Wednesday, April 3, 2013

THE PETER PIPER PAPERS: STUTTERVILLE PART II


                         
   

       There are currently 3,149,318 stutterers stuttering in this country. In 1982 when I went to The Hollins Institute in Virginia, the overall population of The United States was almost 80 million people less than today and there were only 2,316,664 stutterers, including myself. Oddly, I had no idea who and where the other 2,316,663 were. Up to that point, I had not come across even one of my stuttering brethren. Somehow, over two million of them had managed to elude me. It seemed, at the time, that there was a better chance of me coming across Big Foot.    

Towns used to have
the Town Crier
never to be confused 
with the Town Stutterer.
      It felt like there had been a force field around me that kept all other stutterers away. Wherever I went, I was always the only one who stuttered. Moving to new neighborhoods and changing school districts didn't help. The job of Town Stutterer was always waiting for me. It was a job that seemed to be solely mine for the simple reason that no other stutterers ever showed up to take the position for themselves. I couldn't quit or get fired from it, and it always traveled with me.
This held true from elementary school all the way through college and after, when I went to work full-time as a stuttering salesman at my family's used fur store.
     Thousands of women from all over the city and tourists visiting New York from around the country and abroad came to shop at our store each year. Among all these women were customers with every conceivable handicap you can imagineBlind women, deaf women, women in wheelchairs without legs, other women without arms, midgets and giantesses. Every kind of woman except the one kind of woman I hoped would come in to buy a fur--- a stuttering one.  Destiny, it again seemed, would not let me meet my first stutterer. It made me wait until I flew all the way to Roanoke, Virginia. This is because Destiny is an asshole sometimes. But Destiny always has its reasons.
                            Welcome to the
                      ' MEET and R-R-REPEAT '      
        
       Each of our video interviews had been shot by the head speech therapist Ross individually and at different times, so I had not yet met any of the other stutterers who were there for the course too. We were all invited to a 'Meet and Greet' back at the Hollins Institute later that evening, which I decided to go to instead of deciding to kill myself after being forced to bear witness to the horror of what my stutter actually looked like on video.
    After waiting 21 years, the prospect of finally meeting other stutterers was overwhelming. For years I had tried to picture what my first encounter with another stutterer would be like, but not once did I imagine that instead of one stutterer it would be with a whole group of them.
    On the walk back over to the Institute, I envisioned the intense connections I was about to have and the life-long friendships I would be leaving Virginia with at the end of the three weeks with people who I hadn't even met yet. I already had plenty of friends back in New York and felt very loved, especially by my boyfriend at the time, Scott ( who has been my best friend for 34 years). But deep down I always felt that I was missing something important by not also having friends who actually understood my life as a stutterer.
     Only stutterers understand the  different levels of hope and desperation we go through, the amount of anxiety we carry, the comedy we have to create, the humiliation we have to ignore, the constant preparation and effort we have to make, the strategies we have to consider, and the tricks and compensations we invent and use. I also wanted a friend who could understand and appreciate the simple, great thrill stutterers sometimes enjoy when we get out difficult words. No fluent-speaking person in my life, not even Scott, could possibly understand these feelings, no matter how much they loved me. 
     I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I was also looking forward to, for the first time in my life,  seeing people stutter in front of me. I wanted to see what it looked like and how it sounded when other people did it. And on a more egotistical level, I was dying to see how similar I was to the other stutterers, and if there was at least one other stutterer who was just like me. Exactly how many gay, Jewish stutterers who were loud, funny, and sexy were out there in the world? And was there going to be any at the 'Meet and Greetbesides me? 
      From the moment I left my hotel room I was staring at random people in the elevator, downstairs in the lobby, and on the sidewalks wondering who amongst them were my fellow stutterers  heading towards the 'Meet and Greet' too. Of course it was impossible to figure out. Even a stutterer can't spot another stutterer just in passing. If you see a person coming towards you with a long, white cane you can pretty much assume they are blind; you can also usually spot deaf people in advance if they're doing sign language while crossing the street ignoring the loud sirens of ambulances and fire engines coming towards them. But there is nothing to help you spot a stutterer strolling down the street until we actually try to speak. That's what is so tricky about us ---we look and seem perfectly normal ---until we open our mouths. 
    
                                                   *                                                                                           
        As I was opening the door to the Conference Room I realized I was about to step into the first room, out of every room I had ever stepped into my entire life, where I was not going to be the only stutterer. I closed my eyes for the moment it took to press together all the memories of the thousands and thousands of rooms I had been in and the thousands and thousands of people I stuttered at who never stuttered back at me.
     The closest I had ever gotten to what I was feeling at that moment when I saw all the stutterers together was the first time I stepped into a gay bar, named Chances, four years earlier when I was seventeen and under-aged, armed with a fake I.D. and a big smile. There was the similar long overdue feeling of safety that comes from sharing something in common with a group of people. Walking into a room full of stutterers made me feel even safer. I might not have been able to use my good looks to protect myself as much as I did at a gay bar, but for the first time in my life I wasn't going to be judged by strangers for stuttering.
      All the chairs had been removed and none of the staff was there. The only things in the room was a table with different kinds of drinks against one wall and a podium with a white board on the wall in back of it that read:  
                                     Meet and Greet-6:00 P.M.
                                Introduction to Precision Fluency Shaping Program
                                                 by Dr. Ronald Webster- 7:00 P.M.
       The situation seemed to be intentionally set up for us to mingle and introduce ourselves to each other, something that stutterers generally don't rush to do. Without seats to escape into or staff to listen to, there was more pressure for us to start talking. 
    
                     MEET & GREETS FOR STUTTERERS USUALLY 
                TAKE A LITTLE MORE TIME TO GET THE PARTY STARTED.

   It started out silently with a lot of smiles and nods and cup sipping. This strategy lasted for a few minutes, and then something surprising started to happen. Being amongst ourselves emboldened some of my fellow stutterers to start conversations. I started hearing a few isolated stutters, like the first few kernels of Jiffy-Pop popcorn that pop before most of the others start popping. Soon almost everyone was 'popping', taking advantage of the chance to show-off their stutters for the first time instead of trying to hide them. 
    What was and still remains one of the most fascinating things about stuttering is that every individual person's stutter is caused by the same faulty physical mechanism (whatever that elusive cause might be), yet each of us has developed our own original convulsive choreography to deal with it, along with facial gestures and repetitive movements that made each of our stutters totally unique. I tried describing this back in September 2011 in KICK,KICK,STOMP,STOMP, ONE and TWO and CHA,CHA,CHA part 1    '...to help get a word out, I sometimes have to throw my whole body into it. Heel stomping, chair kicking, thigh punching, table tapping, head bobbing, eye twitching, neck whipping, shoulder jerking, whatever it takes. For a few really bad stutters, I've had to bounce up and down like I was on an invisible pogo stick. It's Modern Dance at it's most primal with choreography that even Martha Graham couldn't follow..'  Some stutters were spectacular to watch, others were heartbreaking to see; others were bordering on comical, and the self-flagellation of a few looked painful.
    Serving beverages to a group of stutterers was not the safest idea. Hot coffee or tea was especially dangerous when being held by a person with a stutter on the more 'athletic' side. The pile of napkins on the table was gone in half an hour, and wherever I turned, someone was dabbing up a spill from either the carpet or their clothes.        
    I hadn't said one word to anyone yet because I was so enthralled with just listening and watching. Each conversation I eavesdropped on turned out to be about Ross and the video-taping. Apparently, every stutterer there was as shell-shocked as I was over being filmed. The video-taping had had a demoralizing effect on the whole group, which was probably Ross' intention. He wanted to strip us of any tolerance of our stutters and reinvigorate our senses of humiliation and embarrassment that might have gotten lazy over the years, no matter how bad some of our stutters were. As long as he could make us hate our stutters and make getting rid of them our top priority, he didn't mind us hating him too. 
    Some of the stutterers there had heard stories about Ross even before they arrived. It turned out that Ross' unwavering stoic seriousness was legendary; according to stuttering folklore he was once a severe stutterer himself, a fact  which I myself can't confirm or dispute. The one thing I could confirm was that the whole group seemed to be quickly bonding over our mutual and immediate dislike of Ross. This goes to show that nothing can unite people faster than sharing a common handicap or hatred.
     The big question everyone had for each other was what words were the most difficult to say on the video. An older man (which to me back then meant someone in his late forties) with silver in his hair and beard, explained that his worst stutter happened when Ross asked him his profession. The man curled in his lips together and squeezed his eyelids shut each time he tried to get out the word "paleoanthropologist", which he was finally able to puff out of his mouth after his lips gave way and opened.
    Another man not as old and a little less distinguished looking held his hand up in the air in a fist moving it up and down over and over like he was pulling on a broken cord trying to get a bus to stop. He was also snapping back his head at the same quick speed like he was catching peanuts being thrown rapid-fire at his mouth. "My name," he finally said. After that he had to tell us his name,which took almost 45 seconds. His lips looked sewn together as he tried to say the 'B' of Bartholomew, which unfortunately he was named.  And then he had to tell us that he went by 'Barry' instead, which took him almost as long as Bartholomew. 
     Like all stutterers, I knew the words and sounds that were my nemesis. This meant when Ross asked what the names of my family members were, I went into a free-fall of stuttering on the video. 
    "M's and P's are my worst," I jumped in, smiling at the little group. "And  my brother's name is Mitchell, my sister's name is Melissa and my mother's name is Priscilla." I said the entire sentence without one stutter, including the three names, which I had never been able to do in my entire life. "That's funny. I can't believe I didn't stutter on them," I said , not stuttering at all again. I rolled my eyes and laughed a little. "Wait, this is impossible. 'Mitchell,Melissa, Priscilla. Mitchell, Melissa, Priscilla, " I repeated, trying to make myself stutter. " That's so weird. I always stutter on them," I said bewildered and embarrassed by my sudden and unwanted fluency.
  " Are you being serious or is this a joke," the bearded man asked.
   "No, of course not. I'm being serious," I said with perfect speech. "Here, watch, 'F's' and 'W's' are bad too. Fedora, philharmonic, wisteria, warlock, water-polo, Fifty-five," I said  flawlessly. None of the men were smiling or finding it amusing in any way. " I don't know what's wrong, "  I said in all seriousness, for the first time in my life panicking that I wasn't stuttering. " This has never happened before."  Desperate to stutter at least once as proof to them, I started throwing out any words that I could think of that were hard for me to say. " Bewitched, molasses, marmalade , metamorphosis, mercury, Madame Curie, Tennessee Williams,  Mount Vesuvius, Pompei, potato, tomato, "  I rattled off without a hitch. Even 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow,' two words that to this day I avoid saying, came out easily. "This is so crazy. My speech is never as good as this,"  I tried to laugh it off again as the men turned their backs on me.
    My stutter, as usual, betrayed me, appearing when I don't want it to and vanishing the few times when I need it. That's how spiteful a stutter can be. I looked around and realized that I was the only one not talking to anyone. I was in the middle of the room all by myself. It horrified me for a moment until I remembered that I hate groups anyway.
  
      
     

2 comments:

  1. Hi Gar- as usual this is so brilliant and funny. I can't wait for the next installment. You describe the scenes so well I almost feel like I am there, (but thankfully, am not!) Is it wrong that I laughed outloud when reading the travails of your fellow stutterers' attempts to speak? xo

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  2. I loved it! Great read. I too pictured being there. and I laughed so hard at the I hate groups!!

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