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I have these fragments of early childhood memories, pieces of a visual, sensory jigsaw puzzle that has a myriad gaping holes...
My earliest recollection is as an infant in Detroit lying naked on the floor on a fleece white blanket next to a naked infant Japanese American girl. My parents took a black and white snapshot of this event that always stirs this particular memory. The little girl, Karen Hisata, was the only child of my parents bosom friends, Tom and Sotie, and this odd coupling must have been the source of some amusement. I must admit, we looked indelibly cute and as innocent as innocence can be, I with my chubby little arms and legs and full head of ink black hair (I was born this way), her with her hair tied in a bow on the top of her head like an asian Pebbles.
Understandably, I don't remember falling down a flight of stairs in my parents' Royal Oak (my pre-school babbling rendered it "Oak Oak"), Michigan home, and I don't recall my lower front incisors cutting through the bottom of my lower lip or the hospital stitches required to sew the mess up. Funny, I can visualize the stairs in my mind, but not the fall. The brain suppresses such traumas. Circumsized males never recall their penis hazing either.
I have these slivers of thoughts about the Gerletti boys, much older than my brother Kevin and I, who lived next door. Rough-housing and running wild in the front yard with these big, fair-haired ever-smiling young men, Lee and Kim. Their father's name was Bruce and I always assumed I was named after him, but this was pure coincidence. In typical Japanese American fashion, my parents chose what seemed like perfectly normal American names (albeit, Scottish: Bruce and Kevin) for their children, belying the fact that we were as oriental and immigrant and different from White Anglo kids as you could get. At least our first names would raise no eyebrows.
Amusingly enough, my father told me I'd been named after his favorite comic book character Bruce Wayne, the Dark Knight himself. Parents get their inspiration for naming their offspring from very strange places.
The most vivid and haunting early recollection I have comes from the period when I was perhaps five on the eve of my family moving from Detroit to New York City. The year was 1961. For some reason the thought that this was our last night in Detroit is overwhelmingly real. We were staying next door at the Gerletti's. Our home was empty and ready for the new owners. I remember falling asleep in a strange room. I sense my mother's presence in the room with my brother and I. Asleep.
Sometime that night I awoke, or believe I did. The bedroom was still and eerily silent. Everyone in the house was asleep. There were long shadows in the room cast by moving branches and distant streetlamps. For some reason, I began to stare through the door of an open closet. It was as though I was drawn to that space. Within the dark umbra of the closet I perceived faint shadows that lay beyond the physical confines of its space. I rose from my covers and stepped into the closet, pressing past dangling clothes, groping in the inky darkness for its rear wall. There was none. Being more curious than afraid, I continued to move forward. Into the void.
Soon I sensed I was walking through the center aisle of a cold long dark room, passing row upon row of shadowy beds, ever so faintly outlined against dim walls. It struck me as being a hospital ward of some kind, beds filled with forms - bodies that were very still. There was no sound in this corridor and, although I observed these forms, I could not make out any features or faces or movement. At the end of the corridor I perceived a tall emaciated female figure - a nurse with her hair bundled tightly beneath a cap. She seemed to be waiting for me, observing me from within a haunting shroud of opacity.
Suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks. I had this overwhelming sense of uncertainty. It was a curious feeling because I wasn't exactly afraid and I wasn't certain whether I should stay. But something inside, a spirit -- something instructed me to turn around and leave this place for, if I remained, I sensed I would somehow never leave.
I remember about-facing and passing these murky rows. From askance I made out shadowy crucifixes hanging on the walls above each bed, grey on grey. My pace quickened, I could feel my heart thumping and the air race in and out of my nostrils. I emerged from the closet and made a bee-line for my bed, slipping between the covers. I fell asleep instantly.
The next morning as my mom made their final preparations to leave, I stood before that closet and stared at it in the amber morning light. I stepped inside, pushed beyond the hanging pants and cotton shirts and felt its cool plaster walls. It was an ordinary closet in every way.
Shaking my head quizzically, at the age of five I wondered whether I had dreamt the entire experience, or had sleepwalked into another room. But the absolute vividness and reality of that corridor and those beds was unshakable, undeniable. I could smell that other place, feel my feet as they touched that cold stone floor, see that lone still figure at the corridor's end. The event had definitely taken place, and the dimensional wormhole portal was now sealed.
I never breathed a word of this experience to a soul, until many years later. When it was too late.
My family boarded a propeller plane and soared across the Midwest plains into New York City. I have these flashes of my first aerial view of the Manhattan skyline, these gleaming glass and metal towers rising above a grid of streets and traffic and teeming humanity, an Oz-like, nearly Orwellian vision.
My father settled us in a two bedroom apartment in Flushing, Queens on Parsons Boulevard, a curious location removed from the City and far removed from the treelined Royal Oak single family home suburbs. Our second floor abode afforded us a panorama of an asphalt street and traffic light and cookie cutter rows of four story red brick apartment buildings, like some modern Warsaw ghetto.
Behavioral psychologists almost universally agree that one's character is indelibly imprinted and emerged by the age of three; thus, whatever dominant and overriding personality traits I possessed were fully intact by the time we arrived in New York. Flushing became the formulative urban landscape of my developing psyche. In the early 1960's it was a neighborhood of working class Germans, Blacks, and Puerto Ricans and, as would be the norm throughout my life, we were one of the first Asian families in the area.
Being a skinny, smallish Asian kid who was not athletically inclined, I quickly became a victim of racism, verbal abuse, fistfights, and ostracism. My tormentors were mostly members of other minorities who delighted in having an even more helpless and hapless scapegoat to release their pent-up frustrations upon. I was never invited to play sports with the neighborhood kids, invariably shunned from their social encounters. Many an afternoon I ran home to my mother in tears after being verbally assaulted and physically battered by local ruffians.
It was the mean streets of Queens that ingrained deep within me the irrefutable self-realization I was immutably different from everyone else. It was my mother's tender love and sincere compassion that assured and convinced me I was special. And so I believe it was during this period of my life that I slowly withdrew from the physical outside world and began my retreat into the interior world of thought and creative expression.
This was not some random direction, for my life was brimming with influences, both conscious and unconscious.
This was not some random direction, for my life was brimming with influences, both conscious and unconscious.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
One morning in the tiny bedroom my brother and I shared in that Queens apartment, I struggled to open my eyes. I was in-between dreaming and waking, and was very conscious that I wanted to force my eyelids open. Soft, unfocused light bathed my retinas in blurry circles; they were superimposed over my dream imagery for a moment.
