Special Friends—A Fall From Grace-13.

As I was leaving the cottage on the last day of Sixth Grade, I’d handed Greg a note that said, "I love Ellen Flourie." I figured three months would be enough time to buffer me from the razzing and heckling I’d receive if I just said it to his face. Jim Magnus had a girlfriend and when I got back to Michigan, I found Hal Buelter did too. During the summer I decided to start admitting that I liked girls too, but I hadn’t quite gotten to that point in Early June.

I’d been conscious of romantic feelings for quite some time now. A girl named Debby Standal had been telling people all through Sixth Grade that she liked me but though I liked Debby as a friend I didn’t like her as a Girl Friend.

Between Grades Six and Seven I flirted with several girls and continued to wrestle with the age difference between Ellen and me. I thought it would be an excellent idea to ask Jim Magnus about my dilemma. We’d shared so much together as long as I could remember that it seemed downright poetic that he should advise me about girls. I didn’t have a chance to see Jim that summer and though I did talk to him later, by then I’d pretty I’d pretty much set my path.

When I returned to school in the fall though, Greg had forgotten what I’d written in my note. While I’d expected to endure a series of pithy remarks from Greg before laying the subject to rest, I now had to go through the whole thing over again. I tend to think certain utterances of mine will be so controversial that they will surely provoke vociferous or at least acrimonious comment once set free. I’m often wrong. The trouble is though that other things I say don’t appear to me to be particularly dangerous but often provoke acrimony quite unexpectedly. This was one of the former cases. "Weird" was all Greg could manage when I told him I was in love.

On a trip to the store with Chris Keppler, I again poured out my feelings about Ellen. "That’s your business," He Said. Chris did help me out quite a bit though. Being sighted he helped me find Ellen sometimes so I could give her things, ask her questions, deliver painfully composed messages.

I’d met Ellen officially during Study Hall sometime during the later part of Sixth Grade. I’d been noticing her for quite some time. This was largely due to the fact that she and Danny Lander had been keeping considerable company and I realized that I felt jealous. I talked to Danny and he admitted that he liked Ellen, but denied stronger feelings. Still, simple observation suggested otherwise. I was quite courtly about these matters generally but felt that a man shouldn’t monopolize a woman’s attentions unless he was prepared to admit his feelings about her. I dreamed about Ellen fairly often and found myself nearly tongue-tied when in her presence. (Nearly but not quite.)

When I returned to Vancouver to find that Danny had not rejoined us this year, the field appeared to be entirely clear. The only problem with my quest really, was the difference in our ages. I was twelve, she nineteen, a fact that I confirmed on the first Friday of the new school year, at our annual Watermelon Feed. This was the first time I’d attended as an Older Student, which as a Seventh Grader, I now was, at least for some purposes.

I found I was still as attracted to Ellen as ever and resolved to court her seriously. But I did not rush into the thing headlong. Starting instead, with small overtures, such as a Hershey bar presented to her in the Library. I was crushed to find out later that Ellen had given the candy bar to the librarian since she Herself did not like chocolate. (I’d thought all girls liked chocolate! This being possibly a conviction gleaned to a number of years living with Christine, my sister, who was an absolute fanatic on the stuff.) I later discovered though, that Ellen loved licorice. Since I did too, this seemed like yet another good omen.

By now I’d amassed a fair amount of information about Ellen and her family, absorbing each fact like it was a chemical formula or a rocket parameter. Ellen’s mother was Mexican, her father French. She had six sisters and a brother and was the youngest in the family. Her parents lived most of the time in San Diego, but had a small residence in Mexico on the beach. Gossip was that the family was quite rich.

Ellen was born blind. I never knew the precise cause. I’ve observed in a previous chapter that the eyes being a part of the brain, injuries that affect the eyes often cause damage elsewhere in the brain. I don’t know that Ellen had any sort of brain damage. These things are hard to diagnose by observation only, especially when one is not qualified to do so. This is particularly true of blind persons who may be sheltered to a great degree to advanced ages and are apt to appear child-like. Ellen definitely did not act like a 19-year-old woman.

Even for a sixth-grade girl which she was now, Ellen was sometimes perhaps sillier than average though not drastically beyond normal limits for her classmates. She was prone to loud emotional outbursts or joy, sorrow and indignation. Many Mexican women both young and old are prone to loud and spontaneous demonstrations of emotion, both positive and negative. I currently work with a large number of Hispanic women and I can see some of Ellen in most of them.

To me, Ellen seemed like a reasonably normal Sixth-grade girl. Since first romances don’t tend to last more than a few months at best, the furor caused by my interest in this spontaneous, good-hearted, deeply religious girl appears to me, more and more ridiculous the older I get!

For some reason, which I never discovered, Ellen had been going to school in Washington State for several years now. Her case wasn’t unique. We had other students from California. I was coming from out-of-state. I’d heard some stories about State Schools for the blind in California, of which, owing to the great length of the state, there were two. One story had it that a student had drowned in the pool at a California State School. There had evidently been some other problems. As we say now, There Were Issues.

Seventh Grade started out looking like Sixth, but with frills. Greg and I greeted each other warmly. Larry Dizatelle who’d been invited to leave in fifth Grade because of stealing I believe, had returned and called me his old buddy. Gary Thomas, Stan McGovern and a couple of other boys had moved to Cottage Four, but Chris Keppler was still with us. One of our first evenings back, Chris, Larry and me had a long discussion about sex, girls, sex, half witty jokes and remarks, I.E. what do Indians use instead of Rubbers?—Buckskins! Oh yes, we talked about sex too.

On another evening, with my tape recorder running and some of us in my room, others of our friends talking to us through the open window, we accomplished a series of facsimile performances. Included was my wedding to Ellen with her absent and Kenny Hilstead, an amazingly funny day student, officiating as clergyman. "I now pronounce you man and wife. Go to the gallery and get the cake later!"

We had Mrs. Barns as our teacher again and we greeted one another with genuine affection. The boys had more numerous gym classes than in Sixth Grade though for this particular year, most of the evening schedule had been canceled. Study Hall was intact I now went to the older kid’s study hall, which was 45 minutes later than the younger kid’s period. This gave me some extra time after dinner to dispense with things like schoolwork and leave Study Hall open for those things for which it was obviously intended. This was a good thing too, since we had Gym up until dinnertime.

Mondays were a little different from other ways. We had Monday afternoon assemblies as before, ending about 3:50. After assembly there was an alternating-week arrangement with one week being Social Dancing and the next week Health. Health was sex-segregated and Mr. Olson taught the boy’s class. It started out offering to be interesting, a chance to get some straight talk on some perplexing matters which had arisen over the last year or so. (Social Dancing had Ellen in it.)

As if that wasn’t a sufficient reward for just being alive, we also had Recreational Swimming on Monday Afternoon before Dinner and Ellen was there too, at least some of the time. Older girls missed swimming fairly often and some more than others did. In spite of the fairly frequent proximity however, I’d yet to manage any time with Ellen in private, a matter to which I must direct considerable attention.

Our Social Studies class this year covered World History and World Geography. Each chapter in our book began with a story about young people, their families and communities in the age or time period described in the following sections. I gained my first love of Ancient Greece in the 3^rd chapter and became somewhat preoccupied with the idea of great civilizations, which had risen then fallen again. What kind of civilization would we have today if Greece had continued to grow, develop and flourish? Would the Romans have built practical steam engines? Could the "Dark Ages" be avoided if there’d been electric lighting in Camelot? Would Columbus have demonstrated that it was possible to voyage to the moon?

Besides more gym, I also had a practical arts period that alternated with Choir. I’d been invited to join choir this year, which was a matter of discretion on the part of the Director. The Practical Arts program consisted of three 12-week blocks; one each is Crafts, Home-EC and Woodshop. Boys and girls alike had some of each, which I thought was an excellent idea.

As with our Gym class, Grades 7-12 were divided into three groups for the Activity period. My group started the year with Crafts, taught by Mrs. Carden. I’d liked her very much as a teacher of English the previous year but this year, for some reason I didn’t get along with her so well, or she with me. While working on craft projects, we weren’t held to the same rules of silence as in textbook classes and perhaps I chattered too much.

In my group were some students from Mrs. Barns’ class as well as Darryl Barton, a boy from Cottage Four, Theresa Brick, Ellen’s best friend and Christine Buckley, also from Cottage One where the older girls lived. I would become fairly close to both of these girls, especially to Chris, due to the strange series of events, which dominated much of the year to come for her and myself.

Chris, Theresa and I worked with clay for the first few weeks of the session. I don’t recall that we accomplished much, but it was the first time I’d been allowed to work with potter’s clay in a relatively unrestricted fashion. We each did a sand casting in plaster, which I’d done in previously, in Fourth Grade. I then spent several weeks weaving a towel on a small table loom. Mrs. Carden loved to assign informative TV programs to her students and was usually telling the older students about movies made from classic book or programs on educational television. She told me to watch Peanuts, Charlie Brown And The Great Pumpkin, the first time a Charlie Brown special had aired I believe. I took offense at the suggestion and did not watch it, though I have many times since.

A downside of this year was my Math class. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d left the Fifth Grade with a less than exemplary Math background. During Sixth Grade, I’d missed a fair amount of school what with several illnesses, emergency dentistry, emergency eye appointment and tardy returns from Michigan. Though Mrs. Barns had drilled long division into my head and my work really wasn’t all that bad, I’d slid behind the majority of the class, and with three other students, was getting individualized instruction in Math by the end of Sixth Grade.

It was decided this year, to put all of the older students, having trouble with Math in a special class, taught by Mr. Olson, the Shop, Gym and Health teacher. Since the class was taught in such a way as to not leave anyone behind, our progress was held back by an 8^th-grade girl who’d never managed to master multiplication. I found myself thrust suddenly back into Fourth Grade Arithmetic, which probably wasn’t a bad review for me, but took away any remaining sparkle from a class I’d never liked much anyway. I knew that like booster shots, I needed Math, but hadn’t yet gotten to the point where I could see the connection between higher Math and rocket science. Even my Physics book had been largely conceptual.

It seems fairly strange, even in light of the events of this year, but I remember fairly little of what I read in Seventh Grade. I recall Heinlein’s Space Cadet and Fred Hoyle’s The Fifth Planet. My interest in Science was as keen as ever, but I seemed to be reading a lot of history again, much of it biographies. Chris, Greg and I listened together to a talking book version of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. This began for me, a three-year infatuation with a Mars that probably never was, with crystal cities and gently lapping canals.

The urge was still on me to write and I’d written some the past summer. I had a new story concept, something about a group of teenagers, with some girls included, building a blimp which, while navigating through the upper atmosphere, slipped through a time-space warp and ended up in the atmosphere of another planet, many light years away. On this planet a culture existed which was coincidentally very similar to 17^th-century England and its colonies. I spent a very pleasant afternoon one Sunday with Greg, who’d come up with a story scenario of his own. We sat side-by-side at my desk with both our Braille writers chugging along, stopping from time to time to pop malted milk balls and read some choice bit of what one us had just written. Neither of us got very far with his story but I believe this was the last time I ever actually wrote with someone else, until I was married.

My dream of using mind power to visit some otherworldly place had shifted in focus from Oz to the Mars of today or any other time. Perhaps with some sort of hypnotic conditioning, a person could teleport mind or entire self to another planet.

Greg and I did a tentative experiment in the direction. With approached Mrs. Howgan with the proposal that Greg be allowed to come into my room and talk to me while I slept. He was to try to implant in my sleeping mind that I had the ability to teleport myself or Tesser. Perhaps sufficient conviction was enough to accomplish the thing. We told Mrs. Howgan it was an experiment to help us with our schoolwork, but hell, if you could transport yourself to Mars and back, raising your Math grade should be child’s play. Besides, what a Geography report we could write! She agreed dubiously, so long as we were sure we weren’t just goofing off.

Surprisingly I was actually able to get to sleep before Greg’s visitation and I remember a peculiar dream about tessering, but I never became able to pop from place to place without expenditure of shoe leather. Perhaps a real hypnotist was what we needed.

ON visiting weekends with Lois and the family, I began calling old friends more frequently. I spoke with Ruth and the Magnuses and even Keith, Lois’s dad, who seemed to take quite an interest in what I was doing. For the first time in some while I got a chance to talk with Jim. We’d seldom spoken by phone, which seemed strange since we’d been friends for so many years.

As Lost In Space had been a TV phenomenon the previous year, we now had a double science fiction television opportunity. On the one hand Time Tunnel gave Terry Atwater and me some common ground. The other series of course, was Star Trek. I should mention that Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and a lesser-known undersea adventure called Stingray had premiered about the same time as L.I.S. but these seemed more like contemporary adventures with strange intruders than truly futuristic dramas. I was on hand for the premieres of both Tunnel and Trek and didn’t see immediately why the one would be relatively obscure by 1970, while the other, after some initial fits and starts, would grew into a varitable social movement.

I didn’t think much of Star Trek at first. I wasn’t particularly bugged by the plot line of the premiere episode, about the Salt Vampire but the concept of a ship as huge and complex as the Enterprise, seemed unreasonable to me. I still thought in terms of Gemini and Apollo rockets which took off from earth, flew to other planets and returned as quickly as possible, not five-year missions and starships the size of aircraft carriers. After the first episode I stopped watching for three or four weeks. The thing that brought me back was my curiosity about hand phasers. I’d always been fascinated by futuristic sidearms and started watching the series again in order to learn more about these weapons. My favorite episodes the first year, were Arena, in which Captain Kirk makes gunpowder, with which to defeat the Gorn; and Devil in the Dark, in which we meet the Horta, and experience, if you’re like me at least, a sudden and tearmaking transition from revenge craving to a rush of profound compassion for this wounded mother of her race. I think the scariest episode though, was The Return Of The Archons, about Landru and The Red Hour.

I missed most of the Trek episodes in 2^nd and 3^rd season and didn’t catch up on all of them until my daughter was 12 or 13. I don’t know that I was ever that much drawn to Kirk or Spock. Scottie was my favorite. (One of the ways, according to Mad Magazine, that you can tell that You Might BE An Engineer.)

Jim and I spoke of many things during our phone conversations that year. Like me, he had become interested in rocketry and also like me, had been thinking about how to build a sort of engine which staying on the ground, could fling a spacecraft away from the earth. Jim also told me that he’d discovered while working in Biology Lab at school, a set of reactions which produced a sort of micro lighting storm and could somehow, be used to develop rocket thrust. I’d thought I had discovered things like that a few times, some esoteric combination of chemicals which might throw out high velocity particles and room temperature for hours or even days at a time. It was a lot like perpetual motion of a chemical variety but neither Jim nor I understood the energetics of rocketry at this time.

In a candid moment I asked Jim if he’d really intended to run off with me and my pirate band, back when I was ten and he was thirteen. He said that he had, sort of. The idea of living on our own and making our stuff from foraged materials had appealed to him but being a pirate didn’t seem all that realistic.

This having been shared led in due course to a greater confidence. When I told him that my elders were giving me a tough time because I had a girlfriend who was older than me, Jim said not to worry about it. I should just keep on with the relationship. All that mattered was whether I loved her enough. I said I loved her all right, but the oldsters probably had a point about a 19-year-old girl. Jim caught at that a bit but said he wouldn’t necessarily advise me to break up with Ellen, but I probably should be looking around a little and not assuming that she was the only girl in the world for me. Jim said though, that one needed to be extremely careful about ending a relationship with a girl if that became necessary because she could be hurt incredibly if I didn’t handle the matter in a sensitive and caring manner. Thinking back, it occurs to me that this was a wonderful conversation for two boys, one Twelve, the Other Fifteen, to have in 1966.

By now Ellen was my girlfriend. I had composed a couple of Braille missives following the chocolate fiasco, asking her if she’d meet me after Study Hall or on a weekend. We shared several PE. periods each week, even in theory, the Rec. Gym period on Friday evening, which I thought would be an excellent opportunity to talk. Ellen didn’t go to Rec. Gym though. Being a resident of Cottage 1, she had the option, while we in Cottage 3, had not.

Meanwhile, I consulted a matchmaker. Gary Thomas’ sister, Donna claimed to have the gift. Not too surprisingly, due to all the noise I was making, she matched me with Ellen, (so at least I wasn’t just rushing head-on into this thing!)

One evening I met Ellen after her study Hall. She was still in grade school so had the earlier period. I asked her if she’d meet me the following day at some particular time. She had something to do at the time specified, but said she’d come to the merry-go-round either Saturday or Sunday next. I was in jitters most of the weekend and on Sunday afternoon, I received word that Ellen was at the agreed place, asking for me.

Ellen asked me when I arrived, what I wanted to talk to her about. There were a number of other kids of both sexes present, so I said we needed to go somewhere else for a while. We went walking over toward the Gym, making small talk, I not knowing how to open the subject.

"People say that you love me," Ellen said suddenly.

"Yes," I answered.

"Not Like," Ellen specified, "love."

"Well Ellen," I said, "you might be mad at me, but I do."

"Good," she said. I guess that was a sort of commitment. It wasn’t many days before our Halloween dance in the Gym. Boys chose the girls with whom they’d dance the first number, by tossing a pencil into a dimly lit room where the girls were clustered. Whichever girl was nearest to where the pencil landed or perchance, was struck, was his partner. I think I drew Renée Backley and Chris got Ellen. Chris danced my girl around for a while burping and making her cry "Uh-um!" then we traded partners. We’d come in costume and Count Dracula danced the evening away with Mother Hubbard until oh, 9:30 at least. Ellen referred to me as "my little boyfriend." She had some inches on me and perhaps 35 pounds, but I knew I’d grow—eventually.

We had a sweet sort of relationship and quite innocent. Chris Keppler asked me if I "thought about screwing" when I was with Ellen. I told him that mostly, I was just thinking about being with her. It wasn’t at all that I was ignorant of sexual feelings at this age, but just now it was a big enough step simply to admit that I was in love.

I kissed Ellen in the swimming pool one Monday afternoon when we were walking across the shallow end on the way to the towel stacks. It was a sudden impulse though I’d thought of it often before and I felt it all over as I landed her on the cheek, more or less. Ellen laughed and said she hadn’t expected me to do that and she wouldn’t tell anybody. Kissing was fairly serious stuff at Vancouver and this only happened a few times between us. Eventually, she kissed back.

Though our activities were really very clean-cut, certainly compared to any school romances I’ve seen in the last 25 years except Leave It To Beaver reruns! Things were problematic for us, almost from the beginning. The first time I called home that fall, Mom demanded if I’d found out how old my girlfriend was. I said yes, that I’d found she was really 19.

"This is something we’re going to put a stop to, right?" she said.

"No," I said.

She said I don’t want to hear any more about it. It’s over. That’s all there is to it."

I talked to Ellen and asked if she wanted to continue our relationship. She said she did.

At first our romance was Cute, in the eyes of the house parents. Then it became less so once they realized we intended to remain An Item, at least for the foreseeable future. There had been and were still, some longstanding love affairs in the school which had gone on for years.

About this time, everybody in by age group seemed to be pairing up. Terry had announced his affection for Llana Oler. Diana Smith, also from my class, fell for Kenny Hilstead, the comic fellow who’d performed my fake wedding. Other couples happened. We’d get together during the sunny autumn afternoons, taking turns pushing each other on the swings or on the merry-go-round, teeter tottering, several couples together. Quite innocent, but the houseparents of cottages One and Two seemed always to find excuses to call the girls back in after a half-hour or so. Rooms needed to be straightened. Laundry needed putting away. Talks needed to be had. It soon became obvious that there was a conspiracy to keep boys and girls apart and we responded by insisting on walking together to class and socializing during free time.

I found myself becoming quite a rebel in this respect, and even a leader. Previously, when I was in trouble, it had been for things I Hadn’t done. Now I was fairly often on the carpet for things I did. It felt highly unnatural to be cut off from the company of girls. Many of us had been raised with sisters of course, and even many of our PE. classes were co-ed. I’ve been uncomfortable with all-male social gatherings since this time. This never was a fear of homosexuality sort of thing. It was simply an emotional conviction based on the decision to Like girls now those social situations most generally didn’t need to be segregated.

It was actually amusing how schizophrenic houseparents could be about boy-girl interactions. On one hand, we were watched almost constantly while out on the campus, with help from The Nurse, in her high crow’s nest. On other occasions we were told to run errands down to the girl’s cottage. Once Mrs. Petit made me carry a girl’s slip down to Cottage Two. (Since girls evidently changed their clothes more often than we did, or they wore more stuff or something, our washing machine was often employed in helping out with their laundry.) Audrey Jacques met me at the cottage door, giggled, took the undergarment and thanked me.

All in all, I seemed to be joining the gang more or less. I was getting out more, getting along with older kids, as well as those in my cottage and Cottage Two. My teachers all seemed to like me. I’d never liked rock and roll particularly, but was perceiving a certain affinity to some songs the others liked and even enjoyed dancing to the modern tunes. Girls were of course, all into The Beatles, The Stones, Paul Revere and The Raiders, The Mammas and the Papas.

Terry Atwater and I had largely set aside our differences and were having a pretty good time together once more. Classes were interesting. I enjoyed Sunday school a lot. I was no longer ready to cry when I left Lois’s house. Though I never did learn to like Sundays back at the end of a weekend away.

We had track during our Tenth-period Gym class the first few weeks of the Year. On a good day this class just about let us make it to dinner on time. I’d been dreading track all summer since Mom had made such a big deal about my ankles turning inward. This too, was at least in part, a behavior problem of mine. Some Dr. had told me to sit with my ankles crossed and this would supposedly help correct the problem. At least that’s what Mom said. I didn’t recall the conversation particularly. The same Dr. had counseled Mom not to put me in corrective shoes since "He’ll never be all that mobile, running and climbing trees like other boys." So now I was in Track, four days a week, running three to four miles per session. I didn’t like it much, but it didn’t manage to kill me either.

After the weather got too wet for good traction on grass, we had several weeks of swimming (in the pool,) then a portion of the year devoted to wrestling. Ellen complained about her once-per-week fitness class as if this was something above and beyond anything that I’d be expected to do and I mentioned that boys had team sports or weightlifting five to six times per week. She said she hadn’t been aware of this. She thought only girls had extra gym.

We asked Mr. Olson in our Health class, why we had so much PE. in our week, even taking up part of our Saturdays. He said that before the new gymnasium was built, boys were sitting in their rooms masturbating from Three till Six every day after school. (I don’t believe I ever kept it up that long, even on Sunday!)

Mr. Olson taught Health Class mainly by insult and embarrassment. He called us the Peach fuzz Crowd, (Health classes were broken down into Junior and Senior High sections,) and said we had very little to offer a girl, that there was no particular reason a girl would like any of us. He required us to write an essay on what should happen on a First Date, then basically made fun of our material. I remember putting quite a bit of thought into my scenario and believe others did as well. This was the first time we’d been allowed to discuss sex-related matters in a teacher-student context.

Ellen and I decided to go steady and even talked of getting married someday. I thought I’d go to the University Of Mexico or perhaps one of the California schools when I was ready for college. I expected to learn Spanish by then. I’d live someplace near enough to one of Ellen’s Family’s residences that we could be together often. This would be more than five years in the future and was the next thing to shear fantasy, but are not most of our early notions of romance and marriage?

At Thanksgiving, I bought some Christmas presents, including gold necklace and bracelet with crosses on them. Though they were only eighty-five cents apiece, I’m assuming they were but lightly plated but they looked gold and Lois helped me find a good price at a bargain jewelry counter. I’d told Lois about my girlfriend and shown her the green-inked E.F. on my upper arm under my shirt, which I had Chris Keppler renew every day or so. Like Mom, Lois asked how old Ellen was, having not heard of her as yet. I hedged, saying she was older than me but only in Sixth Grade. I also bought a necklace with a bell ornament on it, for Diane Smith, whose name I’d drawn in our class Christmas exchange. This was a rather fortuitous thing, since Diane’s boyfriend was off-campus most of the time in the evening, and weekends, while I was restricted considerably in my opportunities to see Ellen, Diane and I were often left out as the odd wheels. We kept each other company at such times in a platonic way and I was happy to have an excuse to give her a gift.

Ellen was Definitely happy with her gifts, which I gave her as soon as I met her again after Thanksgiving break. There was a bit of a buzz running among the girls in Ellen’s class and mine, concerning her presents, and I was quite proud.

Shortly after the Holiday, I was called to the office of Mrs. Beaumontie, the School Psychologist. She said she needed to ask me some questions because every so often, she talked to students, just to see how they were doing. This seemed natural enough to me. I’d taken intelligence tests before and knew that was just part of going to school.

Mrs. Beaumontie proceeded to ask me a long series of questions, which I answered promptly. Then she told me she’d been talking to my friend Ellen this morning and Ellen had been wearing the bracelet and necklace I’d given her. "She showed them to me and is very proud of them." Then she went on to tell me that Mr. and Mrs. Flourie were intelligent, well-educated people. (I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the price of beer in Brisbane, but she seemed happy with it.) I said I was glad Ellen liked her gifts, that she’d said substantially the same thing to me and I liked Ellen very much. Mrs. Beaumontie gave no indication that there was anything wrong.

I did not hear the end of this story until I was a senior in High School. At this time I was in the Vice-Principal’s office. I’d come up on my own to follow up on a report a religious fanatic had made on me, for Terrible Language. (I think I’d said hell.) Mr. Faylor had forgotten what had been reported about me, but proceeded to go with me through my entire student record.

Among the things we found there, were two IQ tests, one from John Hay, one from Vancouver and Mrs. Beaumontie’s report of her conversation with me. She had called me a "very superior student, who discoursed intelligently, was knowledgeable and talked freely about his relationship with a tall, attractive but slow-learning girl of 19." She said I was I was unquestionably the leader in the relationship, Ellen was no mother figure to me, (I guess that was one of the concerns school authorities had about us.) She concluded by saying that I was pugnacious and threatened to kill fellow students who bothered Ellen. All of this would’ve pretty much been my own analysis of the situation though I did not know how high my intelligence scores were.

So far as I could tell, the school administration totally disregarded the findings of their own school psychologist and went on discovering phantasms such as a supposed predatory sexual interest Ellen was thought to have concerning my tender body. I may be stating unfairly here since this particular item to me preprocessed by my mother. From my perspective, it seemed as if the school held me to be the sexual aggressor. At any rate, the whole thing was made of cobwebs. Looking wistfully back, I wish this were the only problem the Administration and I had to worry about this year.

In early November, a new boy joined us from the State School in New Mexico. He was Seventeen and seemed to materialize out of nowhere. No announcement had been made about his impending arrival, at least none I’d heard. I first became aware of Paul Cline in Choir Class as Miss Lassarde, our director, was quizzing him about his musical history. She was somewhat taken aback when Paul told her the Choir in New Mexico was larger than our own. Then she asked him about the songs they’d sung this year and Paul made some wise crack like "I don’t remember everything because most of the time I don’t bother to sing."

Singing or not, Paul didn’t stay long in our Choir. The story I had from him was that he’s asked Miss Lassarde if he could get a drink of water. She’d reportedly, responded "I don’t know. Should I excuse you or not?" To this Paul had responded

"Well I don’t care. I’m going." He’d gone and hadn’t come back. It wasn’t mandatory to be in Choir unless Miss Lassarde wanted you and I imagine she perceived herself dodging a bullet in not Wanting Paul.

Pretty soon, stories were going around school. Paul spoke some language which was either Spanish or Navajo, or both. He liked to say things to people, which were, though indecipherable, obviously obscene. He also smoked cigarettes but that wasn’t unique. Chris Keppler and I sneaked off into the bushes now and again for a few puffs when either of us could manage to swipe some cigarettes from home. (Airline meal trays, even those given to kids, included a four-pack of Viceroy cigarettes in those days. I’d pocket them, declaring that my big sister smoked Viceroys. She did, but that didn’t mean I’d be giving them to Her!)

Paul and Terry Atwater seemed to have some kind of secret. They’d asked Greg if he could hurry up and finish in the restroom on one occasion because they had something private to discuss. I’d heard Paul talking to Terry and the stuff he talked about sounded fascinating; bullfights and Indian rituals and other exotic stuff. I was somewhat jealous of their relationship. I perceived myself as someone who could get along with bad assed sorts of people and this definitely would describe Paul.

One day I was going into the school building as Paul was coming out, and he said, "Excuse me." I asked if his name was Paul and he said it was, but that he’d just been going through the door. (He hadn’t meant to start a conversation.) I said I’d been wanting to meet him and introduced myself. He shook my hand and went on about his own business. This was our first meeting. The next was a bit more significant.

I was leaving the school building one afternoon when Paul came up beside me, said, "There’s my buddy" and held the door open. He asked if I’d like to be best friends.

I said "Sure," more or less out of reflex, because the question took me quite off guard. As we walked along outside now, Paul asked me if I trusted him. I said yes and he asked me

"Would you trust me enough to take your pants down and let me see?" (Paul had a fair amount of vision. I said I’d have to think about that. Paul said he couldn’t tell me right then why he’d ask me to do such a thing, but it would be worth it to me. He said we should meet again sometime soon in a more private place. In the meantime, I shouldn’t talk to anybody about this.

Chris Keppler seemed to know more about physical and sexual stuff than anybody else in the cottage, albeit at a rather crude level. Terry Atwater had been hanging around with Paul. So I called them together in my room, told them the story and asked their advice.

Chris laughed and said the guy was probably curious about cocks and was doing a comparison survey or something. Terry said less, but intimated that Paul had spoken of a secret of some kind that he was going to share with him.

Later and more privily, Terry told me that Paul had spoken of a disease, he had, which originated in his genitiles and had spread and was now infecting his heart. From there on, things got complicated. Paul had a cure for the disease which might work on persons in less advanced stages, like Terry (and me evidently.) Paul himself had been saved, at least for now, by having Navajo blood put into him in a tribal blood brother ritual. Indians were supposed to be more resistant to the Disease. How Paul could tell which persons were likely to have this Disease, remained yet unexplained. I assumed that whatever cure Paul might have must be some sort of Native American remedy. I said that if medical science hadn’t managed to find a cure, it wouldn’t be likely that the Navajo Tribe would have one either. Terry trotted out a list of diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, for which Indians had found cures.

Terry told me Paul would feel my penis and perhaps take a urine sample and that I should go along with him to see what he had to say about my condition. I didn’t like being told or even advised as to what to do in this respect, though I had asked Terry’s advice initially. I determined to find out a lot more before I submitted to anything like this.

Paul met me in the restroom after Study Hall one evening and tried to get me to pull my pants down. I told him I’d rather not. It was just as well, because the custodian came in just about then.

Paul brought up the subject a couple more times and I told him I trusted in God and if I had some disease, God could cure me. Paul said "Okay" and left, exuding wounded feelings as if I’d said something spiteful to him. To understand what comes after, the reader will do well to keep in mind that Paul was first and foremost, phenomenally able to make people sympathize with and feel sorry for him. He operated on pity and guilt.

Paul met me in the hall the day after this last exchange and said "You know, I’ve been thinking, when you talk about God being able to cure you, well maybe it’s Gods way of curing you to send me to help." I apologized for hurting his feelings and Paul accepted, radiating nobility now.

It would be a while before an opportunity offered for Paul to Examine me, but we were spending a lot of time together now and Paul began telling me of his adventures in The Southwest, or what he claimed them to be.

Paul had evidently been close friends at the New Mexico School for the Blind with several Navajo boys, especially one Albert Secitaro, whom he claimed as blood brother. Paul claimed further to have been adopted into the tribe. He said he’d lived for some time on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, but was somewhat unclear as to when, and claimed to have a betrothed girlfriend there.

A concurrent narrative had it that a man Named Robert Heath of Lubbock, Texas had befriended Paul when he was ten or twelve. Mr. Heath was a trucking boss, and again, according to Paul, had helped Paul buy a number of tractor-trailer rigs. Paul could tell you about every truck and the men who drove each. He claimed that in real life, he was a company owner, but in order to get through school he dressed poorly and allowed himself to be confined most of the time in State School.

Probably the most fascinating part of Paul’s story was that Paul’s company, The El Paso Lubbock Line, was in a sort of gang war over route privileges, with the Homer Glover Packing Company. These Texas truckers carried guns and knives and seemed as wild as any TV Western I’d ever seen.

Thinking myself quite savvy about things military, I offered to design a cannon to help Paul’s guys knock out enemy trucks. He said that would be a fine idea!

Drawing On Jules Verne, I designed a cast-iron smooth-bore with a barrel length of twelve and a half feet, a at-inch diameter and a ten-inch wall thickness. It used 50 pounds of black powder to throw a 500-pound ball. The cannon could be fired with matchlock fuses or with electrical squibs. (Rather primitive stuff really, but Paul said it could smash a truck at 1500 feet distance.) Of course on Paul’s orders from Vancouver, his Texas friends had hired a foundry and cast it within a couple weeks of receiving my design.

I was by no means the only person to be taken in by Paul’s stories. I think a quarter of the boys in the school had at one time or another, been promised something incredible from Paul’s company to be delivered by truck. He promised to get me two revolvers, one .44, the other .45 caliber. They’d be arriving any day. Delays occurred though understandably enough and one thing led to another and the pistols never did manage to arrive.

On another occasion, one of the Drivers, Jerry Johnston had supposedly brought me a bayonet. Jerry’d accidentally cut himself with it though while wearing it naked on his belt and the blade had been dishonored, no longer being worthy to present to someone as good as me, so I didn’t get that either.

Still Paul frequently showed up with truck parts, radiator caps, Kenworth emblems, bumper signs, even bottles of after shave and deodorant which were brands I’d never heard of before. Paul also showed me tapes with voices I didn’t know, purportedly, some of our truckers. There was even one reel, which had diesel truck sounds on it, mixed with gunfire, including machine guns. It was all very realistic sounding and obviously no TV program. There just was no simple answer to the mysteries Paul presented.

By now, our afternoon Activities Group had transitioned into Home-EC. Somewhat to my surprise, I enjoyed learning how to toss a salad, sew on buttons, chop walnuts, pit dates, break bread and butter it, set a table, seat a lady.

Chris Buckley confided to me that she was interested in Paul.

Much of the activity in Home-EC class was focused on preparing Christmas treats. My class did fruitcakes mainly, while others did cookies or fudge. We’d all take home a gift package to our families, containing some of everything.

This Christmas, Mom, Dad and Chris were flying to Seattle. They stayed four or five days, all the time I’d have with my family until June. It wasn’t much of a visit. I seemed to be in trouble over quite a few tings. I don’t recall anymore exactly what altogether. I knew there’d be an issue over Ellen and I intended to talk with Dad, which seemed the appropriate thing for a 12-year-old boy to do. I wanted to explain that I liked Ellen a lot and we weren’t doing anything to be ashamed of. Dad, never a great one for Finesse, tried to open the subject in the living room, in front of everybody. I told him I’d talk to him about it, but I’d do it later.

So Mom attacked me next time the four of us were in the car, saying we were going to settle the matter of "this stupid girl right here and now." She said she was my mother and I would do exactly as she told me to do. Mom decreed the Ellen was mentally retarded a solution which seemed to have served her so conveniently in similar situations in years past.

The gift I remember that year was a guitar, which was rather exciting at the time, but turned out to be something of a trap in the making. I’d seen an inexpensive guitar in a store back in Michigan at the end of the summer. It cost $23.95 I think. I’d talked a lot about buying it for myself with money I’d accumulated. This would give me something to practice with at my leisure. Now Mom and Dad had spent "Nearly Forty dollars" on a somewhat better guitar and now my playing of it was something that they could oversee and administer.

Lois and Bruce were quite a bit into Star Trek this year, as I was also by now. We tried to share the show with the parents, who took an instant dislike to it. Mom did enjoy the Tribble episode and Dad got a kick out of A Piece Of The Action, about Chicago-style gangsters,) but S.T. #1 was effectively banned in my home for the majority of it’s run.

Jim Magnus came over with his mother, one afternoon and showed me some chords on my guitar. We had a friendly talk, shared some candy, and generally had a nice time. Dad gave me several dollars before he, Mom and Chris flew back to Michigan. Lois confiscated most of this for my train ticket back to school but I still had $2.83 left. Since my weekly allowance was twenty cents, I was feeling rather flushed.

Chris Keppler and Larry Dizzatelle had transferred back to Spokane to attend public school. Chris was told he was welcome to return anytime he wished, (at least in the opinion of Mrs. Petit,) but Larry was told he wasn’t wanted again, (by the same authority.) I’ve sometimes wondered how much of this may have had to do with the fact Larry was half Indian, or was it solely on account of Larry’s well known, sneaky, manipulative greedy ways? Chris was in trouble fairly often as well, but was generally held by those who knew him well to be a pretty open and generous person.

Shortly after I arrived back at school I had a conversation with Paul one night and he told me the school Dr. had gotten wind of his feeling bad and had given him a prescription for some medicine which could help him. Paul couldn’t get the medicine though, since he had no money. I told him I had $2.83 and asked him how much he needed. Wasn’t it amazing that the amount I’d mentioned was precisely the cost of the medicine! Being a reasonably generous person, if not particularly savvy, I handed over the money, glad enough to help a friend. Paul thanked me profusely and promised he’d pay me back in a week or two. (Problem was Paul never did, then or at any other time, to my knowledge, buy any medicine.) Next day, Paul showed up with a Dave Dudley album of great trucking songs, some collector coins and a new pack of cigarettes. I was rather at a loss though because I perceived he still needed that medicine. I think I paid for that same prescription several times in the weeks to come.

Ellen gave me a very nice wallet she’d purchased in Mexico. She’d told her parents she had a boyfriend that loved her and even told them my age. They’d said this was good and her mother had suggested Ellen buy me a gift. It was the first really nice wallet I’d ever had and was handsomely engraved with a bull’s head. One unkind person said Ellen had probably picked it up in Mexico for a quarter or so but I was rather sure it had cost more than her jewelry had. I carried it proudly and made excuses to pull it out and show it off a bit fairly often, (not even having or needing, a condom inside!)

By now, Chris Buckley and Paul were an item around school. Chris and I were growing closer as friends, though she was nearing 18. Since Paul and I were friends and she was recognized as his girlfriend, we formed a somewhat intimate trio that persisted throughout the year. Things don’t always work out in situations like this, but in ours, it did fairly well, at least in some ways of looking at it. It was interesting that we should have both become close to Paul at right about this time, because it was now that Paul began getting in trouble with the school. Perhaps we were drawing together in an effort to protect Paul, or perhaps Paul was drawing us nearer in an effort to screen himself. Paul could be very charming.

Paul developed the habit of dropping by my window evenings, or on weekends, to talk. Sometimes Terry would join us, by coming into my room and talking through my open window to Paul. One Saturday afternoon, Paul told us he’d been accused by Mr. Burhow, the superintendent, of engaging in homosexual activities. He said he’d told Mr. Burhow he had these tendencies because he thought he’d be left alone if he agreed with whatever the school said about him.

Even at the time I was Amazed at this! I didn’t at the moment, know what homosexual tendencies were. Terry said he did, but didn’t share the information. It made him feel superior to know things that others did not. I never did get entirely clear on how and why the accusations began, but here is what I think happened.

On some weekend when I had gone home, Paul had evidently met with a boy named Bobby Butts. Bobby was about my age, but was somewhat retarded and had just transferred up from Primary this year. Paul had, according to the reports I heard taken Bobby’s pants down and touched his genitals. At some other time, he had evidently done similarly to Ricky Bennett, another boy in our cottage.

I don’t know exactly when these events were supposed to have occurred. Both boys had evidently told houseparents about their experiences with Paul, but I don’t know if this was on their own or as the result of some investigation in which I was not involved. Paul said he didn’t remember what had happened in either case, which strangely enough, was believable.

Like much about Paul and even about myself, I’ve never received satisfactory medical explanation for this, but he was often subject to a trance like condition, which he referred to as being Out. I first experienced this state of his a few weeks after we became friends. One day I met Paul up by the school building after school and he was speaking strangely. That is, he was muttering in a language I didn’t understand, grunting, jumping over the railing near the school, and trying to take my book away from me.

At some point, Paul fell against the wall of the school building and suddenly came to himself. He told me he’d dreamed or imagined jumping over a horse. Then he had thought he’d been fighting with a Mexican over a sack of money. I explained to him what had really been going on and he showed me what to do if this occurred again.

At the base of Paul’s sternum, just above where his ribs veed upward, was a depression, about an inch across and perhaps a quarter-inch deep, which he referred to as his Spot. At first I thought this was the result of some past injury, though later, Paul told me it had been caused by the Disease, which warped bones along with all of the other terrible things it did. However originated, the Spot seemed to be a source of intense pain for Paul if pressed upon, and would jolt him back to the present. I therefore, on finding Paul in his Out condition, should wait till we could be alone, then press my finger or knuckle hard against the spot.

Regarding the accusations about Paul, I theorized and Paul agreed that he had been Out on the occasions he’d been with Bobby and Ricky and had perhaps thought they were me and had proceeded to do what he called Checking.

The material, which occupies the next portion of this chapter, is quite distasteful. For those who choose not to read it all, or to merely skim, the term Checking refers to Paul’s method of diagnosing the progress of the Disease and the supposed method of arresting same. Several activities were involved, all of them unpleasant, at least to me, as well as distasteful often painful and even frightening. These activities went on all year until late Spring and from time to time, occurred during the next year when we were in Seattle. The process left imprints on me, which remain to some degree, even today.

I’d again raised the ire of school officials by failing to sign up for Saturday morning bowling. This was another of the things the faculty couldn’t exactly order me to do, but is was considered a credit to our athletic program that several teams of blind and partially-sighted students "volunteered" to turn out each Saturday morning, to show their school spirit.

To me, the most sublime part of the week was on Saturday morning to be allowed, after staying up comparatively late on Friday night, to for once, ignore the damned morning bells and sleep in till ten or so. I ritualistically put away my watch on Friday night before going to bed so as to avoid being even tempted to know what time it was and would drowse luxuriously through the yawns and protests on less privileged persons, (those who needed help getting dressed or washed and those who must rise and bowl.) Since I had Weightlifting at Eleven and recreational swim in the afternoon, I felt this was enough activity for Saturday.

Still I did bowl on occasion, since we sometimes went to the bowling alley for a Monday afternoon special activity, or to the ice skating rink or on fieldtrips. It was on one of the group bowling events that I first found out what Paul’s Cure really entailed.

DP#1. Paul explained that The Disease would effect the muscles and other tissues associated with my rectum. It wold also affect my urinary system, but he was less specific about that. He said that fissures or "pockets" would form up inside the rectum and that would be a Very Bad sign. He also said the rectum became loose within the body. Paul demonstrated with my coat sleeve, but asking me to visualize a pipe with the coat sleeve as a lining but the lining being too big to lay smoothly against the inside of the pipe. He said eventually, the lining of the rectum would fall out, leaving me unable to hold a stool.

DP#2. At a time when everyone else seemed to be busy with the bowling, Paul and I went off to the restroom. We locked ourselves in a back stall, which seemed to give fairly good coverage from someone entering unexpectedly. Paul had me take down my pants. He spent some time palpitating my testicles and feeling my penis. This was a more or less neutral sensation and frankly, he did not appear to be attempting to stimulate me in any way. Then, he inserted his forefinger into my rectum and probed Deeply! I’d never had anything bigger than a thermometer there and certainly never so deep. It hurt and made me feel other sensations too, such as an urgent need to pee. I know now that he must’ve been pressing on my prostate.

DP#3. AS Paul worked he made low exclamations to himself as if he were discovering something surprising and terrible. He said he was sorry, but my Disease was even worse than he’d suspected. Paul always said that generally, he could just look at somebody and tell if he had The Disease. I only know of one case in which he claimed to have discovered The Disease in a girl and that was likely fictional twice over. By now I’d become pretty well convinced that there actually was A Disease however since other lies I’d heard were nowhere as complete and fleshed out as Paul’s claims. He said I had two of those previously mentioned Pockets in my rectum and there were a lot of other things wrong, but he could help me.

DP#4. Paul said that a major component of the cure for The Disease, was to refrain from having bowel movements for long periods of time. This would strengthen the muscle, which controlled elimination like exercising any other muscle. Paul suggested three days between bowel movements as a reasonable goal. I told him I thought it was unreasonable to expect me to hold on that long at a stretch and this wounded him because of course, he was only trying to help me. He told me I should just do the best I could and could build up from there, adding that he’d know how well I was doing because he could ascertain progress or loss when he Checked me.

DP#5. Paul also said that masturbation was a good way to strengthen other internal muscles, because it was a form of exercise too. He said he’d teach me a better way to masturbate one of these days. (Even though I and several of my close friends had yet to achieve the ability to ejaculate, most of us tried fairly frequently, so as to know when, since this achievement, likely to occur somewhere around one’s 13^th birthday, was a thing of some note, like shaving, voice deepening or a girl’s first period.

DP#6. Paul said that besides Checking, he needed to test urine and stool samples as often as possible. He claimed to possess a chemical of some kind, which revealed the progress of the disease when added to waste material. Besides demanding that I participate in the Checking process whenever he could find a safe spot and a few minutes in which to do it and hounding me about my bowel movements, Paul kept giving me glass bottles which I was to fill up with urine. He also directed me to give him my stools as often as possible, wrapped up in toilet paper, in plastic bags, However I could get them to him, and he must have All of each output, so he could check the structure. There’s some scientific validity in this, but I doubt Paul had anything like the diagnostic skill to which he pretended. I think however that Paul may have invented the bread twister because he came up with a sandwich bag with a pipe cleaner to seal it shut so it would be easier to transport the cargo undetected. My flesh crawls sometimes when I think of how risky it was to provide these samples in an open toilet stall in my cottage and how close I must’ve come to being caught on many occasions. No, I don’t Know what Paul was actually doing with all the samples and I don’t want to know. He would exclaim over these as during the Checking sessions. He told me my urine samples were red with blood and I was excreting veins through my urinary and GI tracts. I was also loosing muscle tissue in my stools. I.E. I was falling apart inside. Soon I’d be a smelly, impotent creature, ready for permanent hospitalization, before I reached Eighth Grade!

DP#7. When all of this seemed just too much and I said perhaps I’d just let the Disease take it’s course and die if that’s what was in store for me, Paul said my testicles wouldn’t develop either and no girl worth anything would have me then. This did scare me because I was very concerned about developing and becoming an adult, even though I thought I might not live out the year. Of course all of this was delivered in a sympathetic, very concerned manner, but no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. The Disease kept getting worse. Paul told me though, that Terry Atwater had cried when he’d tried to check him and wouldn’t let Paul continue. He said Terry might be stronger than me in some ways, but I was much stronger in others and braver too.

Some things were a bit different around the cottage now. Mrs. Petit had taken up the position of Head houseparent for the girl’s cottage. We got a new afternoon houseparent and Mrs. Dunlappe took over as evening houseparent two evenings per week. Mrs. Dunlappe was the night nurse who’d tried the year previous, when I was in the Infirmary, to make me go to the bathroom against my will and ability. She was a very difficult person with whom to deal. I’m not entirely sure what her problems were. She was extremely touchy, demanding, controlling, in some cases, downright scary. She seemed to lay psychological traps for certain of us, and it was very difficult to get through an evening without some sort of scolding from her.

She seemed to have it out for me, even before I was in trouble about Paul. If I ate my salad before my entree, she’d demand "What’s wrong with this dinner!" and shove the plate in front of me. If I ate the entree first, it was "Don’t forget about that salad you know!" She invented table manners I’d never heard of before. I knew I wasn’t supposed to put my elbows on the table but I couldn’t rest my wrists there either.

Mrs. Dunlappe had been working night shift at our cottage since the beginning of the year and even having to deal with her for the first hour in the day was hard enough. One morning when I found myself at the breakfast table, in an effort to make some sort of conversation, I remarked that it must be strange to have to stay up all night then sleep in the daytime. She said, "Just don’t get so sarcastic." I told her earnestly that I hadn’t meant to be sarcastic, but had just meant to sympathized with her. She said "Oh, what was it you said?" I repeated myself then and she made no comment.

Now with Mrs. D. as an evening houseparent, we had to deal with her for four or five hours at a stretch. She wasn’t always nasty but one just never knew what would set her off. Besides, she had a high pitched, querulous, almost eldrich voice which set one’s teeth on edge even when she was being nice. I did learn after a while that she lapped up flattery like a cat at the cream bowl. She was convinced that she did a wonderful thing every day of her life in ministering to the poor, unfortunate Blind and wanted this point recognized in every way possible. If I thanked her for being so nice to us this evening, she puffed up like a balloon and floated off to Seventh Heaven. This made me want to puke all over myself and didn’t do a lot for my self-esteem, but was rather funny.

Mrs. Dunlappe had been a phenomenon at Vancouver sufficiently long that a couple of generations had experienced her. I’ve spoken with a number of other past residents of Vancouver, who generally shared my impressions of Mrs. D. We tended to suspect she might be a Lesbian, perhaps a latent one. She’d been married at some point and had a daughter grown. She always seemed to find her way back to the girl’s cottage for part or all of her work assignments. This was nice for us, but not so much for them, who didn’t like Mrs. Dunlappe any more than we did. She managed to be at her more frequent around cottage Three though, just precisely at the right time to give me the worst time possible and she lost few opportunities to do son

Mrs. Dunlappe was one of those people you really can’t ever talk about quite enough. For devotees of Heidi films, (of which there are surprisingly many versions,) she would be a very nasty Frau Rottenmeyer. I was sure there was something sinister about this woman and said so a good many times. Other houseparents would giggle and "Tsk-tsk." Mrs. Howgan said that the rest of the ladies were becoming jealous because I talked so much more about Mrs. Dunlappe than any of the rest of them. It’s interesting to note that Mrs. D. was eventually fired for locking a boy in a closet as a punishment, then forgetting he was there for most of a day! This wouldn’t happen for several years to come though, so the school continued to enjoy the blessings of her Good Works, though I, thank the Goddess, would be far away.

Since Sixth Grade I’d been watching my nieces from time to time, when Lois and Bruce went out for a late dinner or perhaps a theatre movie. I don’t believe I got paid then and didn’t expect to be but the responsibility was good for me. Deb and Kelly were good kids, though Kelly, my younger niece, could argue like a Jesuit. If I had any problems, which I seldom did, I could always call Ruth Johnson.

Around the beginning of Seventh Grade I believe it was, I discovered that Lois had a rather amazing collection of lingerie. In my house, girls tended to wear white cotton, women, white nylon generally, though sometimes cotton in summer, sometimes net, all unadorned. Now I saw my first bikini-style items and others I didn’t quite know what to call, much of it lace, sewn-on ornamentation, embroidery. I never let my nieces see me, but I tried on a lot of Lois’s things later in the evening when they were asleep and even brought a couple pairs of panties to school with me. I wore them to morning classes sometimes, changing hurriedly at lunch so as not to let out my secret at lunchtime, Gym being always in the afternoon. I don’t quite recall an exact timeline here, but it could be that some of these activities had to do with an effort to regain some control over my own existence. Because of Paul’s ministrations and warnings, I was becoming increasingly more concerned about my developing sexuality. Others would soon do what they could to make me feel even more insecure, but at the same time there seemed to be something correct or appropriate about wearing women’s underwear part of the time. Lois had many pairs, so I didn’t seem to be harming her. I even shared my secret with a few of my friends, including Greg, but not Paul.

Paul said he wanted there to be no secrets between us and he asked me if I’d told him all of the private things I had. I said yes, but kept this corner in reserve.

The homosexuality issue was being raised more and more at school. Paul had told me the word meant "having some guy play with you, but not having a good reason like Checking." He said I should never let anybody play around with me. One Friday evening, Greg and I had tried to have intercourse but neither of us had much idea of what we were doing and it was more embarrassing than anything else. Another one of the schizoid policies of our cottage was that more than one boy could not be in a bedroom during the day without leaving the door sufficiently wide to allow a casual inspection as a houseparent strolled by, but we were allowed sometimes to sleep together. This occurred on Friday or Saturday nights with special permission. A practice also fairly common in the girl’s cottage with results often similar to my slight adventure with Greg.

Even at age 12 though I think I understood there was a difference between boys who experimented once or a few times and someone who made a life practice of having sex with another man. AT no point had anyone suggested to me that there might be anything involving love in man-man physical relationships. Greg and I had joked about two men getting married and taking turns with one of them wearing the dress on alternate days, arguing whose turn it was, but this was only a joke. Homosexuality, even according to Paul, was a filthy thing and not excusable.

I was visiting the Johnson’s one weekend. Bill went to bed early because he habitually rose at around 5:00 A.M. Ruth and I sat up past midnight talking. For some reason, I was describing to her an experience I’d had on a train trip home the previous year. I’d been sitting next to a Canadian man named Barry who seemed generally uninformed. He thought we’d already gone to the moon. He didn’t know how to find a girlfriend. He seemed to think the State School would be rather like a poorhouse out of Charles Dickens.

At one point, Barry asked me if my sister gave me enough to eat when I visited her. I said yes, she did. Then he asked me if she made me do strange things to her. I asked what sort of strange things? "Oh," he said "—like having you rub lotion on her body?" I said, that no, that had never happened and suggested that maybe he had gotten some of his ideas about blind people from story books.

Nothing particularly untoward had happened on the train trip after that and Barry had even come up to Lois and me and given me half a Hershey bar with nuts, he having eaten the other half. Having told the part of the story about Lois and the lotion though, Ruth said "David, I’m going to talk to you like I’d talk to your mom or Lois, okay?" I said of course that was okay. "Do you know what a homosexual is?" Ruth asked.

"I think so--," I said. She explained that this man may have been a homosexual and might be thrilled in some way by talking to a young boy about personal things and though there wasn’t anything wrong with sitting near him on a train, it would be a good idea not to ask such a person to take me to the restroom. This sounded like excellent advice because you wouldn’t want to trust somebody so ignorant of the

Space Program, Canadian or not, let alone the Sister’s Body Issue!

I asked Ruth if I could tell her something which I’d like to have kept private. She said I could tell her anything at all and she would keep it in strictest confidence. I told her some of the story about Paul, a minimum amount about The Disease, his periods of being Out, the Spot, even the trucking company. I did admit that Paul asked for urine samples but didn’t discuss Checking.

Ruth suggested that perhaps Paul was Epileptic and perhaps the pain from a previous injury, when the Spot was pushed, might cause him to come out of a seizure, though she said this was only speculation. I told her that Paul had been saying lately that God was telling him to help me and that we had talked a fair amount about God, which was true. Paul knew I was fairly close to my church and used the God angle as another line of argument to direct my behavior. This would increase as time went on.

Ruth said she really thought I shouldn’t give Paul any more urine but shouldn’t drop him as a friend either. She said she felt that Paul may have constructed this story about a Disease in order to hold onto me as a friend, so if I let him know I wasn’t going to desert him, he might drop the Disease idea. Ruth also offered, very generously, to make an appointment for Paul and me with Dr. Underhill, a long time family Dr. of the Johnson’s and one I’d seen myself on a few occasions. She said that he could talk to us about some of the medical issues Paul was mentioning and being a deeply religious man, he would be glad to let God be in the conversation as well.

I brought this proposal to Paul and asked him if he didn’t think Ruth was being very generous. He said that was nice and maybe we’d go see the Dr. sometime, but not anytime soon. This just wasn’t the time to do that right now.

A number of things were developing at school now. Terry had suddenly ceased being Paul’s friend and was threatening to hit Paul in the Secret Spot. People around school started getting the idea there was "something wrong" with Paul and some of them started targeting him in various ways. Surprisingly enough to me at the time, girls generally seemed to like Paul quite a bit, even if he was a bit strange. I’ve found this to be often true of homosexual men, many of whom are in much demand among women as friends and confidants. But Paul of course, was never homosexual!

One evening a custodian stopped Paul and me walking out of Study Hall together and he walked me back to my cottage with his arm around me, as if I might escape. He delivered me to the houseparent’s room where Mrs. Howgan was waiting for me. I protested being brought home in this manner, under escort. She said, "I don’t want you meeting with Cline." She then sat me down behind closed doors and tried to explain why.

Mrs. Howgan said Paul was a boy with a particular kind of problem- that he was interested in boys in the same way that normal boys were interested in girls. Someday, she said, Paul would overpower me and do to me whatever boys like that did. She added that young men and boys had even been killed because of these sorts of goings-on.

During this time I wasn’t exactly sitting passively. I told her that Paul and I had very important things we needed to do. (I was thinking of The Company and its ongoing war, but didn’t say so, of course.) At one point I yelled at her, it seeming so unfair the way Paul was being maligned. She offered to send me to Mr. Burhow, which backed me down somewhat, but I resolved nonetheless that she wasn’t going to tell me whom I might and might not have as my friend.

I had several more confrontations with Mrs. Howgan about Paul, each time she attempted to explain why he and I must stop spending time together. She started referring to him as "that boy with only one thing on his mind."

Chris Buckley agreed to hang around with Paul and I to show we weren’t doing anything wrong, and so did Greg. Though houseparents were determined to keep Paul and me apart, teachers didn’t seem to care very much one way or the other, at least at first.

The more effort that was made to keep us apart, the more possessive Paul became. On the comparatively rare occasions I got to see Ellen, Paul would show up, demanding that I go off a piece with him, so he could Tell Me Something. The Something would turn into Several Somethings and my time with Ellen would be largely used up. I didn’t particularly like the fresh way in which Paul talked to Ellen, who was glad of any attention. I tried discussing the trucking company with Ellen, and even a bit about The Disease, but there wasn’t that much I felt I could share with her, save that it was personal, which she respected and didn’t pry.

I got quite angry with Paul on the occasion of our next dance in the Gymnasium. I’d been looking forward to this event for a long time. We were there with Chris and Ellen and Paul kept demanding that I go back into the locker room with him, because he had Things he had to tell me. When I said this was really too much, that I was going to spend my party time with Ellen and he should spend his with Chris, Paul played his trump card and said he was getting sick and tired of all the trouble around here and was going to kill himself after the dance. So, I had to go into the locker room with him and beg him not to take his own life—or thought I had too.

I couldn’t tell anyone around school about Paul’s problems, nobody in authority. Paul had been to Drs before he told me and they’d hurt him terribly with their instruments and probes. In fact, that was the whole idea of his wanting to help me with The Disease, to save me from undergoing all of the pain and trouble he’d endured!

A number of other things kept happening as well, which had the effect of pulling me ever deeper into the web. There was supposed to be a Braillewriter down in Lubbock Texas, where Company Headquarters were, and several of the drivers had learned Braille. Learning the basic alphabet and some punctuation isn’t really all that hard and that’s all Paul had ever learned. I started getting letters from various truckers and even from Mr. Hewath himself. They were interesting letters, in different writing voices and with different mannerisms in writing, spelling and grammar. Some of the letters were from Mexican men, some from Navajos. Some of them spoke more or less like me, but with a Texas lexicon, I.e. howdy, vamoose, Pardner, plumb full, old buddy.....

There was Mack Davis, a six-foot-six giant, reputedly the best fighter we had. There was Cecil Tucker, who agreed to read my most recent manuscript and gave me advice about Ellen, telling me not to pay attention to what my mother had to say. Manuel Lopez told me in his often-hilarious Mexican spelling and sentence structure, that he was my good buddy-amigo and how happy he was to be working with somebody like me. Fairly early on, I’d become a partner in The Company. I had many other new friends as well.

Robert Heath wrote that he was very happy that I could help Paul, because he knew Paul hadn’t been feeling well and he needed a friend like me. He said he loved all of the things I’d been doing for Paul’s company and for his own as well.

This last was probably most significant. Since the time I’d designed the cannon, I’d kept up a more or less steady stream of weapons ideas for my trucker friends to use; small solid-fuelled rockets for bombardment, plans for a James Bond-like car with an arsenal of arms and defenses, nasty types of ammunition to be fired out of shotguns, tiny hideout knives which could be hidden anywhere yet were heavy enough to throw. Never mind that in much I suggested I had no clear idea of what I was talking about. My friends in Texas and New Mexico kept exclaiming over what I’d done and called for more. Even when Paul got sick of a subject, I could generally find an ally among the truckers.

In trying to evaluate what made Paul tick, for all of these things Paul had told me were very real to me at the time, and Paul himself was certainly no figment of my imagination, (too many other people saw and spoke with him,) I’ve considered that he may have been a multiple personality. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Paul was hurt a great deal by a cruel father in his early years and was only able to escape that man’s ferocity when his parents divorced. His mother remarried with a Mexican man named Brito. There evidently was still some custody conflict over Paul when I met him. Mr. Cline evidently wanted Paul as unpaid labor on his Michigan farm and Paul was quite emphatic that he did not want to go there.

Though preferred to live with his mother to his dad, he seemed to despise her as well. I never did meet Mrs. Brito, but spoke to her once on the phone when I’d called to speak with Paul. She evidently took a rather immediate dislike to me. I don’t know if she was truly evil, or if Paul had simply pushed her as far as a mother could be pushed. I’d hear a lot about her supposed cruelties in the next year or so. For now, Mrs. Brito decided that I sounded like a girl and a boy who sounded like a girl never amounted to anything according to a TV show she’d seen, or so Paul relayed to me.

Though Paul could ingratiate himself to most females, he thought and spoke of women and girls as if they were essentially stupid, trivial and irritating individuals whose opinions and wants really didn’t matter much. At the same time, a number of girls, including Chris, were shelling out money to Paul on a regular basis, to help him buy cigarettes, (possibly disguised as medicine.)

Paul also relieved me of any extra spending money I might have whenever he discovered I had any. Once I told him I really wanted some money for myself, just for a change he retreated into his wounded dignity, then pointedly asked Greg to lend him some money, saying that for some reason I was unable to help him.

Paul manufactured a story a day or so later, that he’d been put in jail for something or other while he’d been off campus and had only been released on condition that he bring in $2.00 of a fine he was supposed to pay. (Smoke I’m sure) but I gave him a dollar and a dime, all I had left and apologized for not having more. With Paul, all authorities lied and there were always things going on "that they’re not telling you," so his stories were difficult to check.

Eventually Paul let it slip that his company hauled liquid oxygen as well as uranium and other tantalizing material. He also had a connection with the White Sands Proving Ground near Roswell, New Mexico. Supposedly he was able to negotiate 14 acres of test range from which I might launch rockets, for six years, with an option to renew. He also told me he’d been able to buy a scrapped Titan booster and I’d be able to start building a moon rocket, Galileo style, a la Heinlein!

Meanwhile, things were getting even weirder on the home front. Paul’s periods of being Out, that altered state into which he went, became more frequent and longer each time. He began mistaking me for persons he claimed to have known, Cecil Tucker; another driver named Tiny Burlson and once a hooker he said he'd met. This last may have been a joke, though Paul never indicated that. Sometimes he acted as if he didn’t recognize me at all and had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned things we did together. He always seemed to come around though in time for the next Checking session.

I’ve said that a multiple personality disorder might explain Paul’s bizarre behaviors, but from what I’ve been able to find out from experts, Paul’s personality was too tenacious and purposeful to fit the standard profile of M.P.D. even though many such persons come from extremely abusive backgrounds.

Paul was I believe, and for whatever reason, actually in a great deal of pain most or all of the time. He often leaned on me, when we walked, which others interpreted as cuddling. He’d cry out to me sometimes before Gym or swimming and say he couldn’t move, so sometimes I’d stay behind in the locker room with him and try to help. Paul would lie on the dressing bench for a time until he could get up enough energy to get up again. There wasn’t much I could do, but I was afraid he was going to die and I cared about Paul. Of course it got back to the cottage that I’d been skipping Gym, though interestingly enough, the locker room was never checked while he and I were alone in there.

According to Paul, the hurting came from the Glovers, those enemy truckers who’d beaten him up, stabbed him, worked him over right in his own room in the cottage. Supposedly Paul had gotten a gun from our friends but he said Mr. Gustavsen, the head houseparent in his cottage, had found out about it and locked it up in his cabinet safe.

While all of this was going on, life continued to happen around school. My age/class group had three dances that year, two in our cottage, one in Cottage Two. I wasn’t allowed to take Ellen to any of them, of course, but all three times I had dates, once by my invitation, twice by the girl’s.

I was turning out as many school assignments and more, as in the previous year but I can recall very little of what I did academically the second half of Seventh Grade. I remember writing a report on Bohemia and another on Viet Nam, (excluding the war,) but not much else. It seemed most of my free time was consumed answering the letters from Paul and all of the other personalities which were writing to me. The news from Texas became worse and worse and each morning I was flooded by more messages which must be read. In order to get through all of them, I often put myself in potential peril by reading these missives on my lap or in my desk, not even bothering to keep my place in the text book incase called upon to read, something I hadn’t done since Third Grade.

Terry and I became bitter enemies again. He beat the hell out of me in Wrestling Class with the teacher and the whole class watching (it was a challenge match, which I could not honorably refuse.) After the match ended, Mr. Anderson said "David I think you’re a real good wrestler." It was obviously sarcastic.

"Do you really think so?" I said as if his tone had been lost on me.

Terry beat me up on another occasion because I’d been three times, found talking with Lana, who was his girlfriend, but was a friend of mine as well. I couldn’t see Ellen hardly at all anymore and I wanted girls with whom to talk. Lana and I talked this over at some length and agreed that Terry was being an ass. Terry did apologize after a couple of days, but that wasn’t the end of my trouble with him.

One evening after recreational PE. Terry and Jim Eccles stalked me through the Gym after everyone else had left, threatening mayhem if they caught me. I managed to give them the slip and Stanley McGovern told me what they’d been saying about me in the locker room a while before they went searching for me. Since Both Jim and Terry were Totals, I was able to evade them until they finally left the building, at which point Paul appeared as if out of nowhere, having obviously witnessed what had been happening to me. In spite of his big talk about loyalty and caring for one another, he hadn’t helped me.

Paul had been talking to his mom and step-dad about me and asked if I could come spend the weekend with him sometime. Mrs. Brito wrote me a letter saying they had no spare accommodations at this point and it wouldn’t be convenient for me to visit just now, but she was glad Paul and I were friends.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Dunlappe received the letter, read it to me, but wouldn’t let me have it. All of the other houseparents, as well as the superintendent read it.

Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Howgan caught Paul and I together up by the school building, (mercifully after Paul had completed his Ministrations,) and took me to see Miss Beckman, the head of Houseparents. Miss Beckman asked me why I’d defied my houseparents by going to see Paul yet again? I said I’d been trying to talk him out of running away from school, which he’d been promising to do, again. She said, "Well, you didn’t have any luck at all, did you?" I said that yes, I’d convinced him to stay, which made her very angry and she said it would be a good thing for Paul to run away from school, he was too much trouble to begin with, which, I suspect others would have endorsed.

Then Miss Beckman proceeded to rehearse a string of other misdeeds with which I’d been involved. I’d dared to bring Paul to church with me and had forced the school bus driver, Dick, a man who’d liked me, had said "Good morning Professor," every time I’d boarded the bus, (until recently,) to stop two boys from acting like lovers on the Sunday school run.

As pressure had steadily built for Paul and I to disassociate, I’d wracked my brain for legitimate ways for he and I to be legitimately together. Paul was always vowing to commit suicide if he couldn’t see me. My Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Oline, had said Paul would be welcome in her class, even if he was older. I valued my Sunday school lessons very much and was eager to share this with Paul. As for us behaving like lovers, I really don’t know from where that came. So far as I remember, we were sitting like two normal passengers on a bus. Perhaps Paul was casting puppy dog glances at me or perhaps I looked too girlish! Whichever way, Church stopped for Paul.

"Why don’t you sit with Ellen?" Miss Beckman demanded, (with great sarcasm, "At least she’s a Girl!" This made me absolutely furious. If Ellen and I have been allowed some privacy for the very nice relationship we’d once had, we could have enjoyed riding to church together, though she was Catholic and I Lutheran. But the School Authorities just couldn’t have that. Mrs. Osland, not even Ellen’s teacher, had taken Ellen aside and filled her up with a lot of vicious propaganda against me as well as Paul. She may have been correct about Paul being a dangerous influence. I’d hardly quarrel with that now, but I never perceived myself to be a homosexual and I’d tried to shield Ellen from the ugly things that were going on around me. (Why in the world would anyone concerned about someone turning me homosexual, do her best to drive away from me my most valued female companion?)

For her part, Ellen had felt threatened by this encounter with one of our more strident teachers and became resentful of me. I saw the school faculty wouldn’t be satisfied until every dirty story possible had been told about me and Paul and that Ellen would be hurt even more. I don’t wish to put too fine a point on it but I was weary of being besieged from so many directions. I did care about Ellen, then and later. I basically picked a fight with Ellen at the next opportunity. I think she was talking to someone else when we were supposed to spend time together, so I asked her if she wanted to break up. She said she didn’t care, so I said, "Okay, we’re not going together anymore."

I said now to Miss Beckman, "We broke up about a month ago."

She said, "You have?" Mrs. Howgan evinced surprise though I’d announced Ellen and my ending spat at the dinner table. Miss Beckman said, "Keep it broke up."

Then she went even further, as if enough evil hadn’t already come out of her vicious mouth, "When you came here, two-three years ago everybody was making such a fuss over you and you were supposed to be so good. Well, we find you’re nothing special at all!" I guess she was referring to Mrs. Osland’s praise of my reading ability back in Chapter Ten. Miss Beckman had driven Mom and me to our hotel after my first day of visiting at the school back at the end of Fourth Grade and I’d thanked her especially for the ride.

As Mrs. Howgan and I walked back to my cottage, with her explaining that Miss Beckman knew even more about homosexuals than she did herself, I realized that I needed not to act tough, but to act smart. Viciousness must be met with cunning.

Mrs. Howgan called me into her office later that day to receive my punishment. I was restricted to campus until further notice, which wasn’t that big a deal. I was not to loiter around Cottage Four, where Paul lived, or go to the store there, for two weeks. I said I’d been thinking things over and I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be hanging around "Cline" anymore. Mrs. Howgan was notably relieved and I put on a great show of being carefree, having made a clean breast of everything.

I told Paul what I’d said to Mrs. Howgan. Most of the teachers still weren’t watching us very carefully so we had plenty of chance to talk, at least a few minutes here and there. Paul was angry but I told him if we didn’t play it smart, we were going to get him kicked out of school. Mr. Burhow had threatened him a number of times by Paul’s own admission.

About now, Mrs. Dunlappe came on center stage. I’d lost my Braille watch in the Gym and asked her if I could go over and look for it after dinner. She said no in a knee-jerk fashion, then asked if I was "perchance going over to see Paul?" This while standing in the rec. room in front of much of the cottage population. I said no, I wasn’t and meant it. She demanded to know what was under my coat. (In attempting to fix the zipper one night she had pulled the tab off so I couldn’t zip it at all and had to hold the coat closed with my hand.) I threw it open to show there was nothing hidden there.

"Shall I go with you?" she asked. I said that was okay with me. "You’d better bring it back with you!" she warned. I told her I was Looking For The Watch, but wasn’t sure where it was. In the end I went, by myself, didn’t see Paul, didn’t find the watch.

The watch had been lost once before and had been found by Danny Parker, a cowardly bully from Cottage four who enjoyed making life miserable for younger boys. He’d found my watch on that occasion, given me a snotty lecture about taking care of my things and said that he’d give it back to me this time, "But if I find it again where it doesn’t belong, I’ll have lots of fun jumping up and down on it!" I never saw the watch again after it disappeared the second time.

Mrs. Dunlappe began harassing me more than usual, yelling at me each time I left the cottage that I was not to be meeting with Paul. If I was in Greg’s room, she’d come in to ask if I was supposed to be in there. Greg outweighed me by 25 pounds or so and could easily have thrown me out!

When I passed Paul in the vicinity of our cottages, I ignored him, which he couldn’t accept and kept shouting messages to me and things I should tell my houseparents. We met clandestinely in the halls and relied increasingly on notes. These notes were becoming more and more important, at least to me, for two basic reasons. For one thing, I’d been recently getting letters attributed to the Homer Glover Co. They had begun as threat letters but I addressed a response to them, addressed

To the member of the Homer Glover Co.

Sirs;

You are Goddamn sons of bitches and have my permission to go to hell. I went on in that vein for a couple of pages, applying every insult I could contrive. After that, they started writing me conciliatory letters, begging me to work with them. Paul was a homosexual and would rape me. The guys who said they were my friends were no good, just a bunch of crooks. With Paul’s agreement I began functioning as a secret agent for my side, exchanging letters with them as if I was one of them and feeding dummy information. Soon thereafter, I started getting letters from the Glovers, telling of the deaths of various drivers I’d thought I’d known and had cared for.

First there’d been Ken; A driver whose truck had supposedly blown up as it was crossing the Portland Bridge. I wrote a funeral service for Ken, based on the Book Of Job. The Lord giveth, The Lord taketh away.

Next, it was a triple murder, Jerry Johnston, Juan Tega and Speedy Clatt. All three were killed gruesomely, the details related with great relish by the Glovers. Paul and I had cried over that letter. This war was taking on an even more sinister character and however deluded I was, I went to bed each night, believing I held men’s lives in my hands and had been partially responsible for several deaths.

Even if this whole grim business turned out to be some monstrous joke, I’d conducted myself as one intending to cause the loss of human life, however evil I might believe the Glovers to be. If all of this were true, now I had several friends dead. And the killings went on.

As Paul began even more ill, or so he claimed to be, I was corresponding more and more with the truckers who were supposedly making runs up from Texas to spend a week or more at a time in Vancouver, giving assistance to Paul for a week or more at a time before being relieved by one or more replacement drivers. They kept asking me for direction on various matters. What should they do about Glovers hanging around? What should they do about Paul being beaten up? How should they deal with police who were growing suspicious of our operations? They never seemed to do what I told them, but Cecil Tucker and Paul’s blood brother Albert Secitaro supposedly died as well and Manuel Lopez was gravely injured.

One day I got a different sort of letter, claiming to be from the daughter of the Chief of the Navajo Tribe, Catanai or Pretty Flower. She said she’d dreamed about me and was sure we were intended for one another. She and I began a romantic correspondence, which I shared with Christine Buckley. By now we were in Wood Shop together. I was making a pig-shaped cutting board for Mom. Again I had a girlfriend. Paul told me a great deal about Catanai whom he said he’d known for years and had even taught her English. She said she’d learned Braille in order to write me.

Paul and I rode the train together to Seattle where his family lived as well as Lois’s. Once we got away from school there wasn’t much of anyone to keep us under surveillance, so we spent time in restrooms, smoking cigarettes and doing the other things we’d been doing since January. I met his step-dad and introduced Paul to Lois. She said she thought Paul looked like a nice enough kid and we talked by phone several times during the three-day weekend we were at home.

Lois and Mrs. Brito had spoken on the phone two or three times by now and she’d told Lois that Paul operated on the level of a twelve or thirteen-year-old child. She said though, that Paul did write to presidents of trucking companies and got answers back.

This was the time Paul’s mom got the idea I was feminine. My voice wasn’t any higher than most boys my age, but I spoke fairly formally and was sometimes called Ma’am by telephone operators. Mrs. Brito had been aware for some time of the suspicions regarding Paul’s sexuality and had denied this staunchly. So far, this cloud over the relationship between Paul and I had yet to be revealed to my family.

I continued to write to Catanai. Paul went through another spate of threatening to kill himself and now the cure for that was I must become a Navajo like he supposedly was. (Paul had no natural Native inheritance of which I’m aware, but claimed to have been initiated into the tribe. So I went through some initiation rituals too. I wore bands of cloth around my ankles, under my socks where they wouldn’t show. Paul said I should have them on my wrists too and the bands should be leather, but we had to work with what we had and he knew the school wouldn’t allow me to wear anything that showed. The bands supposedly had Navajo hieroglyphs painted on them. I have no idea whether they did or not.

Our track team sometimes bussed over to the School for the Deaf, which had a bigger track, which was graveled. Ours was only grass and a mere eighth-mile around. One afternoon I fell hard, embedding gravel in my knees, left elbow and forehead. When Mrs. Dunlappe saw my bloody wounds, she said, "Did you see anybody?" After dinner, she sent me up to the nurse, who shaved away a bit of my hair and painted the abrasion on my head. (I never even showed her my knees.)

Later, after Study Hall, Paul gave me a letter that said he’d tripped me on purpose as part of my Navajo initiation, since each brave must learn to deal with pain. I’d done well, he said but still there was some reason he’d decided he was no good and needed to go to Texas by himself. He would be leaving tomorrow. I entreated with him to stay but he would only agree that I could come to meet him tomorrow and say good-bye.

I gathered up my most prized possessions next evening, bade good-bye to Greg then went to find Paul. I told Paul I’d go with him. He said I couldn’t. I asked him why and he said the war had gotten too big and ugly for a young fellow like me and I needed a chance to be a kid. I said my girlfriend in New Mexico needed me to be with her. He said she’d understand.

By now I was crying. Paul walked away, his transistor radio playing Country KWJJ, The top gun in Portland.

Danny Parker, the bully I suspected of smashing my watch, having seen Paul and me together, came up and started chanting "Homosexual." I told him he’d better leave me alone. He started making little irritating slaps at my face, not hurting me, but I was already hurting. I pulled my knife and screamed I’d cut his throat if he didn’t go away! Danny went lumbering off, oozing evil like a garden slug leaving its silvery trace.

I met Danny Parker, (now calling himself Daniel) when I was a senior at The University Of Washington. He was as arrogant and obnoxious as ever, but was now a Born again Christian and a Hebrew Major. It’s mean spirited of me to say probably, but Danny Parker is one of those people who tend to lower one’s overall opinion of Christians generally. He claimed to have no memory of ever meeting me before.

After Paul’s departure I went back to my room and stood there with a knife against my breast, thinking how nice it would seem to have an end to all this. I don’t know that I really wanted to die, and my religious training warned that suicide was a sure trip to Hell. I’m relating this to show just how ill I had become. It was the occasion of our second cottage dance. A girl named Cathy Harrang had asked me this time and I’d all but forgotten about it, until a houseparent came to my door, saying my date was waiting for me.

I’d looked forward to going back to camp Magruder again this year, as an opportunity to have fun times with Ellen. Now she and I weren’t an item anymore and Paul was sounding off about not wanting us to go to camp and maybe he’d do himself in because of it. He’d supposedly been brought back from that Departure of his, which had come close to making me suicidal, following a moviesque chase through Oregon and California, with Paul at the wheel of one of his diesels. (I had no evidence whatever to indicate that he’d ever left Vancouver.)

Finally Paul consented to go to camp, if we’d be in the same cabin. I obviously had no control over that, but said we would be.

As part of my rocketry program, I’d asked for a quantity of mercury to be purchased for use as reaction mass in the atomic rocket I intended to build. At the pre-camp assembly, the day before we’d all be leaving for Magruder, Paul told me that Pretty Flower was dying, along with his own girlfriend and several other Navajo women. They had swallowed mercury.

This, in a way, was my fault, since I’d asked for the stuff in the first place, but our Company colors happened to be red, white, blue and silver. Pretty Flower thought it would be a loving gesture to weave me a blanket and dye it silver. Unfortunately, Navajo women tasted the dyes they intended to use before applying them to the wool. (This was an assertion Paul made, and hasn’t been verified elsewhere.) Now my beloved one was dying.

I spent the evening finding out what I could about mercury poisoning from the Encyclopedia, learning basically that the white of an egg should be administered if mercury was swallowed, then a Dr. should be brought as soon as possible. I figured castor Oil wouldn’t hurt either. I got the information to Paul and told him to have a Dr. brought to the Reservation. This idea seemed not to have occurred to anyone, since Drs. did more evil than good.

In the morning, Paul sent me a packet of papers by way of Greg, who was making after breakfast visits to the nurse just then. The packet contained several letters, among them a plaintive goodbye from Pretty Flower, apologizing for drinking "the silver water" and asking me not to be upset about her death. She said I’d find somebody else.

Of course, I was devastated and remained so for weeks. I was twelve and she was very real to me at the time. I could only share my pain with Greg, Chris Buckley and Paul himself, since I wasn’t supposed to be having contact with Paul, how could I explain any letters received through him? I also had to go through four miserable days at camp; (they’d thrown in an extra one this year.)

They’d also opened up a small cabin in addition to the usual boy’s bunkhouse. I was assigned to this Extra Residence. Paul was not. Paul kept chanting that he’d gotten a bottle of mercury from the science lab and it was "real heavy." He wondered what it tasted like.

Already beside myself, I told him not to do such a terrible thing to himself. He said his people had died that way. He thought he should as well. Later announced he wouldn’t have to carry that heavy bottle around anymore, because he’d gotten it all inside him.

Over the next few hours, while trying to appear as if we weren’t hanging around with each other, I begged Paul to eat an egg at breakfast, next morning! This was all I could think of to do. Finally he agreed and all the next day, he kept claiming he was passing silver-colored excretions each time he went to the bathroom. Of course if anyone had really ingested an entire pint of mercury, he’d have died almost instantly. A funny thing about The Disease though, while killing you in several vicious ways at once, it protected you from more mundane things. That’s how it worked for Paul at least, though it never seemed to protect me from much of anything.

Houseparents and teachers were taking turns holding me by the hand so I couldn’t "wander off with Paul." Paul kept imposing himself at every opportunity. Mr. Anderson grabbed me by the collar at one point and removed me to a different part of the rec.-room from where Paul was. Mr. Olson held Pal and I up in front of the population of the boys’ cabins before breakfast the second morning and asked Paul if he could afford a marriage license for us. At the final campfire each year, the couples were named who’d been selected the greatest camp lovers that year. This year, Paul and my initials were whispered about.

I’d been on a supply committee to help prepare for the camp trip this year and had since last year been promoted to a faster hiking group. I won a rowboat race and a mule-riding race as well. I wasn’t doing all that badly, except for Paul’s presence and the bombshell he’d dropped right before we left school.

As a write this, I am feeling such anger at myself for not on a hundred different occasions, seeing through Paul and exorcising him from my life right there and then. Everything seemed to make perfect sense at the time though and like many an abused wife has said over and over; "I loved him." I truly cared about Paul and in a twisted way I believe he cared a great deal for me and was terrified of losing me.

Astoundingly enough, my family had yet no inkling of all this. I believe things would have remained so, but for one small slip. Though the school had threatened to talk to my parents, they didn’t much relish sharing authority and would generally involve parents only as a last resort.

Things did change rather suddenly on the next going-home-weekend after we returned from camp. On the drive from the train to Mercer Island, where the Browns now resided, Lois told me she’d been talking with Paul’s mom again and she’d mentioned that Paul had recently written a letter home in which he said He’d not been seeing much of me lately. Lois wanted to know why that should be. I tried to put her off but she kept insisting. Was there something about Paul that caused the authorities to want to keep me away from him? Finally, when it was clear that I wasn’t getting away without providing some kind of answer, I said, "Well, he’s supposed to be a homosexual."

Lois was taken aback since she had no idea I even knew a term like that. She asked if Paul had told me that he was and how did I know what that was? I said Paul had told me what the word meant, but had said definitely that he was not homosexual.

That subject occupied the rest of the weekend, with Bruce holding forth at considerable length on the subject of homosexuals, (using the term Homo, which I still despise.) Even Ruth Johnson, when we visited her on Saturday afternoon, said "Davy, Paul is something called a homosexual, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be his friend anymore. Your Mamma could take the two of you to the beach or something and you could play together there, but you shouldn’t be alone with him." This was the most enlightened comment on the subject I’d yet had, but I knew full well what Paul would say to full time supervision of our activities and whose fault it would be.

Uncle Bill said simply, "This is a bad business, Son. You don’t want to have anything to do with this."

When I’d discuss the matter of Paul with Ruth on that other occasion, she had promised to keep the whole thing in confidence and she’d kept her word, which rather surprised but impressed me. Other adults in my experience, treated promises to children as something to be set aside when convenient, for the best of reasons of course.

The Disease got mentioned and Lois naturally wanted to know about this too. I basically got by with saying that Paul took some sort of medication for his condition, which seemed to have something to do with his heart. She warned me not to take any of his medicine myself. Paul had been giving me medicine from almost the beginning, in order to help me strengthen the muscles which The Disease liked to attack. They came in a glass bottle and were tiny pills, apt to crumble if they were shaken up too much. They contained a Navajo root of some such. I took my medicine faithfully and would sometimes give them to Paul at his request to help him when he was feeling badly.

Many years later I learned at last what this medicine actually was. I was in my fifth year of college and was taking tea with the woman I would later marry, and her roommate in the dormitory where we all lived. Lenore’s roommate, June, offered me a saccharine tablet to sweeten the tea. For the hell of it, I popped the tiny pill into my mouth and for the first time in more than a decade; I tasted the sweetish, baking soda like flavor of The Medicine which Paul had given me by the bottleful, directing me to take two tablets every four hours.

As the weekend progressed, stories about the ill treatment Paul and I had been receiving began to come out, particularly Mrs. Dunlappe yelling at me about my trip to the Gym after my watch and Mr. Olson’s asking about our marriage. Lois promised she’d call Mom and Dad and see what could be done for us. She did so and I believe Mom took careful notes, but something was lost in the translation.

Monday morning I was called from class, over to Mr. Burhow’s office. I found him convened with Miss Beckman and Mr. Donaldson, the Principal. Mr. Burhow reviewed my history at the school when I’d arrived, how long I’d been here and so forth, as if I were undergoing some sort of application process. Then he said "The reason we had you come over here today---" and I said

"Yes?" He proceeded to relate a quite dramatic version of what I’d told Lois. His narrative, cross examination, recapitulation and Translation, took quite some time, but the meat of it all was to the effect that some errors had been made in reporting what had actually occurred at school. He capitalized on these errors to discredit virtually everything I had to say.

Lois had somehow gotten the idea that I’d been taking a shower at One o’clock in the morning! when Mrs. Dunlappe had first started yelling me about meeting Paul. Lois might have confused the Watch Incident with the time I’d fallen on the track and had showered off in the Gym (as usual) before returning to the cottage to be interrogated about "seeing somebody." "Essentially, Mrs. Dunlappe had yelled at me, on a number of occasions, in front of a cottage full of other kids, the time of day of my degree of wetness notwithstanding. But Mr. Burhow kept harping on the discrepancies of time and place in order to make the point that I appeared to have been exaggerating.

As for Mr. Olson’s nasty remarks about Paul and me, Lois had evidently reported them as having occurred in a classroom. They hadn’t at least the one I related to Lois. They’d been uttered in a fresh-air Venue at camp, but again the mistaken locale was used to discredit me. Miss Beckman took over then and attacked me once more for presuming to help Paul, when I had no business doing so. The woman obviously had a personal vendetta. Mr. Donaldson actually said very little.

Mr. Burhow said "You caused all of this trouble for yourself then when things get a little rough you scream like a chicken." I said I had not. He reiterated "You screamed like a Chicken!"

Next he launched into more undermining of my character and Paul’s. Why was I so stubborn about being with Paul? "Don’t you know he’s using you for a Girl?" (I’ve drawn some applause in feminist circles once or twice, by pointing out that the real problem is, we treat girls like Girls.)

The upshot of the conversation was that I would return after lunch and together, Mr. Burhow and I would call my mother. In the meantime I was leaving Miss Beckman with the very unpleasant task of having to tell Mrs. Dunlappe that she might have been a little careless in addressing me, in spite of what I had been doing these last few months. Mr. Donaldson had a similarly unpleasant job in saying essentially the same to Mr. Olson.

We did meet after lunch and since Mr. Burhow was controlling the phone, it was his interpretation of events, which actually reached Mom. She asked me reasonably enough, if I understood what a homosexual was. Then she said she wanted me to stay away from Paul. She didn’t have time to deal with this sort of thing. She asked me if I wanted to come home right now. I said I did not. Even if I could pass to Eighth Grade, which Mr. Burhow said I could, I was sure that missing six or seven weeks of school wouldn’t help me next year. Besides, I didn’t want to run away either.

Mr. Burhow and I met one more time that day to wrap things up. I told him I hadn’t said anything at all to my family until Lois had forced me to talk. I hadn’t intended to scream, like a chicken or in any other fashion. He said, "Oh, you know these women. When they want to find something out, they can get pretty hysterical." I damned near puked on him!

So it was that I gained my reputation as the kid who was sent to the Superintendent’s office three times in one day! Mrs. Dunlappe and Mr. Olson were both Talked To by their superiors. Now Mrs. Dunlappe was whispering her venom in my ear instead of shouting it across the cottage. Mr. Olson was now subjecting me to punishment exercises. Forcing the whole class to run until I could overtake everyone and get to the head of the file, jerking my legs out behind me when I was doing squat thrusts, so I’d slam on the ground.

Since my evenings were so taken up by clandestine meetings as well as the incessant reading and writing of letters to and from my multitude of friends and enemies, I’d fallen into the habit of doing my spelling and grammar exercises after lunch before afternoon classes. This day, Mr. Burhow had so truncated my lunch hour with the phone call to Mom, that I’d had time only to answer three or four questions on my English assignment and they were jotted down most hurriedly.

Of course this would have to be the day on which Mrs. Barns would tell us to exchange our papers for correction. Mine was found very much wanting. Mrs. Barns asked me to walk outside with her. Our classroom that year had an outer door that opened onto a patio. She closed the door and said to me, now out of the hearing of others, "It’s hard when people are saying things about you that aren’t true, but you can’t let your assignments suffer for it, can you?" I agreed that no, I couldn’t. "Then let’s not do this again," she said and led me back to class. (I will always love Mrs. Barns.)

For our final dance of the year a sweet girl named Elizabeth Butterfield asked me to be her date. I don’t know how it happened that the girls got to ask, though the dance was in our cottage, but never mind that! Elizabeth was a year or so younger than me. We danced most of the evening together. She liked the feel of my Banlon shirt and thought I was nice too. I felt the same about her. I wasn’t in love with Elizabeth but knew myself to be fortunate to have a person like her just for a friend.

Somehow, Paul and I were still staying in touch. He was being attacked almost daily by The Glovers. One evening I heard pounding on the fire door at the back of the cottage and a voice demanding "Open up!" I raised my finger in salute, there being a window in the door, and went to check my weapons; a broken meat cleaver, a scout knife and a wrench Paul’d stolen from somewhere.

Another theory that offers itself in partial explanation of Paul’s behavior, is drugs. We knew very little even about marijuana in those days, but perhaps Paul was an early addict of something even more powerful. I have good evidence that he did drugs later on. I can’t say with any confidence exactly what he was doing at the time. He was subject to frequent vomiting, sometimes self-induced. Food never seemed to sit well on his stomach. He smoked whenever he could. He fell asleep in gym all of the time or retreated into one of his trances. His letters were becoming even more garbled and fantastic. Articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, vehicles, especially trucks, talked to him. He claimed a pair of pants urinated on his bed. Cigarettes spoke to him in Spanish. (scary nonsense? Sure, but look what I’d already experienced!)

I continued to be watched. For a while, I went around with a thumb crammed in my mouth, saying that if I was being treated like a baby, I’d better act like one. Mrs. Howgan said, "We’ll change your diapers any time now."

Paul asked, "If you act like a child, should I act like a Homo?"

At last it happened! I received proof that I was mature, at least in that particular way. I told Paul that my testicles were developing after all, and he said that Maybe they were. Then he said he’d just as soon I didn’t tell anybody about this. I told him I’d tell whom I pleased and had already told Greg and Terry.

Since early on in our friendship, Paul had been asking me to give him keepsakes to keep by him when I wasn’t around. First there had been a comb holder I’d made from a leather-working kit and he gave me a Mexican Peso. Then he wanted a pair of socks. Then it was a T-shirt, then various of the drivers wanted items too. Then it was an outer shirt. Pretty soon Paul wanted a pair of pants, then he wanted specifically a pair of blue jeans. I was running out of stuff, so I gave one of the drivers a pair of under shorts, mostly as a joke, and others had wanted shorts as well. All in all I must’ve given away more than half my clothing. I was feeling like Little Black Sambo among the tigers!

One evening, about three weeks before school let out, Paul was demanding another pair of shorts for some reason or other and I brought them to Study Hall with me. Paul met me in the corridor of the school building and I passed the shorts over, my hand to his, and directly into his pocket. Suddenly, two men were upon us, the custodian who’d walked me back to my cottage on the occasion of my first tiff with Mrs. Howgan and Mr. Kister, the groundskeeper. "What did he give you to put in your pocket?" Mr. Royal, the Custodian demanded.

"Just pictures," Paul said, pulling out a book of snapshots he’d taken of me and compiled. I went to study hall. Paul was taken to his cottage.

Paul spent the next day confined to his room and was on the afternoon train to Seattle. Earl Writsma, who’d been my friend, but lately, was among those who suggested Paul and I just get married and have done with it. He told me in the morning, that he and Paul had been good friends for a long time and he’d be glad to bring any messages to Paul that I’d like to send. He did this too and brought replies back to class at recess and Lunch. Most of the messages I received were from Mack Davis, telling me I shouldn’t ever have started ignoring Paul to keep myself out of trouble, because he’d been terribly hurt and I’d better tell my sister The Truth! (About what?) I wondered why, if Paul were so rich and powerful and Mack and his K.W. diesel were on the scene, close enough to send me letters, why couldn’t the three of them just roar off to Texas! Surely though, there’d be some good reason why Paul had to go to Seattle first.

In writing this autobiography, I’ve tried hard to stay within length limits for each chapter. I’m straining considerably with this one. I haven’t related more than half of the things that passed between Paul and me and the congregations of phantom truckers, nor of what happened at school and elsewhere during the six months or so since Paul and I had met. I’ve also neglected some humorous occurrences which didn’t involve Paul, such as the time Mike Green farted and drove Mrs. Howgan, who was bothering us at the time, clear out of the room! Then there was the time I slipped Mrs. Barns a surprise noisemaker composed of a bobby-pin, a rubber band and a button, wound up in an envelope and sounding like a rattlesnake when opened. She slapped me on the butt and danced me all over the room, laughing her head off. I haven’t told about the fun sword fights boys in my cottage had with coat hanger swords, or even about most of the boys in our cottage.

There are a couple of things worth relating, which happened in the time between Paul’s departure and the end of school. In the last letter Paul wrote to me that day, he asked me to take care of Chris. I wrote back and said I would. Chris and I had a fair amount of time together those last few weeks.

The Lions Club did indeed reward our school for the tour the group had taken the previous year, (in association with the preparation for which, if indirectly, my nose had been injured.) The Moses Lake Lions had this year, presented our school with a brand new school bus to do the bulk of transporting on trips and short hops around town. We named the new bus Chief Moses and put on a thank you assembly to honor the Chapter, which had gifted us. Thirty-four years later, I felt particularly called upon to speak publicly concerning this presentation. I’d moved by now, via many other places, to Moses Lake. I’d been invited to address this very same chapter, now peopled by a new generation of men and a few women. I told them in my introduction about the presentation and Chris and my Shenanigans on the way back from Sunday school, as well as other adventures we had. Then I said "It’s taken me a while to get over here, but hey, thanks for the bus, guys!"" This drew applause and laughter and I found to my delight, that two or three members still remained who’d helped with the State School Bus Project in 1965.

The other thing the Lions did that year in the wake of the Washington State tour by our performing team was to set up a much more ambitious tour, clear back to Chicago. I wasn’t going this time either. Though Chris Buckley was our star soprano, she was neither athletically gifted nor a band member. She wouldn’t be going.

So the travelling group could have more intensive rehearsal time, normal band and choir practice was frequently curtailed. Chris and I often found ourselves during these extra free hours, in the back room of the library, where Ellen and I had first gotten acquainted and where I had spent so many happy Study Hall hours over the last couple of years.

Partly because of our closeness to Paul, Chris and I had become quite close during my Seventh and her Eleventh-grade year. Chris took a letter I wrote to try and comfort Paul and mailed it along with hers, to Paul’s Seattle home address. Several months later, I was chagrinned to read in a memoir Paul wrote of this time, that he’d gotten a letter from me, but never mentioned Chris.

I told Chris she was special to me and I cared about her. She said she felt the same about me. We realized by now that we were too far apart in age to be a couple. Besides, she, like me, still hoped to see Paul again. For now though, it was nice to have one another, as special friends, who understood.

We flirted a little. Once Chris playfully fisted me in the groin because I wouldn’t stop singing a dirty and truth to tell, stupid little song I’d made up. Once I touched her breast, because she said I wouldn’t be able to. These were jokes though and essentially harmless. I felt much guiltier about a dream I had, several months later, in which Chris and I had gotten married and in the illogical way of dreams, were living in Cottage Three, just the two of us. It wasn’t a sexual dream particularly, though in the dream I knew we were sharing one of the narrow single beds in the cottage. The guilt came from dreaming about marrying my best friend’s girl!

With Paul gone, there was an enormous lifting of the pressure on me. Nobody had any particular reason to give me a bad time anymore. Still, the anger remained and Paul had gone away, leaving me with various things to dispose of before June. These included clothes he’d insisted I take in exchange for items I’d given him, a large K.W. emblem, a canvas Meat Coat, worn by truckers and dock men when handling sides of beef and the like. There were also various tools and other items Paul had stolen.

All in all though, I have fairly pleasant memories of my days at Vancouver and though I’d have felt terribly guilty to admit it, I was glad Paul was gone, at least for a while. I’d learned a valuable lesson this year, that one never has very many real friends. When put to the test, which I would be at other times in my life, I’ve always found I had a handful of staunch friends who truly cared for me and would go the extra mile if necessary and I’ve counted myself very fortunate.

As in the year past, April and May were beautiful this spring and Mrs. Howgan would sometimes decree that dinner be moved out onto the grass near the cottage, where we’d sit about with plates on our laps.

It was on one of these evening picnic occasions, and I have no idea what brought up the subject, Mrs. Howgan, who was sitting closely by me, began telling myself and a group of other boys a story about Charles Shortridge. I’d known Charlie since Fifth Grade. He was a smallish boy, though bigger than me. Until recently, he’d lived in Cottage four. Charlie was quite powerful, a bit of a bully, though full of the devil and quite a lot of fun when he wanted to be. One could count on him to give teachers a bad time. He’d even given Mrs. Barns a run for her money! He liked to talk in a gruff, froggy voice, which irritated adults and was known for his tardiness in returning from weekends home. It was this chronic lateness which eventually provoked a fight with Mrs. Barns and others, and resulted in Charlie’s abrupt resignation from The Braille Jail.

Charlie had initiated me in Fifth Grade, by dropping me over a railing near the school, (a height of about four feet,) to the grass below. I’d had other run-ins with Charlie, both good and bad and most of us had stories about him. On this occasion, Mrs. Howgan was telling us, and in considerable detail, about a time several years earlier, (Charlie must’ve been about the age I was now,) when he had dressed as a girl.

Mrs. Howgan has come in for a lot of complaining in the last couple of chapters, but she was a very nice, and extremely motherly lady. She was a moralist to the core, but had at times, a surprisingly robust sense of humor. She thought we were way too young to be kissing girls and that sort of thing and she wouldn’t tolerate nasty language. She did however, have a definite interest or curiosity or perhaps a preoccupation with boys wearing girls’ clothes. She more than once mentioned an article she’d read somewhere, that had predicted that men would soon be wearing skirts and dresses. From Mrs. Howgan I first learned about Christine Jorgensen, the famous transsexual. It wasn’t as if she called us all together and said "Alright boys, we’re going to discuss the possibility of asking your mothers to buy you dresses for school next fall" or anything silly like that. The subject just came up naturally enough, as with most other topics of small talk, but it seemed to come up fairly often, and with variations.

Charlie had either gone to a masquerade party or to a Halloween assembly where costumes were being shown. I never quite got the straight of it, having heard more than one version of the story. He had dressed as a girl though and from what I’ve heard, quite convincingly. Mrs. Howgan stated and even restated, that Charlie had not only worn a dress and a slip and buckle shoes with anklets, but had even worn girl’s pink panties, all of this having been borrowed for him from Cottage Two.

Mrs. Howgan recalled fondly, how cute Charlie had been and mentioned that I also would look cute in a dress. She said Chris Keppler was the first of the boys who had dressed up like a girl for Halloween and I’d heard that story from Chris himself as well. I said if Chris could do something like that, I probably could too and Mrs. Howgan said, "Well, sure you could." I didn’t intend to return to Vancouver next year, but the implication was, this might be a project worth looking into next Halloween or other masquerade time, if I did come back.

I don’t think I’d ever given thought before to wearing an entire feminine ensemble, but the idea was intriguing. The things Mrs. Howgan had said kept running through my mind and I talked it over with Chris Buckley. She said, "Oh, you can wear my clothes." (She meant when/if I had an opportunity to do this.) I said nobody would be likely to take me for a girl, since I didn’t sound like one. Chris said though, that when I was speaking softly and was across the room, I did sound like a girl. I would return to these conversations in my head, quite a number of times, this summer and beyond.

The last book I read before leaving Vancouver was a volume called The Iron Clads. I’ve never been able to find it since. It was full of fascinating details about the Civil War gunboats and about designer, John Erickson.

I don’t remember a lot of good byes that year. There just weren’t that many people I was expecting to miss. Greg and I had a vague plan to write each other if I didn’t come back next year. Mrs. Howgan kept insisting I’d be back next year.

I’d been fighting through most of my career at Vancouver, for a later bedtime. My last night in residential school, I put myself to bed at about eight o’clock.

Chris and I had agreed to sit together at the end-of-year assembly next day. It would be a chance to say farewell. Houseparents saw to it though, that I sat with my cottage mates. I didn’t see Chris at all on the final day.

On the 1-49 P.M. Train up to Seattle, I found myself sitting across the aisle from Danny Parker and Terry Atwater. Danny had some sight but couldn’t tell I was there. For much of the trip, I listened to the two of them discussing Paul and me. They were agreeing that Paul was a pretty nice guy really, that I was the queer and probably the one who should’ve been thrown out of school. "We all agreed to that," said Terry, though who might constitute "we" was left undisclosed.

As we pulled into Tacoma where Terry lived, Danny was saying he thought tomorrow, he’d get some chemicals and do some experimenting. For all of his loathsomeness, Danny was a science buff, like me. I leaned over and advised Danny not to blow himself up. He giggled and told me not to worry about it.

No, I would not be back.