Would You Believe This?

When I was 13 years old, I was trying to write a sonnet (I didn't succeed in doing that until my 50s). I put the paper into the palm of my hand as my mother walked into the room. Suspicious, she feared I was sending a secret letter to the FBI to get her in trouble so she demanded I hand the paper over to her at once. I wanted some privacy in which to create my poems so I refused. She grabbed my right hand and dragged me across the room to our wooden bar and pounded my hand on the hardwood bar threatening to break all of my fingers. I feared losing the use of my right hand so when I heard, and felt, a bone break I caved in and gave her the paper. She glanced at it, shot me a look of disdain, then tore it into pieces and threw it in the wastebasket.

Fortunately for me, at that point my stepfather came home. He immediately realized I needed to go to a hospital and insisted on it. He was a psychiatrist and therefore also a medical doctor so she finally agreed although she feared I would tell the doctor what had happened. I knew better than to do that because I knew my mother and her crazy Stalinist CP friends and their connections would always be believed over me.

So I told the doctor I had been learning to dance the Bop and had fallen into some furniture. He bought it. He told me that rock 'n roll dancing could be very dangerous and suggested I go back to Swing or maybe the Continental. All I cared about was when he told me my right hand was going to be all right after 8 weeks in a cast. I would be able to hold a pen and pound my Royal Manuel typewriter again.

My thumb still hurts when it rains during the winter.

When you're an abused kid, people are willing to believe any excuse. I'd been to that hospital quite a few times over the years and given weird stories to explain my injuries. But the doctor was willing to blame the injury on Ike & Tina Turner, or maybe Richard Pennyman. I knew how to dance the Bop. What I didn't know was how to handle my witchy mother.