Pathologically Genuine Draft of Chapter 3: The Birth of Being Different

I had a happy childhood and did not feel like a banana slug in the Mojave Desert. I got transported to the desert later.

Nonetheless there were harbingers of future challenges baked into my memory starting when I was about three or four years old.

For example, I was told that I was a fussier baby than most. That was because I was prone to ear infections, which I much later found out was a sign of being different.

I remember screaming in extreme pain on the couch in my living room with my head on my mother’s lap when a friend of my parents (and someone I called Uncle Buddy) who happened to be an ear, nose and throat specialist, took out a metal syringe that in my memory was about two feet long, and popped my eardrum to ease the pain. That stopped the screaming.

Tubes were then placed in my ears fixing that one problem, but for that I had to give up putting my head underwater for a year. I liked putting my head underwater in a pool then. I had not yet developed the cognitive ability to think about metaphors. As I aged, being underwater meant much more.

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I also banged my head as a baby and continued through most of my non teen years. I’d bang my head against a pillow, the back of a cushioned chair or the backseat of the car. I did not bang out of frustration or anger. I was not trying to hurt myself. I wasn’t even trying to hurt the pillows, chairs, and car seats, albeit that I still occasionally feel guilty about my role in their life. Attention seeking was not a goal either.

Rather, rhythmically banging my head would put me in a hypnotic like state, which made falling asleep easy, and/or made the rest of the world go away making me feel safe and regulated. It was like being in a dark and quiet room with blackout shades. I couldn’t see the chaos outside of the windows.

Unsuspecting drivers on the Pennsylvania Turnpike might have grown alarmed when passing our light blue four-door late 1960s Oldsmobile and seeing me in trance pounding my head against the cloth car seat in a weird state of bliss, while my parents seemed totally unaware and unconcerned in the front seat. Fortunately, there were no cell phones in those days, so my head banging went unreported to the authorities, and my parents were never accused of negligence or child abuse.

I have always wondered how many passing cars swerved and smashed into the guard rails when they spied a little kid in a trance like state smashing his head against the car seat while his parents seemed totally oblivious. But, alas, I will never know.

My parents were rightfully unconcerned because they had experience. My brother, Howard, who is seven years older than me, had done the same thing and there were no negative consequences that we know of. Societal pressure caused him to transition from head banging to rolling by the time I was born, which I was never able to do as a young kid. I kept banging away until I didn’t.

I was lucky to have my own room in our four-bedroom house, so no one was bothered by the sound of a banging head. I didn’t really have a lot of pressure to stop. I couldn’t bang my head at school because the chairs we sat in were uncomfortable and had low backs, so there would have been nothing but air to bang against. Air does not provide the necessary resistance to make banging my head pleasurable.

Banging my head must have had a genetic component. My brother’s first wife, Christine, who is a Chinese American clinical psychologist, apparently walked into a room when my niece, Hannah, was a baby and saw her banging her head in the crib. Christine grew very concerned that Hannah was exhibiting a developmental disability.

She urgently called my brother who rushed into the room. His reaction was not what Christine was expecting, and I doubt she was appreciative. He broke out laughing.

I banged my head until I was ten or so. I finally was able to break that regulatory ritual when I went to summer camp at Camp White Pine in Ontario where me about a dozen other kids stayed in small wood cabins lined with bunk beds, near a beautiful Canadian lake where we swam and canoed to our hearts delight.

I was very worried about being ostracized by my cabin mates because of head banging. I also feared waking up with the other kids having tied my head down to the bed or carried my sleeping body into a canoe and pushed me out into the middle of the lake without any paddle. So, I forced myself to stop. Normality won that battle.

In third grade, another type of quirky behavior emerged. I remember this well because I had a teacher named Mrs. Jerpe (Mrs. Jerky to my third-grade cohort). Mrs. Jerpe was a stereotypical older female teacher in the 1960s. She was stoic, with a mound of gray hair on her head, dressed professionally with no color, and smiled as little as possible. But, she must have cared about all of us a great deal. She had the strength to ignore a bunch of third graders calling her Mrs. Jerky.

I usually sat towards the back in the middle of the room at Davis Elementary School. We had those olden wooden desks with connected wooden chairs where you could lift up the desktop and store things. What mostly got stored there was discarded blobs of chewing gum.

The desks had another purpose which I am sure made them feel more powerful than their role as a used chewing gum receptacle. We learned to duck under the desks in response to an alarm horn that would squeal loudly during drills and would be used should the Soviet Union drop a nuclear weapon on Pittsburgh. Somehow we all truly believed that these magic wooden desks would protect us from nuclear fallout.

One thing that has never changed over the course of human history is that we have an astounding ability to be idiots. I mean we have the brilliance to create technology to use nuclear fission as a destructive force, and the stupidity to convince young kids that hiding under a desk will protect them.

Academically I was at best average, but my dad bragged about me anyway. I was kind of quiet, and for the most part, obsessed with following rules, though I would at times succumb to peer pressure and shoot spitballs or fire gum bands (rubber bands for everyone else in the US except for Pittsburgh) around the room. But, for the most part, I was pretty easy for teachers to ignore. I was not invisible, though. I generally liked the teachers at Davis, and they seemed to like me, I just didn’t do anything especially good or bad to draw their attention.

That was until I started to twirl my hair around my finger and then pull it out in third grade. Doing so felt extremely good and probably kept me calm.

Mrs. Jerpe thought that my parents might be concerned that I pulled out so much of my hair, that I created the biggest bald spot on my head that I have ever had. From above, my hair was that of a diminutive 80-year-old man. I don’t remember my parents noticing, but they must have.

I also don’t remember what sort of intervention strategy was used to stop this behavior, But I stopped. My curly and thick brown hair grew back. Normality won again. Emotional regulation lost.

Once I managed to stop banging my head and twirling and pulling out my hair, I must have learned to live without these comforting behaviors, but I would need to find another one to replace these in my teens.

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I was also unusually naïve, even for a little kid. I trusted everyone and could never recognize whether I was being teased.

For example, we would go to my aunt and uncle’s house often to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Passover, or just to have a large family dinner. My aunt, Jean, was one of the two siblings and older sisters my mom had. Jean was about my mother’s height with a warm personality, and she became the host of large extended family dinners. She had a very strong Pittsburgh accent and is the person responsible my recognition of how obnoxious my brother’s name sounded in Western Pennsylvania. When she said my brother’s name, Howard, it became “haired” but with a very drawn-out nasal twang.

Jean’s husband, my uncle Morrie, was tall and stout with a personality that was even larger than his physical presence, and a hearty belly laugh. He owned a very successful plumbing supply company, which is one that continues to thrive even in the face of Home Depot.

I learned early on at these dinners that my family eschewed polite conversations. Arguing about politics, Pittsburgh athletic teams, or the color of the sky, or anything else was a sport in which my father and my Uncle Morrie were gold medal Olympians. If one wanted to be heard, one only had one choice, and it was not raising your hand. You had to learn how to talk loud enough to successfully interrupt the other three or more people that were talking at the same time to get your words in before somebody else interrupted you talking even louder. I suspect there was a lot more talking than listening going on and that seemed appropriate then. Not so much later in my life..

I was the baby of six cousins from my mother’s side of the family. My brother was the next youngest and he is seven years older than me. The mix of being really naïve and the baby of the group attracted teasing like a magnet attracts nails.

My uncle Morrie and I would have a similar conversation at every dinner. He’d pull me aside. And with a smile mixed with a stern look would tell me that he had a special key to my belly button. He’d then facetiously threaten to use this key to correct any non-compliant behavior a four-year-old might have. I was terrified of what would happen should he ever use the key. I was convinced by him that they if he inserted the key into my belly button and unlocked it, that my tuchus (a Yiddish word for my ass) would fall off. I realized, even when I was four, that life would suck without a tuchus.

I have no idea when I finally realized that whole story was a ruse.

Although my brother was and is my hero, he could take advantage of having a naïve younger brother and be a vicious teaser.

There were four bedrooms in the upstairs floor of our house. Three of those were bedrooms. One of those was my father’s dean. On the left side of the den as you walked into the room was a bookshelf that contained many academic books.

My middle name is Scott, so my full name is James S. Coleman. I learned later that another James S Coleman was to sociology what Michael Jordan is to basketball.

My father had two of his books on the bookshelf. The spine of the books had the book’s title and the author’s name, James S. Coleman, in a large font. When I was probably seven or eight years old, my brother would take me into my dad’s office. We would stop at the bookshelf. He point to the two books by James S. Coleman and then say something like

“Jimmy, look at these two books you wrote!”

I was honest to a fault.

“I didn’t write those books!”

My brother wouldn’t stop,

“Your name is James S Coleman. Right?”

I answered honestly again,

“Yes!”

Then my brother would dig in even more,

“Well, your name is James S Coleman, so you must have written these books.”

I knew I hadn’t authored the books. But my brother’s argument was very convincing. I wasn’t articulate enough then to think of anything else to say. So, I would just break out in tears totally confounded, making my brother’s day.

Having a brother and hero that is seven years older than you and knows how to exploit your naivety is simply unfair. If I had been older, less naïve, and capable of teasing back, I would have said,

“Yes, I wrote those books. What did you accomplish when you were four?”

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I also learned early on that certain experiences could lead to meltdowns- uncomfortable clothes, loud noises, and textures of food.

When I was about four years old, my parents (I assume largely my mother) wanted to get portraits done of me and my brother. So, they bought us the same checkered buttoned shirt, nice pants, and told us to get dressed and ready.

I was blessed with naturally curly hair. Curly hair became a blessing when I got older, because all I needed to do was wash my hair, towel dry it and then let it do whatever it wanted. But in the early 1960s, curly hair was out, straight hair was in. So, my mother would straighten my hair with a hair dryer and part it on the side.

Even by the age of four, though, I was already developing priorities regarding the relative time one should spend on their appearance. In my case, the priority was as little as possible.

Don’t be mistaken- I like being clean and loved baths then, and showers now. However, my priority was always comfort, which meant baggy cotton t-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes (Pittsburghese for sneakers), and letting my hair do whatever it wanted when I was allowed to. If I spent more than 30 seconds in the morning looking in a mirror, that would seem like an eternity to me.

I had no idea then (and still have no idea) why anyone else would care about the clothes I was wearing.

My parents had no idea that asking me to get dressed up for a portrait, and then getting me to pose for a picture, would become one of the most challenging child-rearing days of their lives. I didn’t have the ability to articulate the thought I was having then- “Why can’t I take a portrait in the clothes I love to wear as opposed to ones whose texture and tightness made me feel like I was wrapped in plastic in the middle of the Everglades?”

A child who is not able to articulate how uncomfortable this whole experience was going to be is going to communicate the discomfort in another way. The way I apparently expressed my discomfort was to throw a full-blown tantrum. This is the first tantrum I remember. I don’t remember exactly what I did but I am sure there was loud crying, yelling, and physical actions aimed at punishing my mother if she didn’t leave me alone.

I don’t know how, but my mother calmed me down enough to get me to go to Schenley Park with my brother to complete the portrait. She probably regretted that.

Once we were at the park, the photographer found a tree with two stems with enough space between the stems for skinny young kids like me and my brother to stand between and pose for a portrait. That worked really well for my brother.

I was already feeling claustrophobic from the terribly uncomfortable clothes. The idea of pushing claustrophobia to its limit by squeezing between two trees, posing, and smiling, was more painful than the ear infections. I couldn’t articulate that taking this photo was more than being wrapped in plastic in the everglades. It was like being wrapped in plastic in the everglades inside a small box in a swamp, where breathing was difficult. So, I threw another full-blown tantrum. My brother and I still talk about this tantrum even though it happened sixty years ago.

Somehow, my mother calmed me down again. The only reason that I know she calmed me down is because there is a framed monochromatic portrait of me, as an extremely cute four-year-old, wearing the checkered shirt, with straight hair parted on the side, a beaming smile, standing in the grass with the tree behind me. There was no AI then, so I know it is real even though I really can’t believe it. I could also never forget it. My parents hung that portrait in every house and apartment they lived in from that day.

The Portrait

After my parents died, my brother and I inherited our portraits. I was so looking forward to burying that portrait in the bottom of a dumpster. But I am so damn cute in the photo- probably the cutest I ever looked in my life, and way cuter than I was then and now, so my wife wanted to keep the portrait and hang it in our house.

Every day I am reminded that I was so much cuter when I was four than I ever thought I was. I am also reminded each time I see the photo that my need to wear baggy, comfortable clothes was with me for as long as I can remember and why I don’t particularly like getting an MRI or getting into elevators.

I was not just sensitive to clothing textures. I was also very sensitive to the texture of food. Dense, creamy, or kind of slimy, textures like pudding, Jello, yogurt, or Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup would cause negative reactions. Seeing food with that sort of texture caused my brain to send signals to my stomach, screaming “be nauseous.”

I was able to develop an acquired taste for some foods with this texture. For example, my grandmother made gefilte fish (sort of jellied whitefish) from scratch for Jewish holidays and I was able to enjoy it- but only once a year. But I am not Swedish, so I never developed an acquired taste for lutefisk, so just seeing the slimy jellied fish product can bring on thoughts as severe as suicidal ideation.

My mom understood that it was not a great idea to serve me chocolate pudding given its texture. But I might go to a friend’s birthday party where their parents assumed that chocolate pudding and cake with thick icing was every kids dream. Pudding never fails to nauseate me. Yet, when I was at friend’s birthday party, and cake with thick icing was served, my tastebud’s enjoyment of the sugary icing would outduel my brain’s signal to vomit.

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My parents and I discovered my need to control my auditory environment in a hard way. My memory of the exact circumstances is vague. The memory of my reaction is not.

Many people like fireworks. Most kids like fireworks. I hate them. July fourth is often the worst sensory day of the year for me.

As I remember it, my parents were excited to take me to see the city of Pittsburgh’s fireworks at the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers. We didn’t actually go to the location of the fireworks. We went to a Middle Eastern restaurant that we loved with great shish kabob. And, then after the dinner sat on our car in the gravel parking lot across the street which had a great view of the fireworks. It was also close enough to capture the full 3-D sound of exploding projectiles.

As the first firework exploded, so did my head. I don’t think I even saw the sky fill with color like a beautiful painting. I was totally overwhelmed by the sound of the explosion to the point of being overcome with angst and pain. Being too young, and in too much discomfort, to communicate this to my parents. I threw the only other full-blown tantrum that I remember. My parents could not calm me down in that moment, they had to shove me in the car and take me back home before I was able to calm myself.

I don’t throw tantrums or emotionally meltdown anymore with the bang of fireworks. But sound still is a powerful emotional regulator. For example, my wife and I like to go to a brew pub in Greensboro with our dogs. We will be sitting at a table on the inside enjoying our favorite beverages and letting our dogs collect as many pets as possible. I can be happy, laughing and smiling. Then a gang of motorcycles drives by, and I instantly become numb, stop laughing, the smile disappears, and I disappear inside myself like a turtle retracting into its shell.

Do you think any of this is crazy?