FOR JIM – THE STORY I OWED YOU

 

Dad wanted to call him Rusty because when Mom first brought him home from the hospital he had an impressive crop of rusty red hair. I kind of liked the name, and still do. It's a real guy's guy name. It's the kind of name that gives a kid an edge before he even starts out and puts him a leg up on the Hermans and the Percys and the Lyles and the Francises and the Normans.

Dad's name was Norman, which was probably a good reason why he voted for Rusty, although most of the people who knew him from the time of his youth called him Whitie or Norm. Only the preacher and his mother and dad called him Norman…well, and Mom, whenever she was pissed off at him. I figure he must have liked the nickname Whitie, since his big brother Bob (not Robert, mind you, but Bobby Junior—why do parents do things like that to their kids?) was known as Red and Dad always looked up to him, so maybe that had a lot to do with the Rusty thing too. 

But I guess Rusty kind of smacks of nickname, like people are going to ask, "What's it short for?" or "So what's your real name?" Besides, Mom said she thought it was a dumb name unless it was for a dog. And she didn't want him having a name he was going to go around hating all his life like she did. (Mom's name was Reba–Reba Mae, actually–and she was always saying that every time she heard that someone was called Reba, it turned out to be a bloodhound bitch, or some woman from a hollow so far back in the hills that it had to have daylight pumped in. I do, however, recall her being fairly pleased when Nashville star Reba MacIntyre made the name famous later on.

But, of course, none of that kept her from naming me Danny – not Daniel, not even Dan – because her mother had always loved the song Oh Danny Boy, or from giving me my father's name as a middle name, so that my full name, Danny Norman Newland ended up having the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahah-nyahah quality of childish taunting. But anyway, Reba Mae nixed Rusty out of hand and with her usual bent for whimsical criteria decided that a great name would be that of her favorite TV sports announcer and game show host, Dennis James, who also advertised for Old Gold cigarettes. It didn't matter that the Jersey-born actor cum wrestling announcer's real name was Demi James Sposa. Reba Mae thought he was suave and looked so sophisticated puffing his Old Gold, and she fell in love with his moniker, so the name stuck.

Now, it wasn't until several days later when Reba Mae and Whitie actually started saying his name —"Coochi-coochi-coo Dennis, coochi-coo Dennis James, coochi-coochi Denny"—that they realized, with a histrionic slap to their collective forehead, that people were probably not going to call him Dennis or Dennis James, but Denny. And this was, after all, Ohio, where, particularly up on the lake, in places like Toledo, Akron and Cleveland, people didn't make much of a distinction between their pronunciation of short E's and short A's (as in "I'm going beck to Clevelend" or "I live near Ekron"), so Denny and Danny were going to end up often sounding almost indistinguishable from each other.

This meant that before the poor little kid was even able to pronounce goo-goo and gah-gah, his given name had been usurped in deference to his older brother and he was being called by his middle name. And then, not James either, but Jimmy and later, just plain Jim.

Of course, from kindergarten on, whenever roll was called at school it was with "real" names. So in the classroom little Jimmy quickly became Dennis (Denny, Den). Thus, his friends and classmates called him Dennis and his family called him Jimmy and the whole thing must have been really confusing to the little guy. I remember his first shaky-lettered attempts to print his name. After struggling through the six letters of his first name, he went to the considerable trouble of learning how to draw parentheses, and within them he scrawled, somewhat smaller and surely shakier, (J I M). Little wonder that he occasionally went dyslexic and turned the S in Dennis or the J in Jim inside out in his head and wrote it bass ackwards on the wide-lined, light green pages of his spelling workbooks.

Despite the fact that it might have been easier on his little-boy psyche, however, it was a good thing that Rusty never stuck, because it wasn't long at all before his prenatal shock of oxide red hair turn almost as blonde as Daddy Whitie's. I don't know whether it was the stress of not having a single first name to call his own or whether it was simply his nature, but if he wasn't born to be a redhead, he was certainly born with a redhead's temper. That was abundantly apparent from the outset. Never have I witnessed a more strongly emergent personality prior to the age of one in anyone else I've ever known. And it just kept getting stronger as he grew.

He was the most cantankerous toddler you could possibly imagine. Interested in everything from the time he could crawl, grabbing, touching, pulling and throwing everything in sight and crawling so fast that he almost moved at the rate of a small dog from one place to another on all fours. This meant that my beleaguered mother had to have eyes on him all day long in order to avoid catastrophe. For example, the time he spread the tines of a metal bobby pin he had found on the floor and plugged it into the electrical outlet, knocking himself for a loop, severely burning his index and middle fingers and (fortunately) blowing a fuse. Or the other time that Reba Mae was ironing in the dining room and cooking in the kitchen at the same time and left her ironing board for a few seconds to go check on whatever was in the oven. Jim’s screams brought her running, to find the hot iron on the floor, the cord in Jim’s hand and his tiny arm severely blistered from forearm to shoulder from the sizzling iron sliding down it. Indeed, he carried a scar on his shoulder from that burn for the rest of his life.

Screaming, by the way, was something at which he truly excelled. He was kinetically hyperactive from the start, and learned quickly to bow his back, kick his feet and scream bloody murder if he was picked up or otherwise restrained from doing precisely what he wanted to do. Screaming, in fact, became his main bargaining chip for getting his way, since he was nothing if not astute from the very beginning.

He had a scream that was shrill, incredibly loud and blood-curdlingly persistent. He had powerful lungs and was fully capable of screaming–not screaming and sobbing, mind you, just plain, ear-splitting, intolerably high-pitched screaming–for minutes on end, until he was provided with whatever it was he was screaming for (the toy he had been playing with and that had fallen out of the playpen, the household item he was told he couldn't touch, his pacifier, his “little blue blanket”—which he called boo-bukuck—whatever it happened to be). And he was just as capable of shutting off the screaming mechanism immediately, no tears, no sobbing, no wind-down, almost as if it were an electric siren with a switch, the split second that the desired item was placed in his hands.

My parents were really distraught with this trait of Jim's and asked friends and family members for advice. Coming from immigrant Scots-Irish and German stock as they did, the most usual tip my mother and father received was to give the kid a sound spanking. But they seemed to realize, somehow, that this method not only wouldn't work but might also even make matters worse. The little guy was headstrong and resilient. And corporal punishment wasn’t likely to do more than make him madder and shriller.

My father, for his part, seemed to recall his older brother's having a similar screaming habit when he was a small boy and my Grandma Alice's having cured him of it forever by once heaving an entire dishpan full of ice cold water into his face in mid-scream. He had lost his breath, turned blue and fallen faint to the floor from the shock and my grandmother had had to whack him smartly on the back to get his respiration going again, but it had been the last screaming fit he had ever had. By this point Whitie thought it was worth a try, but Reba Mae felt it was too extreme.

She finally asked Dr. Clyde W. Berry, our family physician, what he thought and his advice was, "Ignore him. He'll get tired of screaming after a while if he realizes it won't get him anywhere."

So my parents tried that for a while and found it to be less than sage advice when dealing with someone as hyper-active and willful as little Jimmy. When he realized he was being ignored, he added new embellishments to his repertoire. First he would scream constantly for about five minutes, and if that brought no parental reaction, he would lie down on his stomach on the floor and continue to scream while pounding his fists and the toes of his shoes on the resounding hardwood. This he would do for another five-minute interval before still continuing to scream but now with his palms and toes planted firmly on the floor while slamming his forehead repeatedly with a sickening thud into the oak-wood grain. This always brought a reaction from Reba Mae, because the one time that she had ignored him, he had butted the floor with his forehead until it had knots the size of goose-eggs on it and until his nose had started to bleed.

But Dr. Berry, a World War II Army physician and former Lieutenant Colonel, insisted that infants didn't commit suicide and that Reba Mae should just let Jim pound his head on the floor until he got tired of doing it. When Reba Mae said that she simply couldn't stand Jim's screaming, Dr. Berry suggested she lock him out on the porch and let him scream to his heart's content.

She said that was easy for him to say but it was another thing to actually do it. Especially since, with as disturbing as his screaming could be, the neighbors were likely to think he was being beaten within an inch of his life.

Heartless as the medical advice appeared to be, however, she did finally take it. And doing so would provide an indirect solution.

One day when Jim was about four years old, and in a particularly vile humor over some unattended whim, our mother reached the end of her tether and locked him out on the screened-in porch of the rambling old house on the main street of town—which wasn't Main Street but Auglaize, although there was a Main Street in town, which wasn't the main street—to which we had recently moved. The raised wood-plank floor of that porch appeared to have a really satisfying resonance when my infuriated little brother battered it with his fists, forehead and feet. He became one with the sound, simply fell into sympathetic vibration with the reverberating porch floor, and it seemed that he might just go on forever producing that rumbling din and accompanying it with a singularly crystal-shattering scream that could be heard a block away...And was.

A delivery man who was passing by on the busy street in front of our house heard little Jimmy's screams over the noise of traffic and the sound of his own truck engine. Fearing the child was trapped or being murdered, he slammed on the brakes, left his truck idling by the curb and stormed up our driveway to the side door off of the screened-in porch. Jim was still pounding head, fists and feet on the echoing wood flooring, totally oblivious to the fact that the man was hammering on the hooked screen door to try and raise someone's attention.

Finally, over the intensity of the shrill screaming, the delivery man shouted, "Are you hurt, Sonny!? Are you hurt!?

Obviously taken by surprise, Jim abruptly stopped screaming, as if his “screaming plug” had just been pulled, sat up cross-legged on the floor in one swift movement and scowling disapprovingly at the poor shaken man, yelled, "NO!"

The man stalked back to his truck, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, and Jim just sat there looking after him as my mother stood snickering to herself in the kitchen, mortified but tickled both by the man's reaction and her irascible little boy's response. As she watched him through the kitchen window, she saw little Jimmy stand up, brush himself off, then sit back down and start playing with a toy truck that he had conveniently had with him when he was exiled to the porch. From that day on, he never again had a screaming tantrum.