's history to consider, beginning with the abuse and neglect that led authorities to permanently separate Daniel from his family when he was ten years old. As Daniel's parent surrogate or "big brother," I knew that the abuse he suffered during his early years had been documented and resulted in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), wherein earlier trauma is reenacted in flashbacks. This may have accounted for the new and questionable incidents of violence and molestation he had reported. Only a couple of weeks ago, Daniel had come home with his face bruised and his books and wallet missing. He claimed to have been attacked by four black kids, wielding pipes, who stole his money and beat him up. Later, witnesses reported that he had actually gotten into a fight with a neighborhood kid, who was white - and lost. Last year, Daniel told of being followed by a bearded man who had forced him into a Cadillac and molested him. Daniel's recent credibility was especially suspect. Hadn't he, one Saturday afternoon, removed all the manhole covers from the sewer system on the periphery of his group home and covered the holes with twigs, grass, and weeds as "booby traps"? Hadn't he promised, after I explained the danger, to immediately replace the manhole covers and hadn't he reneged on that promise? Didn't he lie frequently about where he went and what he did, using his learning disabilities and the side effects from antidepressant medication as justifications for forgetting and making mistakes? The booby trap incident had been especially disturbing because it made me realize that Daniel's defensiveness could distort his sense of right and wrong. The social worker assigned to his case observed that Daniel had been so thoroughly battered by his family and the child welfare system that "rescued" him that it was impossible for him to feel compassion. The fact that someone could have been hurt - or killed - by his booby traps meant little or nothing to Daniel, who frequently declared, "I don't care about anyone else." But I knew another side of him. Daniel was an isolated innocent. He read at a second-grade level and, living with alcoholic parents in a rooming house or in mental health institutions most of his life, he had existed like a primitive in the jungle - separated from the outside world. Even the adults at the group home where he now lived, or the special school he attended, hardly ever talked with him about anything other than fast food and television - to the point where he could not distinguish between the story programs and the news. He believed that Michael Knight (of the Knight Rider TV show) was real and that McDonald's had invented hamburgers. Every conversation I had with him, especially when we first met, became endlessly convoluted because, no matter what he asked, I had to backtrack to the beginning and put my answer into perspective. I once told him I was going out of town, flying. He said he had never been on an airplane. "How long does it take to fly on an airplane?" "It depends on where you want to go. Now, I am going to New York. You know about New York? Grand Central Station? Times Square?" There was no recognition. He had never heard of New York. "How much does it cost to ride in an airplane?" "Well, where would you like to go?" He looked at me blankly. "Would you like to go to California?" He just looked at me. "Dan, do you know about the oceans?" "What's `oceans'?" "You know that there are different oceans on either side of the country?" "No." "The Atlantic and Pacific. If you fly to California, you'll be at the Pacific Ocean, and if you fly to Florida, you'll be at the Atlantic Ocean." "How much does it cost to fly to Florida?" "If you go one way, it will cost you one price, but if you go round trip, you'll get a discount." "What's a round trip?" "It's when you go both ways." "Well," said Daniel, "what's a discount?" Daniel continued to whimper as I tried to decide how to proceed. At the very least, I had to get him away from this house and the fear that the mysterious man, whether real or imagined, was going to come back for him. Daniel was confused about his sexual orientation. I remembered a story he told me of another unshaven man who lived in the woods across from his home who would periodically sneak into the room he occupied with his sister - and molest them both. At the time we talked about this incident, he asked me, "Does this mean I'm gay?" "It means that the person who raped you was evil or crazy, or both. It has nothing to do with you," I told him, although we both knew that I was not being accurate. Whatever had happened to Daniel was directly related to his curiosity about sex or his willingness to become victimized for the sake of drama and his need for attention. Hurriedly, we gathered his possessions and climbed into my car. I drove in the general direction of the convenience store until Daniel pointed to the street to which the man had taken him. I turned the corner, Daniel directing me into the alley he had described. For the first time I began to believe that the incident could have happened. The alleyway was not dark or narrow, but it was clearly out of the way, as was the building to which he pointed, set off in a secluded corner of a vacant lot. The underbrush around the building was thick and concealing. If molestation had occurred, it could have happened here. As I sat in the car and contemplated his story from this perspective, I could hear the distant clatter of an approaching helicopter. This site is very close to a local hospital, known for its cutting-edge trauma and emergency care facilities. Patients were transported into the area via ambulance or to a rooftop heliport day and night. Sitting in this isolated and self-contained little spot in the middle of my neighborhood and listening to the sound of the whirling rotor, now clopping directly above our heads, was a familiar and oddly comforting refrain from the distant past. When I was seven years old, my pregnant mother went to the hospital. Her return, one week later, to our tiny two-bedroom second-floor apartment, with my infant twin brothers, Michael and Richard, forever changed my life. The morning of their arrival, I stood in the hallway on the top of the stairs and watched the deliverymen carry up the cribs with the wooden jailhouse bars and situate them in my bedroom, side by side. The hallway led to the kitchen on one side, my parents' bedroom on the other side and my bedroom adjacent to my parents. The doorway to the living room was behind me. Only after the deliverymen left the house, did I realize something had happened that I had not anticipated. I knew I was gaining brothers, but it never occurred to me, until that very moment, that I would lose my personal space. The bedroom had been my escape from a seething volcano named Jack. Any conceivable misstep from his first born son - a disrespectful comment, a forgotten chore - could trigger my father's sudden eruption. Blood rushing to his cheeks, infusing his face with redness. The leather belt slips from the waistband of his trousers and appears in his hand, folded in half, tip against buckle. He stalks me. Usually, a dozen wild, haphazard strokes.in the butt, on my face or ears.wherever. When his temper erupted, I would escape into my room. Sometime he would pursue me, but eventually he would leave me alone. Thank God for my room. I was like an animal in its den licking its wounds. Safe for the moment, but forever on guard. Now I no longer owned that space. From that point onward, I waited each night in the hallway at the top of these stairs, reading listening to the radio - activities forbidden in my room for fear of disturbing my brothers - until I heard the key in the latch of the front door. My father home from work. I feel his body leaning into the first few steps, hear his shoes scrape each stair, as I dash into my room and leap into bed. He pauses at the top of the stairs. I lay frozen on my sheets under the tent of my covers. Would he, after a long day, hang up his coat, turn to the left and go into the kitchen for dinner? Go to his right to his bedroom to change into comfortable clothing? Or walk to my door in between and push it open? Sometimes he paused at the top of the stairs. There was a conversation with my mother. I could only make out a scattering of words. My mother was volunteering details about my poor behavior. Caught in the middle, trying to balance the demands of the two men in her life, her sympathies and motivations were ambiguous. Footsteps. The door opening. Will he yell? Will he say, "I know you aren't sleeping; I know what you did today," then charge to my bed and pummel me awake? Or, will he decide to let it go - "temporarily"? If "temporarily," I have hope. I will stay in bed until he finishes his shower the following morning and goes into his bedroom to dress. I will run into the bathroom, relieve myself, brush my teeth and rush back to my room before he finishes. I will dress while he eats breakfast. I will appear in the kitchen when he is in a hurry to go to work. Not much time now to punish me. "Wait until tonight," he says. The fear never ends. To get through my sleepless nights without waking my brothers and thereby making my father angry, I made up a number of bizarre, imaginary games, many of which were sporting events. I set my wastebasket on top of my chest of drawers, tied my socks into knots, and shot baskets. I sneaked down to the basement in my pajamas and golfed rolls of toilet paper through the coalbin door with a broomstick. I wedged my pillow upright against the wall in the corner of my bed and boxed it for the heavyweight championship of the world. Some of the games included a boy in school, Marc Lindenbaum. I had known Marc all of my life. He and I were the same age. His birthday was Halloween, and my mother and his mother, Doris, and a few other ladies played poker together each Thursday night. When it was time for "the girls," (how these ladies always referred to themselves) to come to our house, my father would usually go out to dinner. With my mother and her friends talking and laughing and clicking their plastic poker chips on the table in the kitchen, they paid me little attention. Lots of times I would leave the bedroom and creep up the hallway, commando-style on my stomach, to listen to their gossip and entertain myself. Usually, I slithered under the table with a pencil and a tablet and diagramed varicose veins in the women's legs. In my bedroom the following day, I would put my toy cars on the lines I had drawn, which copied the varicose designs on their legs, and pretending they were highways of love, follow them upward from the calf, over the knee, along the thigh and then gun my engines and squeal my tires in a mad dash toward the sacred jungle area - a place I called "Joy City." I don't know if the women were clued into what I was doing with their varicose veins under their poker table, but I was often able to remain quiet and unobtrusive long enough so that they forgot I was around. Which is how I learned that Marc Lindenbaum was sick and dying. I was only eleven or twelve when I overheard Doris Lindenbaum discuss the doctor's reports alluding to Marc's declining health. "I thought the last operation cut out the malignancy," my mother said. "We thought that the surgery would stop the growth, but it didn't work. It was a chance. The poor kid, he doesn't know." "He doesn't know anything?" "He knows something is wrong," said Mrs. Lindenbaum, "but not that he has cancer." Cancer, I knew from Mrs. Schlegel's science class, fifth period of the fourth grade, was something that grew and grew in your body. Malignancy was a word I was unfamiliar with, but clearly it was something nobody wanted. I saw Lindenbaum walking to school the following morning. Lindenbaum bounced when he walked, as if he had shoes with springs for soles, he went up so high with each step, and I wondered how a person so close to death could look so happy. There was a chance that his mother was exaggerating or mistake about Marc's upcoming death, but older people hardly ever joked about death because they were so close to it themselves. If his parents and my parents were convinced that Marc was going to die, then there could be no doubt. Marc had had it. I wondered if he was aware of his fate. Could Marc feel his blood turning to water, his heart beating slower, his brain ceasing to function, grinding to a halt like an unlubricated machine? "Soon I won't be around anymore," my grandparents, aunts, and uncle would sometimes say. Or, "I'm coming to the end of the line. My time is almost up." And more often than not, they were right. As they grew older, my grandparents and relatives and their friends were dropping off at an alarming rate. Their main social activity seemed to be attending funerals, either as visitors or victims. Had Marc, I wondered, gotten the word that he was next? Through the rest of the day, I followed Lindenbaum, watching him in classes, trailing him to the bathroom and water fountain, studying him carefully for telltale signs of death. After school, I followed him home. Delevan, Marc's street, was very narrow, with cars parked on both sides, leaving a single through lane for traffic. Like the street, the houses were small and narrow, yards cluttered with bushes, hoses, sprinklers, canvas swimming pools, and patches of frail, hungry flowers. After Marc went inside, I walked back and forth past the house a number of times. First, I walked by quickly, head bent, as if I was on an important errand. In a while, I passed again, casually now, on a leisurely stroll. The third time, I crossed to the other side of the street, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled from bush to bush until I was directly opposite the house on my stomach. No one was on the porch. Everything was quiet, but the door was open, and through the screen I could see a lounge chair, a table, a vase, a television flickering. I watched for a long time, waiting for someone to walk past the door or come outside to hose down the sidewalk or sit and rock on the glider. But nobody came; no movement, no sound. The gray paint on the house was faded and chipping. Underneath the outer layer of gray, I could make out a previous layer of gray paint. And underneath a second was surely a third and perhaps even a fourth layer of gray, as if the whole house had been put together, beams and all, with succeeding layers of gray paint. For quite a while, I lay on the moist cool grass, my chin propped on my palm, staring across the street at Lindenbaum's house, picturing Marc inside. Suddenly, I detected the odor of cooking cabbage, wafting like poison gas onto the street. The cabbage odor wrapped around me, captured me, just like death would capture Marc Lindenbaum, and no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to purge the putrid, rancid smell that came with the cabbage. I ran down the street and around the corner. I held my nose. I sneezed and coughed. But just as there was no escape from the stink of cabbage, the shroud of death, I suddenly realized, would never release you. A person could not die and then get up the next day and walk to school. Death was forever. I had gone to my grandfather's funeral and I had never seen my grandfather again. You never came back when you were dead. Dead was what was going to happen Marc Lindenbaum, even though he was only twelve years old and looked perfectly healthy - no bald head, no hair growing out of his ears and nose like the old people had, no brown-blotched skin. The one thing to do, I concluded, to help Marc Lindenbaum was to make the last days of his life truly memorable, which is why, bright and early the following day, I waited for him in front of school and handed him a small package wrapped in aluminum foil. "Here," I said. "Take it." "What is it?" "It's a walkie-talkie." "Are you kidding?" he said, peeking under the |
foil. "This is a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes. You better watch it, Gutkind. You better not get caught with cigarettes at school." "That's what it is disguised to look like, but I am telling you what it really is - a make-believe walkie-talkie. There's a built-in aerial in there - and the wires are all invisible. I painted them with invisible ink." "This is no walkie-talkie." "Yes it is. I'll show you." With my thumb, I flicked an imaginary switch on the side of the package and made a clicking noise with my mouth. "First you activate it with this switch. The switch is invisible so that no one will know how to activate or deactivate, except for me, you, and Kiner." I was referring to Ralph Kiner, former home-run-hitting left fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Kiner was no longer a Pittsburgh Pirate by then - his playing days were over - but I treasured his memory. "What do you mean, Kiner? This is ridiculous. You can't talk with Kiner on this thing. You couldn't even talk with Kiner if it was a real walkie-talkie." "That's what you think, but I've perfected this make-believe walkie-talkie in my laboratory." "You see," said Lindenbaum. "Even you say it is make-believe." "Just because it is make-believe, doesn't mean it doesn't work," I told him. "This is stupid." "Gutkind to Lindenbaum. Gutkind to Lindenbaum," I barked into the cigarette package with the aluminum foil around it. "This is really stupid," Lindenbaum said again. "Can you hear me?" "Yes I can hear you, of course I can hear you." "So then," I told him. "It works." "But I can hear you without the walkie-talkie." "How do you know you can?" "Because I hear you all the time." "You can't hear Kiner." "I can't hear Kiner with the walkie-talkie either." "That's what Kiner said you'd say. Kiner said that as long as you think the walkie-talkies work, they will work. But once you doubt make-believe walkie-talkie magic, its power dies." I wanted Lindenbaum to believe this because, at the time, trapped in the dark in the bedroom that was once my private refuge and was now my prison, periodically stalked by a raging father, my most important objective was to believe in the world I made up. To believe in make-believe. The real world was lonely, dar, and terrifying - and my privacy had been stolen from me by the invasion of my brothers. Reaching out to Lindenbaum or Kiner through my make-believe walkie-talkie provided an outlet of relief for my fear, loneliness, and anxiety. In bed at night holding the walkie-talkie in my hand, clicking the invisible switch and hearing the walkie-talkie crackle to life, feeling its warmth in my hands, I became the most popular person in my class. All the kids in school came to talk with me about their problems with parents or confusing moral dilemmas about watching girls take showers through holes in the shower-room walls at camp or fantasizing about breasts, those luscious nippled mounds of flesh and skin we called "bazoongies," or saying the word "fuck" out loud. I was their advisor. I held court. My assistant took numbers. Even parents and teachers came to discuss their students' and children's behaviors. Periodically, Ralph Kiner would call to praise my home-run-hitting ability. General Douglas MacArthur, using semaphore flags from his aircraft carrier headquarters, warned me of suspect Red Chinese infiltrations and asked me to investigate suspicious neighbors, purported to be members of the Communist Party. The walkie-talkies also provided me with an opportunity to vent my own frustrations with my first "shrink" figure, Marc Lindenbaum himself, expressing my worries about my angry, mean father, my constantly complaining mother, my crying brothers, who had invaded and seized my room and diverted all adult attention away from me. Through the walkie-talkie, Lindenbaum was my intimate confidant, whether he was willing to admit it or not. "Please don't tell anyone what I said last night over the make-believe walkie-talkie," I often beseeched him the following morning. "How can I tell anyone what you said over the make-believe walkie-talkie when I didn't hear you?" "That's perfect! If anyone ever asks us, tell them the make-believe walkie-talkies don't exist." The day I fight back. The top of the stairway. My father is whaling me with his leather belt. I fled down the steps; he caught me on the landing and dragged me up to the top. We struggled. Fell to the floor. He was holding me down. We were both yelling. His swinging, lashing, leather strap wrapped around my face like a bullwhip. My mother had been outside, but now I heard her running across the porch. I was crying and pleading for help. She rushed up the stairs, thrust her body between us, and snatched his wrists. He pushed he away and she bounced against the wall, tumbled backwards down the stairs. A son can't hit a father. Unless a father is hitting a mother. I lit into him, fists flying, fingers clawing. He backed away in surprise. Then came the standoff - heavy breathing, barred fists. Two angry bulls. On top of the stairs. The same spot on which I had once been waiting at seven years old, for my brothers to come home and obliterate me. As I think back now, I can't remember my room the way it was before my brothers' invasion. As if that room, my own room, was created for the three of us, as if it had never been mine alone. Any memory of my ownership of this refuge was erased that day of their appearance, that hour. I was an orphan, sneaking in and out at night in the inky icy blackness. I was enmeshed in a paralyzing pool of darkness. But I had a make-believe walkie-talkie. The night after squaring off with my father. I opened my eyes, got out of bed, stood into the room and stared at the blank black walls. After a while, I walked over to where my blue jeans hung on my bedpost and pulle dout my make-believe walkie-talkie. I took it in my hand and went over to the window, pulled up the Venetian blind and, in the light from the street lamps, searched the foil for the invisible switch. I flipped down my thumb and clicked my tongue. "Gutkind to Lindenbaum. Gutkind to Lindenbaum. Are you there, Marc Lindenbaum, are you there?" At first there was nothing, except for the buzzing of our secret frequency, and then suddenly I felt the walkie-talkie warming in my hands. "This is Lee Gutkind calling Marc Lindenbaum. This is Lee Gutkind calling Marc Lindenbaum. Are you there, Marc Lindenbaum? Over." Then came a crackling as if somebody were rolling up paper, followed by wheezing and coughing and more rolling up and crackling of paper, and then came Lindenbaum. "Yes I am here, Lee Gutkind, but you know I won't be here for too much longer." "This is why I am calling to talk with you, Lindenbaum. I want you to take me with you. Over." "I am afraid I can't do that, Gutkind. Over." "Why not, Lindenbaum, why not? Over." "Because death is not a voluntary thing. When you die at my age you have to be selected. We are the chosen few. Over." "Oh yeah? And who the hell does that? The selection, I mean. Who chooses the few? Over." "Who do you think, Gutkind? Who do you think has the power to decide who lives and who dies? Over." I knew whom Marc Lindenbaum was talking about because I had encountered God a number of times in the recent past. I hadn't realized right away that this figure I began sighting was God, Himself, or even God-like, but I began to notice that a helicopter seemed to shadow Marc Lindenbaum everywhere he went. An old man with a long-flowing white beard and bright red nose piloted the helicopter. He looked like Jesus Christ, Santa Claus, Uncle Sam and Woody Allen - combined. But after a while it became crystal clear to me that the helicopter shadowing Lindenbaum, hovering above his head, could be piloted by nobody else but the Big Man - the supreme hotshot - God Himself, the ultimate sponsor of everyone on earth, the man who made our unhappiness possible. I could always hear God in His helicopter before I saw Him; it was beating from a long way off, sharp and dull at the same time, clopp-clopp-clopp, thudding like a lumberjack's chopping axe. The sound came on quickly, growing louder and faster, creating a terrible, vibrating racket. Then suddenly it came into view, bursting out of the clouds, swooping down into the neighborhood and situating itself directly over Marc Lindenbaum's head. The helicopter in which God sat was the biggest, loudest machine I had ever seen or heard. I could see or hear nothing else in the whole wide world now but God and His helicopter, swooping down on Marc Lindenbaum. Yet, whenever it appeared, Lindenbaum would not hear it or see it. He would just stand there, hands on his hips, staring at me, wondering what I was listening to or seeing. I was astounded. I once caught a glimpse of God sitting inside His helicopter in a red velvet cockpit throne dressed in a white robe with a white beard and white buck shoes, the kind that tennis players or golfers like to wear when they get all dressed up. I knew who He was right away. A person so magnificent could be no one else, but God. I took out my make-believe walkie-talkie, clicked on the invisible switch and radioed up to Him. "Gutkind to God, Gutkind to God, Gutkind to God." He didn't answer, neither signal nor word. But I knew for a fact that God had received my transmission because I saw him shrugging his shoulders, shaking His head sadly back and forth, as if to say, "I'm sorry. But I am simply not ready to talk with you at this particular time. Try again later." I have tried often over the years to contact him, hoping he might one day be ready to respond to my questions, but I haven't had much luck. Marc Lindenbaum died not long after Kiner and I befriended him, as everyone knew he would, and my vision of God's helicopter, the all-knowing sage, died with him, until that day, perhaps thirty-five years later, when Daniel was allegedly abused near my house. God was a constant topic of conversation with Daniel. "I don't believe in God because I can't see Him. Who made the television or the telephone or trees? Who made the roads? People say that's God. Where is God? Why can't I see who He is? If God really does exist, then that man in black would not have molested me," Daniel told me that afternoon, as we sat in my car in the alley viewing the scene of the alleged crime. I pointed upward at the hospital helicopter hovering above us. "When I was a kid your age, I used to think that God was a helicopter pilot," I told him. "He clopped around through my neighborhood, hovering over people and deciding whether they would live or die or whther they would be popular or smart in school. I tried to talk to Him, but he always ignored me." Daniel looked at me quizzically. "You thought God was a helicopter pilot?" I nodded. "I actually thought God was both the helicopter and the pilot rolled into one. It was a spiffy helicopter and it had all kinds of gadgets, including death bomb missiles, which He shot at people He wanted to kill." "If the missiles detonated, you were dead?" Daniel asked. "If the missiles were on target, you were selected to die. God programmed each of the death bomb missiles so that people would die when the people who loved them least expected or wanted them to die." "You're saying God was mean?" "I'm saying that God was a motherfucker when He wanted to be, I replied. "God is the father," Daniel said. "That's what the minister at church says that the Bible says. God is the father of everybody, including Jesus Christ." "Do you think that God is the father of the man in black who molested you?" I asked Daniel. "How could He be?" Daniel asked. "How could He not?" Daniel laughed for the first time since we had come together on the steps of the house. "And people say that I am crazy," he said. "I think you could use some Prozac yourself." "There's no doubt about that," I told him. "Now you see the truth. Everyone of us is nearly over the edge." After a while, I backed down the alley and once again headed for the convenience store. A police van was sitting in the parking lot, engines idling. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see two officers, both women, eating a take-out lunch and listening to their radio. Daniel did not see the police van, but its presence provided me with a direction, right or wrong. "Well, Dan, this is your chance," I said, pointing at the white van with its large blue and gold official seal. "We could approach these officers and tell them what happened." Daniel did not hesitate. "Yes," he said with conviction. We got out of the car, walked across the parking lot, and knocked on the window of the van. "I was molested by a man dressed in black," Daniel said. Almost instantly, the officer on the driver's side activated her walkie-talkie. Announcing the specific location, I her summarize Daniel's story to her sergeant, using the word that both Daniel and I had studiously avoided: "A reported rape." Within five minutes, the entire parking lot was ringed with police vehicles. Daniel was asked to tell his story twice more, once by a sergeant and then by a medic, and with each telling Daniel became more distraught. He buried his face in my chest and began sobbing uncontrollably, especially when the medic attempted to take him in the ambulance to the hospital for the long and intense physical examination required. Not surprisingly, investigating police discovered no evidence on the reported scene, behind the bushes in the alley. Nor did the doctors discover any sign of sexual violation or activity on Daniel. But to this day, Daniel sticks by his story. He alone is well aware of the truth of this and many other similar incidents of molestation and abuse he has reported. The abuse of his early years has been frequently confirmed, though. His parents isolated Daniel alone in a rented rooming house where neighbors, cousins, and even elder siblings, violated him regularly. The rooming house burned down. Daniel suffered serious neurological damage when the ceiling collapsed on his head. The system that rescued him wasn't any too kind to Daniel, either. During his adolescence, Daniel was transferred from facility to facility, twenty-one time; his counselors and support workers, his only parental figures besides me, changed every six months and sometimes less. Even the psychiatrist, who had rescued him from a near-vegetative state in a county mental hospital, had been fired from the facility and abruptly taken off his case the evening before Daniel had attempted to kill himself. So if Daniel conjures up a few unlikely stories, I can't blame him too much, and I honestly don't mind having a relationship with someone whose perceptions I don't always accept, literally. I identify with Daniel. The sharp differences in our backgrounds significantly limit my ability to understand the daily realities of his life, but I am starkly aware of the thin line that separates the fortunate and unfortunate of this world. For a long time, I never knew if, when my father reached out toward me, he was going to punch or caress me. The child I continue to have nightmares about - that little boy stranded in the basement darkness and beaten with a strap by an enraged father - was me. Too often we exaggerate the differences between the mentally ill and others who are judged to be sane, but not very nice. The blurred gray lines between criminality and acceptability have never been defined. This was the thesis of my book Stuck in Time: The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness, which told the story of helpless children enmeshed in the mental health system. For part of my research, I immersed myself, off and on for nearly three years, in an adolescent bipolar ward of a psychiatric hospital while, on the outside, I documented Daniel's discouraging life. The title comes from a scene in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, entered his living room, turned on the television, and suddenly became "slightly unstuck in time," an event that enabled him to watch the late movie on TV - an epic about American bomber pilots in World War II - backward. This was a marvelously therapeutic experience: American planes, riddled with bullet holes and bloodied men, took off from an English airfield backward and flew backward to France, where they were confronted by German fighters, which soaked bullets back into gun barrels protruding from their cockpits. The Americans followed the fighters to Germany, backward, where fire and debris were siphoned up from the earth into big bombs. As the backward procession continued, the bombs were stacked on racks in England, then transported on ships to the United States where American pilots were transformed into high school kids. The move subsequently reversed direction, but Billy Pilgrim speculated that if the backward momentum had continued, Adolph Hitler might have been a baby and Adam and Eve reborn. This is what I wished for Daniel, for Marc Lindenbaum - and what, for many years, I always wished for myself; that somehow, with the flick of a make-believe walkie-talkie switch or the wave of a Ralph Kiner baseball-bat magic wand, we too might become unstuck in time, triggering a journey backward to a much more hopeful starting point. Starting over never happened for Marc, who died too soon for magic or medical science to intervene. And life has not yet come together for Daniel, either, who, at twenty-five and now on his own, continues to hop from place to place, seeking a home and a familylike support system. As for me, today, who and what I was before this or any other previous moment will forever be shaded and shaped by the events that led to this intersection between past and present. Previously appeared in Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather, By: Lee Gutkind, ©2003, Lee Gutkind. Used with permission. |