THE PETER PIPER PAPERS: STUTTERVILLE PART I

                         

        Sure, back in elementary school there were some success stories of other young stutterers who were actually cured by public school Speech Therapists. I call these kids 'The Impostors', the ones who grew out of stuttering at an early age like other kids grew out of bed-wetting. Stuttering was merely a phase to them, not the life-long companion it has been for me. Let's get one thing straight, Impostors: You are not a stutterer if you grow out of it; you are only a stutterer if you grow up with it.

          

     There appears to exist a cut-off when curing a stutter becomes much more difficult. That's why the Public Schools System offers free Speech Therapy only until the end of sixth grade. Mr. Calahan and his horrible accomplice, Peter Piper, loose their power and puberty arrives to take control. The great powers of Adolescence either triumph over a stutter or lock it in place. Obviously, my stutter had no plans of leaving. It stuck with me all the way through junior high school and graduated high school with me. It decided to stay to celebrate my legally becoming an adult at 18, and insisted on being right there when I ordered my first drink from a bartender at 21. My stutter had done the unthinkable --it entered my adulthood with me. I had become an undeniable member of the group I call Adults with Stubborn Stutters, or ASSs. 

     Every generation of  ASSs have their own  specialists, practitioners, professionals, nonprofessionals, and quacks, each thinking they will be the one to find the elusive cure for stuttering. Doctors have tried to electroshock the stutter out of us, shrinks have tried to analyze it out of us, acupuncturists have tried to needle it out of us, hypnotists have tried to trick it out of us, gurus have tried to relax it out of us. Hookers have even tried to fuck our stutters out of us. 


   Actually, there was a brief period when I wasn't an ASS , if you can imagine. It was 1982, the year when the impossible suddenly seemed possible. The Precision Fluency Shaping Program, or PFSP, claimed  a 75-90% success rate in its treatment of stutttering, with filmclips of patients to prove it. After doing the program, stutterers could read The Declaration Of Independence in the same amount of time it had taken them to just say their name, address  and phone number before they took the program.  T.V. correspondent John Stossel first broke the news of the treatment on a segment of 20/20 when he himself stopped stuttering after doing The Fluency Program.  This got the attention of ASSs everywhere. It was the biggest news to hit the stuttering community since Marilyn Monroe was added to the Top Ten List Of Stutterers.
     By the time I got the nerve to call the PFSP and register, all the available spaces had been booked in advance for a year and a half. The waiting list was filled as well. My father, Bernie, was even more disappointed than I was. He was outraged that I would have to wait so long. He wanted me to call back and stutter worse, in case they accepted applicants on the basis of how badly they stuttered, like hospitals did with patients who needed organ transplants. 
     I had always felt a little sorry for my father having to be my parent. In Freudian terms, having a son who is both gay and a stutterer makes it look like he must have somehow really fucked up as a father. I wondered if he ever felt judged by other fathers whose sons were more normal.  To my father's credit, he never outwardly expressed any disappointment or embarrassment he might have had over my speech problem, or even over the fact that I was gay. If he had these feelings he did a good job at hiding them, which was one of the things that I realize now actually made him a better father than most. This did not mean he wasn't excited over the possibility of me not stuttering anymore. He was ready to pay the $3000  for the program on the spot, and wrote out the check to prove it. 
     " Mail it to them anyway. There's no way any business would not  deposit a three thousand dollar check for something they're trying to sell. This way if they cash it, they'll have to put you ahead of the other stutterers. Trust me."
    I had no guilt over my father paying for the PFSP. He probably spent almost as much money every month just eating at restaurants. If he could spend it so easily on a lamb chop, he certainly should spend it on me. In a way it served him right for being a little too excited about the possibility of having a son who didn't stutter anymore.
      I figured that the high cost of the Program was one of the best things about it. My reasoning was that if all the free Speech Therapy I was given in elementary school never motivated me enough, maybe Speech Therapy that wasn't free would motivate me more. The more expensive it was, the higher the stakes were raised. I wouldn't have any other choice but  to take it seriously.
    I promised my father it would be the best three thousand he ever spent. I assured him that even though I hated Speech Therapy in the past, this time it would be different. After all, I was 21 and more mature, a man ready to focus and succeed. Or so I believed at the time.
                                                  
                                 STUTTERVILLE
      
     Tech geeks move to Silicone Valley, cripples make pilgrimages to Lourdes, but if you're a stutterer, there's still only one place to go. Hollins Communications Research Institute is located Roanoke, Virginia  and is the place where stutterers from all over the world have to travel to for the Precision Fluency Shaping Program.
      Almost overnight, John Stossel made Roanoke famous, and a steady stream of stutterers have continued to arrive for over 30 years, spending a steady stream of money. If you own a store in Roanoke, odds are a stutterer has bought something from you, not to mention all the extra business hotels and restaurants have gotten.
     When I got to the taxi stand outside the baggage claim at Roanoke Airport and started to stutter on the name of the Institute, the taxi driver held up his hand and interrupted me.
         " Don't trouble yourself, young man. I know where you're heading to," he grinned and put my suitcase in the trunk. He didn't try to make any small talk the entire ride, which was his way of telling me that he understood why I might not have been interested in conversations with strangers. When he handed me my suitcase he wished me luck too. "They get good results. I hear it myself when they talk to each other in the backseat."
      I thanked him and grinned back, feeling a strange combination of relief and embarrassment that he knew I was there because I stuttered. It was a feeling I would have for the next three weeks as I interacted with a town full of strangers who all seemed to know why I was there.
                                                 
       The first thing the head Speech Therapist, Ross, did was to take a VHS video of me answering basic questions. I had never been filmed talking, so I had no idea what I actually looked like when I stuttered. As Ross asked me questions, I tried my best not to stutter. A few of the answers I gave were really funny, but he didn't laugh once. All in all, I  thought I actually controlled my stutter pretty well, which I told Ross when he asked me how I did.

    " O.K., let's see it, " he said, not agreeing or disagreeing with my assessment. He rewound the video and played it back for me on a TV monitor. What I experienced was the most horrifying and embarrassing five minutes of my life. Every stutter showed, even the smallest ticks that I thought I was hiding. My head bobbed, my eyelids fluttered, my mouth contorted, and my chin kept cocking up like I was trying to sneeze but couldn't. Ross, totally unmoved, watched while I looked at myself in disbelief. I wanted to run and lock myself away and never 

open my mouth again. I couldn't believe that I actually went through life making such grotesque, painful faces every time I talked to people. I thought of my boyfriend Scott immediately. How did he ever fall in love with me after he saw me stutter? A feeling of absolute humiliation completely filled me. The realization that almost every person I had ever spoken to had seen my face twist and contort and my head jerk and freeze was so overwhelming that I had to block it out of my mind so I wouldn't totally fall apart.

        I couldn't bear to look up at Ross after he turned on the lights when the video ended. I never wanted to lift my head and look at anyone again. My illusion of myself was shattered. 
    " Worse than you thought?" Ross asked matter-of-fact without any sympathy.
      I nodded in my chair looking at my feet.
    " It usually is. That's how the ego protects us. It's the ego's number one job, to not let us see how things really look sometimes. Unfortunately it also keeps us from acting sooner. But now you know what it looks like and where you stand."  He stood up from his desk and opened the door, ending our first meeting abruptly so he could film the next stutterer who was waiting after me.
     I was shocked that he was letting me leave without saying something to make me feel better. " Do stutterers normally leave your office and kill themselves right away, or do they wait a few hours? " I asked him as I stood up. 
   " Any stutterers who are strong enough to make it this far don't kill themselves." Ross said, ignoring my attempt to zing him.
    " How about saying something encouraging to me after that video instead of just letting me leave?" I looked him right in the eyes as I stood in the doorway.
    " I just did," he smirked, looking me right back in my eyes. " Be ready to work tomorrow."
      He didn't care if I said good bye or not, so I just turned and walked out of the office.
      I couldn't make him laugh or feel bad for me or give me any kind of a compliment. He was intentionally serious and wasn't going to be impressed with anything except hard work. 
     It was definitely going to be the longest three weeks of my life. 

                                  CONTINUED...