THE PETER PIPER PAPERS: STUTTERVILLE PART III

     It was costing $3000 to have the worst time of my life. That's one thousand dollars a week for 21 days of punishment.  I should  have figured anything called the Precision Fluency Shaping Program at the Hollins Communication Research Institute was not going to be at all fun or easy.

" Hard work and long practice
 can be oh such a bore,
with just the wave of two arms
you'll stutter no more! "

   No magic spell could save me. There was no way to cheat, no shortcut to take or detour to make. This was a problem because making detours and cheating happen to be essential to stutterers. It's part of what makes us so sly when it comes to changing the rules of verbal engagement. 

     The head speech therapist, Ross, and the rest of the staff of the Precision Fluency Shaping Program, or PFSP, knew all the 'tricks of the trade' used by stutterers and wouldn't let us get away with anything. We weren't allowed to avoid, substitute, or disguise any sound. It was like Fat Camp, except the staff just cared about what came out of our mouths instead of what went in.

                                       

The Basics:

The vocal cords
(or what looks like a vagina in my throat). 

    One of the first things I learned is that there is a vagina in my throat that I can't control. This vagina, also referred to as the voice box, has vocal cords that vibrate evenly and smoothly when speech is fluent. When I stutter, my cords vibrate improperly and clamp together, trapping a sound.
   This trapped sound is referred to as a 'block'. Imagine, if you will, my voice box is not a vagina anymore but instead is a wrestling arena. In this arena, a 'blocked' sound is in a Full Nelson until it breaks free and escapes.

  





























   
                                                The pressure that is built-up by each block varies, making some of my stutters bigger and more obvious. Those are the ones that are painful for other people to watch in person or listen to over the phone. When the sound is finally released, the force behind it can be quite explosive. This creates what is called a 'hard-onset'. This is not to be confused with a hard-on, which also can be quite explosive at times. It might help to think of a hard-onset in terms of a manhole cover being blown off or a volcano erupting, which, like a stutter is uncontrollable and quite a sight to see.

   




   

A block and a hard-onset were simple words turned into important concepts, and neither were tolerated by Ross. We were taught to identify these two tell-tale signs of stuttering so we could be sure to never be caught doing them.  

 Sharp, jagged sound waves
of hard-onsets that look like
 broken fangs (above),

compared to the sound waves
 of the 'gentle-onset' 
that fall perfectly into place 
in a flawless formation of
flowing peaks and valleys (below).

   'Gentle-onset' helps to control the initiation of sound. Each sound starts off as a very low amplitude vibration of the vocal cords. The amplitude gradually increases as the vocal cords vibrate more quickly, until the loudness peaks. A gradual decrease in loudness immediately follows until the sound ends at the same amplitude level that it began.

   This fundamental action of fluent 

speech occurs naturally in those of you who don't stutter. In your case, the vagina in your throat is calm and relaxed without you having to make any effort or give it even one thought. Your vocal cords allow  sounds to rise and fall with unwavering uniformity, similar to the superb symmetry of synchronized swimmers.    

   The gentle-onset is the gold standard of proper speech and the cornerstone of the entire Fluency Shaping Program. If we mastered it, the fluent world was ours to conquer.

                NORMAL SPEECH 
                 WITHIN OUR REACH!

 To master the gentle-onset, you must tame the gentle-onset. And to tame the gentle-onset, you must slow the gentle-onset. And I mean really slow. Words had to crawl before they could walk. At Hollins Institute, words barely crawled, at least at the beginning of the program. Each word was deconstructed into all it's different sounds. Then each sound was deconstructed into a beginning, middle and an end, lasting a full 2 seconds.

                                  The 2-second gentle-onset stretch

   For you to grasp just how torturously long the 2 second gentle-onset was, all you have to do is write down the word ' 'WATERMELON'. Then break it down into all the different sounds that make up the parts of it. The WA is two sounds, the W and the A, each lasting two seconds each, for a total of 4 seconds. The TE and the R are another two sounds equaling another 4 seconds. That's 8 seconds so far. Now add that 8 seconds to the 6 seconds from the three individual sounds of the M, the E, and L. The O and the N at the end is an additional 4 seconds, for a grand total of 18 seconds. Yes, 18 seconds just to say 'watermelon'! In other words, it would take the same time to count out loud to '18 Mississippi'.

                                       Watermelon said normally.

An 18-second long watermelon.

                                         

No picture of the 'therapy suites' was available 

but I did find this shot of break-time at a

Hungarian Maximum Security Prison

REDLIGHT DISTRICT  LOCK DOWN

       Ross assigned each of us a 'therapy suite', which was actually more like a 'therapy closet'. They were tiny rooms that faced each other with a narrow hallway in between. There was a built-in tabletop with a chair under it, with nothing else except a small, odd, black box sitting on the table facing the chair.

 

   It turned out that this black box, otherwise known as the Precision Fluency Shaping Program Voice Monitor, or PFSPVM for short, was going to be my new speech therapist. It looked like a basic ham radio. The built-in microphone didn't connect to anywhere outside of the box. There was no human listening on the other end, and no voice, machine or otherwise, to answer me back. The only interaction it offered was flashing one red nipple-shaped light bulb at me whenever I screwed up a gentle-onset. The Voice Monitor had the extremely precise and extremely annoying ability to detect any disruption of airflow or even the slightest hint of a hard-onset.  

  From the moment it first flashed it's red nipple at me, I knew this new plugged-in speech therapist and I weren't going to get along. Machines and I have never gotten along; I don't like anything that I can't charm or make laugh (another reason why I didn't like Ross).

    Hearing myself speak so slowly made it  hard  to focus and to even stay awake. It sounded like a Buddhist chant that seemed to echo in the tiny, bare room. Even though everyone's doors were shut, I could still hear the muffled drones of the other stutterers through the walls. It sounded more like a Tibetan monastery than a speech clinic. Occasionally I heard a loud accidental 'damn it!' or 'shit!' from someone else who, obviously frustrated with the Voice Monitor, forgot to curse with a gentle-onset.

       You would think that the worst part of the PFSP was being in the solitary confinement of my therapy suite while having to spend hour after hour  stretching out every conceivable combination of vowels and consonants for 2 seconds each. For me, having to leave my tiny room and join all the other stutterers at break-times was even more torturous.

      First of all,  I was  very disappointed in the group I got stuck with. I waited my whole life to finally meet other stutterers, and I ended up having nothing in common with them. There weren't any other Jews in my group, or  New Yorkers either, or anyone who was particularly funny, sexy or loud like me. What was most disappointing was the fact that there was not one other gay stutterer in the group. I was sure that there would be at least one, or maybe even a few.
   Having moved into Manhattan immediately after High School to study illustration at Fashion Institute of Technology and then moving into an apartment in Chelsea with my boyfriend Scott, I had become accustomed to there always being a gay presence around me. I wanted to be surrounded by gay people as often as possible to make up for all the lost time I spent with straight people my whole childhood. It was an entirely new reality that gave me comfort and strength. I had thought the days of me being the only gay person in a group were over. I didn't like the feeling I got when there weren't any other gays nearby. After all, it was 1982 and the gay rights movement was taking off, fueled by the start of the AIDS crisis a year earlier, and declaring one's gayness was a powerful political statement and tool.  

       I made a point of letting it be known that I was gay to Ross and to anyone else at the Hollins Institute who I felt the need to tell. When I was in my 20's, I  made it an issue wherever I went, and was happy to have it define me. I was creating an intentional distance between myself and straight people, even if they stuttered. Looking back now, it was probably the most inopportune  time for me to be in such a straight environment as the Hollins Institute in Roanoke. And the fact that I found my group as a whole to be particularly boring didn't help at all. I tried to join conversations during break-times  but I have never been able to fain interest. Hearing fluent people discuss sports, cars, the weather, and National Parks is boring enough, but hearing stutterers trying to discuss it is nothing less than a punishment. 

    What made it even worse was that all of us had to time ourselves as we had these boring conversations. Ross had given each of us a stopwatch that was to be carried at all times. He told us that we were to consider the watches to be   as important to our survival as pacemakers are to people who have bad hearts.  Whenever we were not in front of the Voice Monitor, we had to use the stopwatches to make sure that each sound of every word we said was still 2 seconds long. 

   Ross instructed us to use this 2 second stretch anytime we opened our mouths, even if it was for the most basic question or the most obvious answer. He refused to give any exceptions or 'time-outs', even if someone felt what they had to say was too important to be spoken slowly. We were not allowed to shorten sentences, abbreviate words or use the very handy 'never mind' or the even handier shoulder shrug.  Every sound had to be at the same slow speed.  Ross was like a very strict hallway monitor, except he was  patrolling our mouths instead of the halls. 

   These break-times were when Ross really could show what an asshole he could be. But looking back at it, the breaks also revealed what incredible patience he must have possessed. A lesser man would have gone insane having to listen to as many stutterers going through the Fluency Program as he did over the years. In his defense, the job of head clinician required that he be the asshole he was. In a way, being such an asshole helped to make him the best in the world at what he did.

      Ross never slowed his speech to match ours so conversations with him were very lopsided. Answering him took ten times longer than he took to ask the question. It made any conversation longer than I ever wanted to have with him. But those conversations seemed quick compared to whenever I got trapped speaking to another stutterer. Conversations that should have been finished in two minutes were taking a quarter of an hour. Each interaction turned into an investment. So much effort went into every response that I had to force myself to participate. 

   The first person would click the on/off button of his stopwatch and stare down at the second-hand trying to time each sound of the word he was saying. In the mean time, the second person just stood there waiting. When the first person timing himself was finished, he would click off his watch and look back up. This was the cue for the second person to click on his stopwatch and begin his response, looking down at his watch's second-hand while the first person now stood there and waited. You can imagine how unbearable this  become, at least for me.

   A stopwatch had always  represented the quickness of things, but at the Hollins Institute it became the guardian of slowness. It made me aware of how incredibly slow 2 seconds can be. All the clicking and quick ticking became the background music for all our conversations.

               

    By the end of the fourth day, I could swear I was still hearing faint ticking in my ear as I laid in the bed of my hotel room unable to sleep.  I  was  dreading having to go back to the Institute in the morning and face another full day of the Voice Monitor's  flashing red light and The Stopwatch Sonata. 

                                                   *       

    I had hoped by the next day I would be more inspired about the program, but being back at the Institute in my tiny therapy suite suffering through more hours of the Voice Monitor's silent, flashing judgements was becoming unbearable. Time inside the therapy suite was dragging more and more each hour. Remember, this was in the 80's before PC s, cell phones, and any other technology that nowadays keep us from ever feeling trapped and alone. Once that door closed, it was me vs. the Voice Monitor. There was nothing else in that room to distract or interest me. The only entertainment  I had was to repeat an 8-second "ffFuuUUUuuKkk yyYYYyyooOOoo," over and over to the Voice Monitor.

    My mind was everywhere except where it was supposed to be. I couldn't focus enough to continue practicing with the Voice Monitor. All I wanted to do was go to sleep. I could still hear the stretched-out muffled moans coming from the other stutterers as I put my head down on my arms folded on top of my workbook. But just as I was dozing off, Ross appeared on one of his random check-ins. He went from suite to suite at will, opening our doors without warning to keep us on our toes. I sprang forward in my chair just in towards the Voice Monitor acting like I was in the middle of practicing. He  stood silently against the back walland listened to me doing gentle-onsets into the microphone. He hardly ever commented on what was done well or what wasn't. He knew just his presence alone was enough to usually make everyone try their best. 

    " I told you the first week is the hardest, Gary. We start in the deep-end and then swim to the shallow part. This gets easier, but only if you do what you're supposed to do now. You still have too many hard on-sets, " Ross broke his silence and said.

    I wanted to complain to him but I knew he would make me say it stretched out with my stopwatch so I didn't bother. 

   "You should take this as seriously as you seem to take being a gay person. Your speech is as big a part of you as anything else, " he told me as he opened the door. 

     I sat stunned in my chair not knowing how to answer him.

  " And talk to more people at break-times. You don't have to enjoy the conversations or the people. That's not the purpose of speaking with each other here," he added, closing the door behind him and leaving me alone again with the Voice Monitor that was flashing it's red nipple at me.

    " He didn't mean speak to you more," I sneered at the Voice Monitor and unplugged it from the wall. "That should teach you," I grinned and stuttered at it.

       It flashed its bitchy red light to criticize my hard-onset without even being plugged in. 

        "How the hell did you do that?" I sneered at it again.

      I picked it up and looked at it's dangling plug, then turned the black box over to find that it ran on batteries as a back-up. " You bitch," I said, wishing it was alive for a moment so it could understand how much I truly hated it. 

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 imagine. Blind 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 Greet' besides 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.
  
      
     

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...