elfs | Those pro-life signs around town.

When I was a young boy of 10, my parents were already in a downward spiral and headed for an amiable divorce (for them, rather nasty for the kids) that would let him pursue his womanizing hobby and her a downward spiral of stress and alcohol. Hey, it was 1977; alcohol, cocaine, disco, and The Joy of Sex were all the rage. After the divorce, he moved in with a friend of his who probably did duty as his wing, kept his pot hidden in a plexiglass photo of me and my siblings next to his bed, and was generally more interested in having what they called in the 70's "authenticity" than being a father.

I was a pain in the neck kid with serious ADD and nowhere to go with it, so my parents got suckered into sending me to a school where the staff supposedly had skills in dealing with kids like me.

("Hyperactive and disruptive," the report said; I was to learn two years later that it also said I had "latent homosexuality." Well, at least it wasn't wrong.)

The school was pretty much a fraud. It was so bad that it wasn't until a few years ago that I recognized what I was doing on my second-to-last day there, when I was twelve: I was helping to destory evidence, because the school was being shut down. I was disposing of "embarrassing" records of how little the school had done to help the kids who were there. While I was there, the school's community was effectively split in half: those kids who were mentally retarded, and those who were simply trouble. The "troubled" kids included me, Charles, and Kim: Charles was there because he already knew he was gay (and his parents wanted him fixed), and Kim was there because at 12 she already knew she liked sex (ditto). There was also a boy of 13 with the self-imposed nickname "Frog;" he had a cleft palette and a nasty disposition. He raped Kim one afternoon in the back of a broken-down schoolbus. Nothing was ever done about it.

Unblessed

But the teachers soldiered on. They did their best. And that brings me to the subject of this post: those pro-life signs around town that read "Our brother is a blessing! He has Down's syndrome." Because I was thrown into a classroom with all the other kids, "mainstreamed" as the public schools like to call it, so I was there when the boy in front of me lifted his head and said, "Miss Bartholemew? Are farts solid?"

"No, Danny, they're not," she said with that resignation that only emerges from knowing what comes next.

"Oh," he said. "Then I think I just shit my pants."

Now, I'm not doing this to paint my tragic childhood and go all Million Little Pieces on you. Actually, my childhood went pretty well, all things considered. There is this two-year hole in it, though, where I'd much rather recall idyllic summers in Connecticut away from my family than that psychic superfund site of a "school."

But I think about Danny, and that day, and the smell we all had to put with, even if they did usher him out of the classroom soon thereafter, every time I see that sign.