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Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is credited with coining the phrase, “There are no illegitimate children, just illegitimate parents.” If that be so, I was born of parental bastards into a shanty Irish family on 27 January 1941, almost a year before the United States was drawn, unwillingly, into World War Two. In all fairness the only natural family I ever knew consisted of my mother and me, alone, and in fairness all it would take me almost two decades to become a bastard of my own making.My mother was a bright woman, and beautiful, a la Faye Dunaway in her portrayal of Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (“Bonnie and Clyde” 1967), but a bit bustier. It was because of her physical endowments, I suppose, rather than her considerable mental acumen that at the age of 17 she was unceremoniously separated from her family, the day after Christmas 1940, and entered a Catholic facility for unwed mothers, to be. It was doubly a shock because she had never before strayed more than a few blocks from her home.A month later I was born and within a matter of days my mother and I moved into public housing in Southwest Washington, DC, where we remained for a year. In the beginning there was just the two of us, with time to bond. We slept in the same bed in our single room apartment, which was sparsely furnished with a hot plate, hot and cold running water in a sink and a tub, an unstable table with two less sturdy chairs, and a three side enclosed, door-less “commode.”I recall little else of my first ten months of life, other than the physical memory of being swaddled tightly in a thick cotton blanket when I was three or four months old. At first I panicked at the claustrophobic confinement of the blanket, but soon gave way to its cocooning comfort. As an adult I would hark back to that memory and try to replicate that feeling of comfort and safety to hasten falling asleep.The Moro reflex is one of the 2 basic, DNA ingrained, fears and reactions we are all born with: the fear of falling and the fear of sudden loud noises. We will talk of the fear of falling in this work, because it is a common reflex in sleep and dreams, experienced as sleep paralysis and Hypnagogic jerks, with which many adults are familiar, but uncomfortable if not outright fearful, the result of not understanding the cause and effect. In infants it is an instinctual reflex, for the first 3 or 4 months, to a sudden loss of support. Their unreasoned reaction to a sense of falling involves three distinct components: the spreading out of their arms (abduction), the pulling in of their arms (adduction), and crying. It was probably the annoyance of a baby incessantly crying that resulted in swaddling.The only sound in our home, in my memory at least, was the constant prattle of my mother’s voice. I never cried. But in my mother’s loneliness and isolation she constantly talked to me, not as a child, but as an adult. And at six months old I began to mimic her words, which were a constant source of amusement to both of us, she laughing at me and I chortling unintelligible nonsense, neither of us ever knowing what the other was thinking or saying. The end result was that I could speak somewhat coherently well before I was a year old. I even had some comprehension of the meaning of my mother’s words.I don’t remember anything else until Thanksgiving Day, 27 November, 1941. And I only remember that in retrospect, because the following Monday my mother turned 18 and on the same day managed, with her father’s help, to secure a government position as a Congressional secretary. My mother was very excited and things began to change.My first fully conscious awakening and awareness of anything beyond myself, my mother and my immediate surroundings occurred mid afternoon on 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. It was not the importance of the “date which will live in infamy—[when] the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” that I recall, but a sudden swell of excitement that swept our tiny apartment complex as a flood of strangers came and went in a staccato of excited sound and motion which I conflated with the fact that the following morning we were moving into a new, better and larger apartment. It was only there that I first met any of the other members of my family.Life for me to that point was surreal, viewing the world expectantly through the slightly refracting single window of our tiny room. It was a feeling I would later recall during my first year in college, when exposed to Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot (1953)” in which two characters are waiting for someone who never really arrives. Soon afterward I experienced that sensation again in Shirley Clarke’s “The Connection (1961),” which in its own way seemed to be a somewhat similar tale, but with more characters, in a narrative of a film director recording junkies waiting for a mysterious “Cowboy” to bring them heroin; both Godot and Cowboy being in my mind obviously representative of some unknowable, unapproachable and ultimately unattainable power, point, purpose or meaning of reality, of life, or of a rather tardy and indifferent god. Or so it all seemed to me as a perpetually exhausted freshman struggling through my first semester, simultaneously attending classes at Columbia University during the day and classes at the New School for Social Research at night.But back in the waning moments of my childhood, god and the color green were somehow conjoined at a constant distance, somewhere beyond our window where wonders not yet tied to my life held sway. To me there was only the light of day warming my bare upper torso and steeling me against the darkness and chill that would always follow. The transition from one to the other always took place in the course of our single late afternoon meal, shortly before I was tucked away for the night and my mother would dress up and disappear for the evening, only to reappear beside me sometime before I woke in the morning.My informal education began with the Little Golden Books which my mother used to teach me how to read. But soon I became board with pictures un-dominated by a few words of narrative, so my mother began to read aloud what she enjoyed and I was intermittently entertained and bemused by tales of Richard Halliburton swimming the full length of the Panama Canal (having paid 36 cents, the lowest toll in its history) or his many travels in “Book of Marvels,” “Glorious Adventure,” “The Flying Carpet,” and “New Worlds to Conquer.”Better understood were the simple, clear images of Hemingway’s “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” read to me from the original 1933 version published in Scribner's Magazine, words and meanings that for some reason assuaged my loneliness because of their familiar commonality with my life which gave me some sort of solace. The end result was that by the time I was a year old, while I could not read long or complex words or sentences, I could easily recall and quote, “It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too,” which somehow made sense to while making my mother laugh. And at night, instead of “Now a lay me down to sleep,” I would recite, “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada," during which my mother would frown as she tucked me away for the night. Then, as always, she would dress up and go out for the evening, leaving me alone.In my late teens and early college days I would come to understand what Hemingway meant when he wrote the old waiter saying, “It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too,” suggesting that life was without meaning and that each of us is insignificant in a limitless universe, thus leaving many to seek some elusive meaning, purpose and solace in the equal nothingness of religion. It was only after killing my first man, soon after graduating from college and in the chaos that followed, that I came to know the Nobel Laureate author was wrong and that life, not god, might be the master of and most significant presence in the vast void in which we all exist. The answer and solution to that question or equation, that eternal mystery, would take more than half a century to resolve. But in that discovery I found peace and purpose.At two and a half years old, after having spent most of my weekdays alone, I suddenly found myself in the company and care of three teenage toughs, rowdy and violent “Croppy Boy” shanty Irish wannabe thieves and thugs tasked with teaching me the facts of life and the family trade: making money by whatever means to care for one’s “mum.” The first time I met them was when I was alone at home and answered a loud knocking at the door to our small apartment. On opening the door I was punched in the face, knocked to the floor and my nose bloodied. But I did not cry. All of the young ruffians looked toward each other nodding their heads and smiling.From the floor I asked the biggest, the one who had hit me, “what was that for?” I whimpered.“Don’t ever ask anyone why someone hit you,” he said. “If they do you already know all you need to know. Immediately get to your feet, if they knock you down and go after them.”“Kick the shit out of them,” another cousin said.“And if you fail the first time keep going after them until you do,” the smallest one chimed in, offering his hand to help me to my feet. “Only then will they leave you alone.”That was the first time, but would not be the last, that I ever heard the word “alone.”With that my cousins took me by the hand and led me out into the street. In one way or another I have been alone and on the street ever since.My cousins were seventeen, thirteen and eleven years old. The oldest was named Robert, called “Robbie” by all, and was the nicest by far of the three. Sadly he joined the US Marines in the summer of 1943 and died on Tarawa, Thanksgiving Day the same year. My second oldest cousin took over my training after that and taught me how to be a thief and how to take care of myself, fighting only and always to win at whatever cost. But he was something of a bully and often used his younger brother as a punching bag to accentuate a point. I have never tolerated bullies or bullying in my presence ever since.My mother’s government job by day and Party Girl in the evenings continued to leave me alone both day and night. “Party Girl” should not be construed to imply that my mother was a loose or wanton woman, but one deliberate and determined to make the most and best of what youth and beauty she had, to escape her often dire circumstance. At nineteen years of age she enjoyed a good time and didn’t care who paid for it. Married politicians knew who and what she was from her first day on the job, attending her intern cattle call. She was brighter, bolder, and far more beautiful and experienced than most, so she garnered a lot of attention. She was eternally aware and often spoke with friends on our part line of her “consummate fear of un-halting, unkind time that waits for no one.”Meanwhile, my cousins would drop by our apartment early each morning, just after my mother left for work, and take me out with them during the day, often until late afternoon. When I first met them my mother had instructed me to “Listen carefully and do exactly what they say.” In turn my cousins introduced me to their “business ventures” and told me to do whatever I was told to do, which I always did, and nothing else or more. I did not understand the nature or purpose of my efforts, but was paid a small amount for my help.The value of my services and my compensation I did not understand, but apparently it sufficed for all concerned, my cousins, my mother and for me and I remained employed for more than a year. My mother in particular seemed satisfied with receiving my meager wages, which were incalculable and meaningless to me. What I gleaned were some important and valuable lessons in life, both good and bad. The first was that the frequency and amount of money I made then turned over to my mother had a discernible effect on her mood. More frequent and larger sums were always better than less. Thus at age two and one half I came into possession of one of the keys to a women’s heart.Before aluminum beverage cans came into use there was a deposit on refillable glass soda and beer bottles at their point of purchase. When empty they could be returned in good condition for a few pennies to almost any outlet that sold the same brand. At that point the bottle was placed in a crate behind the establishment to be collected by bottlers or brewers who would clean, refill, cap then send them back out to be sold as if new. My cousins’ scam was to steal empties from the back of one location and return them at another, often recycling our own returns several times in a single day.There was a regular circuit we followed that prevented us from hitting any one place on the same day or consecutive days. This was dishonest, of course, but I did not even know the word, much less comprehend its meaning at age two and three. The real problem was that stealing begets lying and cheating soon follows, forming serious and troubling bad habits, especially for the very young. Conflating success in such nefarious “games” to emotional rewards only compounded the situation.Granted I was not initially hands on in the actual thefts, but was willing, even eager to serve as a smiley-faced “stall” to distract shop owners and cops if they should happen onto our activities and wanted to stop and question us while we were in possession of pilfered goods. My job entailed boldly standing my ground while the others slipped away. Invariably beat cops would delay their pursuit of suspects in favor of returning a lost and weeping child safely back home. It was during this time that I learned not to be fearful of authority, but to always remain calm and respectful. I also learned not to engage in clear or concise conversation where details might later prove false or lead to evidence of our activities or the location of my Croppy Boy cousins.Many single parent children are negatively affected by a sense of something lost or at least missing in the equation of their lives long before becoming fully aware of how or why they are different from other children they know. At an early age I recognize that my circumstance was somehow unnatural and unbalanced by the time I was a year an a half old. Almost nightly my mother made quiet, surreptitious calls to several men. One I assumed was my father, because they were always the same, beginning with quiet seduction, but always ending the same, with hateful accusations of abandonment, not of her, but of me, which I knew to be a lie. Certainly the men who picked my mother up each evening were rather old for her o to be my father. I had seen the fathers of other children in our apartment complex and knew the age of my mother and the men she dated where much older than either.The man my mother saw most was a middle aged army officer and very much a gentleman. He was the only one who ever got out of his car and came around to the curb to open the car door for her. I would smile approvingly as I watched them drive away, leaving alone for night. As a Captain in US Army Military Intelligence he was with the Cipher Bureau (MI-8, precursor to the NSA) and had power and access to rationed PX offerings that lessened the burden my mother bore in raising me. I don’t recall the wedding for some reason and can only conclude that I was probably not there. My mother’s family attended, instead. In any event, my mother, her new husband and I moved into a small but comfortable bungalow surrounded by lawns and gardens at Fort Meade, in Maryland, between Washington, DC, and Baltimore. There I became a compliant and complacent third wheel in my mother’s new family.In short order, three months I believe, there was the unexpected appearance of an occupied cradle in my bedroom. My take on the situation was that my life was about to take another turn, hopefully for the better. For one thing, I no longer had the need or opportunity to engage in my former nefarious activities and, as my mother was no longer working, and had much more time to share with me while caring for my new half-sister.My mother’s distancing from her family and increased independence and control over her life seemed to quiet her demons down for awhile. For me it was but another lesson learned, a wakeup call that change and moving from one situation to another can often be for the better. But in the back of my mind I realized that in the future I would be sharing my mother with at least two other people. That which had been solely mine and most important in my life, was now being shared with other. From that I concluded that changes for the better can come at a price.A week after VJ Day, little more than a year after my mother’s marriage, her husband was summoned to his commanding officer’s quarters on a “personal” matter. It seems that in the course of normal security procedures a random telephone wire tap on our phone had uncovered continued late night telephone conversations, many of a romantic nature, between my mother and two other men, one being my father and the other a much older man in the Roosevelt Administration. Gentleman that her husband was and on the cusp of being promoted to Major, he separated from his wife, my half sister and me, but agreed in the divorce to pay for an apartment for us and continue to support us until both children were of legal age or until my mother remarried.But as things turned out, I never met my natural father and only met her second husband once, much later in life and for a matter of days. But in time I would learn a great deal about both men. With the fashion of men in uniform nearly over my mother had become involved with someone associated with the Congressman she had worked for, someone who was currently a mid-level holdover appointee bureaucrat with the now Truman administration, in the United States Postal Service, I believe.During the 1945 Christmas holidays my mother took my sister and me by streetcar downtown to see the White House Christmas Tree. Afterwards we strolled along snow swept Pennsylvania Avenue to the Woodward & Lothrop department store, at 7th Street, where we quickly hurried in, only to discover we had less than half an hour to shop for stocking stuffers and an angel for the top of our tree before the closing bell would chimeOn the way home, as we approached our streetcar platform on Wisconsin Avenue, my mother stood up, placed my sister's hand in mine and allowed us to stand in the rear exit stairwell while she gather her shopping bags together. Suddenly the rear doors sprang open with a terrible hiss and clatter and my sister and I tumbled out into a moonlit snowdrift. By the time we got to our feet the door had slammed shut again, with a pneumatic sound like that of a dog gnashing its teeth. The metal monster’s bell “clanged” sharply once then lurched forward and clattered away, noisily slipping side-to-side as it rattled along its dark and shiny rails. Clickity-clack! Clickity-clack! Clickity-clack! Ho-ho-ho! Merry Christmas!Though barely half my age, my sister always seemed far braver than I and infinitely more trusting of fate. Laughing, she screeched against the howling wind, beseeching me to help her build a snowman. Instead I stood in silence trying to reverse and reassemble time; to determine what I did and did not know of the meaning and needs of our shared threat. I had never been apart from my mother outside our home and I trusted now that she would return. But the burdens heaped on me were ones I was not certain I could bear. The weight of the world seemed to sit fully on my untried shoulders and slowly settling down deep into my chest.It was only then that I realized I did not even know my address or telephone number. There had never been a need of such knowledge. Even at that particular place and time, in that terrible circumstance I could not have pointed my finger in the general direction of where we lived. My only thought and hope was that if we remained where we were for long enough, our mother would make her way back to us. If not, the spring thaw would reveal our remains and someone wiser than I would carry us home. It was the first time I ever conceived of death and with that melodramatic sugar plum dancing in my head I looked up and saw my mother, her arms filled with packages, trudging slowly toward us along the trolley tracks.A few days after my fifth birthday, in late January 1946, my mother began sending my sister and me on Sunday outings with her new “friend,” a mysterious and all too serious woman she called “Miss Onley.” Before sending us on these jaunts she would carefully bathe, dress and feed us then kiss us goodbye in such a wistful way that I became alarmed and always anxiously awaited our safe return. My first thought was that my mother, like her earlier friend Ann, must have developed some dreadful disease and might disappear like Ann had, forever. The one thing that assuaged my concern was that Ann had grown thin and pale toward the end and my mother remained in exceptionally good health.Sometimes these occasional weekend trips into the Maryland or Virginia countryside went on for hours, though we never seemed to stray all that far from home. Familiar parks and playgrounds came and went then sometimes came and went again, places where my mother had walked with me and later with my sister and me. Even when we went further, by bus or streetcar, it seldom seemed so far afield as we now traveled. Still I never noticed the ever greater range and expanding concentric circles as we went beyond theaters, restaurants and shops I knew. In time, time itself lulled me into complacency and I eventually stopped dropping mental breadcrumbs along the way, something that might serve to lead me home. In spite of my accidental abandonment in a snowstorm a mere month before, I still had not taken time or made the effort to learn and recall our phone number or address.In early spring that year, one warm and clear afternoon, as my sister slept soundly on the back seat of Miss Onley’s Packard, I was jolted awake as the car turned sharply onto an unpaved road then sped up, spitting out a cloud of dust for several minutes before turning suddenly into a gravel driveway and came to crunching halt. It was almost dark by then so I assumed we had returned home and immediately opened the car door and jumped out. But instead of my mother’s apartment building I found myself standing before a rambling, totally unfamiliar two storied farmhouse."I have to make a call," Miss Onley lied, taking our hands and leading my sister and me inside. In the front hallway we were introduced to an unfamiliar couple, while in the shadows behind them, high atop a long flight of stairs, I could see children lining the railing on the second floor. All were looking intently down at us like curious crows sitting along a telephone line. Too young and experienced to recognize the danger, my sister remained nonplussed, but alarms were ringing loudly inside of my head. Instinctively I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong and while my sister was led away “to get something to eat,” my thoughts raced fast forward, formulating a plan of escape."This is your new family," Miss Onley said to me, as if offering a cookie and a glass of milk or a new toy to amuse or distract me. "You will not be going home again!"“Liar!” my mind screamed, though I knew already that her words would prove far truer than either of us could possibly know.In the distance I heard the streetcar again. Clang! Clang! Clang! Clickity-clack! Clickity-clack! Clickity-clack! And I heard the fluttering of wings and felt the claws of a great beast tearing into me. Instinctively I knew I must not react to the terror gnashing at my heart. Fear might betray my inner thoughts and thwart my immediate plans for escape. I must suffer in silence the burning juices that shocked my senses; that caused my hands to tremble and my heart to race. I knew I must use such fear and pain to compel myself back to where I no longer belonged.Calmly I whispered into Miss Onley’s ear that I had to pee. I did, in fact, but even more so I needed a quiet moment alone to think. And while my fate was being decided by others and was already well beyond my control, hidden by the thickness of the bathroom door away I climbed through a small window and ran to the front of the house where the big black Packard still stood.Climbing onto the running board and into the driver’s seat I addressed the instrument panel with utter confusion. My feet could barely reach the pedals and I suddenly realized I had no key and no knowledge of how to start or operated the vehicle. But I had to try. Over the course of the past few months I had seen the starter button on the floor depressed and knew that was where the process began. That act alone might suffice to make the vehicle do my bidding and carry me home.I was still struggling with the starter when the strangers came for me. I did not hear them approach or notice the door pulled sharply, almost angrily open. My ears were too full of the whining and grinding of motor and gears which now drowned out the “whirring” of wings. My eyes were blinded by tears and my throat boiling in the acid of my own bile. Still I was numb to the clawing of strangers and the terrible beast that tore the breath from my chest, its talons tearing my flesh as all together they forced their will on me. Then I was dragged kicking and screaming into a house that could never, would never be my home, where I would now have to live among strangers.The Beast of loss was back, this time with a vengeance. This time it would surely carry me off. I had actually seen it once when I was three years old, frozen in marble in a museum my mother took me to. Even at that early age I recognized that it was not the chains that held poor Prometheus, nor the solitude of his endless struggle. It was the terrible talons that tore his flesh and pierced his heart and bared his soul. We saw! We knew! And both had reason to fear and dread. But what was my guilt? What flame had I pilfered to warm myself, to light my way through the darkness to “That Good Night?”Immediately after our Judas goat abandoned my sister and me, the man of the house took my hand and led me upstairs, ostensibly to be bathed before bed. On arriving in a second floor bathroom he disrobed me, fastidiously folding my clothing and placing them on a hamper lid at one end of the tub. But just as I was about to step over the rim and into the hot, cleansing water he suddenly seized me and pinned me against the side of the tub, forcing me slightly forward over its curved rim. Pressing himself against me while holding me in place, using his left arm and hand in a cross-carry grip, his forearm exerting pressure on my narrow and bony shoulders and chest, he used his right hand to insert his already erect penis between my buttocks. In looking back over my shoulder, I was surprised to find that he looked more frightened than I as he proceeded to work himself to climax.I was penetrated, but was so shocked by what was happening that I remained meek and compliant throughout the ordeal. In fact I felt quite outside myself as though I was an uninvolved observer to the attack. And when he entered me it was no more painful than if I was badly constipated and having difficulty taking a dump. But the sudden realization that there was someone else actually inside of me, inside my body with me, alarmed me terribly. I was no longer safe in and with myself, alone. It was a mental image I would carry forward in time and would allow me to more fully understand a woman when she spoke of rape.I already knew I was smart and agile enough to attack or immediately move away from danger. My violent cousins had taught me that. That I could not do so now made me angry not fearful then muscle memory and instinct kicked in. I had been trained to remain calm and to look for a way to escape or for something with which to defend or avenge myself. It was then that I saw the rattail comb balanced precariously on the edge of the nearby sink. I waited until the man was through with me and buttoning his pants before I seized the weapon of opportunity and thrust the sharp pointed handle upward toward his throat as hard as I could. I wanted and fully intending to kill him, but I didn’t have the strength or skill to do so. In fact my weapon of choice only penetrated about half an inch into his lower left cheek before it became stuck in the joint of his jaw. My attempt did little real damage, but he backed away in horror while bleeding profusely. A trip to the hospital followed shortly and the wound only require a couple of stitches and a tetanus shot.On his return he took me aside, but before he could say anything, in a voice I did not recognize, I hissed in his ear, “If you ever try that again, I’ll kill you, even if it takes the rest of my life,” meaning and believing exactly and entirely what I said. More importantly so did he. At least he never bothered me again.There was no pain, only discomfort, but the fear level during the attack was intense. If I had describe the fear factor I’d have to say it was the rough equivalent of waking in your darkened bedroom in the middle of the night with a violent stranger leaning over you holding a knife, with a factor of ten. My calmness and violence in the course of the interaction didn’t settle in on me until later that night. It would be much later in life that I would rightly attributed them to my tutelage with my rough and ready, “Don’t tread on me,” Irish cousins. I always played the “Little Rascal,” to their “Dead End Kids,” but by imitating them I had apparently learned to never show fear and to posture in the face of danger, to become stoic, deadly calm, both quiet and still. It was such then and in all future confrontations that I have felt most alive, and when I have always been most dangerous. But that sate has never since been exclusive to personal survival. I was then aware that I should have great concern for my sister and from that grew a protective fear and concern for others. Fortunately I did not face any similar circumstances until I was an adult, at least none that required proof of such deadly resolve.Immediately after the deflated bully and pedophile returned to the farmhouse and put me to bed, covering my head with a dark green army blanket as if to hide the deed he’d done, I found myself holding both of my hands tightly over my mouth and silently screaming. But it was not a sound of anguish I found in my head, it was a terrible frustration with the defenseless state I was in and the discovery of how far I would go to never find myself in such circumstance ever again. It was only then that the tears began to flow, for me, for my sister and for everyone else in the whole god damned world. Finally I sank back heavily against my pillow with the thought of salvation in my mind. Even now I can clearly recall the state I was in, the weight of the world finally, fully on my frail shoulders amid memories of long past Sunday sermons that spoke of the redemption of mankind through the sacrifice of a single soul. I knew then that I too was that guy.Later in life I would sense that scream in many guises: in Edward Munch’s Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature); and in the 1978 British horror film by Jerzy Skolimowski, “The Shout.” It still haunts me, but for very different reasons. I was not that guy. I was just human and would fail myself and others many times and in many ways. The sadness of that realization leaves that scream still stuck in my throat and I will never be free of it until I allowed it out, knowing full well the sound of it will cost me my life. But, though I never again felt safe for a moment in my very long life, I never again had any sense of fear in the face of any threat from anyone.