O’Brien’s Literary Speculator Weblog

Note: Many of my readers have asked to have a more fact based and localized recounting of my exploits. So I contacted my inner child and he generously agreed to tell his tale of growing from a mere nipper into the man who stands before you today.

I am still negotiating with my inner teenager and before long he may sullenly slink or exuberantly burst forth with his tale. He said he is still checking dates and the NY Penal Code.

I am Born

I was born in the beautiful Borough of Brooklyn during the Presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower. When I arrived there were two older siblings waiting to greet me, in addition to Mom and Dad and Grandma Marian and Grandma Landy and Grandpa. We lived for the first year of my life on Forty Eighth street but I don’t remember very much about that.

When I was one, we moved from Forty Eighth Street to Seventy Sixth Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway where I did all of the usual things, got toilet trained, learned to walk, talk, hit people when mad, hit people for fun, run around like a deranged child and basically have a very good time for myself. In fact my world was perfect, hot in the summer, snow in the winter, nice warm house, good food loving parents, and siblings galore.

I discover I am disabled

Note: This is one of those disabilities that is too personal to divulge in a blog, and yet so common that hardly a person on the planet has not had interaction or a relation with a person who suffers from this: I speak with Brooklynese accent. This has in later life caused me no end of trouble. People who are rude, dim and unaware of the ADA often say to me, “You talk funny, I can’t understand what you are saying.” I let it slide off, I act unoffended, take names, file suit. The most terrible aspect of this disability is that it causes me to spell phonetically and as some people are color blind, I am comma blind. But that is another story.

I am Sentenced

When I was five, reasonably cute and smarter than I don’t know, everyone, my life was torn to shreds. The act perpetrated was positively Dickensian. One moment my life was a pastoral idle, the next I was marched, maternal bayonet in my back to Gulag 127. From a front porch and the backyard where play was my only commitment, to a four story gray block building with iron fences all around. Said barrier was at least three times my own height. What kind of horror requires an iron palisade three times the height of the inmates. Some will read wonder were they in the same institution? Its actual name is P.S. 127

Mind you I am not against learning, but it must be approached as a joy not as forced labor, my six favorite words had always been: what, where, why, who, when, and how. They were soon to change to, “Why am I always blamed, ma’am.”

Now this is not in fact true though there was enough trauma to get me medical discharge in a fair and humane system. I had wonderful teacher who started out as Miss _______ and mysteriously became Mrs.________. She was old by my standards but I’ll assume she was between twenty two and twenty five, She smiled a lot and even if I socked a malfeasor, (i.e. , snot nosed, literally, kid who was unable to see things in the proper light) in the eye for an intentional wrong she seemed able to recognize it as an accident. Though as I think back on what actually turned out to be nearly saccharine days, she seemed to see assaults against me in the same accidental light. It was disturbing.

It was also during this time that I had some of my first concrete lessons in the art of negotiation.

Herein follows the tale of the “Arbitration with Lincoln’s Log.

Here I must temporarily stop as the slave driver has cracked her whip muttering something about how I’m stretching a coffee break into a sabbatical.

Only to return refreshed to my story.

When I was five I had one brother and three sisters, all of whom were quite nice, though they thought of me as a ruffian. At five I was in the Gulag and my oldest Sister was a fourth grader my older brother, and oldest brother as well was in the second grade and the little ones were enjoying the bliss of childhood.

It so happens, that as Sear’s Catalog time rolled around I being a budding historian asked for the Colossal Chest of Lincoln Logs. I wanted to build a replica of Fort Ticonderoga. My parents apparently underestimated the actual number of logs necessary for the undertaking and bought a smaller package of the beautifully notched round brown logs with green wooden slats for the roofing. Instead of a box that would have taken every five year old on seventy sixth street just too lift I received a tube about one foot high six inches wide with enough Lincoln Logs to build a replica of the one room log cabin in which the great statesman from Illinois was born.

I addressed this matter to my father, saying I had been thinking of the great mans end in the white house, not his beginning in the one room house. My father patted my head and said, “What an imagination you have now go play with your toys.”

Well I did, But the limited number of logs meant that building any thing other than the little cabin was out of the question, or was it? I sat down in the middle of the Dining room obstructing the flow of traffic as was my want. My brother who was really a much more civilized and refined person than myself, asked me to move. I said, “no.” He asked again. I said no again he said I’m getting Dad and discovered that the Lincoln Logs might have another use. I said, Don’t call Dad or I’ll hit with my Lincoln Log. I was not to be made a liar I rose so as to not be blocking the thoroughfare and hit my brother with the Lincoln Log. Now mind you I’d no intention of harming the boy, he was after all my big brother and I loved him dearly. He however, not realizing I was only trying to remain honest and not to harm him, he pulled his head back and instead of a love tap on the top, I knocked his front tooth out. I was horrified, but expressed this horror with a hysterical laugh.

Naturally, this was a case of the worst timing as my brother had already called my father, so when I struck, Dad was not safely around the corner leaving room for plausible deniability. I was caught red handed, and laughing at my brothers plight. I stopped and did the only thing I could, I started wailing louder than my brother, but was apprehended and upended and taught the meaning of the phrase, I’ll give you something to cry about. Those were unenlightened days to be sure, and corporal punishment was the rule of the day. Can’t say the beating lasted a long time because after the spanking Dad had to deal with the injured child, and as I recall I was still able to walk and run around as my grandfather would say, Eric is behaving like a whirling dervish. Though of course Eric is not now and wasn’t then my name.

Filled with remorse, and a perverse curiosity, I thought an eye for eye, Yes and eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth. My father shouldn’t have spanked me, he should have hit me in the mouth with a Lincoln Log and knocked out a tooth, which I suggested to him about ten minutes after I stopped crying. To this he said, “Are you nuts? Go play outside.”

And I did.

Moved by peristaltic motion

Not long after the Lincoln Log incident, I discovered what I believe is my spiritual side. It is the side or facet of my personality that has gotten me into more trouble than I care to think about although I will write about it here. I as a child, and this is strange because as an adult I do not like them, would wedge myself into any tight space I could find; under, over, in, behind furniture cars, garages, fences and the like. I would get myself in and then play whatever type of game that it is that children play when they have wedged themselves into a space that was accessible to no one else.

I liked to hide and once in such a space I wouldn’t answer anyone who called, not out of malice, but so that I could appear moments later and claim to have been sitting there when they walked by, invisible. I thought it was completely plausible that I could become invisible if I wanted. I then thought that the others who could not see me might be right, I may have wandered through a door that was invisible and into an invisible world. No one believed that any more than my being invisible, but it had the advantage of being remotely, remotely, remotely possible if not completely improbable. I was learning to work in the gray lands, in the inter-zone, or in the field of law where an ounce of gray may be more valuable then a pound of black letter. Inside of the small spaces I began to imagine myself in places not connected to the earthly plane. Some of the places were like Beach Comber Island or Rat Fink World. These places were to a large degree influenced by the popular culture of the time, with Gilligan’s Island being the most captivating piece of the culture, although Rat Fink was also up there. Just as an aside Ed “Big Daddy” Roth is still one of my favorite artists.

One day, however, while I was in seclusion in the back of the dining room closet, which was not your typical cube of a closet, but a tapering closet, sort of like a dunce hat laid on its side, I had my first mystical experience. I was day dreaming in the utter darkness when I heard voices ones which I at first thought must belong to siblings or neighbors. Wishing to know what they were about these voices, and the people from whom they emminated, I leapt up. Now I should not have been able to leap up because the top of the closet was only about six inches above my head or it should have been about six inches above my head it was not there.

When I was erect, I looked about and saw a glimmer of light and I walked toward it. It turned out to be a light taped to the head of a rather plain looking person, except for the hat, the green skin the extra eye on the top of his head and having two right feet. I asked himwho he was in my normal manner. “Tell me who you are or I’ll knock your head off with my Licoln log,” I snarled. Now I know that people don’t really snarl out whole sentences but I am trying to show the mood I was in and the rather dangerous nature of my being.”

The green boy with the ligth on his head simply replied. “I am Otto Plato, and I live in your stomach. I have come to take you on a journey through your digestive track so you can see what I have to put with when you eat enough food for five people and drink copious amounts of soda. I was perplexed to say the least and not in a mood to be toyed with so I got ready to slay Otto when I was hit with a pungent aroma and found I had been transported into the sacred temple of my body> Was in my mouth actually and the teeth were moving up and down my toungue trying to crush me and I had no choice but to jump blindly into the gaping maw of my throat.

Landing in the vile bile and acid bath that is a child’s stomach I retched and heard the voice of Otto Plato, “Welcome to my stinking and fetid home.”