Fucked Up: Notes on the Inescapable Curse of Dyslexia

I SHOULD WARN  all of you at the very beginning this is an essay of endless disappointment, anger and embitterment. As I have acknowledged via this space many times before, I am accursed. The curse is dyslexia – an indescribably horrible, bottomlessly depressing, makes-me-look-like-an-idiot disability vividly demonstrated by the mortifying fuckup that no doubt stripped me of all journalistic credibility and reduced last week's essay to a textbook demonstration of personal and political grandiosity.

It is precisely because of dyslexia I have never been able to take myself seriously as a writer. What is so embittering at this (final) stage of my life is I have no choice but to embrace writing as my primary medium. My physical ability to photograph – that is, to lug around the requisite equipment and perform the essential contortions of the Photographer's Ballet – is increasingly diminished: I am crippled by worsening arthritis in knees and shoulders; I am hobbled by deteriorating spinal injuries, the legacy of a Washington state archetype, an obscenely coddled habitual drunken driver. My finances are even more wounded: I can scarcely afford the expense of film and processing; the cost of digital equipment and its prerequisite software is forever beyond my reach. But to call myself a “writer” is a lie, a gesture of phoniness, for no matter how hard I try to avoid it, my twisted mental circuitry will inevitably do as it did last week: make some horrendous mistake – typically a transposition – that will give me the appearance of nothing more than a presumptuous moron.

Such is dyslexia and the bottomless miasma of fear and self-hatred in which the dyslexic is forever entrapped. It is no doubt the reason as a child I came unusually late to speech, so late my mother had begun to dread she would be publicly disgraced by having spawned a congenital idiot. Probably – because dyslexia also destroys one's sense of balance and thereby retards one's ability to learn to walk (for me a frightful struggle during which my parents encouraged bipedal locomotion by spanking me whenever I crawled) – my first recognition of selfhood was acknowledgement of unacceptable inferiority. Obviously I was terrified of making mistakes – or rather of the punishment so provoked – long before I dared talk. I remained stubbornly silent until I felt reasonably sure of my linguistic skill: what remained unsaid remained unpunished. Finally I uttered my first word – “light” – and then, to my parents' astonishment (or so I am told), I immediately began speaking in complete sentences.

Dyslexia is also why I was unable to read until I was rescued from illiteracy by my mother's older sister, my Aunt Alecia Durand, dead of old age since September 1993, but during her long lifetime a working artist and professor of fine arts, the sole familial elder who did not either despise me or regard me with embarrassment and scorn. My memories of Alecia are uniquely fond and always uplifting, the only reliable kindness and warmth in an otherwise cruel and chilly upbringing. It was Alecia who understood what is wrong with me, who did not reject me for my dyslexic failings, who gave me art supplies and encouraged my creativity, who hired me a summertime tutor after I nearly flunked second grade and who thereby freed me to advance so rapidly I was reading at a 12th-grade level half way through third grade. Alecia was my liberator, my childhood's first and only grown-up Muse. The tutoring she arranged for me was the best, most pivotal, most affirming, most cherished gift I was ever given by anyone in this life. It expressed a depth of understanding and acceptance never approached by any other adult in my family including my father, who – though he gave me my first cameras – was so repulsed by my dyslexic disabilities he belittled me as “goon boy” well into my early teens.

But not even Alica could cure my loathsome penchant for dyslexic error. For example though I grasp mathematical principles quite easily, I can never do the actual arithmetic: my dyslexic brain invariably scrambles the digits into the wrong answer. Elementary, junior high and high school math was a nightmare of parental scorn and retribution, two years of algebraic misery and a year of geometric stress, a three-year sequence mandated by my father though my grade never once rose above an unacceptable low C – my dismal performance the source of his judgment I was “not worth sending to college.”

Two decades later, my father already dead, I had the proverbial last laugh. Much to my surprise, college math proved notably easy: I chalked up a solid four-point average in basic physics and astronomy and the remedial courses essential to compensate for my bottom-of-the-garbage-can math score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. I even began to understand the mathematically stated principles of physics as a kind of poetry. At first I rejoiced, believing I had somehow been miraculously healed by passage through the groves of academe. Later I learned it was merely because in college I could smoke in class: nicotine, a potent neurotransmitter, momentarily alleviates dyslexic dysfunction.

Meanwhile journalism – specifically photography and reporting (my efforts at the latter always reinforced by cigarettes) – had become the one and only intellectual endeavor at which I dared trust myself: film didn't lie or distort its message, at least not in those days, and when the job called for writing, I made damn sure I took accurate notes. There was always enough nicotine to keep my brain focused and there was always a sufficiently competent editor to make sure the demons of dyslexia hadn't betrayed me with some inadvertent but nevertheless ruinous fuck-up. For the first time in my life I acquired actual self-confidence: if there was a story to be gotten, I knew I could reliably get it. Hence the contents of my lifetime resume: about two-thirds of my income earned by reporting and editing, mostly in staff jobs at various local newspapers and a couple of major trade publications; the other third earned by photography which – because it was blessedly immune to most forms of dyslexic self-sabotage – brought me many years of local recognition as an artist and occasionally garnered the imprimatur of credits from genuinely significant journals: Newsweek, Paris-Match and The New York Times.

But it was my reporting skill – my insatiable curiosity and my ability and persistence at asking pointed questions – that opened the greatest number of newsroom doors. Never mind my dyslexia-tainted spelling was always less than perfect; never mind that was another of the failings that proved to me I could never be a real writer. Even when I was a teenager, covering sports as a part-time stringer, my editors applauded my reportorial talent, suggesting – absurdly I always thought – I was destined for journalism's upper echelons.

Obviously none of these people recognized me as a dyslexic; had they done so they would have dismissed me as my father had : “goon boy,” at worst an embarrassment, at best a creature of no value. But by the time I was doing newspaper work I had learned to hide my affliction behind eloquence, to never allow anyone close enough to discover my dysfunctional family's lurking scandals – madness, attempted murder, divorce, brutality – much less to see my own repugnantly flawed mind. As a result I was alone, profoundly lonely and without hope of alleviating my loneliness. Not only did I “talk funny” – I had never completely shed the accents of my mother's Michigan, my father's Boston and my own native New York City – I was also spastically clumsy, a dyslexic affliction impossible to hide and especially repellent to females raised to lust after only the most gracefully athletic males. My fellow teens saw my body-language as contorted and grotesque; their disgust was palpable enough to keep me on the sidelines at the few dances I dared attend. Better I not dance at all; better I stay home – or content myself with covering the event for the school paper, of which, by my senior year (1957-1958), I was managing editor.

In September 1962, near the end of a miserably off-and-on marriage to pretty but untrustworthy Baltimore art student and after my completion of the three years active-duty required by a six-year Regular Army/Army Reserve enlistment, I took a sports writer's job on The Knoxville Journal, which had employed me as a stringer from September 1957 through November 1959 and offered me full time work when I returned from Korea to civilian life. All went well for the next nine months, but on 3 June 1963 – 49 years ago today – I was swept up in the flagrantly illegal mass arrest of “40 Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee” – suspected Communists, Communist sympathizers, artists, intellectuals, bohemians and Civil Rights Movement activists targeted by the local One Percent, a vindictively racist clique of haughty southern aristocrats. (Have patience; this is a revealing story – I promise – and what it has to do with dyslexia will be clear in a moment.)

Quickly freed on the strength of my press card, I naively believed The Journal would right the outrageous wrongs I had witnessed firsthand: an unprovoked raid against a quiet gathering of graduate students and faculty members, arrests without cause, the savage beating of a Panamanian vice-consul named Milton Vargas, the brutal invasion of an academic couple's shrubbery-enclosed yard and home by Knoxville city police and Knox County sheriff's deputies, sneering thugs-in-blue who rousted the bewildered guests, awakened and terrorized the couple's hitherto soundly-sleeping three-year-old daughter and then trashed the dwelling itself. But Editor-Publisher Guy L. Smith was uninterested in what had really happened. Instead he demanded I write a racist lie – that I substantiate a carefully contrived frame-up that would have convicted and probably jailed 39 innocent men and woman on false charges and in many cases ruined their lives or at the very least destroyed their careers. I refused; Smith retaliated. He had me arrested in his newsroom and charged – again falsely – with disorderly conduct. Ron McMahon, Smith's disciple, star reporter, and chief journalistic factotum then knowingly slandered me and the other arrestees on Page One. Josef Goebbels would have been proud.

The criminal case was soon dismissed, but I had volunteered my reportorial skills to the Civil Rights Movement my first hour out on bail. I agitated judicial resistance to the mass arrest and wrote I-don't-remember-how-many accounts of what had truly happened. Among these was a detailed report eventually published under my byline by The Knoxville Flashlight Herald, a local African-American newspaper. Though a (white) Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phillip Bacon edited the piece to death – he reduced my angry prose to coldly emotionless academic dreck – the text nevertheless revealed the basic facts of the atrocity. Meanwhile Ruling Class Media throughout the nation methodically suppressed the real story, either repeating the racist lie or affirming it by silence, never mind the beating of vice-consul Vargas had escalated the arrests into an international incident. But the formidably skilled reporters of Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskovo Soyuza – Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (aka TASS) – soon assembled all the relevant details, and Pravda published them on Page One of its Moscow and International editions, the first public disclosure of the incident's ugly truth, a welcome exposé of capitalist “democracy” and an enduring lesson in the varied meanings of journalistic freedom.

Though I had nothing to do with the Soviet press coverage – at least nothing I know of – the notoriety of the arrests themselves soon ended my already troubled first marriage. I will never forget the concluding conversation with my first wife:

Carolyn: “Are you getting involved with Communists and stuff?”

Me: “Probably.”

Carolyn: “Then I'm gone.”

Obviously she did not realize I was “involved with Communists and stuff” at least from the moment I became my father's son and – if reincarnation is anything more than fantasy – for a lifetime before that as well.

Given Carolyn's personal goals, which despite her bohemian facade included many of the conventional milestone/millstones of success, she was undoubtedly right to have left me, and I was relieved to see her go. Indeed her departing question was typically, definitively hypocritical: she was well aware of the red-star/hammer-and-sickle politics that for as long as I can remember have been and remain the ideologies of my heart, yes even during the years when – stupefied with anger at my betrayal by a social-service agency – I was trying vainly to transform myself into a “libertarian conservative.”

But that is getting ahead of the story. Suffice it to say I was able – despite the 1963 incident, despite also my penchant for the occasional dyslexic error – to make a comfortable post-arrest home for myself at a succession of small and mid-sized newspapers merely because I had an indelible reputation as a competent reporter. Nor did I conceal the fact I had neither personal regrets or professional contrition for my defiance of Smith and his Ku Klux-minded effort to purge UT of its “troublemakers” and “outside agitators” – the latter the source of this blog's title. Often I made it clear that, were it necessary, I would go to jail again – an assertion I frequently used to determine whether a prospective employer and I would be a suitable paring.

Then as now, the episode's only lingering bad taste is the astonishingly ungrateful silence of the 39 men and women my journalistic integrity and personal honor saved from conviction on trumped-up charges. Not one of these intended victims – some of whom went on to distinguished academic careers – has ever thanked me for the protection I gave them. None even deigned to acknowledge my defiance of Smith, much less the penalties I paid for it. Apparently U.S. academics regard newspaper reporters – even reporters who dare rise up against oppression – as beneath their notice. It is a prejudice I have observed many times since, another manifestation of our nation's allegedly “nonexistent” class-warfare.

The point though is the Knoxville incident, the odium of which undeniably imposed an ideological ceiling on my career, nevertheless left me at least marginally promising prospects for employability as a journalist, thereby further encouraging my foolish belief I could overcome dyslexia. I was especially emboldened in the Northeast, where in 1965 I quickly learned my seemingly odd combination of cynicism and open-minded curiosity was welcomed as an indigenous trait. Back in Manhattan during the middle '80s, it appeared I would prosper there as I had during the '60s – that is, until my first serious (medically mandated) effort to quit smoking resurrected my dyslexia in all its dysfunctional destructiveness. The result not only cost me a superb job but ended my career: when you get the boot at age 46, you're done; the cause of your termination is irrelevant. After that event – in 1986 – my life spiraled steadily downward. Dyslexia always wins.

Its triumph was also victory for the clinical depression induced by the 1983 fire. Though its mysteriously ignited flames destroyed my life's work, consumed my identity and burned away any rational hope my efforts would ever achieve meaningful recognition or significance, gainful employment had dampered the depression itself. But it had nevertheless smoldered like stubbornly persistent embers, and the career-loss inflicted by dyslexia fueled it into a slow-motion inferno, an all-consuming conflagration of inextinguishable magnitude and paradoxically glacial result.

Thus began my interminable journey on the highway of woe that descends to the lowest most frigid circles of dyslexic hell. Familiar with Washington state's formerly generous approach to rehabilitative services – knowledge imparted mostly by years of award-winning reportage (1970-1983) – I returned here from New York City in late 1986, stupidly believing the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation run by the Department of Social and Health Services would help me find some line of steady employment with which to replace my dyslexically ruined journalism career. Indeed I had a prospective occupation in mind, something for which an extensive battery of DVR tests soon indicated I was both intellectually qualified and psychologically fit. But DSHS, apparently viewing me as a “white male oppressor,” chose to destroy me instead. In 1989, after a long and bitter controversy over my eligibility for rehabilitative services, DSHS labeled me “permanently unemployable” and thereby forced me onto Social Security. Twenty-six years before I was due to retire, I was condemned to live out my remaining years inescapably imprisoned by the increasing loneliness and isolation imposed by ever-worsening, eventually fatal poverty. The ruin so inflicted was total and irreparable – not just economically fatal, but a psychological death-sentence as well, anathema to anyone for whom life and work were not just inseparable but synonymous.

Whether ousting me forever from the workplace was the agency's revenge for my earlier history of truthful and therefore invariably adversarial reporting on its outrageous arrogance and habitual malfeasance, or merely another example of the bourgeois-feminist fanaticism with which it defied legislative intent by enforcing secret and illegal gender quotas, or some malicious hybrid of both, I will never know. Nor do I care; it no longer matters. What does matter is DSHS ended my life as anything more significant than a complex lump of protoplasm; its damning decree – ironically rescinded only by the formal conversion of my disability stipend into my old-age retirement pension – informed the world for the next 26 years I had been nullified, finished, canceled out.

Had my quest for a new career been successful, I would have continued writing even if most or all my income came from unrelated sources. I did just that during my year as a commercial fisherman (engineer/deckhand on a salmon seiner, 1982-83), likewise through the years I earned most of my pay working in printshops (1972-1976), during which I was also the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun. But the fire had made it impossible for me to pick up a camera without being felled by grief; its most agonizing loss had been thousands of irreplaceable prints and negatives, many of historical or sociological value. Though I would once more take up photography in the mid-1990s, writing seemed after the fire as if it were fated to remain my primary medium. Because I assumed the label affixed to me by DSHS guaranteed I would never again be credibly published, I now wrote purely for recreation: journal entries, attempts at poetry, even reportage. The utter absurdity of seeking significant publication was a backhanded blessing; it ensured I was never dyslexically compromised by the absence of competent editors and so absolved me from fear. In an eerie parallel to my early childhood, what went unpublished went unpunished.

But deteriorating health forced me to quit smoking again, this time permanently, and 23 September 1995, my first day as a non-smoker, seemed to be my last day as a writer of any sort. To attempt to write was to trigger an intolerable nicotine fit, its physical sensation a massive jangling of nerve-ends, its mental image my brain reduced to a writhing double-handful of spaghetti-like worms from which I was trying vainly to extract a word, a sentence, a paragraph, even a single character or letter. For the next seven years I was so paralyzed by dyslexia I could compose nothing more complex than grocery lists. Eventually – because I discovered I missed the emotional release provided by recreational writing, I taught myself to write again – practice, practice, practice – though I knew my post-nicotine ability would never equal (or even approach) the intellectual focus or the verbal speed and fluency I had achieved by the suppression of dyslexia with tobacco.

Eventually I did learn how to construct workable sentences and paragraphs without nicotininc self-medication. But as I said before, dyslexia always wins. Last week's unforgivable error proves I am as angrily disabled by dyslexia today as I was on my first day without cigarettes, as ravaged as I was on that awful 1946 morning in first grade I was proclaimed the class dunce after the first public demonstration of my inability to read. All that is different now are the manifestations: though I am no longer revealed as an imbecile by my former inability to distinguish between “went” and “want” or between “from” and “form,” I am still effectively reduced to imbecility by the fact – no matter how good I am at editing the work of others – I cannot catch a glaring blunder like the one that utterly destroyed the credibility of last week's essay and in all probability also obliterated the credibility of every word I have ever written: misstating the title of Richard D. Wolff's Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism.

Of course I eventually corrected my horrific fuckup – I had dyslexically typed “Challenging Communism” – but I did not discover it until nearly 12 hours after the irrevocably damning fact of its electronic publication, and by then the damage was done. Now you see why the prospect of dyslexic errors always terrifies me, as well it should; blunders like these have ambushed me for as long as I can remember. As a smoker I nearly always caught them; when I failed, my editors came to my rescue. The one exception throughout my entire career in paycheck journalism – the still-nauseating public mortification of a dyslexia-induced mistake on Page One of a suburban Seattle paper – was allowed into print by a soon-to-be-ousted boss because his malice toward me trumped his concern for the thrice-weekly's quality and reputation. Now, today, as last week so emphatically proved, I have no defense at all against dyslexia. And I presume it is only politeness that protects me from a comments section justifiably overflowing with hurtful jeers. Verily, I thank you for your silence.

Again, such is dyslexia, a source of self-hatred that can never be ameliorated because its demonstrations of disability are unrelentingly merciless. Nor, in my case, is it dyslexia alone. This affliction in concert with a long and depressing litany of other dismal autobiographical facts – the fact I was conceived not with love but to entrap my father into marriage; the corollary fact my mother tried to murder me on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 (apparently, or so the evidence indicates she believed, to pay the Devil for facilitating her entrapment of my father); the subsequent fact my father – who had saved me from my mother's knife – tried only weeks afterward to dump me in a Virginia state orphanage – all this I take as irrefutable proof the infinitely sadistic god of Abraham (if indeed he exists at all) not only regards me as an abomination and hates me accordingly but takes cruel glee in inflicting just enough suffering to ensure the core characteristic of my life is constant obstruction – omnipresent gloom that now in old age is intensified by the mostly low-grade but nevertheless relentless pains of physical disabilities.

Such too is the awful fate – or so say any number of mythologies – of the intended sacrificial victim who somehow escapes or is rescued from the altar of doom.

Because dyslexia frustrates all its victims, anger and bitterness are among its clinical hallmarks, but my own frustration is radically intensified by the fact I have an exceptional intellect. Depending on the measurement of intelligence-quotient, whether I was hung over when I took the test and whether I was allowed to smoke, my IQ scores range as high as 145 and have never been lower than 135. My verbal skills are even more exceptional: they test in the topmost one-tenth of the nation's uppermost one percent. Worse – at least for me – is the corollary fact such abilities invariably foster irrepressible “callings” – the instinct to be productively useful and win recognition thereby. But now that I am forever denied the clarity of nicotine and the protection provided by editors, dyslexia invariably reduces these alleged “gifts” to liabilities, reducing the associated “callings” to nothing more than invitations to grandiose disaster. Talent and the instinctive need to properly apply it thus become, via dyslexia, a mechanism of indescribable vexation – literally an internalized torture machine.

That is the real horror of dyslexia: whether by the neurological clusterfuck of “went” versus “want” or by its adult counterpart in “capitalist” versus “communist” or by some other failure too hurtful for me to remember or imagine, it forever obstructs my purposes. It obliterates the joys of my achievements and replaces those rare pleasures with unspeakable agonies of failure. Such is dyslexia as I know it: the eternal triumph of a genetic flaw over which I am utterly powerless to do anything save curse the god in whom I mostly don't believe for damning me with an affliction the ruinous totality of which I cannot doubt – a perfect example of divine malevolence, its tribulations escapable only by death and perhaps not even then.

Do not misunderstand: this is not my resignation from an always disappointing and increasingly miserable life that given the realities of capitalism can only become more desolate. As I have said so many times before, the savagery of capitalism redefines survival itself, elevating it to an act of revolutionary defiance. This is especially true if one is, as I am, part of the bottom-most 99 Percent, those of us who – because we are no longer exploitable for profit – are ever-more-brazenly targeted for extermination by genocidal abandonment: the unspoken policy behind the threats to Social Security, reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare, and the slashing of every other government service vital to our survival. Hence I will continue to write; I will even – when I am so moved and assuming I am physically and economically able – continue to photograph.

But after last week's capitalism/communism fuckup I will never dare imagine my writing has any merit beyond the fact it fills my remaining hours and maybe weeks and months or even years and thus rescues me from the overwhelming boredom that alternates with politically or medically induced fright as the dominant conditions of the cast-off worker's long slide through the carefully muzzled ghettos of old age downhill into the ultimate silence of the grave. Such is the final lesson taught by dyslexia, the ultimate proof life itself is at best a cosmic joke, at worst a terminal illness. Never since the Summer Solstice of 1945 have my actual prospects risen above temporarily abated misery. It cannot be said too often: dyslexia always wins. I am again my disparaging father's “goon boy,” again my hateful mother's “clumsy little oaf.” Dyslexia prevails.

LB/3 June 2012

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