painted black.)
In September of 1959, my mother and her friends went to the Biltmore on Division to see the premiere of
The ambulance made it to Lutheran Deaconess in time. When I made my entrance into the world, my face was blue and there were traces of blood coming from my nose and ears. To give you an idea of how limited we were medically just thirty-five years ago, all the doctors could really tell my parents was that I had a degenerative muscle disease caused by trauma to the womb.
My mother blamed herself for many years.
When I was in grade school, one of the class trips was to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Oldtown, where there was an exhibit of freaks from the Barnum & Bailey circus. Freaks was actually Phineas Barnum’s get-rich-quick term. His partner later referred to people like me and Celandine as “human curiosities.” Me with my bulging head and wrap-around eyes, Celly with the second head sticking out of her ribcage.
One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son’s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy’s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as she, so that my mother needn’t worry about me.
My mother smiled sadly when I told her this, and now I realize it was because she knew how my adult years would hurt me, and that my coming school years would only foreshadow this hurt. She smiled the way one does when they are recalling that the person they are talking to used to be so young and tiny. The sadness of the first recognition of mortality. My mother expected the worst. And so I would still hear her cry at night.
But the school I went to was Childermas Research, one of the Cook County clinics.
During my first year of classes, I met Celandine Tomei. Some of the other children and their parents whispered about her.
The ages of the children in class varied; some learned slower, others had inhibited body functions and needed to be taught with much patience.
Celly was a 1959 baby, just like me.
She was the first girl I ever saw naked.
Childermas Research was one weird fucking place. You entered this maze of buildings at Eighteenth and Honore, passing a little sliver of what looked like a Philadelphia rowhouse; this building that was the burn ward for the entire county, and the Lighthouse For The Blind. On the northeast horizon, a huge pair of red neon lips, advertising Magikist carpets, beckoned.
The classes of reading and spelling lessons weren’t too difficult; our rehab sessions reflected our needs. The therapists were great. Vonnie Llewellyn and Ron Szawlus had the patience of saints, I swear. Rehab mostly consisted of coordination exercises, games to make each person use their right and left sides independently, or in tandem.
What was weird about Childermas was my classmates. Not all of us were allowed out on class trips, like the one to Ripley’s. Sometimes I felt as if it was a prison. I was never treated badly, but I felt as if all of us were being manipulated in some way that I could never hope to comprehend.
Juvenile Rehab — where we were — was Room 18, big black numerals on an orange door. Room 20 should have housed the burn ward, but there were people of all ages in there, hooked up to various machines. I heard several orderlies grousing about having to work the Pain Detail, which was kat-corner to Room 20. A blank blue door.
I never saw any of what went on in that long corridor of sub-rooms. But I heard the screams. Several times over the years, I have vomited into my palm or my garbage can, whichever is more convenient, when I recall those damnable, high-pitched, keening screams.
Once it had nothing to do with memories. In a medical magazine, I came across photos of stillborn thalidomide babies like Celandine.
One of these “stillborn” children was nothing more than a nerve column wrapped around bone in the placenta.
So many deformities in one classroom. A boy who looked like his skull had been caved in with a lead rod, another with one bug-eye, as if his head was a bubble being blown from a plastic pipe. Many could barely stand. I was able to, but the weight of the excess blood in my brain made my head slump down. My chin often touching my chest, I’d stare up, my eyebrows framing my view, at the lovely Celandine.
There was nothing visibly wrong with her. Compared to the others, at least. Her spine was curved to the right; I heard Ron Szawlus mention that it might eventually realign itself. She always wore billowy, flowered dresses. Of course, this was 1966, and all girls dressed in clothes that covered every possible aspect of their young sexuality, the flowers exuding innocence. These days I see the same patterns on women wearing maternity outfits.
By the middle of 1967 the schedules of many of my classmates changed. Both Celandine and I, as well as several others, had improved enough with our mobility and coordination that we only had to come for therapy three times a month. This would continue until I was thirteen. The therapy offices — a two-flat on Aberdeen — were closer to our respective houses.
Gone were the memories of the boy in the burn ward, the one the nurses in the pain detail talked about. His mother had left him asleep on the top of a coil heater. Instead of doing skin grafts, the doctors had peeled away several additional layers of skin from the boy’s buttocks and performed experiments involving the injections of T- lymphocytes.
Gone, too, were the strange people kept in the psychophrenic ward, as I called it then. I now know that Jimmy Dvorak, Frankie Haid, Billy Bierce, and other infamous Chicago killers of recent past were diagnozed as schizophrenics. But this was a word my parents did not know, and I had to make do with phonetics.
I only saw Celandine during therapy classes. Celly went to Wells public school, which was a lot closer to the therapy clinic.
I learned a lot about her. The fact that she was a child of thalidomide, that wonderful sedative that pregnant women were given until 1963, when it was banned. Her mother had been prescribed the brand name Kevadon and was herself eventually diagnozed with peripheral neuritis. Being young, I thought that was really keen. A drug that back-fired. In therapy, Celandine and I both practised the FeldenKrais Method. This was something invented by a former judo instructor to help improve posture and self-image. The latter was something I certainly needed. Celly was getting more beautiful by the day. I would long for the first, second, and fourth Wednesday of every month that summer. I found out that her mother was into holistic therapy, and that she gave Celly daily injections of aconite, which was really wolfsbane, no shit, and this presumably acted as an adjuvant of her “Vagus nerve,” which was an ideal pain inhibitor. I often wondered later how much pain she had actually been in. Pretty, but still wearing frilly dresses instead of shorts and a blouse like most everybody else in Wicker Park, even the fattest of the girls.
And she liked me a whole lot.
My mother was glad that I had found a friendship in Celandine Tomei. Thinking back on it, I don’t recall that they ever met during our days at Childermas. Celly and I would often walk hand in hand through Humboldt Park. She and her mother lived on Division and Hermitage, right next door to a holistic healing house that was usually tenanted by beat poets and abstract artists. Celly’s father, before he died, worked as a steerer, someone who
