The following is a series of excerpts from the book.


Prologue

I wasn't kidnapped as a child, never abused, abandoned, beaten, or sold to the highest bidder. My parents didn't lock me in the basement. The cults never got hold of me--not counting a pretty wacky Bible camp. I wasn't transgendered, interracial, or multinational. No president denied that I was his love child. No aliens abducted me (although sometimes I wished they would). I wasn't blind, deaf, mute, epileptic, dyspeptic, or unable to digest milk. I wasn't an altruistic autistic. No one in my family was a psychopath or a sociopath, but a few of my cousins definitely went down the wrong path. My worst disease was mumps, and the closest I came to physical tragedy was a bee sting on the lip.
   
I'm not a celebrity or related to one or sleeping with one.

I breathe air, drink water, eat food.
   
But on a Tuesday afternoon in fourth grade, I realized for the first time that I was only "mostly normal."

***

I was singing with my classmates in music class. My voice was years away from changing, high, sweet, and boyish. I would never make the Vienna Boys' Choir, but I wasn't awful.
   
Halfway through the class, the school secretary came into the room and whispered mysteriously for a moment to Mrs. Claudio, my music teacher.
   
Mrs. Claudio then pointed toward several spots around the classroom. "I need you and you and you and you and you to please go to the speech therapy room near the main office." She pointed quickly as if conducting a more talented class of singers, and her slightly crooked index finger left in doubt exactly which students she had singled out among my mumbling classmates.
   
After a moment, a few kids ventured forward with their heads down. All of them spent most of their school day in what at the time was called "special education"--"special-ed" for short or "sped" if you wanted to be cruel. They were mildly retarded or had pretty serious versions of what we now call "learning disabilities" and only joined the rest of us for lunch, recess, gym, and music class. And they each spoke with a speech impediment--convenient ammunition for the jerky kids who liked to tease them--so the school had recently hired a part-time speech therapist.
   
After these kids dutifully gathered at the front of the classroom, Mrs. Claudio said, "John, please join them. Do you know where the room is?"
   
I nodded.
   
"Good," she continued. "Then you can take them there."
   
This was a very proud moment. Mrs. Claudio had appointed me to show the less advanced students where they needed to go for speech therapy. Clearly, she recognized my leadership potential and responsible nature and entrusted me to escort these kids to their speech therapy session, so I led the way, feeling very pleased with my new role as "teacher's assistant"--not "teacher's pet," a label that would have doomed me for a decade to come.

I walked the other kids to their assigned room, made grown-up sounding small talk along the way, and then pointed them to the door. Helping these kids was a pleasure. I liked them and was glad I could contribute in my own small way to their education. Speech therapy might help them fit in better and feel less isolated.
   
Beaming with pride, I walked back to music class and returned to my place among my friends.
   
Mrs. Claudio, inexplicably, stared at me. "John," she said, not hiding her impatience, "why are you here?"
   
"I took them to the room like you said," I replied, confused. This seemed like no way for her to speak to her new assistant.
   
"No, John," she said, striding over to take me by the elbow and hustle me toward the door. "You were supposed to stay there with them. You need speech therapy too!"
   
"Too, too, too ..."
   
Her words echoed around me as I staggered into the empty hallway.
   
"Thpeech therapy?" I said to myself, stunned. "Thee thays I need thpeech therapy too."
   
Throughout fourth grade, I missed an hour of music class each Tuesday afternoon to attend speech therapy. The drills with the therapist eventually helped me learn to stop substituting "th" sounds for my "s" sounds--a problem I didn't know I had until then. I learned an even more important lesson that first day of speech therapy: it hurts to be singled out because someone thought I didn't fit with everyone else in school.
   
I never again used the word "sped" (or "thped").


Missing so much music class that year might have adversely affected my singing ability. If there had been treatment centers for the singing-impaired, I would have been sent to one. Dad and I were by far the worst singers in church, back when I still went to church. My sisters rolled their eyes when we sang, then asked if I sang badly on purpose. In a way, I guess I did because I decided as soon as I hit puberty that I had a very deep voice. I dipped my chin into my collarbone and lowered my voice as deep as I could, trying to sound like my naive perception of a very talented opera singer. Instead of praise for my rich tones, all I earned was a sore throat from the strain.

When my class chorus sang at our sixth grade graduation ceremonies, I was one of a handful of kids not allowed to sing with the group. Ironically, the only other people banned from singing were my old speech therapy friends. We sat in the audience while our classmates stood on stage and sang some dopey song about how we were all "blossoming" into young adults.
   
Mom asked me after the ceremony why I sat with, "those, um, kids, um, you know, the 'slow' bunch." I didn't really mind not singing with everyone else. Instead, I enjoyed the reunion with my speech therapy friends from fourth grade. We reminisced about our year of Tuesday afternoons and joked about how I thought I was just escorting them to therapy.
   
"The look on your face when you came back …" one of the kids said. I made that face for them again--an expression of overwhelming disappointment. We all laughed. Then we watched our miserable classmates up on stage as they muddled their way through dreadful practice sessions.

Maybe we couldn't always talk and sing as well as everyone else in our class, but we were certainly happy to be spared from taking part in that stupid blossoming song.






Between the Eyes

As a growing farm boy, I ate as much meat as anyone else. Beef and venison were my favorites--but butchering was not. The strongest person in our family from about age fifteen, I was also the most sensitive. I hated butchering more than any other farm task. I simply couldn't bring myself to cut into an animal carcass, so my job was limited to heavy lifting. I hoisted the dead-weight animal up to a hook and hung it there by notches Dad carved between the bones of its lower hind legs. Then I went away and waited to be called when more lifting needed to be done. Dad recognized all of the other hard work I did on the farm as a kid, and I felt grateful to him for respecting my wishes not to be a full participant in the butchering.
   
We butchered one of our cows every other year or so. Our cousin Blaine, a butcher, came to help us in exchange for a quarter of the beef. Blaine thought a normal, healthy boy like me should be interested in cutting chunks out of livestock. The looks and chuckles he gave me led me to think that he considered me a bit of a sissy, but he was too polite to say so in front of Dad. Each time I hoisted part of the cow up to a hook, then walked away, Blaine shook his head.

My last summer at home before college, I decided to show Blaine that I was more of a man than he thought.
   
We were preparing to butcher the largest bull we had ever owned. Despite his size, he was gentle enough for children to pet his enormous snout. Mom had named him "Suzie" for his calm nature. Blaine arrived at seven one cool Saturday morning in early summer, and he and Dad sipped coffee and chatted on the porch for half an hour while I listened to their country banter. Finally Blaine reached into his truck window and pulled out his rifle.
   
"I guess I'd better go shoot this big fella so we can get started on him," he said.
   
I stood and said my first words of the morning. "How about if I do it?"
   
Blaine looked surprised. "I thought you didn't go in for this kind of thing."
   
"I'd like to give it a try," I said.
   
Blaine turned the stock of the gun my way. "Okay, young man. It's already loaded for the job. Just put one right between the eyes."
   
I took the gun and walked the fifty yards or so toward the field where Suzie was contentedly chewing dewy grass and swishing his tail to fend off the flies that were already out that early in the morning. I didn't want to shoot this fine animal whose company I had enjoyed while feeding him cornstalks and green apples for two years. But today would be his last morning on earth--that was certain--and at least this way, he would die in the company of a familiar face rather than Blaine, a stranger to him. Besides, I was eighteen and wanted Blaine to stop thinking of me as a little softhearted boy.
   
Suzie glanced up at my approach, and I spoke quietly to him while raising the gun. As I sighted on the middle of his forehead, I kept talking, telling him that he was a good bull, the best bull we'd ever had. Then I squeezed the trigger.
   
The gun jerked a little, but I didn't really hear the shot until it echoed off the mountain a second later. Suzie didn't even flinch. For a confused second, I thought I must have missed--but I couldn't have missed from six feet away. Then I noticed a small red circle and a trickle of blood forming right where I had aimed at his forehead. The bull snorted twice and shook his head, as if shaking off an annoying fly that had landed on his snout.
   
With my heart hammering and my ears ringing, I pulled the bolt back, ejected the shell, and brought the gun back up to aim at the same spot. This time, when I pulled the trigger, Suzie's legs crumpled so quickly that they seemed to disappear. He landed with a meaty thump.
   
By then, Dad and Blaine had walked up behind me.
   
"What the hell happened?" Dad asked.
   
"It took two shots," I said, sounding calmer than I felt.
   
"I'll be damned," Blaine whispered. "I ain't never seen that before."
   
He took the gun from me and picked up the ejected shell casings.
   
"You hit him with the first one?" Dad wondered aloud, still puzzled.
   
"He sure as hell did," Blaine said. "Boy, you are one steady son of a gun. You shot him twice like you been doing it for years."
   
The rest of the morning was a blur. We tied the bull to the back of the truck and dragged him to the barn for butchering. I did my lifting when called, and this time Blaine didn't chuckle when I walked back to the house. The rest of the time I sat on the porch and looked at the spot where the bull had fallen.
   
That was twenty-five years ago. I haven't touched a gun since.





Thing

New Life Bible Camp was also the scene of the most traumatic medical crisis of my young life. A week before camp when I was fifteen, I took a walk in the woods. At one point during the walk, I unzipped my fly and took a pee. I didn't know it at the time, but I must have touched some poison ivy not long before relieving myself.

The next morning, I woke with my hands, arms, and lower legs covered with the familiar rash and blisters of an allergic reaction. I'd had bad cases of poison ivy many times before, so I knew I faced two weeks of itching, creams, sprays, and ugly red and pink marks all over me. When I went to the bathroom that morning, however, I encountered the shock of my life.
   
I stood over the toilet and lowered my pajama bottoms. When my penis popped into view, I nearly fainted. It was swollen to twice its usual size--and not in the good way. The shaft felt lumpy with blisters, and the end was puffy and enflamed. It looked like the hammerhead shark in our biology textbook. As I stared with horror, the thing suddenly began to itch painfully. Then, as I began to pee, I experienced a burning sensation like nothing I had ever felt before (or since). I nearly lost my balance and peed all over the floor.
   
That morning at breakfast, Mom saw the rash on my hands and gave me a tube of lotion to ease the itch.
   
"Mom," I said haltingly, "I think this case of poison ivy is worse than usual."
   
"Is it farther up your arms and legs?" Mom asked.
   
"Sort of," I replied. "I got it on my ... umm ... thing."
   
"What thing?" Mom asked.
   
"You know," I replied without meeting her eyes, "my thing."
   
"Oh, your thing," Mom said, finally getting the point. "Well, how did you do that? Were you rolling around naked in the woods or something?"
   
"No!" I protested. I had done my reading on poison ivy. I knew the rash-inducing particles could be transferred from one part of the body to another. "I got it on my hands, and then ..."
   
"Were you playing with yourself?" Mom asked.
   
"No!" I responded, honest for once about this subject. "I took a pee in the woods yesterday. It must have happened then."
   
Whatever doubt Mom had about my explanation, she kept it to herself. "Well," she sighed, "let's call the doctor."
   
I got a shot in the butt that day from a very cute young nurse with a very large needle. As I lowered my pants for the shot, I kept my little hammerhead concealed. For some reason, I thought that the poor nurse might faint at the sight of such a monstrosity. It didn't occur to me that she must have already seen plenty of penis problems in her brief career. Like most teenagers with embarrassing conditions, I assumed no one else in the world ever had such a problem.

A few days later, I went to New Life Bible Camp for a week. The shot worked well to clear up the rashes on my arms and legs. Unfortunately, my smallest extremity was more stubborn. For the entire week of camp, I fidgeted uncomfortably and spent lots of time in the restroom scratching where I shouldn't have been scratching. My only relief came during swim time when I lounged in the shallow end of the pool, basking in the soothing cool water and chatting with cute girl campers who had no idea the terrible secret lurking just beneath my swimming trunks.

I couldn't tell any of the camp counselors about my problem because they certainly would have told me God was punishing me for lust. But if God really punished teenagers for that, then there must have been many more rashes under many more swimming suits than my own. In fact, considering what I saw some of the counselors doing that summer, they probably had rashes all over their bodies.

By comparison, my little hammerhead wasn't so bad.





Arm Wrestling My Father

His voice was a bad combination of loud and nasal, adding another level of irritation as he taunted me for a third time: "Whatsa matter, farm boy? Are ya chicken?" Remembering that voice still makes me cringe twenty-five years later.
   
My sister Pam's boyfriend Mark was twenty, two years older than she and four years older than I. He was a big, obnoxious city jerk who liked to tease me for a variety of reasons: because I was younger, because I did well in school, because I spent my summer vacation helping Dad tend crops and cut firewood for winter. Of course, I would learn a few years later in my first college psychology class that he teased me primarily because he didn't like himself very much, but I didn't have that perspective at age sixteen. Instead of sympathy for his emotional weakness, I mostly felt disgusted with him.
   
Mark had spent a good portion of the evening proving his manhood by beating Pam arm wrestling several times--his idea of the perfect date. He toyed with her each time, pretending to be working hard as she pushed with her tomboy strength. Then he pounded her arm down on the coffee table and leaped to his feet in celebration, pumping his fist in the air and prancing around the living room, singing a bad rendition of Queen's, "We Are the Champions." Pam would too quickly forget her pride and the sting of defeat and tell him how strong he was and how he was her hero--an early example of the kind of mistake I would eventually see too many strong women make with weak men.

So Mark and I took up positions on either side of the little wooden coffee table and planted our elbows. He gave me his best evil-eye and assured me that I was "goin' down, sissy-boy" as he wrapped his fat hand around my bony one in the macho soul-brother handshake of arm wrestling.
   
We were both close to six feet tall, although he weighed more than two hundred pounds (at least fifty more than I did in those long-ago teenage years), but I noticed his soft and doughy middle. He had quickly given up the one time he condescended to help Dad and me load firewood into the old pick-up, claiming a football injury as he limped back inside the house. Dad and I just smiled and kept working. In contrast to Mark, I was thin but strong from years of outdoor work alongside Dad.
   
Mark pulled away from my hand three times to make adjustments, claiming that he didn't want me to cheat with an illegal grip. Pam was clearly rooting for him, but the fan support evened out when Dad walked into the room and saw what was going on. One corner of his mouth turned up slightly, and he gave me a wink. I didn't need a word from him to know that he wanted me to kick Mark's ass from one end of the living room to the other.
   
Finally satisfied with his grip, Mark counted, "one-two-three-go," jamming "three" and "go" together to try and catch me off guard. His pale arm vibrated with more strength than I'd given him credit for. My arm quickly became a knot of muscle, matching his every push with equal force. Realizing that this wouldn't be the easy victory he anticipated, he lifted his elbow, a clear foul, and nearly put me down. With the same strength that could throw a wet bale of hay into the barn loft, I recovered and bent his arm back an inch per second, gradually pushing him toward defeat. With his arm two inches from the table, he pulled away and jumped up, claiming a cramp and rubbing his arm with a hurt look on his face.
   
Dad and I exchanged "what-a-jerk" looks as Mark stalked out of the room, Pam following closely behind. "Good job," Dad said. I thanked him and was about to say something bad about Mark when Dad did a curious thing. He got out of his chair and knelt down on the opposite side of the coffee table. "Wanna try me?" he asked as he put his thick arm on the table. "Okay," I replied automatically, used to saying yes to any request from Dad.

Dad once told me while we rested in the middle of some outdoor project how glad he was that I worked with him on the farm because my older brothers hadn't always helped. My mouth fell open because I hadn't known I had a choice--although I would have chosen to join him anyway. It wouldn't have occurred to me to refuse to go out to repair a fence with him or to pick a dozen ears of corn for dinner. Likewise, it never crossed my mind that I could refuse to arm wrestle with him, so I locked my hand into his.
   
I thought Dad would beat me without much trouble. All my life, I had been a bit ashamed of not being more like him. He was only five feet, seven inches tall but very strong, a man with well-defined pectorals long before tax accountants and stay-at-home-moms went to the gym three times a week. His arms seemed as big around as my legs, his neck as thick as my chest. He played semi-professional baseball and was a star on his high school football team, playing a mythic position called "scat-back," where he could either overpower or outrun any opponent. In contrast, I was a gangly kid, with a body built for basketball but a temperament for chess. Dad came to every home game to see me rebound and play defense, and he didn't seem disappointed that I scored fewer points than most of the other sons.
   
Because Dad was so strong and vital and alive, I could easily forget that only five years earlier he had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. One winter afternoon during fifth-grade math class, I heard the school principal summon my sisters and me over the loud speaker. Mom picked us up and drove us to the hospital where Dad had been taken that morning shortly after we left for school. We were assured that he would be okay, but I was shocked to see his usually wind-burned bronze skin so pale next to the hospital-issue sky-blue pajamas and starched white bed sheets.
   
A few weeks after that, Dad came home. But he couldn't go back to his job as a construction steamfitter or to work around our farm. In fact, we put a hospital bed in the living room because he wasn't even allowed to climb the stairs to the bedroom where he had suffered his heart attack. For six weeks, Dad slept in our living room, watching television, reading the paper, and mostly being miserable because he couldn't get outside and work. Eventually, the color returned to his face, and he began venturing to the porch and up the stairs. Soon he started sleeping in his own bed again, and a cousin came and hauled the living room bed back to the hospital.
   
Dad never returned to his real job, but he always found plenty to keep him (and me) busy on our farm. We got by on his veteran's benefits and disability from the union, and Mom eventually got a job as a clerk in the gift shop of an authentic recreated pioneer village. Mom wore what we called "granny dresses" to work three days a week while Dad focused most of his attention on cutting wood to feed our furnace now that coal was a bit beyond our means. Tending a few cows, chickens, and a garden always kept us well stocked for food, and Dad soon grew strong again, his muscles thickening over the course of a few years.
   
To my surprise, Dad didn't force my arm down right away. In fact, I held my own very well. At first, I just tried to avoid having my hand slammed down instantly, but soon I realized that I had a chance to win. Pushing with all my might, I thought my nose might start to bleed from the intense pressure. When I looked at Dad, I saw him straining too. His eyes bulged in a way that I had never seen before, and sweat formed on his upper lip. When I looked at his arm, the arm I had so long admired and wished that mine resembled more, it looked wrinkled and creased near the crook of his elbow. The muscle didn't leap out as I had seen it do so many times while he worked his chainsaw. His hands, I noticed for the first time, had age spots.
   
At that point, I once again saw Dad in the hospital that day five years earlier, pale under the harsh lights, looking small and frail to my eyes for the first time. Suddenly it dawned on me that Dad might not be the strong man he had been, that the strain of arm wrestling might be too much for him--even just arm wrestling his skinny, semi-sissy, teenage son. I realized that I might be hurting him, making his damaged heart work too hard--maybe even killing him.
   
I faced a choice. I could let myself weaken a fraction so that he could win quickly. Such a tactic might be easy because we were so evenly matched despite his heart condition--my growing youthful power and his mature adult strength. If I eased up my arm a little but kept the strain showing on my face, he probably wouldn't even know that I was faking it. Or I could bear down with all my might and try to put him down as fast as I could. I wasn't sure that I had the strength to carry out this plan, but I knew I could give it a try.

Something important hinged on my decision as I moved toward my manhood and Dad faced the decline of his. Should I let him win so that he could hold onto the hope of keeping his pride, or should I try to beat him and see if his pride in me would overcome his own disappointment?


Five years after that pivotal arm wrestling match, Mom called me at the tiny college apartment I shared with three other guys. "Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johnny," she sobbed over and over until my aunt took the phone from her to tell me that my father had died that afternoon while plowing snow outside our home, this heart attack so swift and severe that he died before he could even shut off the truck or reach for his medicine. Everyone was relieved that he was taken without pain while doing work he enjoyed. At the funeral home, when someone remarked how natural he looked in his casket, I said that he had never looked so dead before. Then I quietly went to a rest room and cried for half an hour.
   
When I think back on that evening of those two very different arm wrestling matches so long ago, I'm still not sure what to make of my decision to pin my father's arm to the table. It had taken all of my strength. I can still see the moment of surprise as he watched his arm being bent down by the son he had carried home from the hospital. Did the years between my infancy and that evening seem to him as compressed and impossibly brief as the years between that evening and today, more than two decades later, seem to me? Did he think to himself, Good lord, this boy is stronger than I am. When the hell did this happen? Why didn't I notice? When his expression quickly turned to pride, did he really feel it, or was he using it to mask his own disappointment in himself at that moment? Or did he think, I probably won't live much longer if my own son can beat me arm wrestling?
   
I am now not far from my father's age when he had his first heart attack. I tell myself that I don't have same risk factors. My last cigarette was one I swiped from my father's pack a few years before I arm wrestled with him. I'm the first man in my family line to have a job where I go to an office rather than a work site. I get my exercise on a stationary bike and a pec-deck. I drink bottled water and eat ground turkey instead of my father's beer and steak.
   
Every now and then, when I can't sleep at night, I ask myself why I didn't let my father beat me at arm wrestling. I've told myself for years that he would have known if I had faked it and would have lost respect for me because he would have believed that I had lost respect for him. But doubt comes creeping. I beat my sister's jerk boyfriend because I wanted him to know that I was stronger, more important, more valuable, a better person than he was. I've always been called laid back and low key, but at that moment I burned to let Mark know that he wasn't my equal.

When I sit in my office or teach my classes or ride my stationary bike and live my civilized life, can I allow myself the thought that I beat my father simply because I wanted him to know that I could?