Reverberations

One afternoon I was watching a TV show and a guest on the show described how he enjoyed scaring his little boy with practical jokes. He insisted it was just harmless fun. The show’s host, a doctor, told the man that what he was doing could be harmful, but the man didn’t believe him. I sadly shook my head. I wondered why a grown man would enjoy frightening children. I would have liked to have told that man a story. My story was about a little boy not too different from his little boy. I would have told my story something like this:

There was a boy. One day when he was 3 or 4 years old, his father told him to stand in front of the family’s radio. The old radio was as big as a jukebox. It had a powerful tube amplifier and a 15 inch speaker. The boy stood in front of the radio as he was told, and his father placed a record on a phonograph that sat atop the radio. A song began to play. The name of the song was The Wreck of the Old 97. The boy’s small size meant that he was standing directly in front of the 15 inch speaker, a foot or two away. At a point in the song, a train whistle blew. When the train whistle blew, his father turned the volume control up to maximum. The scream of the train whistle was deafening. In fright, the boy looked up at his father. He saw his father laughing heartily, as though it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Years passed and the father never tired of telling anyone who would listen the story about the record and the train whistle and how he scared the wits out of his little boy. The story never failed to make him laugh. Life went on after that, but the scream of the locomotive’s whistle and the terror the boy had felt lay deep in the boy’s mind like a dark seed buried in fertile ground.

Years later, when the boy had grown into a young man, he was sitting one evening at a table with strangers in a large dining hall filled with many tables of strangers. After dinner, a person stood at a lectern and began to give a speech. Beside the young man, just a few feet away, was a large and powerful loudspeaker. It was the only loudspeaker for the entire room, so the volume of the sound coming from loudspeaker was very high. During the speech, a strange thing happened to the young man. He was struck with fear. This was not an ordinary fear, but a runaway fear that fed on itself, becoming greater and greater until it could grow no bigger. The room faded, the people around him at the table became silhouettes, he could hear nothing but his own racing, pounding heartbeat. He could think of nothing but fleeing the room, and it took every ounce of mental control to continue sitting at the table. He was sure he was dying or going insane. It was the most awful thing he had ever experienced.

After a few minutes, his racing heart slowed, the dimness faded, he could see his dinner companions once more, and he could hear sounds again. Normalcy seemed to have returned. Alas, this was not to be a one-time event. It would soon happen again, and again, and again. The young man didn’t know it at the time, but the event would happen hundreds of times, thousands of times, for decades to come. And though the young man knew it wasn’t real, and that it was just his mind bluffing itself, the intensity of the fear remained just as high and just as disabling as that first time. The young man went to psychiatrists, but they couldn’t help. He went to hypnotherapists, but they couldn’t help. He tried other therapies: progressive relaxation, systematic desensitization, alpha-wave biofeedback, meditation, and of course, pills. He went to great lengths to avoid the things he knew would provoke that primal fear. It always happened in the presence of others, so he avoided social situations whenever he could. He became a “loner” so that he could escape panic-producing situations faster without having to invent explanations and make apologies. But still, panic attacked him when he was driving, attacked him in restaurants, attacked him in the dentist’s chair. Panic attacked him whenever panic would be the most inconvenient thing that could possibly happen. He learned to not show he was under attack. It was his secret. No one could have understood, anyway.

If a prank played on him when he was 3 or 4 years old was the seed, his home life was the fertile ground that nourished the seed. Perhaps, if his early years had not been filled with anxiety, if he had not awakened in the night to find his mother pushing his bed across the room to block the bedroom door, only to see his father’s fist smash through the solid wooden door – if he hadn’t been awakened in the middle of the night (“shhh … your father is going to kill us”) and hustled off in the darkness to a hotel – if he hadn’t been witness to drunkenness and fighting virtually every day of his childhood until he felt his brain would explode – if he had not had to be invisible so many times – if every day had not been something to survive: then his life might have been different, and an early cruelty might not have made all the difference.

I wish I could go back in time and talk to that little boy. I want to explain things to him. I want to reassure him. I want to tell him to not be too afraid because, despite the cruelties to come, he will survive. But I can’t tell him that. He’s gone. He’s only a wisp of memory now.

I can’t talk to him but I can speak to adults with children. I would remind them that adults have years of psychological armor that young children don’t have. What seems like a harmless prank to an adult can, with a young child, reverberate down the years to reach fruition decades later. That fruition can take many forms: panic attacks for one person, drug addiction for another person, run-ins with the law for still another person. Every event shapes a life for good or for ill.

Before his life was over, my father confided to a close relative – who later told me – that had he known those many years ago the effects of his behavior, he would have behaved differently. So it would seem my father had regrets, though he never expressed them to me. I suppose he didn’t know how.

That’s the story I would have told the man on the TV show – the man who considers it fun to frighten his young child with harmless pranks.