American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  Every day after school that spring, a group of us gathered in the coffee shop to drink cokes, eat French fries, and play Led Zeppelin on the jukebox. Before long others also noticed the skulker. Dennis Vickroy pointed out his uncanny resemblance to a character on television, in the commercial for Glad Wrap. He looked like the Man from Glad.

  What did he want? Why was he there?

  I began to wonder if he was the one who had fallen out of that car, thinking that in his fall, he had sustained a head injury and lost his memory.

  When I proposed my amnesia theory, Dennis took a long drag on a cigarette and considered it. “Maybe,” he said. “But then why is he antisocial? Wouldn’t he ask questions? Wouldn’t he want to know who he is?”

  I said he might be right. Still, with amnesia—based on what I knew from TV and the movies—you could never tell.

  Dennis tapped a cigarette ash on his plate. “I say he’s here on an errand. It looks like he’s waiting for someone.”

  We took turns wondering out loud about this stranger.

  “Where did he come from?”

  “He’s a drifter.”

  “He looks dangerous.”

  “He’s on the run from the law.”

  “Where does he sleep?”

  “He’s a thief.”

  “He’s a secret agent.”

  “He’s an assassin.”

  Dennis took a last drag on his cigarette and extinguished it in a puddle of catsup left on his plate of fries. “He is the Man from Glad,” he said. “He’s here to help keep our sandwiches and leftovers fresh.”

  One day when five or six of us were pressed into a booth, the Man from Glad came in the coffee shop and sat in the booth closest to the front door. He sat with his back to us, facing the sidewalk and street. When the waitress took his order, he practically shouted it at her. I wondered if he had both hearing loss and memory loss. While we watched him, Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” blared on the jukebox. Doug Propp had figured out how to turn the jukebox volume up. Once or twice, the Man from Glad turned in his seat and glared at us. When the song stopped playing, we all fell silent, watching.

  “Man from Glad,” Dennis said, barely audible.

  Everyone at the table hunched down and snickered.

  “Man from Glad,” he said again, louder this time.

  If he heard us, the Man from Glad didn’t let on.

  The internal gizmo in the jukebox clunked, and its needle lowered to a 45, more Zeppelin. We sat listening, watching. When the song ended, we all stood up and flung ourselves at the door, where we piled up like so many nervous, chuckling idiots. We couldn’t resist turning to look at him. The Man from Glad was having black coffee. On the table next to his cup were a pen and a blank piece of paper. He looked up at us and yelled, “What do you goddam kids want?”

  “Are you the Man from Glad?”

  “Get the hell out of here,” he barked at us. “Leave me alone.”

  The Man from Glad remained a shadowy figure around town for a few more days and then disappeared. Whatever it was, his mission was completed. I liked to think of him getting into a car at the edge of town and speeding away. In fact, I pictured his exit as a rewind of sorts: the rusty Lark backing into town from the north, the Man from Glad rolling backward, arms and legs flailing, falling back into the car as the right rear door opened and closed upon him.

  And away he went, his memory intact.

  For some time now I’ve been having premonitions.

  I will be backing my car out of the garage when I anticipate, all in a flash, the entire structure caving in on the car. Or, while waiting for coffee in a Starbucks, I’m visited by the vision of the place exploding. Only it’s not a vision—that suggests a scene more fully realized and protracted than these flashes are. And it’s nowhere near as precise as the house falling on top of me. In a blink, I think I’ve known, or will know, sudden obliteration. The premonition experience lasts less than a second. It’s always catastrophic.

  I have an idea this is not really a premonition but a postmonition, the recovery of a memory.

  The fall of 1971 I was in a serious car accident. I attended the local community college, preparing for a career in public accounting. Driving my Volkswagen across sections of farmland one morning on my way to class, I cruised through an open intersection. Tall corn grew on three out of four corners, which also made it a blind intersection. I was in the middle of this intersection when a van coming from my left collided with my car, which rolled like a yellow ball through a shallow ditch and eventually came to rest in the vegetable garden of one Mrs. Metevier. She saw everything, called for help, and was able to give an exact account of what had happened. I have no recollection of the accident, nor do I remember the day before, the morning leading up to, or the week that followed the accident.

  Gradually I woke up, finding myself in a hospital bed, in traction, immobilized. I experienced the confusion—that baffling sense of disorientation and strangeness—one feels when awakened from a deep sleep. Rather than passing in a few moments, however, it lasted a few days. Nurses told me where I was. My parents, borrowing from Mrs. Metevier, explained what had happened. My legs were broken. I’d had a bad bump on the head. I began to piece together the story of that morning and the days that followed.

  That happened to me? Really?

  Had I been out, I wondered, unconscious for days?

  It was more like a semiconscious state, my parents said. They asked me questions, and I answered in gibberish.

  Did I even know who I was?

  They said it was hard to tell at first.

  In his 2001 memoir, Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks recalls two events in his life that illustrate the complex relationship of trauma and memory. In the winter of 1940–41, while London was under bombardment during the Blitz, a one-thousand-pound bomb fell very near Sacks’s home. The bomb didn’t explode. It was the middle of the night. He and his family, along with the entire neighborhood, got out of bed and—still in pajamas—walked gently away from their homes and neighborhood, convinced that the bomb might explode any minute. (It didn’t.) The second memory also involves a bomb, this one an incendiary device that did actually detonate behind their house during the war. Sacks recalls his father and brothers pumping and carrying buckets of water, pouring them, to no avail, on the fire.

  It wasn’t until the publication of his memoir that Sacks learned from an older brother that while the first memory was an accurate account of what had happened to him, the second one, though also accurate, was an acquired memory. At the time the second bomb struck, Sacks had already been relocated from London to the countryside, the way many youngsters were. He learned of the thermite bomb from an older brother’s account of it in a letter. Over time, Sacks had taken possession of the story. He had become an eyewitness. It had become his memory, part of his life story.

  “All of us ‘transfer’ experiences to some extent,” Sacks writes, “and at times we are not sure whether an experience was something we were told or read about, even dreamed about, or something that actually happened to us.” An individual’s personal truth, his or her core sense of self, can be founded on both actual, verifiable events and on acquired, altered, or even fabricated events. Sacks asserts, “Some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else.”

  I stayed in the hospital three weeks, fastened at first to a circle bed. The contraption was like an indoor carnival ride. I lay on my back. Every so often a nurse latched a thin board and mattress just above me to the bed frame, and the bed rotated and deposited me on my belly. Then after a while it rolled back and returned me to my original position. Once my condition improved I was moved to a regular bed. Day and night, nurses swished around me in their crisp whites. I sipped water through crooked hospital straws. I peed in a can and pooped in a pan. I looked forward, unembarrassed, to daily baths given to me by female nurses roughly my age whose touch was gentle and impersonal and su
re. I woke at night and knew where I was. I waited eagerly for the bland scrambled eggs, the meatloaf, and the fruit cups when the food cart arrived. I was returning to my broken body, discovering my altered self.

  In the bed next to mine was a boy my age waiting for scoliosis surgery. He was small in stature, pale and fleshy. He had a round face and a head of thick black hair. Afternoons when his friends came to visit, they huddled around his bed and talked in low voices. It was impossible not hear their stories.

  They broke into houses and stores. It sounded like a hobby of theirs. They talked about their fresh loot: cowboy boots, a reel-to-reel tape deck, a glass fishbowl full of souvenir matchbooks from places around the country (all those memories!). They said they were waiting for my roommate to come back, to join them again in these heists.

  When he asked me one day about myself, I said something about college and public accounting. Only a few weeks had passed since the crash, but that version of myself felt like a story now. He wondered when I would walk again. I said it would be months.

  “How many?”

  “Four or five.”

  He explained they were implanting a rod in his spine. He hoped it would help him straighten up and grow taller. I tried to picture him bigger, stronger, breaking through the back door of someone’s house with a gunnysack over his shoulder and carrying off people’s stuff.

  “What happened?” he said.

  I told him what little I knew about the morning, the collision, and what had happened next. Then, for good measure, I added, “I had amnesia.”

  He turned with his whole body and looked at me. “Cool,” he said.

  Having said it, I felt strangely enhanced. It was cool. No one I knew had ever had amnesia. Probably no one he knew. Then I thought of the Man from Glad, his mysterious wanderings around town, his crabby disposition. “Yeah,” I said. “Just for a week or so. It was pretty strange.”

  “What was it like?”

  I described it as if I remembered it. “You don’t know where you are,” I said. “You’re very confused. You can’t answer questions.”

  He turned away and thought for a minute, smoothing his thick hair. “What if it comes back?” he said. “What if you forget again?”

  It never came back. And in truth, I don’t really know if it was amnesia. What if it did come back? Could a person remember amnesia? Could he remember not remembering?

  Shortly before leaving the hospital, I asked a nurse if I would ever recover those days before and after the accident.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “Why would you want to? What good would it do?”

  No good whatsoever. But I wanted to know. One of my most important memories, I said, and it was like it happened to someone else.

  “You leave it alone,” she said. “You’re going home. You should be glad.”

  Home, to my family, to my past. And to a whole future of memory that lay ahead of me.

  8

  Clinical

  The spring I turned eighteen I took child psych at the local college. The course was my second in psychology, taught late in the afternoon by a real-world psychologist named Norval Dirksen. He wore ill-fitting suits and white stay-press shirts that floated on his two-pack-a-day frame. Between classes, while my friends shuffled data-processing cards and crunched differential equations—focusing on the hard stuff—I applied myself to my imagined future.

  I memorized lists of defense mechanisms, outlined chapters in the textbook, and read Dibs in Search of Self, the story of an emotionally disturbed youngster who, with the help of a compassionate therapist, knits together a unified personality.

  “Dibs,” Dr. Dirkson said, “got better.”

  Around this time, we were having a situation at home. One night I woke to a heavy scratching sound on the roof. Something was up there. The sound of its claws and the hollow thump of the creature’s slow footfalls just above my head filled me with the kind of primordial dread you feel only in the dead of night. I tossed the covers back, reached for pants and a shirt, and padded to the utility room, where I found my father, also partially dressed, standing in the dark testing a flashlight. “Raccoon,” he said.

  We opened the back door, stepped out into the muggy night, and stood in the wet grass in our bare feet. When he aimed the light at the roof, I saw he was right. A dark form huddled in one of the valleys of the roof. We took a step closer, the light jiggled, and then we stopped. The thing was looking directly at us. Its yellow eyes glowed. I knew there was no chance of it leaping from the roof and locking its teeth on my throat, but at the moment, it seemed like a real possibility. My father said he could shoot it. I pictured him aiming a rifle while I held the light. But I imagined him missing, or worse, wounding it, and the enraged animal attacking—by mistake—the guy who was holding the light. We settled on a trap, which we put next to the chimney the following morning. The next nights those yellow eyes glowed in my long-term memory. I strained to hear those terrible claws, and every morning I woke up hoping there would be nothing in the trap. I didn’t want to confront it. I just wanted it to go away.

  One day a week that term, I drove to a shuttered school in Saginaw, where a back room had been opened, painted cheerful colors, and dedicated to the care of emotionally disturbed children. This was what the college called “practical experience.” You went to a place where a particular kind of work was done to find out if you really wanted to do it. I was watched over by a woman named Mrs. Wheeler, who told me she was actually a social worker.

  She rolled her eyes. “Same thing as a psychologist,” she said, “sort of.”

  I saw myself eventually doing couch and notebook work with “clients,” but I knew I needed to start somewhere. I would have to peel a few potatoes, my father said, before I could make a soufflé.

  My job was to observe. There were ten children. I watched Stephen, a round little guy with a red face who sat for hours at one of the tables swinging a wooden mallet, hammering wooden pegs into a block. And Emily, a little girl who drew black crayon swirls on tablets of paper. And Tina, who sat in a yellow beanbag chair with a doll pressed to her chest. The room was noisy. The kids cried a lot.

  “Stephen says he’s hot,” I said one morning to Mrs. Wheeler.

  “He’s working,” she said. She mimed his hammering motion and smiled.

  “But he is hot,” I said. “I touched him. He’s hot.”

  She swung her imaginary hammer again.

  The kids didn’t play together much. They just collided with each other. There were frequent low-level assaults and thefts. Then they had juice.

  I asked Mrs. Wheeler, “Does Tina ever leave that chair?”

  Mrs. Wheeler shrugged and gave me her you’ll-find-out smile.

  The third week I visited there was a new boy. I assumed my point of observation and took out my notebook. This new boy, dressed in blue overalls, lay under one of the tables the whole morning. Every so often, he got up on his hands and knees, turned in circles like he was chasing his tail, and then lay back down. Surrounded by racket and chaos, he seemed nothing if not bored, taking luxurious sucks on his left thumb and stirring the hair on the back of his head with his right index finger. I ran through my list of defense mechanisms and decided to take a stab at sounding clinical.

  I pointed him out to Mrs. Wheeler. “That one,” I said, “seems to exhibit reaction formation.”

  “What?” She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked.

  “Reaction formation?” I said. “His defense mechanism?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  I was in it. I thought I might as well formulate a complete psychological thought, put it on the table. “An exaggerated response to his surroundings, the direct opposite . . .”

  “That’s Patrick,” she said. “He’s my son.”

  He lay under the table on his side, his back to his mother.

  “Is he . . . ?”

  One look at her, and I didn’t finish my psychological
thought. No, young Frankenstein, he’s just visiting today. She didn’t have to say it. I gave her a tight smile and tapped my pencil a few times on my notebook.

  Three more Fridays I went for this practicum. Each observation was long, loud, and uneasy. I never saw Patrick again. Mrs. Wheeler treated me with equal parts respect and newfound skepticism. Those long mornings, I think she heard what I heard—the sound of claws scratching above us, the slow progress of a creature on the roof, a beast we didn’t want to catch but simply hoped would go away.

  9

  Psyched

  Last night I had a nightmare about donuts. In the dream I was very hungry, and I was eating donuts, lots of donuts. Every donut I ate, I got hungrier. I drank down glass after glass of milk, tearing apart glazed donuts and swallowing huge chunks of them, barely chewing. Then, sort of half-asleep, half-awake, I realized it was just a dream. The sensation reminded me of what I felt when I quit smoking and then dreamed I had started smoking again. Same emotions—horror, disgust, self-loathing.

  Donuts are practically a universal food. Humans must be hardwired to desire them. Donut lust lurks in our unconscious. Who came up with idea of frying dough, rolling it in sugar, pumping it full of custard, and slathering it with jam and icing and chocolate? Probably the same kind of people who thought of the lethal injection.

  I was in ninth grade when Dawn’s Donuts appeared on the corner of Center and Hemeter in Saginaw. I saw it as something exotic and magical that had come from outer space and landed on that corner. One happy day an ice storm blew through Freeland, uprooting trees and downing power lines. School was closed, and a bunch of us piled into Richard Roche’s Chevy Nova and rode to Dawn’s Donuts, where we drank mugs of coffee and ate donuts. That may have been the first time I ate a cruller, sometimes called a “French cruller.”