THE NAME OF THE ANGEL

By Osiris Edward Dalton

    NEVER ABANDON A FRIEND WHO IS IN A CONFUSED STATE OF MIND.

    HELP END RAPE.

Contact info:

osirisedwarddalton@gmail.com

Edward Dalton, P.O. Box 702, Providence,

Rhode Island 02901

Also check out my book/blog of taxi stories:

 realcabrides.blogspot.com

THIS IS A ONE-PAGE SCROLL DOWN BOOK/BLOG.

Dedicated to my grandparents, Alessandro and Anna (Forte) DelSignore and Edward and Margaret (O'Keefe) Dalton

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

ENDNOTES

(Readers: I suggest you look at the endnotes after you read the book/blog. Definitely check out Endnote 1 about the Hollywood actor James Woods.)

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PART ONE

       "I speak of the light of the day..."

(Most names have been fictionalized. Real names are noted.)

    "What's the name of the angel, Eddie!?"

       When the man raped me he held me under water so there is water in my lungs and I can't breathe.

      "What's the name of the angel, Eddie!?"

      My aunts gather above me and ask me about this angel because they know I think I have an angel that protects me  and they want me to come to life. 

      "What's the name of the angel, Eddie!?"

      As I choke into blackness there is the sound of a siren, the clicking an uncle loading a gun and wild screams in Italian...

     That day I make a complete physical recovery.

     YOU HAVE LIVED THROUGH WORSE.

     I develop mental and physical problems, though.

     How I recover involves a good life - rape doesn't have to ruin you - and this happy ending and often funny free book/blog...

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     To begin:   

     On a spring 1961 visit to Papa Joe's place, I, a 12-year-old, lead cousins in wrecking a children's clubhouse.

     The same-aged clubhouse builders find out I bring on the destruction.

     Their weird plan for revenge is to:

     1. Hypnotize me and give me a post-hypnotic command so I can't fight.

     2. Take turns beating me.

     3. Have my betraying cousin Fredo say the word Beelzebub to me to snap me out of my hypnotic trance. (Re: Endnote 2.)

     (Note: You can't make a hypnotized person do something that person doesn't want to.)

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     I find out the hard way about this Hypnotize, Beat and Beelzebub plan on a later visit to Papa Joe's (Alessandro DelSignore - real names), my widowed Italian grandfather's Providence, Rhode Island home. (Note: Providence, Rhode Island is a mini-city located on the northeast coast of the United States.)

     After greeting Papa Joe and others, my cousin Fredo suggests a walk.

     It's a cloudy May Memorial Day weekend Sunday. In my just-went-to-church-clothes Fredo leads me west on the then dead-end Prosper Street.

     We go past an end-of-the-street fence and a No Trespassing sign. (Re: Endnote 3.)

     We step down upon a sandy hilltop overlooking the river-like Canada Pond and the highway beyond where cars zoom north and south with their head lights on. (Re: Endnote 4.)

     "Surprise!"

      I am suddenly surrounded by 16 youths.

      Though I try to escape each time I move a bony leg or a skinny arm I face a baseball bat, a hockey stick or a club with silvery sharp nails sticking out.

      "Boy: We hunted you down like a tiger!" brags the boy general of the clubhouse army.

      After seven young girls and boys leave, my traitor cousin Fredo skitters back to Papa Joe's where my loving aunts will feed him and he will remember to say the word Beelzebub...(Re: Endnote 5.)

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     Now in wild ecstasy my cousins Fredo, Fred and I do damage to this little wooden outhouse of a clubhouse. 

     I love wrecking it! 

     As I crash a fist into a wall or break a board I FEEL POWER: Power that is as electric as the high voltage currents Ka-fitzing in the wires that now hang above us surges through my hands and fingers.

     While I even have good, though misdirected reasons for bringing on the destruction, I say the clubhouse clan also have good reasons for revenge. One black eye for Eddie the Clubhouse Destroyer would be just punishment. (Re: Endnote 6.)

     This is the 1960s, though, and things are wild all over.

     Besides heroic happenings like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for Civil Rights and the Race for Space, there are impossibly big fins on  cars, this great new music called rock 'n' roll and crazy dances like the twist. (Re: Endnote 7.)

     Even wilder, in illegal Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) MK-ULTRA experiments people are being given drugs like LSD and sometimes even being hypnotized. (Re: Endnotes 8.)

      So as I stand with my back to the pond in the spirit of the times the seven or so remaining clubhouse youths look down at me.

     "We don't want to hurt you. We just want to be your friend," a few say as they lay down their weapons.

     Considering that they are blocking me from leaving I am suspicious.

     But like a motorist caught speeding and about to "explain things" to a State Trooper, I smile...

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     I speak of the light of the day.

     Video is new back in the early 1960s.

     News clips of President John F. Kennedy and his beautiful young wife Jackie are daily shown in that here-and-now/sharp light contrasting way.

     That day, with the sun going in and out of the clouds and the water of Canada Pond rippling, the light itself seems to have that same video-like quality...

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     I also speak of "Too Many Monsters," a play I have just written and directed at South Woodlawn Elementary School in my nearby home city of Pawtucket, R.I. (Re: Endnote 9.)

     "Too Many Monsters" is filled with creatures like Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Vampire, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man. I discuss the much cheered and foot-stompingly-acclaimed production.

     The clubhouse kids don't say much but at one point I learn there is one among them who has the power to hypnotize me. 

    That one can make me believe I am a lion, a chicken, a rat.

    That one can even make me believe that I am invisible...

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     Beneath the now darkened sky, Michelangelo Dante Sclamfanini brings out his 12-inch-in-diameter multi-colored disk of a hypnotist wheel. 

     Looking like the rings in a tree stump he spins the magical orb.

    Wavy lined colors of red and blue and green and yellow seem to "leap out."   

    Like a rope is pulling me I am suddenly hypnotized and told to imagine I'm a lion...

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   The crumbling foundations of the burned down ice house stand nearby and I vividly imagine a thick dark lion's mane on my shoulders and raise a clawed paw. (Re: Endnote 10.)

     Eddie roars.

     In a loud gut feeling real-lion way, Eddie roars at this brave new world where his friendly and bespectacled sixth grade teacher Mister Cook teaches the class about the ancient Egyptian god Re (Re: Endnote 11), mean men like the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev bang shoes on desks and the deceptively intelligent movie star/World War II munitions worker Marilyn Monroe is looking better and better to Eddie each new day. (And a shout out to Gina Lollobrigida, Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg and Jayne Mansfield!)

     Once I am temporarily back to normal, I even plead with Sclamfanini to once again be changed into a lion.

    I'm not sure - ROAR(?) - this happens...

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     Take heed any Sclamfanini biographers: These are the only shining moments of the trance general's performance.

     After the lion thing, I mean, when Sclamfanini tells me to imagine I am a rat I am in a fully un-hypnotized state of being: I just pretend to be a rat.

     I dance the cha cha up and down the sandy hill in my polished black shoes. 

     I move my hands in fingers in what I imagine to be "talking-like," rat-like ways. (Re: Endnote 12.)

     "Hey! I like this kid!" says one easily impressed youth.

     And when I am supposed to be invisible...

     Well, as Sclamfanini advises I don't look down and stare straight ahead - but a big-size State of Texas freckle can be seen at the end of my nose!

     By the way: I am now at the top of the hill where you can see the simple single-family houses of Prosper Street. Quite consciously (and non-hypnotized) I make a run for it. 

     Papa Joe: Your half Irish grandson you've  ignored his entire life is a-comin' home! 

     (That two clubhouse kids easily capture me is something we will not here discuss...)

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     I am next commanded to lay on the sand with my eyes closed.     

     As a pet dog sniffs at me I hear some pretty peculiar things - like how I should imagine myself in "...a deep, deep hole...", how my arms are gone and my legs are cut off at the waist and so on.

    After, I am instructed to stand with my eyes closed. Hypnotist Sclamfanini tells me when he snaps his fingers and my eyes open that my arms and legs will be impossible for me to move.

     "Only when you go back to Papa Joe's and your cousin Fredo says the word Beelzebub to you - Remember that word, Eddie Dalton: Beelzebub! - will you be able to move your arms and legs!" 

     There is silence for a moment.

     You can hear the sounds of the above electric power lines Ka-zitzing, a breeze fluttering maple leaves, the sounds of cars on the highway across the pond rushing/rushing along.

     "When it's my turn to beat him, I'm really gonna smash in his face!" blurts one.

     And at last!

     I finally figure out the reason behind the clubhouse kids' phony friendliness.  

     If I don't do something pretty gosh-hanged fast I could be next transformed into - why - a sitting duck!

     A dramatic Cape Canaveral-like (Re: Endnote 13) happens -  "...three, two, one..." - and with the power of cold command Sclamfanini shouts:

    "OPEN YOUR EYES, EDDIE DALTON!"

     Well, I open my eyes.

     The clubhouse kids lean towards me.

     Then:

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     "Re!" I yell, fiercely shouting the name of the Egyptian god Mister Cook at South Woodlawn taught us all about. By shouting Re, see, I hope to really weird out the weird clubhouse kids.

     With my hands moving in front of my face like I am swimming naked in the Pawtucket Boys' Club pool - and with my eyes all wild and crazy - I move towards the clubhouse kids.

     I shake my fists.

     I act as insane as any childhood clubhouse destroyer in his Sunday best can act.

     From my half-hypnotized eyes (distinct memory) into the now darkened day imaginary white-light jagged lightening bolts shoot out. 

     I do not at all pretend to be a normal Frankenstein.

     I AM A TWISTING FRANKENSTEIN.

     In my play "Too Many Monsters" the twisting Frankenstein stuns the great kids at South Woodlawn. 

     And stunning the angry clubhouse kids is just what I'm trying to do...

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     Fear of getting my butt whacked wicked bad is precisely what motivates me as an actor.

     With a method to my madness I do homage to my craft by keeping up my twisting Frankenstein role: I shake my legs, I cast an evil look at the kid who just said he wanted to smash my face in.

     "Remem-bah!" he tells his brother.  "Ma said she wanted us home early today!" 

     I stop my act and watch those two brothers flee.

     One youth notices my "break" of character.

     "He's only foolin'!"

     Then he and the rest of the crew rushes to me.

     They punch my chest and my arms and I fall back hard.

     Though I bang the back of my head against a rock I am not hurt.

     Yet I take advantage of the situation and pretend  to be dead...

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     In the tradition of the revolutionary 20th century theater director A. Artaud (Re: Endnote 14) - who stressed that the audience must become part of the performance - the clubhouse kids unwittingly "play along." 

     "He's dead!" one panics.

     "He's breathing!" asserts another.

     Laying corpse still, the youths drag me on the sand to reedy edge of Canada Pond.

     There are sounds of terrified sand sliding and the clomping and snapping of many smelly black ankle- laced sneakered feet.

     Water is poured over me.

     My head is even dunked into the pond once, twice. 

     My Theater of Childhood Hypnotist Cruelty is so intense a few other youths flee.

     Along with one or two other brazen others  Sclamfanini remains.

     Calmly, and not at all frightened, he tries to get me back to my senses...

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     "Eddie, Eddie, hey, Eddie Dalton that lives in a three-decker in Pawtucket and whose father Morris (Maurice) was in the 11th Airborne Division in World War II and whose Irish grandfather Edward Dalton from Tipperary died a year ago...* (*The intelligence information Sclamfanini has on me is outstanding!)...How many fingers am I holding up!?" (Re: Endnote 15.)

     My eyes open groggy-eyed.

     I gaze at his stubby digits and definitely know the exact number. 

     Playing the part of now being half-dead I deliberately incorrectly tell him: "Four."

     (To Sclamfanini: To momentarily segue into the Ancient Greek Theater tradition, if you can understand my English and see what I am trying to tell you, mate, I will now correctly say: "Gamma." (Re: Endnote 16.))

     Then Sclamfanini gives me a light slap.

     His touch feels so crumby (UNCLEAN!) I have a strong urge to get up and start beating him - but the show must go.

     "Ah, this kid'll be okay," he says in a gruff and comical tough-guy way.

     At this point he and another youth - there are only two clubhouse kids at the end - exit stage right.

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     A little while before when the clubhouse kids had me laying on my back as I said they told me some pretty strange things.

     "Even God doesn't want anything to do with a kid like you," I hear.

     As he is going, this curly headed Italian kid - my rat impression fan - shouts out:

    "God loves you, Eddie Dalton! God loves you with all His heart, Eddie Dalton!"

     Despite the clubhouse kids' action of  irresponsibility - NO ONE WHO YOU THINK IS IN A STATE OF CONFUSION SHOULD BE LEFT ALONE! CHILDREN OF EVERY GENERATION MUST BE TAUGHT THIS: IT WILL HELP PREVENT RAPE!* (*AUTHOR'S MESSAGE!) - there's a line of pure emotion that, like the high-power wires connect from wooden pole to wooden pole, seems to connect between his own innocent soul and mine.

     Like two cowboys at the end of some epic western, the last thing I remember is Hypnotist Sclamfanini waddling along and gesturing to his pal. 

     With great puffy clouds in front of them they light out for the Territory of Adolescence on the rusty can-littered shore of Canada Pond.

     I am not quite sure I do this, but I think I lift up my back fists and form my arms goal-pole like in their direction.

      Fools!.. 

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PART TWO

     "...Would you die for Jesus Christ?!..."    

    Time passes, the world grows dark.

    The tail of my white shirt is out of my pants and flapping. My shiny black shoes are caked with mud.

     I'm a bit confused. Perhaps because I am still a little hypnotized I also have hallucinations.

     I see, for instance, a real seeming girl sitting on a sandy incline.

     She says something, I ask a question, she gives me a bizarre answer then: Pop!

     She vanishes.

     I take a few more stumbling steps.

     Another true-to-life boy appears. He says something strange, same deal answering me and: Pop!

     He vanishes.

     Imaginary children aside, I am still aware enough to see reality as it is:

     The pond, the reed-filled shore, the highway across the water, the above ka-fitzing/KA-FITZING high power wires, the foundations of the burned down ice house, this little dock for waterskiing boats that's a few feet beside me, the pond's thick-walled dam to the much further south.

     I am also aware enough to realize that when I am dragged to the shore, a small and kind of harmless yellow-and-black pocketknife - a gift from my beloved parents - falls from my trousers.

     As I wander around and search for this knife four other real people appear upon the secluded shores of Canada Pond...

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     There are two older youths and two adult males in their early 20s.

     In a sneaky kind of way the adult leader of the group clomps out on the rickety little dock. Judging by the smirk on his face I think he thinks he might find something he can steal.

     I can still see him and the dock's under board reflection on the brackish pond water as clearly as the similar reflection in the Rembrandt painting "Susanna Surprised by the Elders." (Re: Endnote 17.)

     I am a little fearful at the entrance of this older group but I maintain a brave front. To make sure no one reads me precisely I consciously keep up what is now a stumbling and mumbling act.

     I even deliberately babble about the hypnotist session.

    "A whole bunch of stupid stupid kids tried to hypnotize me so they could beat me up. But I fooled them and shouted out the name of the ancient Egyptian god Re and..."

    To maybe plant the seed that I am tougher than I look, I tell them that I am trying to find the knife I dropped.

     The leader of the pack (my theory) deduces my way-too-obvious "tough kid" signals and tells his colleagues to show me their knives.* (*It is normal behavior for many youths in this part of the country to carry knives in the early 1960s.)

     One youth produces a white, pearl handled switchblade.

     Like I'm an art scholar standing in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and regarding, well, a Rembrandt, I inspect the knife with the due nods and respectful gestures of the most refined pre-teen switchblade lover.

     Another youth of about 15 - a smiling and big brotherly older type with duck style hair - brings out his orange handled knife.

     It seems as long as a sword. 

     "Wow! That's big! Wow!"

      An older adult, an Italian looking guy with hair piled up Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa/rock-singer-Roy-Orbison-like (Re: Endnote 18) shows me his.

     It's a silver metal device, much like the well-designed instrument of a surgeon. 

      As he stands on the spotted weeded shore and displays it his lips form like an upside down horseshoe. He tilts his shoulders. He holds out his knife and strikes a real macho, real tough guy pose.

     At the time I am taken aback by his show of fierceness. But as I now remember him he is brilliantly hilarious.  The guy even has a striking resemblance to what the late New England Mafia leader Raymond L.S. Patriarca must have looked like when he was a young man. (Re: Endnote 19.)

      The leader of the pack - whose slightly deformed and compressed face indicates he suffered from fetal syndrome - seems a little indifferent regarding: "...the switchblade installation."

     As he stands at the foot of the dock I boldly approach him.

     "Hey! Now it's your turn! Show me your knife!"

     "No."

     "Come on! Those other guys showed me their knives and now I want to see yours!"

       With no eye contact he pulls out a short and crudely crafted blade, a kind of prison-made knife that a hardened criminal might possess.

       He cups the blade in the palm of his hand.

       I don't see this at the time but unlike the other "for show"/"museum piece" blades his knife has probably seen some real use. Yet it does not in the least satisfy my sense of what a knife should be.

     "That's too short," I tell him. 

      He drops the blade into his front right pant's pocket. 

      In a surprisingly civilized manner he defends the usefulness of his knife.

       He brings it out again.

       "Touch it."

       It's razor sharp...

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       Exit: The two youths.

       The sun again sparkles star-like on the rippling waters of Canada Pond. The reflecting light flashes a wavering yard-wide bar of light on the chests of the adult males who now stand with their backs towards an eastward sandy hill.

     What are they doing here?

      The Italian guy looks a little cocky, kind of lets his entire body go limp.

       "I'm just hanging out with old blue eyes here," he says of his (I believe) recently met acquaintance.

       With an emotionally melting look in his own eyes he extends an arm and points a finger kind of like a modern day Diogenes holding a lantern and cruising through the streets of Athens looking for an honest buddy. (Re: Endnote 20.) 

    There is more small talk.

      As the Italian considers me with my clothes all wet and muddy he gives a confidential look to his associate.

      "Hey come on. Let's go down by the river. This (expletive deleted) kid is a (expletive deleted). He looks like - ha! - "Creature of the Black Lagoon..."

(Re: Endnote 21.)

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       Details of the following scene are hazy. But for some reason me and the sharp-knife leader get into a fight.

     We wrestle, we roll on the ground.

     Lord knows, I am anything but a tough kid like the legendary Al Benoit of Pawtucket. (Re: Endnote 22.) But I can be a terror with my legs. I use them to pin the guy on the ground. 

     This is completely out of line with my generally good Roman Catholic boy behavior, but I even think about grabbing a rock on the sand beside us and bashing in his skull! 

    What stops me is that his eyes suddenly start to roll in his head like he is beginning to have an epileptic seizure; as he is under me he now seems pathetic, harmless, someone it would be sinful for me to take advantage of.

     I freeze.

     Now he's the actor and I'm a fool!..

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     NEXT: "Help!" I scream.

     NEXT: The sun is now blasting down and the pond sparkles like a field of stars. I am marched out onto the little dock with its nails and splinters sticking up from the boards.

    I consider jumping into the water and swimming to the other side. Looking back I am a strong enough swimmer to do this.

    But in 1961 Canada Pond is known as a place where many drown - so I don't jump.

     When I reach the end of the dock I face to the north with my main assailant standing above and before me.

      "Would you die for Jesus Christ!?" he wonders in a kind of comical and triumphant and maniacal way.

      I don't know what I answer.

      This I am sure of:

      The Italian guy is on the shore at the end of the dock.

       He flashes his surgical-like knife, the light of the sun reflects on it.

        He rolls his eyes this way, that way (my theory) so as to see if anyone may be witnessing us. 

        He is scary to me at the time. As I now consider him he reminds me of some Silent Movie star like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton comically moving their eyes.

        I don't think this but looking back the Italian/Ray-Patriarca- look-alike is (again) brilliantly hilarious...

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       NEXT: The sun goes behind the clouds.

       My pants and my underpants are pulled down to my ankles, the top part of my body becomes submerged in the cool water at the steep-at-the-edge dredged pond. (Re: Endnote 10.)

       With my eyes open underwater I look at the liquid grayness in front of me and see a submerged hill in the sand.

       The rapist penetrates my anus with his phallus.

       It's painful.

       I feel his vicious thrusts once, twice. Then, as though I am under Novocain and a dentist is drilling my teeth, I feel no pain. I only hear muffled sounds of his animal-like grunting, feel his clothes and body against my back.

      I swallow some gas tainted water; my lungs fill; I start to drown.

     Using my arms and hands like I am doing a push-up, I somehow manage to touch the pond's bottom and "leap up" to gasp some air. (This probably saves my life!)

     The rapist grunts and moans.

     "When is my cousin Fredo coming back to help me?" I wonder while being raped under the water.

      The guy finishes. 

      I feel the limpness of his phallus flap against me and am pulled onto the shore.

      Alas!

      The blind cruelty of life we all must sometimes live through...

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       After the rape the sun is again shining.

       I am wet, sprawled out and drenched on the ground with my pants half-pulled up.

       With a sadistic smile the rapist grabs me hard by the collar of my wet shirt.

       "Listen ya little guinea," he tells me. "Forget me, forget what I look like, got it!? Or we'll the both of us come back and cut off your guinea mother's (deleted)!"

       In a state of shock and a still half-hypnotic daze I stare up at him. His shirt seems dingy, his deformed face: Evil! 

      What happens next is that his entire face seems to starts swirling around - much like the hypnotist wheel itself. Eventually - real memory - his face looks like a piece of stinking gas-emiting dog feces you might see on a sidewalk on a hot summer's day.

       He unloosens his grip on my shirt collar, turns his back, stands proud.

      The Italian guy is running away from Canada Pond and up the sandy hill in scruffy pointed shoes. That one smiles in a nervous kind of way.

       In a loud and crude joking manner the rapist shouts to him.

      "Hey, buddy! Ya got five dollars!? (Ha, ha!)..."

        Then he, too, runs away...

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        I know what I experience is pretty terrible.

        I know people who are raped sometimes die or are crippled for life because of it - AND I GENUINELY SYMPATHIZE WITH THEM AS I DO WITH ALL PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN RAPED.

         But I must say my own rape is no worse than when you get into a minor fender-bender, say, and maybe break a wrist or something.

         It's memorable but no big deal. 

         You have lived through worse...

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PART III

  

      "...What's the name of the angel, Eddie!?..."

       I wander near the little dock still a little hypnotized and now in a state of shock.

      The world gets dark. There's a sense of Calgary-like foreboding, a feeling of a goddess-like being in the sky hovering.

       An out-of-this-world event happens:

       As much as I can recall some kind of angel/prophet/wizard approaches by the shore. I can't at all describe him.

      I think he tells me about the future of my life.

      I think he speaks of various dates, discusses spans of time.

      This is the only thing I positively remember:

       "What kind of person will I be when I grow up?" I ask in 12-year-old boy innocence.

       "You will be a great man."

       And I recall him now because of the utter finality in which I distinctly remember him answering me, as though he's saying something so basic like the sun is hot.

      Imagining myself as a lion (ROAR!) and seeing imaginary children (POP!) is nothing compared to this!..

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

     

     Once he departs the day again brightens.

     With my pants half down, I stumble around. 

      The water of Canada Pond ripples. Cars with headlights white and bright on the highway across the water zoom north and south, zoom south and north.

      I stand amid reeds and touch them in a numbed-to-reality manner; the air seems humid; I feel clammy, sweaty.

     An older cousin (Mario) happens by.

     "Hi, Eddie. What's going on?" 

     He tells me that my pants are down.

     "Don't tell anyone that my pants are down,"" I say as I adjust them. I'm as horrified at this as the Biblical Ham was at the sight of his father Noah's nakedness.

     We turn our backs to the busy highway, the pond.

     We walk up the rain-gullied hill, pass by the ranch style fence and the No Trespassing sign that marks the end of the then dead-end Prosper Street. (Re: Endnote 23.)

     I find out later Mario is sent to look for me after someone reports hearing my cry to help.  Worried adults are thus gathered outside Papa Joe's simple white-shingled house.

     "I f-f-f-f-f-f-f-found Eddie by the side of the pond!" Mario yells at them with his typical stutter. "He had his pants down!"

      Like two soldiers from the War of Childhood  Mario props me up at we continue our eastward trek.

     Mario's mother, my Auntie Camille, sees me hobbling in the distance. She smiles and probably thinks I'm playing a part from my family-famous South Woodlawn play "Too Many Monsters." When she gets a closer look at my death green complexion her own beautiful face expresses horror.

     On the street there are oaths in English -"Eddie's hurt!"..."What happened?"..."Somebody better call an ambulance..." - and many others in bad, learned-in-the-USA Italian.

     I walk by everyone and approach the driveway of Papa Joe's where I notice my betraying cousin Fredo.

     Like a madman I lurch out and spit at him and   I swipe claw-like at him. 

     A relation stops me from further attacking him by pulling me back by the flopping wet tail of my shirt.

      Fredo's red-haired mother holds him in a protective way and shrieks:

    "He's crazy! He's crazy! He spit on my Fredo!"

      "Eddie just spit on Fredo," mutters my Auntie Maria in stunned wonder.

      It is an incredible action on my part.      

      I've never spit on anyone...

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     To the slamming slamming forever slamming old black painted slamming screen door I am brought and taken into the first-floor room of Papa Joe.

     A group of aunts look me over and notice my behind where they see blood.

     High Speed Internet has a long way to go before it ever reaches the speed of normal Italian family communication.

    As I collapse (while retaining consciousness) the rape news gets downloaded instantly...

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     My mother - Filomena Angela "Fanny" (ne: DelSignore) Dalton (real names) - catches a glimpse at me.

       "Don't take my son!" she screams. "Please God! Don't take my son! Leave me my Eddie! From now on I'll be good! I'll be good, God!"

       My grandfather Papa Joe bangs his big, lifetime-of-hard-physical-work fists on the big wooden kitchen table.

       My aunts and uncles do whatever it takes to avoid upsetting Papa Joe: The old boy has quite the temper. 

       That day, with dishware rattling and the house itself shaking, in deep fierce Abruzzi (now Abruzzo) Italian mountain oaths that you can feel right into your soul, Papa Joe really loses his temper...

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        The pond water I must have got into my lungs when I was getting raped has stopped me from breathing: I choke, I gag, I gasp, make wretched noises. I end up flat out with my eyes closed on Papa Joe's bed.

       An uncle unsuccessfully tries Cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques (CPR) on me.

       Another uncle takes a turn and stands over me. A plasterer by trade with the biceps to prove it he slaps me pretty hard.

      "Wake up, Eddie! (SLAP)," he shouts like an angel of the Apocalypse. "Wake up! (SLAP)"

       For God knows what reason the uncle who unsuccessfully used CPR techniques goes outside and starts BEEPING BEEPING BEEPING the horn of his brown and white BEEPING BEEPING BEEPING bought-in-France Citroen.

       In a room outside another quite militarily competent uncle grabs a gun.

       His plan: To go outside and find and murder -clickclickclick (gun loading) - my attackers.

       I'm still choking and gagging, Mom is still screaming, Papa Joe is still banging on the kitchen table and issuing deep-voiced scary Italian oaths, BEEP BEEP BEEP goes the Renault.

       And it is at this point that comic relief is provided by Auntie Rosa.

       She enters the room.

       She dumps a battered old spaghetti pot full of water over my head.

        Ha! Ha!

        EXEUNT: AUNTIE ROSA...

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        Next comes the heavy military D-

Day at Normandy invasion: The Italian aunts.

        In their non-filter-tip-cigarette-raspy/East Coast of the United States regional Italian-American accented voices, they gather around me.

       "What's the name of your angel, Eddie?" they ask. "Hey, hey: Eddie Dalton: What's the name of your angel, Eddie. Eddie, Eddie: What's the name of your angel?.."

       My aunts ask me this because a few years before the news is spread in Advanced Italian Family Social Media that I was convinced - by an Irish nun from Providence's Saint Raymond's Church - that an angel guarded me and personally took care of me.

        "Eddie: Hey, Eddie Dalton. Eddie Dalton from Pawtucket, Rhode Island: What's the name of the angel? Wake up and tell us: We'll give you all the candy you can eat, Eddie. What's the name of the angel!? (We love you, Eddie! We all love you, Eddie Dalton!)..."

       Mom's demented screaming, Papa Joe's fists banging and End of Time mad Italian ravings, BEEPBEEPBEEPclickclickclick (gun loading) - and finally, in the near distance, the siren - whirrrrwhirrrrwhirrrr- from an approaching - whirrrrwhirrrrr- ambulence. ("What's the name of the angel? What's the nameoftheangelthename of the angel...")

       In my last moments of awareness I realize the emotions in the house of Papa Joe's are thick, solid, electric. I flash on the fact that these intense feelings always - whirrrwhirrrwhirrr- surround us but that we're usually not - clickclickclick - "in tune" enough to experience them. 

      We live in heaven, we live in heaven, weliveinheavenwelive...-whirrrwhirrrwhirrr - white light/white light/white...

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      Right after I pass into a black abyss the rescue squad storms into the house. They do more CPR techniques on me (or, as I will once overhear my mother say: "...that thing, that thing there they do with the arms..."). 

     They put a tube down my throat and finally - ZIP! ZAP! ZAP! - put two prongs of their rescue shock apparatus to my forehead to jolt me alive.

      Modern rescue techniques make me rise from the dead.

      I shake to life with ancient spasms.

      "Eddie, Eddie," says my teary-eyed mother as she grabs me hard and holds me. "Eddie..."

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       Next: I am hauled out on a stretcher to the street, hoisted into a station wagon of an ambulance.

       There is much foot-shuffling and squabbling by the relations in English and Italian who accompany the rescue team. 

      One uncle - an extraordinary cheapskate who is, as we speak, the richest man in the cemetery (Imagine that!) - informs everyone that we will be billed for the ambulance.

       Besides the cost, my financially astute mother has her own solid reasons for me being snatched right back.

      "If Eddie goes in the ambulance and [NAME DELETED] finds out about it - (a sadistically long-winded piece of garbage uncle) - hey: After all this I just couldn't take it!" 

       Readers might find this hard to understand but that uncle is a bit tough to take. 

     Though I really sympathize with my mother, it is a terrible decision I am taken back from the ambulance and laid out again on Papa Joe's bed.

       (Re: Endnote 24.)

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      Some kind of sedative has been given to me and my breathing is normal. I am soon feeling peaceful, rested and falling to sleep. 

      Soon the bedroom door cracks open and someone stands in the light.

      It's Papa Joe.

      Papa Joe would never be considered a genius in the Italian tradition of Virgil or Petrarch or Caravaggio or Fermi or Marconi or Mondigliani or Wertmuller or Levi or - wow - I could really go on for a long time with a long list of Italian genius names.

      As a matter of fact after he came to this country in 1898 (alone and when he was 15) he mostly did these kind of hard working man jobs that people don't associate with high intelligence: Ice harvesting, loading freight cars, construction work, etc. 

      During the first years of the 20th century he even did railroad work. According to DelSignore family mythology he was one of those guys, I heard, who'd lay sticks of dynamite near rock, I heard, ignite it and:

      KA-BOOM!

      Rock and dirt would white light/Beginning-of-Time/I-was-Atum-when-I-was-alone-in-the-Abyss blast into the sky.

     That May day in 1961, in fact, in his old fashioned ankle-high black boots with the thin white socks and the Sunday fresh white shirt on his broad chest, he walks through his bedroom with the sensitive courage of the strong and dark young man he was handling sticks of dynamite.

       Like he is lighting an explosive charge, in his very first affectionate act towards me in his life he leans down and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

      It is a kiss filled with fire, love, loving family tenderness, determination.

      It is a kiss in which feelings like strength and will and sacrifice are palpably communicated.

      I don't know how to quite say this but as I feel the bristles from Papa Joe's salt and pepper mustache and smell the scent from his Parodi cigars a large part of his soul goes into my soul, is tattooed upon my soul.

      In my mind (REAL MEMORY) I see the sun with thick and red hot huge cables of fire shooting out from its surface to the universe.

       The brilliantly delivered Big Bang explosion of a message as eternal as the Italian poetry of Dante Alighieri:

       YOU WILL SURVIVE.

       ("RE!" I YELL AND HEY, PAPA JOE: I DID SURVIVE!)

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      So anyway I go back home to my second floor apartment in my three-decker home with the great pear tree in the backyard in Pawtucket, the next city over from Papa Joe's Providence house. 

    Without the textile machines in the nearby factory and their usual 24-7 whirring (it is Memorial Day, a holiday) but with my little blue pet parakeet General Douglas MacArthur (real name) chirpingchirpingchirping, I sleep the sleep of the Grateful Dead. (...And the young men will have visions and the old men will dream dreams...)

      NEXT MORNING: Early morning bells from the nearby Little Sisters of the Poor run Old Folks' Home, General Douglas MacArthur chirping/chirping and wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee-time.

     I tell the entire story of my child hypnotist/imaginary children/ boyhood rape story to my mother - "...There were about 16 kids at first..." "...He did turn me into a lion but the guy never even came close to making me invisible.."/"...So he pushed me under the water and..." 

    She's pretty revolted.

    "I should-a had a girl! Hey! All this (expletives deleted), hey, I should-a had..."

     She goes into her bedroom, fetches all these religious medals on shoe strings that she never looks at, grips my hand hard and looks me straight in the eye.

      "Eddie, Eddie: Now listen to me, Eddie: Listen to me, Eddie: I want you to forget all this. I want you to forget all this right now. Listen to me, Eddie, listen to me: On the soul of your Grandma Anna, I want you to forget all this, Eddie.  Swear to me on the soul of your Grandma Anna that you're gonna forget all this! Swear to me, Eddie!"

       In that very den that now overlooks the pale brick Hope Artiste Village - where I that previous fall watched the election results of the Kennedy/Nixon election - I look into my mother's soulful dark brown eyes, really stare into them. 

     Back in the Day, for your information, my mother has a strong resemblance to the Virgin Mary in "Madonna of the Harpies" by Andrea del Sarto. (Re: ENDNOTE 25.) And I do wonder at her reasoning for me to forget about the hypnotist session, the rape, the paranormal happenings, the rape revival and that magical and eternal kiss from Papa Joe.

     But my late Grandma Anna was like a living angel on earth, a real hero of the Spanish Flu Epidemic (1918-1920) during which she visited and fed and helped the sick and dying.

      I would never go back on a promise I would make on my Grandma Anna's soul. (Re: Endnote 26.)

      So I do the very worst thing I have done in my life:

       I obey...

P.S. There were many other incidents of sexual abuse in my life that I repressed, but I say my repressed rape at Canada Pond is the one incident that pushed me over the top and caused so many mental and even physical problems...

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PART IV

(AFTERMATH AND LOOSE ENDS)

       "...I'd say the rapist was murdered..."

      A 12-year-old boy getting hypnotized, sexually assaulted and revived though electro-shock is not a normal rite of passage.

      Though I promised my mother I'd forget about the incident - and my immediate family agreed not to discuss it: "...in front of Eddie..." - through overheard bits of family conversations and other snippets learned through others the incident got out.

     People talked.

     The event grew like the wild assassination theories regarding President John F. Kennedy.  (The following incidents I recalled after I remembered the rape in 2007...)

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      A teacher at South Woodlawn Elementary School in Pawtucket, R.I. - "Mrs. Dennehy" - somehow found out everything. 

     About four days after the event she confronted me in my classroom and gave me a big motherly hug.

      "You poor kid! Don't you know what happened to you, Eddie Dalton!? You were raped, Eddie Dalton! You were raped!.."

     (P.S. Perhaps Mrs. Dennehy found out about the rape through the police.)

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    A few weeks after, while visiting Papa Joe, a Providence police detective came over with some comically bad police drawings based on my rescuing cousin Mario's description of my attackers  he saw leaving the scene. (On this day my mother told me it was "okay" to try to remember the event again.)

      I haven't seen those drawings since 1961 but I can describe how at least one of the attackers was depicted: The guy who held up the knife to me at the end of the dock was shown as having hair that was outlandishly high. His bad depiction sort of reminds me of the old 1960s cartoon figure Fred Flintstone. (Re: Endnote 27.)

      When the detective showed me the drawings I was confused and unable to be of any help...

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      As much as I have been able to piece together - through snippets of conversations between an aunt and my mother - an official inquest was held: My attackers were present. I'm not sure what happened at this hearing, but since I wasn't there to testify no one was charged with sexual assault.

     "One of those guys looked like Ray," said my aunt to my mother - meaning Raymond L.S. Patriarca, the Godfather of the New England Mafia.

     He did, too, that is if Patriarca at the time had been 25 years younger... (Re: Endnote 19.)

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    At an outdoor family gathering in the backyard of Papa Joe's in that summer of 1961 an Italian-American women of about 50 approached me. She started telling me about some guy who held up a knife to me by the end of the little dock. (I think she had been driving by on the highway across the river at the time of my attack.)

      "Ooooooooh: My husband and me could see him! We could see how those eyes of his moved back and forth! Oooooooh: What a bad man!"

      (My mother overheard this encounter and politely escorted the woman away.  She told me that the woman was a nice woman: "...but not so well in the head, Eddie. She means well, Eddie..." Then Mom advised me to forget whatever I had been told...)

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      "I heard two men caught a kid by Canada Pond and did bad things to him," said fellow student (NAME DELETED) at the new school I started to attend in that fall of 1961, Samuel Slater Junior High in Pawtucket. "They said that kid was you."

       Another Slater student - Myra Aylward - told me a story about how I had wrecked a birdhouse and the kids who built it got angry with me. (Aylward said this to me in the 7th grade and then again - in a revised form - in the 12th grade at Pawtucket West High School.)

     I denied my involvement to both students...

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     I believe there was a newspaper account of the incident though I have never seen it. I say this because once at Slater I remember students gathering around a newspaper clipping and for some reason refusing to let me see it...

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      I recall a school assembly (at Slater) in which a teacher spoke about a rumor circulating about a student who was hypnotized and attacked and who attended Slater. He told the students that that kid was not enrolled in Slater but went to a Roman Catholic school.

     Then, for a reason that was peculiar to me at the time, out of all the students present he said something - to me!..

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       Once, about four years after the rape, I had an Explorer Scout experience at a fire station in North Providence in which a fireman was discussing fire issues.

       He spoke about the kid who had been attacked at Canada Pond and how his uncle had armed himself with a gun after the attack...

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       Another time I was on a public bus riding by my house. Some other kid riding said to a friend: "I'll show you the house where kid who was hypnotized lives."

      Amazing me he pointed to my three-decker...

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     In high school - when I was in the throes of mental difficulties and was a bullied and shell-shocked kid - I was once in a full classroom where the teacher had to step out for a few minutes. The kids soon got noisy and rowdy.

       A bully started laughing at me and gave me a hard slap in the face.

        "Ha! This is what your uncle did to you the day you were hypnotized. Ha!"

        The rest of the students roared with laughter.

        I was too stunned and shocked to respond - and really didn't know what the bully was talking about, anyway...

       (For a much more extreme example of high school bullying - and one, years later, that had an amazingly happy "warm puppies" ending - Re: Endnote 28.)

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     These kinds of incidents occurred throughout my life. People would give me strange looks for no apparent reason. Others, inexplicably, would laugh at me. 

      "And he doesn't even know it!"

      I heard that once or twice.

      When I worked for a couple of years (1978-1980) as a reporter at the then named Evening Times of Pawtucket, R.I. two reporters confronted me.

      "When you were a kid weren't you hypnotized by a bunch of kids at Canada Pond?" asked the older reporter, the late Mike D'Ambra, about 19 years after the rape happened.  

       D'Ambra then suggested I had been sexually attacked.

       "No," I denied.

       The other younger reporter looked at me in disgust at what he seemed to think was my responsibility for the various elements of the rape!...

      Other incidents of people speaking of the hypnotist session or the rape itself - one of which (I allege) involved the great Hollywood actor James Woods on national television - were simply outrageous... (Re: Endnote 1 and Endnote 29.)

      Still, after decades I continued to bury everything...

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     When I finally became completely aware of the rape - 46 years later in March of 2007 (which you will learn all about in the next section) - I was "on fire" to write about it. By October of that year I even prepared a first draft novel of the event. 

      I have had difficulty remembering what the rapist looked like but if I had the artistic ability I could paint the guy who held up the knife to me in photographic detail.

     A few years after I started work on the novel, I began writing this non-fiction account, something, besides the good it can provide for rape victims, that I feel would impress any jury regarding my awareness and state of mind involving such a long ago event. (As I wrote there was an official inquest of this rape. There could be an official record of it around somewhere and if the man who held up a knife to me could be located I knew I could positively point him out in a court of law. That I eventually gave up on this quest is explained in ENDNOTE 29A.)

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     As for the rapist himself...

     There is one good reason it's not at all urgent that I seek justice regarding him.

     When I was in my 20s I was at an aunt's house: Mary (ne: Dalton) McDonald (real names). She was a second mother to me and knew I had been having mental problems, various issues.

      She told me that a long time ago some kids at Canada Pond had hypnotized me and then abandoned me. Then she said two guys got me and that one: "...hurt me bad..."

    "Nobody hurt me!" I protested while quaffing  shots from the bottle of Irish whiskey she kept on hand for my periodic visits.

     "Oh yes he did," Aunt Mary insisted. "He was a sick guy. He used to get these little colored girls* (*this was my kindly and loving aunt's quaint but not-at-all racially intended expression) and stick their heads underwater and hurt them."

       My aunt continued:

       "Well, the guy hurt this colored girl whose mother was a friend of this big gangster. Then the gangster got the guy - and - he fixed him...He straightened him out..."

      There are a few things I should tell you:

      One, I think that when my Aunt Mary was discussing "little colored girls" who the guy would half-drown and hurt she was really disguising that she was referring to me.

     Two, I'd say the rapist was murdered...

By the way: The day after I was raped my cousin Fredo (accompanied by his father) came over to my house. He indicated he had something to tell me.

        "Beelzebub," he said... 

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      PART V (PAIN AND RECOVERY)

     "...blessed be the name of my God, who has been mindful of us, wanderers in a strange land..." 

     Book of Morman, Alma 27:36

     "...As for anyone who shall read it (The 17th Spell) daily for h/his benefit, it means being hale  (healthy) on earth; h/she shall come forth from every fire and nothing evil shall reach h/her. It is a matter a million times true. I have seen and it has indeed come to pass through me..."

       The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

      When I tell people I was raped when I was 12-years-old with my head and chest underwater it really flips them.

       They gasp.

       Their eyes open wide.

       "Wow!" they say.

        As shocking as my own rape might sound as I said it just wasn't that bad. Other rape victims get killed - or get maimed for life, contract incurable diseases, get pregnant, etc.

        Like I read this story about a young woman from Florida who was raped. She got so depressed by the experience she killed herself. (I wish I could have spoken to her. I could have helped her...)

       Then there's this other story about a woman in India who was driving somewhere, got lost, asked for directions and ended up getting raped. One official had the nerve to say she shouldn't have been driving and deserved to be raped! (Speaking of India there are a lack of toilet facilities there. In rural places young girls often get raped when they go outdoors to relieve themselves: Terrible!)

     Whether or not you've been raped I'm sure you have suffered more than I have.

       Maybe you've been involved in a major car accident, had cancer, had a stroke or a heart attack, lost a loved one, etc.

        OTHERWISE SAID: SAVE THE HUGS `CAUSE YOU'RE THE ONE WHO NEEDS THEM. 

        (And I'm sure you could write a book describing how you suffered. But don't do it 'cause then you'll really suffer. LOL!)

        It's true I suffered from the forced forgetting of the rape. Yet considering how relatively little I suffered it would be disgusting to moan and groan. All things considered I lived a pretty good life and have no complaints.

        Nevertheless, it is important for me to give you a brief non-whining "shopping list" of my difficulties just to show you what the forced forgetting of the rape did to me - and how many "demons" I managed to cast out. 

         So...

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     1. Right after the forced forgetting of the rape my ability to concentrate got muddled. It became hard for me to study, read, etc.

       I became forgetful, "scatterbrained", couldn't remember what I had just been thinking. I developed short-term memory loss, seemed to always have a mild headache.

       I had all A's in my sixth grade class. It was reasonable for me to believe I was on a path to the Ivy League and at 12 I did want to go to Harvard.

      After, my dreams of attending Harvard faded: My grades went south.

      (After a bad year at Providence College, I ended up going to the then named Post Junior College in Waterbury, Connecticut - a good little school with the greatest kids anyone could hope to meet - where I got excellent grades and then transferred to the University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder, Colorado. Though I never graduated CU I learned a lot. I say my spotty academic career had a lot to do with the overall effect of my repressed rape. Out of everything else, how the repressed rape affected my scholastic career has, to me, been the most upsetting aspect: If my mind were properly working I could have done so much more with my life scholastically...)

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     2. I began to have what I now call "mini-seizures." These seizures certainly weren't as intense as the Grand Mal epileptic seizures so brilliantly described in "The Idiot" by Fyodor Mikolevich Dostoyevsky. What would happen to me was that I'd be about to go to sleep, feel all these wild and intense electrical sensations throughout my body, pass out into a deep black sleep and then wake up about an hour later drained of energy and mentally weak. It would then take me a few hours to regain my strength, my energy.

       These draining mini-seizures became more regular by my mid-30s and became daily events in my 40s and 50s...

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     3. I was constantly tired and never rested. I went through most of my life dragging around my Clown-Large sized feet and always needing a nap. That these naps would often lead to mind-draining mini-seizures is another matter.

      Trust me: I was not a morning person...

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     4. I was a popular kid before the attack. After I became unpopular and stigmatized. Word of the weird hypnotist session and the rape itself - something that kids would deem comical - got whispered about.

       I'd "freeze up" when physically confronted. Youths took advantage of this and I was often bullied in junior high school and high school.

       "Let's get Dalton!"

        I heard that a lot.

        To this day when I think of various bullying incidents I am (unreasonably) filled with shame. I am not a coward - but I was a traumatized and mentally ill kid.

       The world can be a cruel place...

       (Re: Endnote 28.)

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       5. Though I was never diagnosed with it I believe I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Often I would have intense and uncontrollable fits of anger. I'd get into wild and senseless arguments, huff and puff.  I could have written the book on Road Rage and got into at least one fender bender because of all my anger.

       Little things would drive me crazy: The sound of a fire siren, kids screaming on the street, the sniffles of a genuine genius ex-girlfriend - anything!

       I was a crab, constantly worked up over some trifling matter.

       For this reason employment became difficult for me, something I dealt with (one way) by working as a security guard in vacant factory buildings with positively no one or nothing to get on my nerves.

       It was low-paying work but it turned out to be a fantastic opportunity: I used the hours and hours of free and silent time to read and write and study; though I was mentally unwell I became an educated person. 

      I do say by the time I was in my late 30s I was mentally disabled and that I reasonably qualified for a monthly Social Security check, food stamps, medical assistance and federally funded housing as so many others like I was (thankfully) do.

     Still, since I was in such a state of denial about everything, I kept working...

      Now, at 75, I continue to work and gladly pay taxes to the government: It's an honor and a privilege to live in the United States of America where we have so many hard-won rights and freedoms; I wish I earned more so I could pay more in taxes*...(*AUTHOR'S MESSAGE.) (AND SHOUT OUT TO MY GRANDPARENTS FOR GETTING HERE!)

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     6. Throughout my life I had substance abuse problems. Like so many others with traumatic and buried memories, I would drink and take drugs - specifically whiskey, Vicadin and marijuana - to "self-medicate" and blot out bad remembrances. 

     At times my chemically altered mind really affected my ability to make basic life decisions - like my getting the worst secured loan in the history of the world. You might even want to read about a "pretty bad" repressed-memory-come-to-the-surface (I say) LSD experience. It was horrible to go through - but at least it makes for engaging reading...(Re: Endnote 30.)

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     7. From my late 40s until around the time of my rape awareness (when I was 58) I suffered from high blood pressure. I'd get so worked up over things that my face would turn purple: I was a prime candidate for a heart attack or a stroke... (Note: For financial reasons most of my life I was not under medical care and I only theorize I had high blood pressure.)

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     8. Though I am most angered at the mental difficulties I suffered from and how they impacted me academically, I'd say the very worst problem I suffered from was depression. I had severe bouts of depression; I would often spend days in bed only getting up to go to the bathroom or whatever job I held.

     There were a few suicide attempts. Terribly, I do remember often considering suicide when I was an abused and bullied teen.

      That I ultimately overcame my depression is nothing less than a miracle...

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     9. Finally, because I was often so depressed and muddled in the brain - especially considering my short-term memory problems and debilitating "mini-seizures" - I believe I was a prime candidate for developing Alzheimer's as my late father and World War II veteran and good and constant family provider Maurice Edward Dalton (real name) suffered from.

      These days I'm so clear-headed I really doubt this will happen.

      You should also note that similar to my  exercise routine I write and read daily, try to learn new things all the time; I want to "exercise" my mind, that is, and make a solid effort to do what I can to prevent getting Alzheimer's...

      I ain't exactly going gently into that good night, let me tell ya: I'M ON FIRE!...

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      This all noted as you can see that due to the deliberate forgetting of the rape my life was not a bed of roses. But (again) compared with the suffering of others - like you, maybe - I can't complain. 

      I had many good times in my life: I traveled all over the place (I once hitchhiked from Rhode Island to Alaska); was at the original Woodstock (where I saw the Grateful Dead, Santana and Country Joe McDonald and others); AND OF THE MORNING OF MY 50TH BIRTHDAY I DO NOT PERMIT YOU TO HEAR.

     This story isn't meant to be "Victim Literature," anyway: This is "Survival Literature." 

      So - drum roll please!

      It's time I told you how I ultimately overcame my mental and physical problems*! (*A similar account to the following scenes appears in another blog, realcabrides.blogspot.com)

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      First thing: I am a pagan or what I prefer to call a "New Age" Ancient Egyptian Polytheist.* (*A believer in more than one god with a 21st century update.)

     Let me tell you all about the joy and the wonder and the glory of how I became a polytheist: NOT!

     Anyway, sometime during the summer of 2003 I was in my still-the-same apartment on Lowden Street in Pawtucket, R.I., USA, "Third Stone from the Sun." Kind of depressed and grubby I was "just chillin'" with Jimi Hendrix (probably) a-blast.

     R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ring! Ring! R-r-r-r-r-ring!

     Two young Mormons* (*these representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day saints told me it was okay to refer to them as Mormons) - "Elder Ball" and "Elder Jensen" (real names) - were both clean and shaved in pressed suits and neckties were standing on my doorstep. They wanted to discuss religion.

     For about 11 years at this point in my life I had been a night cabdriver in the city next to my great and sensational and wonderful beyond belief home City of Pawtucket, the City of Providence. 

     I met many bad people as a cabdriver but I met many other good people. Since I often got into conversations - in the old days, children, nobody "lived" on their phones and people often "talked" with one another - I learned to respect various viewpoints. OTHERWISE SAID: I was a lot different from the Mormons standing in the "exceedingly bright" sunlight on my porch but I respected their own religious faith.

     I also respected the courage they had to go door-to-door to promote their historically persecuted religion; the young men standing before me were heroic soldiers of the Messiah Jesus Christ.

     As cars passed and kids on bicycles rode by and people walked their great dogs I told these Mormons they had no chance of converting me. But I did invite them up to my stately pleasure dome.

       The next afternoon we had a lively and enjoyable conversation.

       They gave me a copy of The Book of Mormon which I have since read.

        I gave them a copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Book of Going Forth By Day.*) (*I gave them a copy of the Doctor Ogden Goelet edition. Though I consult this edition I do not daily use it.) 

     Now besides being a cabdriver I was also a former newspaper reporter turned writer who compiled a group of my taxi experiences and self-published them in a book called "Real Cab Rides." (While an expanded and totally free edition of "Real Cab Rides" exists at - again - realcabrides.blogspot.com - there are currently no more print editions available.) The spring before I had even taken to the streets on a quest to sell books.

      That was tough.

      It took a lot of courage to approach strangers and I sold very few copies. I reasoned selling books like I did took the same amount of courage that it took for these young Mormons to go door-to-door speaking of their faith.

     And where did they get that kind of courage?

     "When we get up we pray and read scriptures," answered one Mormon in a matter-of-fact manner. "Then the rest of the day takes care of itself..."

    About a week after meeting the Mormons - I'd say on August 17, 2003 - I decided to do exactly what Elder Ball and Elder Jensen did: To pray the first thing in the morning. Maybe this would give me the same kind of courage you needed to sell books to strangers.

     Using the R.O.Faulkner translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead as published by the good people of the University of Texas I started saying spells in sequential order from this book.* (*Note: There's a spell at the beginning of this Texas edition called the Negative Confession - or Spell 125. For reasons I won't now get into I've never said it.)

     The beginning spells are really short so it was no stress keeping up this daily routine. 

    I said a spell for not working in the realm of the dead - a favorite of the ancient Egyptians that I read at my mother's funeral - another for removing anger from the heart of the god. 

     Spell 15 was a long one but I still said it.

     Then - probably on September 1 - I awoke and faced the 17th Spell.

      Spell 17 is a good 4,000 years old and is a good four oversized pages long. It takes about 20 minutes to recite. It's filled with some of the strangest things you will ever read. (I.e.: "I am that great cat who split the Ished tree in Heliopolis...";"...their knives shall not cut into me, I shall not enter into their slaughter houses..."; "I am Wadjet, Lady of the Devouring flame, and few approach me...")

     It is a very informative spell, though, and it gives you a great understanding of ancient Egyptian beliefs, their concept of Creation. Personally, I found the words powerful, steel-like, stellar, electric. Having read a modest amount of literature and poetry in my life the ancient words of the 17th Spell seemed as powerful as anything I have ever read; in the strongest and most real way I "connected" with the 17th Spell.

     Well, I kept on reciting the spell and at the end of it read out the following words (which I will present in a non-sexist way as I always say it):

      "...As for anyone who shall read it*(*the 17th Spell) daily for her or his benefit, it means being hale* (*healthy) on earth; he or she will come forth from every fire and nothing evil shall reach her or him.  It is a matter a million times true; I have seen and it has indeed come to pass through me..."

     As I have told you throughout most of my adult life I suffered from depression. 

    Just a few months before I started saying the 17th Spell I got so depressed I made a nearly successful suicide attempt: I took a lot of codeine tablets with the intent of going into The Big Sleep. I woke up but I felt chest pain for weeks after.

   So after reading those words about saying the spell and being healthy, I decided to daily say the 17th Spell. Besides gaining courage like the Mormons did, maybe this would be good.

    And after daily saying this spell for a month something great happened:

    MY DEPRESSION ENDED.

    I must clarify this immediately:

    Medical people will tell you depression is never cured. But I will say that by October 1, 2003 my depression became much better managed and completely under control - AND THAT THIS HAPPENED WITHOUT MEDICATION OF ANY KIND.

    I seemed to be a much healthier person and no longer "in a fog."

    My sleep marathons ended and I have slept more regularly since that time. OTHERWISE SAID: No way do I stay in bed for days at a time.

    Yes, I have had thoughts of suicide. (Who hasn't?) But these thoughts are always fleeting and lack the intensity of the depression-fueled death wishes I had before saying the 17th Spell. (Re: Endnote 31.)

    I have certainly not attempted suicide since this time.

     I have, in fact, a strong will to live and want to keep living and working until I'm 100: That's my  life cycle goal. 

    (By the way: Though I'd say I also gained courage saying the 17th Spell I had a genuine change of heart selling copies of "Real Cab Rides" on the street and I stopped doing this.) 

    After this dramatic turn of health you bet I kept saying the 17th Spell.

    Within months other positive things happened:

    For instance, at the time I began saying the 17th Spell I was a medically obese 240 pounds. (I am six feet tall.) By late April 2004 I lost 60 pounds. (I have gone up and down over the years but I have never gone above 220 pounds. As of March 2024 I currently weigh 205 pounds and reasonably expect to be back at 180 in a year or so. I'm not rushing.)

    My writing and studying habits improved. I even managed to read the 1200 large page 10th edition of "Gardiner's Art Through the Ages." 

     I kept to a daily walking routine. 

     I also began a program of light exercise and weight-lifting. 

     Keep in mind that I still drank too much alcohol and smoked marijuana like a chimney. 

     I continued to have short-term memory problems, had daily mini-seizures, would often get uncontrollably angry, would be bothered by little things and my blood pressure (a guess) stayed high.

     But because of the seeming cure of my depression, my weight loss and the other good things that were happening, it didn't seem like I had any problems.

     Like, if all the tires on your car are flat and you suddenly get all new tires and start rolling down the road again, things like a bad tune-up or major body rot will not bother you. As for me, since so many good things happened I thought I was doing fine...

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    I kept on saying the 17th Spell on a daily basis. This went on throughout 2004 and 2005. 

    Then, after nearly three years of daily saying the spell, in the summer of 2006 I one day recalled the hypnotist session with the clubhouse kids that happened right before the rape.

    That was wild - and I genuinely had a few unsettling weeks because of this recollection. And while I say it was psychologically good for me to remember this, after a few months I sensed there was more to be remembered because in silent moments - like right before I drifted off to sleep - I would think of the hypnotist session, maybe, and I'd "hear" bumps and grinds and doors slamming and slammming - clickclickclick - in my mind...

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    Now millions of people have seen "Silence of the Lambs" with Anthony Hopkins and Jody Foster. Foster plays the part of top student and wannabe FBI agent (Clarice Starling) who interviews Hopkins (Cannibal Lector), a brilliant psychiatrist and a cannibal who might have information on a vicious killer. Starling tries to get the information but Lector will only give it a bit at time and provided that Starling tells him about her past.

    Starling tells Lector how her life was after her policeman father was murdered. She remembers the crying of lambs about to be slaughtered at this really bad time in her childhood, how she even tried to save a lamb. (It's implied in the movie when she remembers everything there is in her mind - Dah! Dah! - the silence of the lambs.)

    And what, I like Starling could have similarly wondered, were all these bumps and grinds - And wait: was that a door slamming? Was that a car horn beeping? - going on in my mind?

    What could these - clickclickclick, sirens whirring sirens whirring, voices in Italian - that I'd hear in quiet moments right before I went to sleep?

     Every night? 

     Over and over? 

     (I say these mental sounds went in mind throughout the day and thus impacted my thinking, but I only really focused on them before I went to sleep.)

    It was maddening trying to figure this out. But one afternoon in early spring of March 2007 - BA-BOOM! 

    IN STRONG VISUAL AND AURAL FLASHES I  REMEMBERED MANY THINGS: BEING RAPED, THE INTENSE ITALIAN FAMILY REVIVAL, BEING JOLTED BACK TO LIFE THROUGH ELECTRO-SHOCK.

     I could see the Italian guy first showing his well-crafted silvery knife to me with the coarse spotty weeds in the sand. He looked exactly like a cocky, younger looking Mafia don Raymond L.S. Patriarca. (Re: Endnote 19.) No doubt I could identify him in court!

    I could see the rapist himself prowling on the little dock, hear his feet clunking on the wood, see his and the dock's reflection in the water, see me fighting him in the sand.

    I remembered the underwater rape itself, scenes from the intense Italian revival, the sounds of the siren of the ambulance (whirrrrwhirrrrwhirrrr) getting closer, closer...

   I remembered that kiss from Papa Joe, the strong and manly "survival vibes" that transmitted from his soul into mine. [And what details I didn't remember - like my cousin Mario meeting me, the imaginary children popping into reality, James Woods speaking of the hypnotist session on TV, etc. (Re: Endnote 1) - I would remember soon after. Since I remembered the hideous rape nothing "blocked" me from remembering anything else related to it.]

     The moment after I remembered everything my short-term memory returned in full force: Instantly! What a shock! 

     It was like suddenly whatever I had been thinking was being shouted out at the top of a mountain and echoing in my mind: I couldn't easily forget what I thought since I'd hear echoes of the particular thought. 

    That very day I remembered the rape I stopped having seizures. I didn't even realize they were seizures until that day and I haven't had one since. (And get this: For years after this I missed these seizures and the electrical intensity of them.)

    Though this wasn't immediately obvious, that sense of permanent fatigue and my continual mild headaches ended. I'd say my blood pressure started improving at this point, too. (Re: Endnote 32.)

    From that time on I was no longer dragging myself through life.

    I had as much energy in me as I had when I was a kid. Considering the extent of my mental problems and the 10-year-duration of LSD flashbacks I suffered from (Re: Endnote 30), at 58 years of age I felt mentally and emotionally better than I did when I was 12.

     WITHOUT EXAGGERATING, ME REMEMBERING THIS RAPE AND HOW MY HEALTH DRAMATICALLY IMPROVED AS A RESULT OF THIS WAS LIKE THE DIRECT OPPOSITE OF HAVING A HEART ATTACK OR A STROKE.

     And imagine how great it is to be entering your senior years with such a sudden and dramatically positive health reversal! Imagine how great this is for your morale, how such a miracle would inspire you to keep working, and, and my case, to keep reading and writing! I am really glad this happened to me when it did, too: Now, in my 70s, I don't think I'd so easily handle the shock of such an event. Just like Starling (Foster) in the movie experienced the silence of the lambs when she remembered what she did, I experienced the silence of so many rape related sounds in my own mind; I achieved a great sense of peace because of this rape revelation...

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   Though so many issues had been resolved and my life dramatically improved, I still had problems  that would take me a few more years to get at.

   As I told you I had issues with alcohol abuse. (The last time I drank was in 2011.) 

   Ditto for that great-drug-that-can-do-you-no-harm-marijuana.  I do smoke it but I have a handle on it.

     It's true that these days every time I look at my mirror I see the spitting image of my same-named Irish grandfather Edward Dalton.  But at least from the neck down I look a lot younger and everything works.

     At 75, too, though I collect my monthly Social Security retirement benefit, in order to support  my groovy shared bohemian bachelor pad and The Writing Monkey On My Back, I work part-time: A couple of nights a week I work as a shuttle driver for Transdev  America at the Rhode Island School of Design - one of the greatest art schools on the planet with (mostly) respectful and hard-working students. I also write a little six days a week, read daily.

     OTHERWISE SAID: Ya got a pretty happy camper here!

     Oh: Another rape remembrance improvement is that little things don't bother me - even arguably big things.

    One little thing: My kindly downstairs landlady sometimes has her great-grandson as a visitor. The boy is about three and runs around like a madman. My landlady has expressed concern about the noise and has repeatedly apologized for it. 

    I think if I were younger with my mentally challenged self the noise would have driven me whack-o. With my mental health now restored these days the noise doesn't bother me in the least.         

    "Live!" I tell the kid when I see him. "Make all the noise you want!"

    An arguably big negative thing that recently happened was this:

    I had a computer flash drive with this story and the latest nearly complete draft of the novel I was was writing based on it.

     You got it: The flash drive died. (We're talking about 700 double-spaced typewritten pages.) 

     I think this is something that would have made me jump off the City of Pawtucket's Division Street Bridge (a high stone bridge built after the Civil War).

     But when the impact of losing everything hit me I just shrugged it off and kind of laughed. 

     I should have had a back-up copy - but in a sense I did: Everything I had written had been stored in my mind - and I've had no problem re-writing everything by hand and putting a solid hard copy on paper. (Love them Sharpie pens!)

    I'm telling you that when I was younger and mentally unstable it would have been easy to push my buttons - but not these days.

    I have now been daily saying The 17th Spell for over 20 years...

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     One important note: I continue to say the 17th Spell and will continue to say it. For a few reasons I get into in the next section it works for me. I am even convinced the 17th Spell is what "pushed me over the top" regarding the resolution of my mental and physical problems, my rape awareness and other instances of sexual abuse that aren't included in this document. (Out of everything else I went through it was repressing this rape that affected me most. I know this because of the dramatic improvement in my thinking that happened in a snap of a finger right after I recalled it.)

     However, readers should be aware that during my life I have had many sessions of psychotherapy. Although my rape (or other instances of sexual abuse) never came to the surface, the therapists - particularly a Roman Catholic priest and a humanist woman - helped provide me with some of the necessary analytical "tools" to uncover such buried memories.

     Yes, I will continue to say the 17th Spell.

     But without the benefit of scientifically minded psychotherapy I do not know what may have ultimately happened.

     The two lands - science and religious faith - connected...

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 PART VI (CONCLUSIONS)

Section One

    (Though I do here urge people to daily pray in the religion of their choice - as a way to be healthy and have a better personal life - I am well aware if you have no faith you don't pray. I respect your freedom of choice and insist you, too, will benefit from what you will read since I have developed a kind of prayer for atheists. Don't laugh: I say this regularly - AND IT WORKS! This unique prayer is discussed in Section Two, the latter part of this chapter.

     Additionally, for me to suggest people pray every day may seem hilarious to many who knew me years ago and others who can see from my other writings that I am often a profane person; in the parlance of the Born Again Christians many would deem me a sinner.

     Yet I do pray (or say spells) every day and spend (usually) 30 minutes doing it, a practice I have daily done (as of June 2024) for over 20 years. Also, I (usually) say my specially crafted non-religious "prayer" for atheists which I began saying about three years ago.

     I say readers should bear in mind that like there is a separation between church and state there is also a separation between how we live and the Divine Forces. 

    One is saved by the grace of God and not by one's actions... 

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     Let's first clear up this matter:

     Though I am a rape survivor I only say these three things learned from experience and shown in this book:

      1. A PERSON WHO IS IN CONFUSED STATE OF MIND SHOULD NEVER BE LEFT ALONE.

      2. A PERSON WHO HAS BEEN RAPED SHOULD GET FREE MEDICAL HELP AND PYSCHIATRIC COUNSELING.

      3. RAPE CENTERS EVERYONE SHOULD BE INSTRUCTED TO RETURN MESSAGES TO RAPE VICTIMS ASKING FOR HELP - EVEN IF THE VICTIM ASKS FOR HELP IN THE FORM OF A LETTER.

     It is my sincere hope that lawmakers everywhere will consider this when making laws that impact rape victims. Hopefully my own story will make them more sensitive to the suffering rape survivors often endure. I also hope law enforcement agencies will help spread the news of never leaving a confused person alone as happened to me and I strongly encourage them to use my story as a real example. I am sure most already do this but I say this is a message that warrants constant repeating with each new generation. And I do hope rape centers everywhere take heed on answering people who send letters asking for help. 

     By all means tell them my story, too! 

     See, the fact that I was comically hypnotized then raped while being held underwater is something people will remember and it may change their behavior...They won't forget. They'll talk about it AND THEY'LL LEARN.

     I am very sympathetic with rape survivors and victims of sexual abuse. 

     According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) 13 percent of all women who get raped attempt suicide, 33 of women who get raped contemplate suicide and one out of every 10 rape victims are male. 

     There are more statistics I can provide but you get the picture: Rape has a devastating effect on our society and world.

     There are also plenty of worthy and qualified people who have written books and articles and filmed documentaries on rape. So if you wish to read something truly authoritative on this issue, say, why not Google "Books on Rape" and see what you come up with? 

      I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

      I believe that we can make an impact on this devastating crime....

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     Though I do wish to tell this story to people who have been raped, the central theme of this book/blog is not rape, though: It's more about how you can improve your health and life and lose weight and deal with any substance abuse issues and get in shape and how you may overcome many of the problems that I did. Though I lack the qualifications as to what may be most beneficial to you, like someone who has traveled a road before you and may be able to tell you "a thing or two" about the highway ahead I do feel I can be similarly helpful. 

     It's with this kind of humble and folksy spirit I will conclude this book/blog...

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      First: The 17th Spell.

      I insist saying this spell daily has worked wonders for me, but beyond what I already said about it I have nothing much else to say.

      I have reasons for not pushing the 17th Spell, some of which I may someday get into. (Big plan: When I'm in my late 80s and early 90s I intend to write about this. Ha! You think I'm retiring from writing!?)

    I will now only say two things:

     1. DO NOT PLAY WITH THE 17th SPELL.

     By this I mean don't say it a couple of times and expect miracles. Maybe my opinion will change when I get to be older but I would be happier if people didn't say it instead of fooling around with it.

     2. THIS SPELL IS NOT THE WORK OF SATAN.

    Specifically, among other gods and goddesses, Isis - the name of the angel for me - is mentioned several times in this spell. She is the virtual savior of the faith and a divine being that sets an example for faithfulness, courage, beauty, determination and forgiveness - which, of course, is a quality that's as Christian as you can get. 

     It pains me deeply to think the name Isis has been so vilified with its current association with a terrorist group. Because to me the goddess angel Isis is really an eternal being of divine love and spiritual light.

     Additionally, since I do encourage people of all Christian faiths to daily pray, I am reminded of the Bible in which some people accused Jesus Christ of being Satanic in that He used the power of Satan to cast out devils. 

     Christ brilliantly pointed out that a house divided could not stand and that it would be unreasonable for Him to be accused of being in league with Satan. And if I do encourage people to pray - to Jesus Christ, if Christianity happens to be your faith - how does that make me (and vis a vis, the 17th Spell) connected with the Prince of Darkness!?

     Again, the 17th Spell is not evil... (Re: Endnote 33.)

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     Yet even though I do not push the 17th Spell on people, because I daily say it I see from personal example the great benefits that come to people through daily prayer - like the courageous young Mormons I met (and me, too, since what I do I consider saying spells a form of prayer.)

     As already discussed I achieved astounding mental and spiritual improvements with regards to my daily spell-saying. 

     Remember: My severe depression was superbly managed within a month (of my daily saying the 17th Spell in 2003) and it has never resurfaced. Also, there was significant weight loss, muscle gain, a genuine improvement in my outlook on life - and there were the spectacular mental and physical improvements that followed when I fully remembered the rape. (Then, too, I have since conquered my substance abuse issues.)

     I really think I would be dead now if I hadn't started saying the 17th Spell.

     MORMANS SAVED MY LIFE!

     PRAYING WORKS!

     (And hey Elder Jensen and Elder Ball: I owe you a glass of water!)

      If I could be famous for 15 minutes, as the artist Andy Warhol said that everyone in the future would be, this is what I would shout out to the human race:

     PRAY OR SAY GOOD WORDS DAILY!

    "Prayer availeth much..." says the Bible.

     "We must fortify ourselves with prayer..." says the Koran.

      Note here that I don't say what religion you should be. Whether you're a Christian or Jewish or Moslem or a polytheist - that's fine with me.

      Just pray in the religion of your choice - that's all I say. 

      When I say the 17th Spell - and I regularly say more spells than this one - I usually sit down, stand up for a few others. For my own religious reasons I face the west. (But certainly you can pray in the direction of your choice.)

     I sit when I say it because it's just easier for me and I reason I can still emit the sense of devotion that I feel.  

     Frankly, I don't care how you want to pray but sitting works well for me - AND IT HELPS GET THE JOB DONE.

     I recommend that you pray for 20 minutes a day. I say praying for at least that long "charges you up" and helps you face the day.

     People who drive their cars on superhighways to commute - and I know a lot of people in California have long commutes - might want to consider praying while they drive: I don't believe praying is a particularly bad distraction with regards to being an unsafe driver. (By the way, I earn a part-time living driving and I am indeed a professional driver. OTHERWISE SAID: I do have the qualifications to make such a statement.)

     For Roman Catholics saying the rosary beads takes about 30 minutes. Why couldn't a Roman Catholic say the rosary beads (in a safe way) and drive?

     Here are a few more reasons why I believe praying daily works:

     (And atheists:  Please hang in there a little bit! I'm gettin' to youse!)

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     1. For religious people praying every day is a way to daily connect with the divine forces.

       Like, so many people only pray when they're having major problems.

     "God, please help me!" they plead.

     And I can just imagine God saying:

     "Oh yeah! I remember you! The last time I heard from you was six years ago when you needed $157.72 for a fuel pump. I got you the money - and how's your car running?"

     I could be wrong, but I say when you "check in" with the Divine Powers daily - and daily experience (my religious view) their healing and blessed cosmic vibrations (for Christians, for instance, just to say the name Jesus Christ is to experience healing powers, a divine force; ditto for Moslems saying the name of the Prophet Mohammad) - They with a capital T know "you're a regular." But I also say if you pray every day you seldom need help since I do believe praying daily also makes you quite strong and quite independent. 

    Mostly when you daily pray you just want to express your gratitude for everything you already have...

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     2. Praying daily is what I call a "good habit magnet."

     I do say spells every day and it helps keep my life together. But because I got into the habit of saying spells daily I unintentionally taught myself how to maintain other good habits.

     For instance, being a writer I read. So like daily saying the spell I now daily try to read pages of various literature a day. Right now, for example, I am methodically reading the Bible - at least 10 pages a day - and "The Heart of Darkness" - also at least 10 pages a day, often many more - by Joseph Conrad. (And how much I read literally nothing: The Harvard educated President John F. Kennedy reported that he read two to three books a day.) Still, even daily reading this little adds up and will improve your knowledge of literature, art, science, the world.

     In a six-month period in 2020, using this same method I read about 20 books, several plays by Shakespeare, much of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and pages and pages and pages of worthy magazine articles. (I subscribe to The Economist, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books and Time. I regularly read The New York Times. Ha! It's funny to think of my reading these publications! It's a long way from when I only used to read Rolling Stone!) 

     Ditto for my exercise program. Believe me, I don't lift much but I do some reps with dumbbells and also do sit ups and leg lifts (and so on) on a tri-weekly basis: I have good posture, stand tall. In the last week when I told people I was 75 they sincerely thought I was much younger.

     As for my diet - I am able to keep on it.

     As far as writing, well, I do face the Great White Page and usually a little bit for six days a week. (I usually do this right after saying the spells.) I'm not exactly chained to my various computer devices and loose leaf papers, but by keeping up this habit I make steady progress in my writing, keep my mind and soul alive.

      All these activities are done in addition to my working a part-time job (a hard and demanding part-time job, too!) and that despite all this activity I seldom feel tired, beat, even rushed. 

      Praying daily has helped me develop these manageable good habits...

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     3. Daily praying builds confidence, improves your self-esteem, gives you daily strength.

    This world is filled to the brim with negative people. There is no joy in their lives - just misery. 

     I say life is fantastic. 

     When you consider the spiritual forces and cosmic vibrations that constantly surround us, to me there's no doubt that we live in heaven. The fact that we don't always see the divinity of our lives is because our souls have been numbed by life, as my own soul often is. 

     Yet no matter how dead I feel I always realize this deadness is my fault and my responsibility, not the fault of natural and eternally beautiful divine forces that are always around us.

      You express the following view to most people and they'll think you're insane. But it is what it is: WE LIVE IN HEAVEN. (I do mean this in the spiritual sense. Materialistically and in other ways, we citizens of the world have problems that we must work to overcome: Get it!? Solving the problems of the world -like rape - is neither on God nor the Divine Forces but on us: WE'RE RESPONSIBLE! US!)

      I say praying every day makes you realize this and that realization can give you greater strength and confidence to live your life.

     Let me tell you, you really need to have a lot of confidence when you're a writer - and I do have confidence...

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     4. Prayer gets you through hard times.

     Some years back I heard a woman say:

     "If a person doesn't have a religion I really feel bad for that person because someday they're going to need a religion."

      I say just about the same thing:

      If you don't pray I feel bad for you because there will be times in your life you'll really need to pray.

      Since I have started to say the 17th Spell, for instance, I have had periods of bad times. When my mother died in 2005* (*my father had died a few years earlier) I had a rough year. I kept daily saying the 17th Spell (and others), though, and I just slammed along. (I got through the grief.)

     Beginning in 2010 I had extreme financial problems (my bad) and also physical pain (as the result of an enlarged prostate and kidney stone issues). For about five years I went through one of the roughest stretches of my entire life: A house I owned was nearly foreclosed on, I had to go to court because of this a zillion times; I had to go to doctors, doctors, doctors (I was finally operated on by the good people at Rhode Island Hospital) and I had to stick to this training program of a job that, like, wow, totally sucked. (F.Y.I. Though those nasty little foreclosure ads appeared in the newspaper three times my house was never foreclosed on: PRAISE THE GODS AND THE GODDESSES. HAIL THOTH!  HAIL SAKHMET! PRAISE ME FOR ATTAINING THE SERVICES OF THE OUTSTANDING LAWYER BARBARA HARRIS AND THE LEGAL FIRM OF RASKIN AND BERMAN*!(*REAL NAMES) 

     I was in my early 60s when I was going through all this and if had happened to me at a different period of my life I think it would have been the end of me. Still, I prayed, endured and stayed (generally) optimistic about life.

     I also want to add this:

       "When life looks like Easy Street there is danger at your door," to quote from the song "Uncle John's Band" by the Grateful Dead.

       To which I say:

       Prayer can get you through the bad times - but it can also get you through the good times.

       Like, I've read about these Rap stars who suddenly become multi-millionaires and their entire lives get flushed down the toilet.

       I say getting through the good times is a great challenge and that you really need to pray to survive them...

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     5. Praying daily helps to make your entire life a little more organized.

     As I noted praying daily is what I call a "good habit" magnet. Perhaps because of this things around you just seem to be naturally organized.

    For instance, my apartment is not super-clean but it's orderly enough to suggest basic sanity. In no way is it so outrageously messy that you're certain its occupants are mentally ill. Be assured that I (or my roommate) seldom go on massive cleaning sprees, either. We each perform certain tasks and the place virtually seems to clean itself. If you ever visited me you'd be impressed.

      My laundry, my food shopping, my ability to get to work on time - even though I walk my mile "commute" to my job - happens in a way that's stress free and healthy.

      My life wasn't like this before I started saying the 17th Spell. Before 2003 much of my place seemed like I had been shipwrecked and all my books and things got flung on shore. I was always in a last minute rush to get to work, too.

     Them days are gone...

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     6. Praying is a great investment of time.

     If you spend 20 minutes a day praying (as I strongly recommend you do) you'll have more time in your life to do other things.

      Like, one result of my daily praying is that I sleep less. (And I always wake up rested!) This is just one way that praying itself has saved me time...

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      7. Praying is free!

      You don't have to buy anything to pray. You can get all the prayers you want on-line and for zilch, the bubble.

     In the United States people spend millions going to gyms and other places. Being a strong believer in physical exercise I would be the last person on earth to suggest they stop doing this, too: I've often thought of joining a gym to use good weight-lifting equipment.

      But unlike joining a gym praying doesn't cost you a dime.

     And for what you get out of it...

     Wow...

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Section Two

      I did say that I developed a prayer for atheists.

      This is something - in addition to my saying The 17th Spell (and various other spells) - that I've now been saying for about three years. I find that it works and in lieu of the fact that atheists don't worship God or Divine Forces, it's a "prayer" that addresses other non-religious aspects of anyone's life. 

      I call it a prayer of gratitude, a prayer of maintaining self-esteem (or inner strength) and a prayer of setting and meeting goals.

     I say religious people may want to consider saying it since it doesn't compromise anyone's religious beliefs; so much of it is just counting your blessings. What makes it work for me is the peaceful and appreciative sense I get when I realize how well-off and lucky I am. Certain things about it "kick in in my conscious mind" when I'm going through my daily routine, too. If I say out loud in the morning that I will stick to my diet, for example, I remember this during the day when I feel like gorging on pizza.

      What I've presented here is a modified version of what I say: Since there are so many empowering and spiritually fortifying things I say in my daily spells, I don't see the need to repeat myself when I say this particular prayer.

     I say anyone who says this may want to change it so it fits into their own life.

     Customize, customize, customize!

      Make the following words your own and change them if you want and just think of what I have here presented as a rough guide to what you (hopefully) end up saying.

      As I said these words work and they've been extremely helpful to me.

       I'm sure anyone else can benefit from them.

       Ultimately they may even help you improve and take charge of your own life (and overcome various mental and health problems) as I have done.

      (I usually stand up when I say this but I don't think this should be a requirement. If you're comfortable sitting down saying it - fine. Also, I (again) think this could be a good thing to do when you're driving to work in the morning - in which case I recommend you make a recording of what you say and just listen intently to your own words when you drive. Perhaps you can even listen to a recording of it on headphones when you're on a bus or in a subway...) 

 

PRAYER FOR ATHEISTS

     I am grateful that I have arms and legs and fingers and toes and all my members. I can see, breathe, think, walk and do things. I have a mind and a soul. These are big things and there's no way I take them for granted.* (*Sadly, many readers won't be able to say all this. Others who can should feel grateful because if you can honestly say this it's better than being a billionaire.) 

    I have clothes, food, water, a roof over my head and money enough to survive.* (*Again, many readers won't be able to say all this. Those of us who can should feel grateful.)

    I am warm, comfortable, clean and have so many other things going for myself.* (*See above notations.)

     I am grateful for the fact that I have a job (or a source of income) and that I am able to support myself.*(*Again: See above notations.) Or: I am grateful for the fact that I am a student and learning new things every day.

      I am grateful for my family and friends and pets. (List the names here if you want - and keep in mind there are people in this world who won't be able to say this.)

    I will have the courage to face my past and not be ruled from it. We may learn from history that we don't learn from history but I will learn from the history of my life and become wise doing this.*(*This is something I recommend that everyone keep in this prayer. So many people have gone through traumatic events in their past - like I have - that they don't want to deal with. Maybe they're too ashamed to admit something bad happened. Like, many women have been sexually abused as children but "blank out" when they start to think about their abuse; many war veterans have been in horrible battles that they just "block out." FACE THESE TERRIBLE MEMORIES! DON'T LET THEM MUDDLE YOUR MIND - LIKE I HAVE - AND BE RULED BY THEM! I say if you say this you will build the confidence it takes to unblock these bad memories. And to the people of the world who were sexually abused when they were children I want to say: YOU ARE STILL A BEAUTIFUL AND SACRED CHILD! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU IS PRETTY COMMON, TOO: YOU ARE NOT ALONE!) 

      I have power, power to control my body and what happens to me.

      I deserve to be treated with respect.

      I have freedom - so much so that it is overwhelming.*(*Here I will refer readers to the great French existentialist and Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus and how he would have absolutely concurred with what I just wrote.)

       I am a good and honest mother, worker, student, etc.

      I control my life and am responsible for everything about it.

      I take responsibility for all my actions.

      I will not be bitter.* (*I always say this to avoid ever being considered a bitter old man. Ha! No way!)

      I will continue to appreciate the good little things of life.* (*For me one little thing I appreciate is feeding the birds and squirrels - "the customers" I call them - from my porch. What a great feeling I get when I do! For you it may being kissing your wife good-bye on your way to work, walking your children to a school bus, petting your dog, etc. There are so many great things we do in our days.)

     I will maintain a healthy lifestyle. I will walk (or swim or lift weights or do yoga, etc.) on a regular basis, I will eat healthy portions of healthy foods. I will make a strong effort to stick to my diet and my exercise program. (For people who are trying to quit smoking cigarettes or lose weight this is a great thing to say.)

     I will work towards getting clean and sober. Or: I will continue to stay clean and sober.*(*THIS IS SO IMPORTANT FOR MANY TO SAY. PEOPLE MUST HAVE THESE WORDS ECHOING IN THEIR MINDS WHEN THEY FACE SO MANY DEADLY CHOICES AND SAYING THIS THUS EMPOWERS THEM.) 

    I will forgive myself for all past misdeeds and not be so hard for current ones. If I don't cut myself some slack I am being unreasonable.

     I will remain proud of my accomplishments no matter how minor they may seem to others.

     I will be less talkative and listen more than I speak; I will not "parade" my erudition. Let others invest more words in conversations than myself.

    I will speak clearly.

    I will keep a clean apartment, be responsible paying my bills.

     I will be patient with children, the elderly, animals, people with challenges.

     I will not give up on learning new computer skills, will go to various blogs and YouTube instruction videos.

     I will remember the dead and will have a special place in my mind for them.

     In a sense through me the dead I remember will have eternal life.* (*The real dead are the forgotten. The living are the remembered. And here you may want to say the names of the dead that you want to be remembered.)

    I am grateful for the people who died defending this country, the people who made it great and for the people who continue to make it great.* (*And here I sometimes mention the people at the Thundermist Dental Clinic and my health providers at Blackstone Valley Health Clinic.)

      I am grateful to live in the United States where I am free to say and do what I want.*(*Of course, put in the country of your choice. Also, while I'm not all that grateful that I live in the State of Rhode Island - Don't get me goin' about this crumby place! - you might feel differently if you're from Texas, say: From what I've heard Texas is better than paradise. I must say, though, for all my complaints about my state that in Rhode Island homelessness is nevertheless being handled admirably by our government. California: Learn from Rhode Island!)

     And here I say to add more, subtract what you want, etc. This "prayer" is a good way for you to get through your life, feel happy, improve your sense of self-esteem, motivate yourself to do things: YOU OWN IT! 

     While I say it forms an alternative form of prayer for atheists it is something (again) religious people might want to consider saying in addition to saying their daily prayers...

       Peace...

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ENDNOTES:

1. JAMES WOODS INCIDENT

(The following endnote regards a brief sequence in a television show I saw once about 30 years ago. It may contain inaccuracies. If anyone knows when this television show aired get in touch. I'd like to see this interview again and make necessary corrections. I DO NOT WISH TO BRING FORTH ANY LAWSUITS. Additionally, I think James Woods is a genuinely great actor. I am sure he didn't know the extent of my suffering; he would not have made fun of me if he knew I had been raped. And while I sense we have differences my only complaint regarding him is that he doesn't get bigger and better roles...)

    In the early 1990s I was living in a small beloved third-floor apartment on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island. One night I got bored and turned on the TV. (I owned one back then.) It wasn't David Letterman but a late-night talk show was being aired.

     The host (who I don't recall) and the Hollywood actor James Woods were talking. 

    The subject of high school days came up.

    Woods said in a joking way that seemed he was "bending" facts that he attended a boarding school in Massachusetts. (According to his Wikipedia biography the Utah-born Woods was raised in Rhode Island - my state - and attended Pilgrim High in Warwick, R.I. from where he graduated in 1965.) He said he once visited another high school for a sports event.

    There was a kid at this other high school who was kind of a legend: Woods said the student had once been hypnotized and abandoned and had never been taken out of the trance. The youth had been given all kinds of weird suggestions, too - like he was invisible, that he didn't have a head, etc. - and that because he hadn't been taken out of the hypnotic trance he went around still believing those suggestions.

      "Look!" said a companion of Woods who pointed to the bleachers of the opposing team. "There's the kid that was hypnotized!"

     Much to the laughter of the host, the audience and the (probably) millions of people in their homes watching, Woods added:

     "I've never seen anyone as messed up as that hypnotized kid!"

       (Har, har!..)

      After I saw this sequence on television I had the strangest feeling since it seemed like Woods had been talking about me! But since I was still in a state of denial regarding my rape (that happened after my hypnotist session which I had also blocked out), I deemed that feeling to be just a weird perception.

     Later, I blanked out, had a seizure, sunk into an abyss-like sleep...

     Years later when I remembered the hypnotist session and the rape I remembered that late-night television show.

      I also recalled this scene from my high school days which was a little different from the scene Woods reported:

     It was a Saturday in 1965 and my high school (the then named West High of Pawtucket, R.I.) was hosting an afternoon basketball game. (It could have been with the school Woods attended, Pilgrim High, or another school.)

     I was strolling down a corridor and a tall kid with acne (Woods, I believe) and a few of his companions were approaching in the opposite direction. When the group got close enough Woods pointed a finger to me and said - with the royal, feminine-like manner of a Roman Caesar from a Hollywood movie:

      "Oh look: There's the kid that was hypnotized..."

     I remember later being quite depressed over this and really crying in a deep and painful way.

     When I was in high school I was pretty messed up, okay...

P.S. One thing I just recently recalled from this broadcast is that the host was prompted to say something about not leaving a confused person alone. It was extremely responsible for the network to do this and they performed a great public service: I praise them and am grateful they did this. Not leaving a confused person alone is one thing I think every child in the world should be taught. Again, I do wish I could again see this show, have positively no intention of bringing on litigation. Frankly, I wish I knew which network it was so that I could praise them here. Anyway, I say we should all have thicker skins in this country when it comes to petty crap like this!

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2. BEELZEBUB

    Beelzebub is a name that comes from an ancient Philistine god that was worshipped in Ekron. It was later adopted by some Abrahamic religions as a major demon.

     One source describes Beelzebub as a being capable of flying and he was known as: "Lord of the Flies." Loosely speaking you could say the name Beelzebub stands for Satan.

     Interestingly enough "Lord of the Flies" is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize winning author William Golding which is about boys who were in a plane that crash-landed on a South Pacific island and they later descended into chaos. 

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3. NO TRESPASSING SIGN

     At the western end of the then dead-end Prosper Street there was a sturdy ranch style fence that marked and blocked the end of the street. In its center there was a tall wooden pole with a small tire "hooped and threaded" above a No Trespassing sign. The faded weathered gray and black sign - which was prominently placed before the sandy hill and the lengthy, river-like Canada Pond itself - did not say No Trespassing. What was on it was a "legalese written" warning not to go westward beyond the fence and into the area of the pond. The sign was ignored by one and all.

      When I was a child and unable to read much of the sign I asked an aunt what the sign said. It was at the height of the children's "Davy Crockett" fad of the mid-1950s and I was a major Davy Crockett fan. My aunt and I stood before the sign and she read a pompous statement regarding how Davy Crockett had discovered the place (or something).

      I went along with her but I knew she was stretching it.

      See, though I was nearly illiterate I knew what Davy Crockett's name looked like in print and I couldn't see it anywhere on the sign...

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4. CARS WITH LIGHTS ON

     Across the recently built highway (Route 146) were cars rushing north and south and many with their headlights on.

     Because so many highway fatalities occurred on Memorial Day Weekend - of which that day, Sunday May 28, 1961 was a part - keeping car headlights lit was nationally promoted as a reminder for people to drive carefully...

         

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5. A MORE COMPLETE ACCOUNT OF WHAT HAPPENS WITH THE CLUBHOUSE KIDS

     What I wrote about what happened with the clubhouse kids and myself is essentially correct. Various incidents and background information that were omitted (in order to keep the story fast-paced) include these:

     The clubhouse kids had been hunting me down for weeks. My initial betrayal had not been through cousin Fredo but from a classmate of mine to whom I had foolishly bragged about how my cousins and I did damage to the clubhouse. (My classmate knew a clubhouse kid and ratted me out.) 

      Fredo, who lived in the neighborhood, was easily captured by the clubhouse kids. He confessed his part in the crime and was sentenced to hard labor at: "...Siberia on Canada Pond."   (It was my understanding the adolescent Rodion Raskalnikov/Ivan Denisovich hauled boards and building materials and foraged for wood up and down the pond's shore with the elusive "steppes" and Route 146 cast dreamily in the distance. It was during his "penal servitude" he became friendly with his task masters. Re: "The Stockholm Syndrome" in which captives sympathize with their guards.)

     One Sunday a few weeks before the ill-starred hypnotist session about six clubhouse kids cornered me by the pond (and from what I can deduce through no betrayal by Fredo).

      They wanted to gang up on me but I was shrewd enough to prevent this.

      Talk ensued.

      They said they heard about "the hole" we three cousins had dug and how its unintentional defilement provided inspiration for the clubhouse carnage. (Re: Endnote 6.) They made nothing of the hole.

    "How would you feel if someone came along and tore down your home?" they asked.

      I managed to steer the conversation away from such a hot issue. I distinctly remember talking to the hypnotist artiste himself about books we had both read, specifically ones by author Jack London.

     Our brief literary chat talk turned back to the most pressing matter: The clubhouse destruction.

     Fifty dollars would cover damages and we could all depart as friends.

     It was an exorbitant price that was akin to the outrageous financial terms established in the Treaty of Versailles, that horrible post-World War I agreement that virtually ensured World War II, the communist Chinese revolution, the wars in Vietnam, etc.

      Though it was pure bull poop on my part, in the spirit of Nicola Machiavelli I glibly told them, yeah, okay, $50 was nothing to me since I had this underneath my bed in coin and cash savings.

    The group fell for what I said hook, line and sinker; I walked back to Papa Joe's unmolested...

     The next couple of Sundays, the day I usually visited my Italian relations in Providence, I avoided going to Papa Joe's. On one of those days that I was absent my mother, who, like her decent and respectful and responsible siblings would always regularly visit her elderly widowed father, reported that kids of the neighborhood came seeking my company.

     "I didn't like the looks of those kids, Eddie," said my perceptive mother. "Are you in trouble, Eddie?"

       "No..."

       On Sunday May 28 1961 - the next time I went to Papa Joe's - Fredo, who by this point was deeply involved with the clubhouse kids, indeed betrayed me.

     "Let's go to the pond," he suggested.

     "Nah. Mike Sclamfanini and the other kids might be waiting for me."

     "Not today. He's gone to a carnival."

     "A carnival!? What carnival?"

    "I don't know," Fredo answered with a faraway expression and a suspiciously robotic response. "He's gone to a carnival."

     SUBTEXT: Fredo had been obviously instructed to tell me that when I next visited - a visit he must have made the clubhouse kids aware of before I arrived - to say that Sclamfanini  had gone to a carnival. Lacking imagination he didn't know what to say beyond this.

     Fredo also reported that Sclamfanini could hypnotize people, something that really piqued my curiosity.

     MORE SUBTEXT: Though the plan of the clubhouse kids was foolish there were elements of brilliance to it. Imagine the psychology they used to have me already thinking of being hypnotized, something, I'm sure, they made sure Fredo told me...

     When Fredo led me to hilltop before Canada Pond I instantly saw a badly hidden Sclamfanini reclining on the ground behind a small boulder. There were about sixteen children present, many young children. One proud boy walked by brandishing a hockey stick a lot taller than himself.

     "Get away, punk!" I told him - which is something I instantly regretted: He was just a little boy and didn't deserve such meanness.

     Later, a scuffle occurred between myself and Sclamfanini, during which I punched Sclamfanini in the mouth.

     "Fight him back!" urged his cohorts.

      "I can't fight him back," said Sclamfanini.

      He pointed a finger to the round circular hypnotist tool underneath his jersey. 

      He mouthed the most gut-busting excuse for not fighting a kid ever made:

     "I GOT THE WHEEL!" he whispered, meaning that he couldn't fight me because he was carrying the circular hypnotist tool under his shirt and didn't want it damaged. (Hilarious!)

     Next he said in an adult, school-teacher-like way:

     "You're going to be very sorry you hit me, Eddie Dalton..."

      At this point I so trusted my cousin Fredo - I've heard it told that in an Italian family your cousin is your virtual sibling - that I didn't think he betrayed me.

     "Fredo: Fight these kids back with me! I can't fight them all alone!"

     Fredo stood there like a log and made a pathetic attempt to fight Sclamfanini. Fredo's lack of effort really embarrassed me, really angered me! 

     At the end of that "battle" Sclamfanini gave Fredo a light and ultimately insulting slap across the face. 

       Still not believing Fredo had betrayed me Sclamfanini at one point said to him:

     "Come on Fredo: Show him your horns like I told you."

     Fredo, who at this point was seated on the sand, brought out his two index fingers and pointed them at me horn like: The fool's gesture!

      (Real and paranormal perception: When Fredo made that gesture I swear I saw little horns instead of his fingers...)

     Soon Fredo abandoned me and ran back to Papa Joe's.

     "Remember what I told you to say, Fredo," Sclamfanini shouted back at him as he disappeared behind the fence with its No Trespassing sign.

     (Fredo's big job was to remember to say the word Beelzebub to me when I theoretically came back all black and blue and red all over...)

      

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6. REASONS FOR WRECKING THE CLUBHOUSE

    I had great reasons for wrecking that clubhouse. (And my cousins and myself didn't tear it down completely. We just damaged the thing so it looked like it had been slammed by a hurricane.) 

      I realize the clubhouse kids had reason to be angry with me and that I wouldn't have wrecked it if I had it to do  again. 

     But I also believe my rage at the very sight of the clubhouse was justified;  its vandalizing wasn't just the mean-spirited action of a 12-year-old boy. 

    To me that clubhouse stood as an insult to my family, my soul. 

    To me my leading the destruction of it was a heroic act, an angelic act.

    God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. 

    In the same righteous spirit Eddie Dalton led his cousins in the destruction of the clubhouse by Canada Pond.

     To backtrack:

     First, it must be said that the adults on the Italian side of my family instilled great values and a strong work ethic in their children. 

     They were a loving and caring group.   

     The combined military service of my five Italian-American uncles was roughly 80 years.

     Four of my Italian uncles served in World War II and one received the Purple Heart medal for wounds he got in the Battle of the Bulge. One uncle became an Army Ranger which is an elite Army unit like the Green Berets. Another uncle served in three wars, the last time with his son ("Fred" in this blog/book). There was, in fact, a small national news story on television about father-and-son serving together in Vietnam where "Fred" was shot and he received the Purple Heart medal. 

    It disgusts me to think that so many people think Italian-Americans have ties to the Mafia: NOT THE DELSIGNORES. THEY WERE HONEST AND HARD-WORKING PEOPLE WHO PUT THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE FOR THIS COUNTRY, THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO CONTINUE TO MAKE THIS COUNTRY GREAT. 

    Not to be disrespectful, though, but based on what I saw and talk, like a lot of similarly good families I'd say the Italian side of my family has always been a bit dysfunctional - and especially since the 1957 death of my beloved grandmother Anna (ne:Forte) DelSignore* (*real names), the person who had all the spiritual "glue" that bonded the DelSignores together.

    There's no reason to get into any specifics of this family dysfunction except to say that (again) after the death of Grandma Anna things got (my personal perception) just a "little" weird.

    In addition to the general weirdness, we children and cousins endured various "guilt trips," too. (I.e.: We had everything while our aunts and uncles walked barefoot 10 miles to school - uphill in blizzards, of course - during: THE DEPRESSION!)

    We were also commanded to get along with one another. (I.e.: "Hey: That's  your cousin Fredo. YOU MUST LOVE HIM!"  That was the vibe. OTHERWISE SAID: Feelings of affection were not allowed to freely flow through our souls...)

    One Sunday in the early spring of 1961 while the nevertheless hard-working and loving and war hero adults* (*My aunts and mother should also be credited for the hard work they - and women like Marilyn Monroe - performed working in factories on the home front!) were gathered around Papa Joe's kitchen table smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and shouting at each other in bad Italian, my younger cousin Fredo, my older cousin Fred and myself grabbed an old shovel of Papa Joe's. 

     We took that tool to the shores of Canada Pond with the intention of doing - who the heck knows. 

     We wandered 100 yards northward past where the little dock was located to an area of the forested shore.

     I could have been inspired by the need to have a Fall-Out shelter for Papa Joe since Fall-Out shelters - places you could huddle up to avoid a nuclear attack - were the rage in the United States in the early 1960s. So I grabbed the shovel and started digging.

    I was proud of the physical work I was doing. 

    It was a manly endeavor, just like the hard work Papa Joe himself had done during: THE DEPRESSION. (According to all DelSignore historical records: "...Two jobs Papa Joe had during: THE DEPRESSION...") 

    When I got tired of digging I handed the shovel to my cousin Fred.

    "Here: You dig!"

    Fred dug and dug and dug. 

    Then Fred handed the shovel to my cousin Fredo - and he dug.

    All this intense "work" went on for about 20 minutes, at which point we had dug a hole about eight inches deep, four feet wide and six feet long.

     It wasn't the Grand Canyon. 

     But the important thing was the united effort behind it: For the first time in our lives we three cousins bonded; there was a great feeling of brotherly love that wasn't forced - as our elders commanded it be - but that was natural and sacred and free flowing.

    That hole may have seemed like nothing. But to me it stood for real family love.

    I, Eddie, may have gone on next about plans of doing something more with the hole, digging it much deeper, excavating various "rooms" - I'm not sure. But I am sure is that when we took the shovel back to Papa Joe's that day, we were gripping on each other's shoulders and acting as the conquering warrior brothers that we were and could have always been...

     About a month passed before we once more got together. Though the feeling of intense brotherliness had at this point diminished, the three of us were still (uncharacteristically) naturally getting along. This time (without the shovel) we band of cousins once again walked to the shores of Canada Pond.

     We came to the very spot where we had dug our hole.

     But when we saw "our hole" this time...

      Right next to it stood this ramshackle and slanted floored little clubhouse about six feet high and three feet wide. 

     You could even see that during its recent construction our very hole had been walked on and (unintentionally) defiled.

     The hole itself hadn't been any construction marvel, but (again) to me it stood as a symbol for family love, family bonding.

     The clubhouse itself seemed to mock that divine sensation; the family had been dishonored...

     My cousins both shrugged their shoulders haplessly. 

     To me, though, the clubhouse was as demonic as the buildings of the World War II concentration camps.

     And admittedly in a spirit of boyhood mirth - albeit with a sense of angelic honor - I shouted out:

    "Let's wreck this (EXPLETIVE DELETED) thing!"

     So we did.

     My cousins Fred and Fredo did extensive wall and door damage.

     I "bravely" entered the hellish abode and spit all gooey on the slanted floors, crashed into a cardboard wall, punched a fist through a counter. In doing this I felt such power as I have never again felt in my life: My very fingers were like thick, lightening-like-bolts of electrical currents, my grip was mighty, godly. 

    Not even the morning of my 50th birthday - OF WHICH I DO NOT PERMIT YOU TO HEAR - matches the passionate intensity of wrecking that clubhouse. Nay, nothing I have ever in my life done felt that great!

     Though I would not again wreck the clubhouse, experiencing the intensity of the feelings accompanying the clubhouse destruction was worth all the suffering I was to later endure: The rape, the revival, everything...

    Life is passion...

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7. THE TWIST.

     The twist was a popular dance in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. It's performed by standing with your feet shoulder width apart and by literally "twisting" your torso to the music.

     It was popularized by pop singer Chubby Checker...

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8. MKULTRA (or MK-ULTRA)

    This was a code name for illegal (mostly) human experiments by the United States Central Intelligence Agency between 1953 and 1973.

     Basically, in the then unknown Cold War race for brain-washing and mind control between the United States and the Soviet Union, people were given high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals. They sometimes also underwent electroshock, were subjected to hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation and verbal and sexual abuse.

    Experiments (which were legal) were conducted in Canada, but experiments happened (illegally) at many universities and hospitals in the United States.

     In my home state of Rhode Island some MKUltra experiments happened at the prestigious and world-class Butler Hospital in Providence under the aegis of then director Dr. Robert Hyde. (Hyde is considered to be the first American to take LSD.) (Source: "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate," by John Marks. Also: Google: C.I.A. MK-Ultra experiments; the Church Committee Reports...)

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9. SOUTH WOODLAWN ELEMENTARY  SCHOOL OF PAWTUCKET, R.I.

     South Woodlawn Elementary School was located right up the street I grew up on, Warren Avenue. Built in 1904, the three-story pale red brick structure had (when I was attending between 1954-1961) about 500 students between the grades of Kindergarten and the 6th grade.

     It was mostly women who taught there - Miss Morris, Miss Maglone, Mrs. Dennehy, Miss Hogan, Miss Clark, Mrs. Reynolds, Miss O'Neil: So many kind and caring people!  They did an excellent job! Nobody got through the 6th grade without having learned basic math, basic reading and writing skills; these (mostly) patient and happy women worked hard and didn't just pass students.

     South Woodlawn's most illustrious graduate was the newscaster and journalist Irving R. Levine...

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10. ICE HOUSE

     When you stepped down to the top part of of the sandy hill west of the then dead-end Prosper Street, in the southerly direction - probably about 75 yards away - there were the white cement foundations of an old burned down industrial building.

    I could be wrong but I say this former building had been an ice house.

     Before refrigeration - before, more specifically, the 1920s - slabs of ice were cut from ponds and stored in nearby buildings like these for summer consumption. The very name of Canada Pond seems to suggest a cold lake where much ice could have been harvested.

    Right at the shore of Canada Pond near this ice house sand under the water was dredged: Unlike was case southward by the dam, as you stepped into the water (near the ice house) you were knee deep, said dredging indicating ice was harvested here since the dredging would make easier its harvesting...

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11. SPELLING OF RE

     The Egyptian god Re was spelled RA in my 6th grade class ancient history book. This spelling may have been based on the translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead by E.A.Wallis Budge. I prefer the translation by R.O. Faulkner in which the great god's name is spelled Re...

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12. CHA CHA 

     A dance of Cuban origin. Dancers dance two consecutive quick steps (on the fourth count of each song measure) that characterizes the dance. I learned to do this dance in dance classes which were held on the old wooden corridors of South Woodlawn Grammar School.

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13. CAPE CANAVERAL

     When rockets were launched at this Florida cape before 1963 the site was called Cape Canaveral. On the Thanksgiving evening right after President John F. Kennedy was murdered, President Lyndon Johnson suggested naming the entire area Cape Kennedy. (Kennedy's last visit to the place happened six days before his death.)

    Although in 1973 the area was re-named Cape Canaveral the NASA's Kennedy Space Center located there still retains the Kennedy name.

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14. ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896-1948.)

     Widely acknowledged as a major figure of the European avant-garde, Antonin Artaud had a profound influence on 20th century theatre.

    The aim of his "Theatre of Cruelty" was to shock the audience through gesture, image, sound and lighting.

    Artuad influenced writers such as Peter Brook, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet...

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15. THE 11TH AIRBORNE DIVISION

     The 11th Airborne Division was a United States airborne formation activated in World War II consisting of one parachute and two glider infantry regiments. (My father Maurice Edward Dalton was attached to the gliders.)

     The division took part in the Battle of Leyte and the invasion of Luzon and the liberation of Manilla (all in the Philippines).

     About 2,000 civilians were liberated during a bold raid made by the 11th Airborne Division at Los Banos, Philippines. 

     After going to New Guinea and Okinawa the unit participated in the initial Occupation of Japan. My father claimed he was the very first Rhode Islander in occupied Japan.

    "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling also served in the 11th Airborne Division.

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16. GAMMA

     Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet.

     In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3.

(PICTURE TO BE INSERTED.)

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17. SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS

      Susanna and the Elders is a painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt that was completed in 1647 and is currently housed at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, Germany. It's based on a Biblical story in the Book of Daniel in which Susanna heroically refuses to be sexually corrupted by a few vile elders. (PICTURE TO BE INSERTED.)

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18. ROY ORBISON (1936-1988) 

     "The Big O" or "The Caruso of Rock" most famous songs were probably "Pretty Woman" and "Only the Lonely."

       His duck-tailed style hair was particularly high. (Photo to be inserted.)

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19. RAYMOND L.S. PATRIARCA

(TO BE COMPLETED, PICTURE TO BE INSERTED.)  

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20. DIOGENES (412 OR 404 BC - 323 BC)

     Diogenes was a Greek philosophers and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy.

     He is remembered for his famous stunt of carrying a lighted lamp during the day in Athens purportedly looking for an honest man...

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21. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

         This was a 1954 American made 3D monster horror film about an amphibious humaniod fish-like creature in the waters of the Amazon.

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22. AL BENOIT

       Albert "Al" Benoit was the toughest kid in Pawtucket, R.I. With deep red hair and freckles and the roughest and readiest attitude of anyone I have ever known, the average-sized though muscled youth was someone you always wanted to be on the good side of. When he glared at a foe with his deep blue eyes his stare was so intense Arnold Schwarzenegger of "Conan the Barbarian" and the "Terminator" movies would have flinched.

      I remember walking down the street with him once. I said something mildly disparaging about a teacher who had befriended him and done him a kindness. Almost immediately I was flat on my back with Al suddenly over me. (I instantly changed my view.) 

     Al Benoit was a legend in his own time, and, since I believe he has passed into the other world, remains a myth, a "tough kid" god.   

    About a decade ago I met a great singer whose speciality was singing old Neil Sedaka hits.* (*And Mister Entertainer: I enjoyed your performance. Please get in touch in you read this blog since I do wish to include your name.)

      He was about my age and though from a different part of Pawtucket he remembered Al Benoit.

      "He'd give you the fear of God if he ever looked at you with those intense eyes of his. But the thing is, he never let anyone pick on the kids from the projects. He always stood by them and always stuck up for them..."

     AL BENOIT: THE DEAD ARE THE FORGOTTEN AND THE LIVING ARE THE REMEMBERED.

     AL BENOIT: YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED!...

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23. PARANORMAL EVENT

     One more paranormal event: As I am walking I imagine a screen with a black background and white text and the words of this story (I think) on it! (A bizarre visual thought induced by trauma and hypnosis!? A "window" of the future with words on a screen as they are currently presented!?)

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24. ON NOT GOING TO HOSPITAL

      By the time I was placed in the ambulance I had physically recovered from the attack. Except for the possibility of having contracted a venereal disease there was no physical reason for me to have gone to a hospital.

        The reason I should have definitely been placed in immediate medical care would have been for a psychological assessment. 

       Had I gone to a hospital and just had the most basic interview by a psychologist it's likely that I would have been able to "get a grip" on the rape  rather to have later repressed it and to have had my entire life soooooooo negatively impacted - mentally and physically.

        I've often wondered how my life would have changed if I had the opportunity to have reasonably "processed" the event.

        I say if anyone has been raped or sexually assaulted they definitely need a session or two with a medical professional: NO EXCEPTIONS...

       If any legislator read this: TAKE HEED...

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25. ANDREA DEL SARTO (1486-1531)

      A painter from Florence, del Sarto painted during the period of the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. One of his most notable works was Madonna of the Harpies and Nativity of the Virgin. (Picture to be included.)

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26. "GRANDMA ANNA"/THE DEATH OF JOSEPH STALIN

     The former Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. I was still three years old - about to turn four a week later - and I remember the day he died because it was also the 67th birthday of my grandmother Anna (ne: Forte) DelSignore.

      Though it was a weeknight we all (uncharacteristically) went to Papa Joes's (who had with his mustache, ironically, a strong resemblance to Stalin). All of the children of the DelSignore's were around and a few of the grandchildren, with me as the youngest attendant. ("Hey, Eddie Dalton: You're getting to be a big boy..." "Wait `till you see the cake, Eddie!" Other affectionate words in Italian.)

     There was a moment of darkness - and the candle of the cake - well over 60 - were lit.

       "This cake looks like a bonfire!" it was proclaimed.

      I remember those candles and how they burned and filled that simple room with light.

       Those candles shone with the love that my Grandma Anna always felt for us and the world...

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27. FRED FLINTSTONE 

    Fred Flintstone was the main character in the animated sitcom "The Flintstones" which ran on the television network ABC from 1960-1966. The cartoon show portrayed a humorous look at cave people. While the guy in real life had hair unlike Fred Flintstone there was indeed something about the crumby drawing that reminded me of the cartoon character.

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28. GETTING BEAT UP IN HIGH SCHOOL

PART ONE

     When I think of the worst time of my life I always think of the years between May 28, 1961 -the day I was raped at Canada Pond - and late June 1967 - the day of a great hippie party where I first heard the Doors first album and met a beautiful art student: Light my fire!     

     Not only did my mind suffer "nuclear winter" because of the forced forgetting of the rape, but so many other forces were working against me: With my parents constantly arguing my home life was World War III, many of the adults around me were hurting me instead of helping me, most of my teachers were half-dead, etc.

       Everything else I have gone through - like the "fun-filled" 9 plus years of bi-weekly "rat-aura" LSD flashbacks (Re: Endnote 36) or the five-year ordeal of fighting foreclosure were nothing for me to deal with; I was hardened to life thanks to my tough adolescence. (Ha! At least I got something out of it!)

     Besides my loss of concentration, the onset of seizures, my chronic fatigue, my loss of short-term memory, etc., one thing that happened to me after the forced forgetting of the rape was that I'd "freeze" when confronted by bullies. (Perhaps this "freezing" happened because an attack by a bully triggered taboo-to-be-remembered memories of my rape.)

    As a consequence I became a target by the worst and cowardly kids (who all had big brothers, of course) and got bullied a lot. I daily got picked on, ridiculed, jeered at, insulted, pushed around, had books I was carrying ripped from my hands and tossed to the ground - and so on. 

      It was a miserable way to go through life. I was too mentally ill to properly deal with it.

     Often I thought of suicide...

     Though I did miraculously manage to have a few good friends and many good times - Just think of the music that was happening back then: The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan!...- I was still a misfit, a social recluse, the lowest-on-the-totem-pole youth with mental and emotional issues. And I certainly never went to the principal's office to complain about the bullying. I had a sense of honor and was too ashamed to discuss it.

     I walked this treacherous tightrope of just wanting to be left alone just wanting to be left alone why can't these kids leave me alone I'm not doing anything to them - and keeping my horrible rape memory buried...

     Yet by my senior year in high school (about six years after the rape) - I was more or less beginning to "fit in." On many Friday nights at my high school - the then named West High of Pawtucket, R.I. which, at the time, had a student body of about 900 - I would attend school basketball games. I was too awkward and too "physically stunned" to be any good at sports, but I found that rooting for the home team on the school's fold-out wooden bleachers, yelling, stomping my feet, carrying on like a mad man fan, etc. - was a good psychological release for me. As I say there were some good times in these bad years and going to these basketball games at West High - I usually went alone - was one of those good times....

     There had been a basketball game in February 1967 that I attended. I don't remember what team my home team played or the results, but it's a safe bet that I enjoyed myself. I even remember being happy at a haircut that I had that day got - it was straight cut along the back - and I felt like a "cool dude."

      When the game ended I took the stairs to the back parking lot which was the exit from the gym. I was near the end of a crowd of other departing kids. Beyond the students in front of me it seemed like something was happening in the crowded parking lot ahead. I didn't see it but this pretty strong and drunk high school jock and three of his friends were picking out kids from the exiting crowd and roughing them up, punching them, pushing them to the ground. Students near them who witnessed the violence were laughing. Ha, ha! What a riot: NOT!

     Since I couldn't see what was going on I just continued shuffling my mortal coil of a rail-thin 140-pound body along. 

     Innocently, I came into the drunken jocks' line of fire.

     "Let's get this kid!" one dead-faced one slurred.

     Another fellow student by their side who was not directly involved with the jock violence gestured with a skinny wrist and a beer can weighted hand, made a sinister lynch-mob smile and laughed. 

       "Yeah, get this kid, (NAME DELETED)," he urged with hilarity. "Get Ed Dalton!"

      I was soon pulled and beaten hard by the four youths - on my face, chest. Since there was ice on the asphalt and I was wearing leather loafers I slipped and fell (THUD!) on my back.

     While on the ground a few jocks kicked at my head, my chest. 

      I sustained only superficial injuries...       

     When I got up I could see things clearer: Amid a crowd of about 100 students a good 50 or so had partaken in the "Blessed Sacrament" of Colt 45 Malt Ale. They thought my beating was high comedy! It was now my faithful duty to just accept the beating and move silently through the beer-breathed mob. After all, in the hierarchy of the West High social order the jocks were of the aristocracy and I was a serf. (Another student who had been beaten like this later told me after he had endured the "lordly barbarity" that's what he did: He took his beating and moved on.) 

      Normally, just moving on is what I would have done. To paraphrase a line by Louise-Ferdinand Celine I would have used my brains, been a coward, exited the scene.

    I was, mind you, extremely embarrassed ("Ha! Look at Dalton!") that I was beaten and ridiculed like this - and in front of so many of my classmates. Much more than the punches and the kicks, it was the embarrassment - my loss of basic dignity, that is - that really got to me. After so many years of bullying and cat-calling and abuse, the embarrassment I experienced that night was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back...

      I know I have included the disturbing rape scene - which I think is graphic but morally necessary - but I deliberately wrote this book/blog without one swear word. I will therefore not quote what I screamed to the leader of these four jocks in particular. But you can be sure my words were the most vile profanities imaginable. Like thick red flames shooting star-ward from an erupting volcano these oaths filled the cold black February air. Considering that about half the kids who witnessed this were young girls, I was a little ashamed - then and to this day - about what I said. But as lights from lampposts and a bright and other-worldly light itself (true perception) seemed to  illuminate illuminate illuminate everything, from me words just blasted out shocking, disgusting, crude, insane. ("I'LL GET YOU BACK, (NAME DELETED)! I'LL GET YOU BACK, YOU (EXPLETIVE DELETED)!")

     It was like another person was screaming, not me, and I just couldn't stop myself; like a god cursing I roared... 

     Me screaming and swearing was pretty unexpected - especially when you consider when it was coming from a normally bullied kid like me - and it had timbres of unspeakable defiance: NO ONE EVER REPROACHED THE KING OF THE JOCKS LIKE THIS! NO ONE HAD EVER STOOD UP TO SUCH MIGHT AND POWER! For a moment after I had stopped yelling there was a stillness in the crowd, a sense of disbelief. 

    God, I was so sick of high school with its stupid rituals and everything: Teachers who showed up to class rip roaring drunk (swear to you), other politically connected incompetents who had no business being teachers, a guidance counselor from Hell, favoritism shown to various kids - I was tired to death of it and especially the unjust and mindless grief that I had for years endured: Enough! 

     Like a chorus of chirping insects on a hot summer's night are suddenly silenced by a loud noise, so, too, were the students in the back of West High School rendered mute by my furious rage, even the drunken jocks themselves...

      After I stopped my screaming and continued to walk away the silence gradually ended. And while I have so far focused on the drunken high school mob it would be irresponsible for me as a writer to suggest everyone was part of it. In my utter embarrassment and disgrace I recall at least a dozen or so of my classmates looking at me with genuine sympathy. 

     Two shining eyed ones - Harold Shlevin and Barbara Fellner, both top students at West*(*real names) - seemed especially compassionate. Poor Harold was then a frail and kind of sickly teen who couldn't have possibly stood up to these jocks; neither, of course, could have Barbara. Still, as I kept walking, I knew they and several other fellow students like them were "pulling" for me. 

     I won't forget the empathy they expressed, could never in a million years forget the goodness and intelligence of so many of my fellow West High students, my Class of 1967. (My high school nickname was "LS" - as in LSD - Dalton. Whaddaya think about that!?)

      When I approached the end of the parking lot there was a group of students in total favor of the violence, though. One beautiful girl with long blond hair - a student I didn't know from another school and not to be confused with similarly beautiful blond females from West - was among them. And when the crowd got loud again and the roaring drunken teenage blood lust rose to a crescendo, this Drunk Demon of Teenage Stupidity started waving her fists and laughing.

     "Kill him!" she shouted. "Kill him!"

      (She was so passionate in her drunken lynch-mob rage, so full of joy - and so good looking!)

      Like a powerful bull awoken from his slumber, the drunk jock I had screamed at broke free of his stunned silence: He rushed behind me, grabbed me by my shoulders.

      "What did you  say, Dalton? What did you say!"

     "I...I...I'm sorry," I wimped out and begged. "I didn't mean it." 

       Then he slammed my back against the hood of a car - he was so much stronger than I was - and punched me hard in the face.

      Bruised and bloody and more humiliated than I had ever been in my life, much more humiliated than I had been when I had been raped - At least I hadn't been raped by people who'd continue to be worshiped at school on Monday! - I silently stumbled away.

      I next had this wild thought.

      I knew to the bottom of my soul why the Nazi holocaust of World War II happened: People would not rise against power.

      Some days later after news of this event spread throughout the school and the assailants themselves had been temporarily expelled - a great high school English teacher - Wallace Whitelaw - approached me.

       "I hope you grow up to be a forgiving person," he said....

P.S. I later confronted the beer-can wielding kid who had been egging on the drunken jocks to beat me. 

     Said he:

     "You gotta understand: They wanted to beat me - so I had to change their minds..."

      Also, though I was initially filled with hatred concerning the beautiful long-haired blond girl  who shouted out: "...Kill him!" - when I now think of her shouts it really makes me laugh...Wow...She was waving her fists and laughing so hard and really into the cruel mindlessness of the event.

       I wonder what happened to her!?...

PART TWO

     

      There's one fantastic thing that happens when you're unpopular in high school: You never have to attend a class reunion!

      When there was the 20th reunion for the Class of 1967 one person called and left a message on my answering machine (which I never returned); another person told my mother to tell me about the reunion (which I totally ignored).

      Ditto for other class reunions I have heard about. 

      West High's name has since changed to Shea High School. In recent years they decided to renovate the 1940s era building itself.  Former students were even invited to visit the building before construction work began.

       "There's a lot of love in these corridors!" someone reportedly said to a reporter from The Valley Breeze.

        I almost puked my guts out.

        In those corridors there was also a lot of misery and despair and disgust and hatred and existential dread: Mine!

     For years I had issues with my high school years and many of the kids I went to school with. I was especially angry at the four young no minds who beat me on that February night in 1967, the others who mocked and scorned me when I was flat on my back on the icy asphalt.

      Fortunately, around the time I remembered my rape I realized that while I bore psychic scars over my junior and high school years the people who caused them were kids. They must have had a lot of issues themselves and all had a lot of growing up to do. It was therefore unreasonable for me to judge them as you would judge an adult. 

     I am not at all an all-forgiving Christian but I thought it was wise to just forgive them...

     Nearby where I live in City of Pawtucket - and right over the city line in the City of Providence - there is a street divided by a semi-forested park-like island in the middle with a walking path named Blackstone Boulevard. It's a beautiful place - it was shown in a movie by Woody Allen ("Irrational Man") - and a place where I almost daily walk and sit on a park bench and read. 

     On the eastern edge of this street there is, for about half of the boulevard, a stone wall made of boulders that borders Swan Point Cemetery, one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the United States. (The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft is buried there - as are my parents and former co-worker and friend Josh Lovett.)  At one point of this wall there is a small rusted and locked iron gate that is situated about 200 yards west of the spot where my parents rest.

     Many times, when I am walking along the path of the forested island of the Blackstone Boulevard, I cross the street and stand right outside the narrow gate. I look towards the little forest and the path before it that goes to the cemetery itself and say a spell for my parents... 

     One gray and foggy early spring day as I stood there I thought of the kids in my high school and all the agony and grief they (many times) caused me.

     "I forgive you," I said.  

     Like I say it was a misty day, like the kind of mist we'd normally associate with the fogs of heaven. I crossed the street where the wall and the gate were and got back on the boulevard's island path. I walked southward.

     Now for some years I had a woman friend - Kat - who, to me at least, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. With her tribal-like tattoos and her fantastic runner's body, to me she was like this wild pagan goddess, like Kurtz's tribal woman in Jospeph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." For years and years and years - and even now - I often walk around and see various women.* (*Ladies: I'm a respectful man and never make any woman I may subtly look at feel uncomfortable; I know of the terrible visual harassment you endure.) None, to me at least, can match Kat.

     But that day after I forgave the kids in high school and began walking, through the heavenly mist I saw a woman approaching me from the opposite direction on the path.

     I couldn't believe it: She was at least as good looking as Kat, maybe even better looking if that's humanly possible.

      She was dressed in the gray leotards of a ballerina, other simple clothes; though she wasn't voluptuous she was pretty and had a great body. Her eyes were sort of a gray blue, a blue velvet kind of color. I caught sight of her and I'm sure my facial muscles dropped: I was finally seeing someone as beautiful as Kat! I kept gaping at the young woman in stunned amazement.

      As she returned my stare there was this feeling emitting from her eyes like a line of electricity going out from her soul into mine. 

      I got closer. I realized that she was young, really young, possible as young as a 15-year-old high school kid. And like any right-minded older man would do I turned away. Considering her age - and again, I am not a Christian - in my mind it would have been wrong to have continued looking.

    Yet in that soulful mist she kept staring at me! 

    She kept projecting this kind of divine feeling with her gray/blue eyes!

    Was it just a coincidence that I had finally encountered someone as beautiful as Kat right after I had finally forgiven all the kids who had tormented me in high school?

      Was it just a coincidence that that person had projected such divine sensations towards me?

      I'll say it straight: After doing what I did at the cemetery gate by forgiving my high school tormentors, on that foggy early spring day in Providence I believe I met up with some divine entity that was there to tell me that forgiveness is always a great thing...

      (And hey high school English teacher Mister Whitelaw: Let it forever be known that you, like Mister Burns (a great person!) and Mister Keough  (a wounded war hero) and Mister Varone and Miss Minkins and a few others  - were a great teacher and that I, Edward "LS" Dalton, did grow up to be a forgiving person!...)

P.S. I know there are many of my former classmates at West who will read this and remember the names of my attackers. In the spirit of forgiveness I respectfully request you never mention them. 

     "West is best," as we used to say in our putrid school motto...

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29A. WHY I GAVE UP ON SEEKING    JUSTICE

      In 2013 I sent a non-fiction account of the rape - an earlier draft of this story - to the local rape crisis center, Day One of Providence, R.I.

      I was quite serious - and extremely willing - to endure the emotional distress of a rape trial and could positively identify the young man who held up the knife.

      Though I could have used a little psychological help, I thought that once I explained how I recovered I could even help others who have been raped.

     In the simply written cover letter I told Day One I needed help and I'd appreciate it if they contacted me.

      After two weeks I heard nothing.

      That package could have been lost in the mail so I sent another package and cover letter.

      A few days went by: Nothing.

      I called Day One and asked if they got anything.

      "Oh yeah. I think there was something like that floating around the office," I was told. (Exact quote.)

     Though I was a little hurt they hadn't read the letter, I told the person I had been raped and would probably be calling back in a few days.

     (And yes: I knew I could have called Day One. But I did feel because of the length of time between my rape and the present - then, in 2013, 52 years had gone by - I wanted to show Day One that I really remembered the rape. Also, I have had surprisingly good luck reaching out to various people and organizations writing letters. Finally, it was difficult for me to suddenly discuss this if that makes any sense; it was just easier for me to reach out to Day One by mail.)

       After some thought I decided not to call Day One and speak to them: They didn't seem to care.

      I was also a little disturbed that after two solid attempts to reach them by mail they wouldn't give me a call.

     Former newspaper reporter instinct told me that was quite a story so - after waiting a full month - I decided to send Day One a registered letter.

      (This is an exact copy of that letter. Note that it was quite similar to the cover letters of the 30-plus-professionally-prepared-page packages I had that spring sent:)

July 21, 2013

(MY ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER WERE INCLUDED HERE.)

Dear INTAKE MANAGER:

     Help!

     I was raped a long time ago, remembered the attack in recent years and am in need of your services.

     I did send you two packages recently - on May 28 (2013) and on June 15 (2013) - but have received no response.

     Please call!

     I need you to call and help me!

Thank you,

Edward Dalton

     (I have a copy of the letter, the receipt for the cost of postage, the signature of the rape crisis center person who signed for and received the letter.)

      Day One did not respond.

      To see the side of Day One, although it had been over I month since I had spoken to them perhaps they were still under the impression I would call. Perhaps, too, contacting them by phone was the only way the center could deal with rape victims. 

    But I say this is wrong.   

    Even if a person who is raped and writes a letter for helped should be contacted by any rape center. 

   What if a person were unable to speak, for instance, and writing a  letter were the only way that person could communicate?

   What if a person were elderly and difficulty reaching out?

    Rape centers throughout the world take heed: DON'T BE LIKE DAY ONE!   

     After this a few months went by and on October 1, 2013 I  wrote a letter to Catharine Taylor who was then director of the Rhode Island Department of Human Service, Elderly Affairs. I explained my situation. (By the way, at the time I was 64, elderly by federal definition.)

    I immediately got a reply.

    Taylor  made an appointment with the lawyer Steven J. Bagian who answered my questions. He patiently told me I should proceed with the matter through various authorities.

    I wish to  thank Tayor and Bagian for their help and professionalism. Also, a shout out to Jose Rodriguez who is a fellow employer of mine at Transdev and who -  a few years ago  - contacted people at the Rhode Island Attorney General. (Rodriguez, who I keep urging to run for public office, at the time had a full-time job for the attorney general - and of course these are real names of people.)  

    But though I made a few half-hearted attempts to contact various people, between work and writing and everything I gave up. I just didn't feel I had community support in the matter and I really didn't want to fight this alone.

   Anyway, at this point (2024) the guy who held up his knife to me must be in his 80s if he's even alive.

   My dear sweet friend the Angel of Death - Hey dude! The door is always open - but take off your shoes!  - will take care of him...                                                                                                                                                      

29. RUSTY SCUPPER

       A bizarre incident occurred when I was 31 in 1980.

     I was at a singles' bar in Providence, R.I. called the Rusty Scupper. I was standing at the bar amid plumes of blue cigarette smoke and (probably) on my third gin and tonic. Glasses clinked, people at the bar chatted.

     Besides a convex westward facing window in a sunny alcove near me a few people were seated and talking. I ignored their chatter. Only when someone started telling a story about a kid who tore down a clubhouse did my ears perk up:

      "...So - for revenge you wanted to hypnotize him, give him a post-hypnotic hypnotic suggestion that he couldn't fight back and then take turns beating the kid up!? (HAR, HAR!)"

      "Yeah. This kid was big and tough. You wouldn't have wanted to have gone it alone against him.*"

      (*Note: I know I had a bit of a wit, but when I was 12 I was neither big nor tough.)

     "Wow! (HAR, HAR!) You must have been strange kids! (HAR! HAR!)"

     "We were weird," said the speaker with a chuckle and emphasizing the word "weird."

      Because of the noise in the bar I didn't hear all of the conversation but what I did hear gave me a strange kind of feeling - especially when the speaker mentioned how "a cousin Fredo" (the name of my cousin) betrayed the tough kid.

      "So you turned this kid that tore down your clubhouse into a cat and a rat and told him he had no arms or legs and made him invisible...(MUCH LAUGHTER FROM THE  OTHER  LISTENERS)...Gee (HAR, HAR!) then what happened?"

     "Ah," said the speaker in this tough guy/macho way, "we just left him by the side of pond all (EXPLETIVES DELETED)."

      Then - and adding in a positively sick way:

     "Later we heard some older guys came around and, you know, they did some things to him..."

     OTHERWISE SAID: This kid got what was coming to him for tearing down our clubhouse because by leaving him so mentally confused we set it up so that he'd be raped...

      Being a bit sloshed at the time I didn't think much of the story. I did indeed get a strange feeling about it - in 1980 I was still in a state of denial about the rape and everything - but I was comfortably numb enough by the alcohol to brush it off...

      Later I walked near the still bright alcove where the speaker was. 

      The people who had been listening to him vanished, he was alone.

      He was a morbidly obese man in a really tight suit. It looked like the buttons from that suit would pop out if he took a deep enough breath. For a second our eyes locked - and he looked shocked: His mouth formed in this fearful small circle and he seemed afraid - of me! For a moment he made me feel like I were a big cat (ROAR!) and he was a tiny yellow canary.

      Why was he so afraid - of me!?

      Years later when I remembered the rape I remembered the incident at the Rusty Scupper.

     I know who he was but for reasons of litigation I won't name him.

     Besides, any competent attorney would point out that I was under the influence of alcohol and my identification of the person would be reasonably and rightfully brought into question...

P.S. Along with the largely false story overheard at the Rusty Scupper, the equally false story by (I allege) James Woods on television (Re: Endnote 1) and other overheard snippets of accounts and rumors, I am (again) strongly motivated to write this book because I want the true story of what happened to me presented; for my own peace of mind I want to set the record straight.

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30. RAT AURA TRIP

     If you ever meet anyone who knew me around 50 years ago and s/he tells you I once took a lot of LSD and turned into a rat that person would not be lying. Since I never did turn into a rat - neither under hypnosis nor under LSD - that person would not be precisely reporting what happened but just honestly relaying what s/he believes.

     On one dreadful day when I was 19 in August 1968 I took a lot of acid - a double dose, I'd say - and this is what occurred:

      I was driving not too far from Canada Pond where I had been raped.

     Perhaps my location reminded me of the hypnotist session when the child hypnotist failed to make me think I was a rat. 

     Because suddenly, this wild thought occurred in which I felt I was in extreme danger of being transformed into a rat. 

    Thinking this frightened me and (while driving!) I blanked out. Under the influence of LSD "my mind" went out of my body. 

    It was like my conscious being was a pilot in a fighter jet being ejected in his seat up, up and away into the wild blue yonder.

    OTHERWISE SAID: I FREAKED OUT.

     When I came back down to earth I not only had this strong idea that I was in danger of changing into a rat but that now (again under the influence of the LSD perhaps), there was this near-visible aura of "rat-ness" to what I saw and heard: The cars, people walking by, all reality itself. There also seemed to be this paranoid rat-like "significance/secret meaning" to the songs on the radio, signs on billboards, things said. 

     To put it is best I can I believed rats secretly ran the world. And under LSD that day I became poignantly aware of a kind of "rat-world conspiracy" that everyone knew existed but were compelled to be silent about - just like how hundreds of millions of people in China know that Chairman Mao was a mass murderer but don't say it for fear of being sent to jail.

    (That this "being silent" conspiracy is exactly what happened in my family when aunts and uncles and cousins were aware of my rape but forbidden to speak about it also bears consideration, Herr Doctor.)

    In a private collection of journals by Lost Generation poet and Black Sun Press publisher Harry Crosby* (*journal copies available at Brown University's John Hay Library), Crosby discussed returning to Boston, Massachusetts from a sojourn in Paris, France. Cars on the roads of the Bay State (back then in the 1920s) reminded him of packs of rats: It was this kind of similar perception regarding cars (and people) I began to experience. 

    What happened to me is also similar to what the late Terrence McKenna reported in "True Hallucinations" happened to his younger brother Dennis. After a particularly potent dose of psychotropic mushrooms Dennis screamed out that he didn't want to be changed into: "...a giant insect."

      Later on that day of My Bad Trip my father went to a psychiatrist I was seeing. He gave him enough sedatives and Thorazine to have stilled the 400 horses at the Charge of the Light Brigade. After taking these pills I went into a long, drugged out sleep...

      For weeks after I was quite the wreck. I still had this insane drug-induced perception that there was a rat aura around things, that a conspiratorial kind of rat-world existed about which everyone knew but had to be silent about. 

     Eventually after lots of Thorazine things got less intense but the wild experience remained in the back of my mind: I was to have severe flashbacks - really debilitating and demoralizing events - every few days: AND FOR YEARS! 

     Like if some proverbial "contestant" said the secret word "rat," I'd be on my way to having a severe flashback, you bet your life. (And go on YouTube and check out the Groucho Marx show "You Bet Your Life" with the guest Albert Hall on it. It'll really crack you up!)

     Why I earlier said that people who knew me back then would not be lying to you if they told you that I took a lot of LSD and turned into a rat is this: To people I ever discussed this event with, I usually "short-handed" the incident and told them that I took a lot of LSD and turned into a rat. 

    This account was fairly honest and helped me avoid discussing the real complexity of the event, which I, as a younger and less erudite person, was unable to properly articulate, make people understand. Giving the short and basic report also helped me to avoid remembering my underwater rape itself, an experience I would continue to repress until I was in my late-50s.

      Again, unlike the time when under hypnosis I really did imagine myself as a lion (ROAR!), really shape-changed into a lion (ROAR!) with a lion's mane and paws and (ROAR!) claws, under LSD I never shape-changed in a long-tailed, big sharp toothed rat but only experienced a rat aura world and various thoughts regarding a rat-world conspiracy.

       Again, too, if you do happen to meet people who tell you I took a lot of LSD and turned into a rat, besides giving them my love and my best regards (Hi, beautiful people!) keep in mind that these folks are not lying but just telling you the truth as they simply believe it to be. (And be sure to thank them, too, on my behalf for indirectly publicizing this book. Any publicity is good publicity and I assure you it's a real, ah, "rat-race" attracting wide readership...)

      Frankly, though these rat aura flashback were terrible to live with, they kind of served as a psychological red herring in that occupying my mind with this horrid flashbacks made it that much easier to repress my taboo-to-remember childhood rape - and the many other incidents of childhood sexual abuse I endured. And while they say to every dark cloud there's a silver lining, this rat aura/flashback experience had many good things about it:

      1. Before this experience I had seriously been considering trying heroin.  This bad trip took me away from the world of drugs. After it I couldn't even smoke marijuana without having severe flashbacks: Because of this trip I stopped taking drugs. (A close friend of mine reported a similar bad-LSD-trip-that-brought-on-bad-flashbacks-when-smoking-marijuana. He said he even knew of a couple of other people this happened to. Both of us really wonder about the current therapeutic resurgence of psychedelic drugs, too: Crazy!)

    2. Because of my distancing from the world of drugs I was never in possession of drugs and was therefore never arrested for possession of drugs. It may seem incredible today but back then (in the late 1950s and the 1960s) they often sent people to prison for possession (and dealing) the smallest quantities of marijuana: Beat/hippie hero Neal Cassidy - the inspiration for a lot of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" and Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus driver of FURTHUR - served a few years in San Quentin Prison for a minor quantity of weed and could not be hired back at his railroad job when he was finally released, for instance. 

     3. I definitely didn't "melt" because of excessive marijuana use. Except for a few brief periods in the late 1970s and early 1980s I mostly avoided marijuana - only returning to weed in the spring of 2002 nearly 34 years after my rat aura LSD trip...

     As I said I suffered from these severe flashbacks for years. But finally, after about a year or so of intense psychotherapy sessions - sometimes twice or three times a week - these flashbacks finally ended around the beginning of 1979. (Thanks doctor and priest Bernard Duval - who also provided a quick analysis of the poet Ezra Pound when he was a patient - and Duval was an intern - at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Duval said the great poet and dirtbag Pound had been traumatized by his brutal incarceration in Pisa, Italy but was not fundamentally insane. Duval told me his analysis endeared the disgusting war criminal/greatest of American poets Pound to him.) 

     At the end of "Notes of the House of the Dead," the fictionalized account of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's 19th century incarceration in Siberia, Dostoyevsky describes the joy of having the iron shackles around his ankles - that he was punished to wear for years - finally hammered off.

      The joy he felt at that moment! 

      The joy I felt when these regular Rat Aura flashbacks finally ended!...

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31. COMIC SUICIDE THOUGHTS

     As I stated I have not attempted suicide since 2003 but I have - like everyone, I say - have had fleeting thoughts about it.

     The last time I really dwelled on it was in November of 2009.

     The world was crashing in on me.

     I was dead broke - which was my own darn fault - so broke I subsisted for awhile on dated cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. These cans were limited, too: Like I'd eat one can on a Monday, skip all food on Tuesday, eat another can on a Wednesday - and so on. At the time I refused, for religious reasons, to apply for food stamps. I lost 20 pounds between November 1 and December 31 of that year.* (*Yes, people sometimes go without food in the United States of America, people you would not believe go without food...)

    At one point I figured the only way out of my severe financial woes was to commit suicide. I'd go to Home Depot and get some rope and hang myself in nearby woods.

     Then I realized: I was so broke I couldn't afford to buy any rope!

      That really made me laugh - and ultimately put an end to my thoughts of suicide...

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32. BLOOD PRESSURE

      Since I've stayed away from doctors most of my life - I seldom had health coverage and couldn't afford medical care - it's my own reasonable guess that my blood pressure was "out of whack" for a large part of my adult life. Just one incident that makes me say this because I remember working as a cabdriver and hearing various mechanics who worked at the cab station remaking how my worked-up face looked purple. Since I was overweight and smoked cigarettes and drank zillions of cups of coffee and drank glasses of whiskey straight and used Vicadin (in the 1990s especially) I don't think I'm being out-of-line to suggest that I was a prime candidate for a heart attack or a stroke.

       This all changed after my significant loss of weight and my rape awareness, though - and I do have official records of my blood pressure.

      At age 62 in the fall of 2011 - about four-and-a-half years after my rape awareness (and eight years after I had lost weight) - when I underwent non-rape related prostate surgery my blood pressure measured at 120 over 80.

      "You're like a teenager," the kind nurse at Rhode Island Hospital who measured my blood pressure told me.

      Various other times throughout the 2010s when I had my blood pressure measured at Thundermist Dental Clinic in West Warwick, R.I. - the positively fantastic place I go for my teeth - my blood pressure remained in this excellent range. In October 2020, in fact, it measured at 130 over 86. That's a little high but still not too shabby.

     A few months later Covid happened, I had my shots and voila! After a good provable decade of having good blood pressure in November of 2021 I was in the danger zone: My blood pressure jumped to 190 over 110! (And yeah: Maybe I'm being paranoid when I blame the Covid shots for this increase but it is what I instinctively think happened.)

      Fortunately, through the care of the great people at the Blackstone Valley Health Clinic and medication - Lisinopril  and Amlodipine - as of June 21, 2024 my blood pressure is at (drum roll please): 120 over 80. Pretty good! (Thanks Grace Cook!) I don't at all mind the medication I take - It's cheap! - but I'm reasonably hoping that within a year I'll be off all medication.

    

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33. ISIS

      It pains me to think that the name of a courageous, graceful, bold and heroic goddess - Isis - has been used as an acronym for a terrorist group.

     And here's my last story for you:

     A few years ago I was on a public bus and sitting at the very back.

      Suddenly a few dozen high school kids barged in and a young woman sat next to me.

      One kid a few seats up started teasing her.

       "And what about your name, Isis!?" he said to the female student who was sitting besides me.

       I got a little angry and I turned to her.

       "Isis is the name of a goddess that stands for courage and heroism and forgiveness and love and peace," I said with dignity. "Be proud of your name..."

      (As I stated previously Isis is the name of the angel...)

THE END