Eating paint?
I’ve got two
pictures for you to look at. Take a moment to really look at them...
What the would you think if you saw that kid in the flesh? Is he sick? Was he in an accident? Did his parents do something to him?
Yeah, it’s a picture of me, from about sixteen or seventeen years ago. Yeah, I’d been in an accident, a bit of a bike wreck. The wound over my eye is the one that resulted from that. The rest of ‘em?
My tongue did it.
Sounds pretty disgusting, right? I mean, how many times does somebody have to lick their lips to actually erode the flesh enough to draw blood? The answer is nearly every waking minute. And every time, I was told I needed to break that habit.
Welcome, kids! It’s time for another story of benjamin’s Neurological Stew Head.
I know my mother’s reading this, so I need to get this out of the way here at the start: I don’t blame you or my dad for not “doing something” about this. It was the early eighties, for heaven’s sake. People didn’t really talk about OCD and Tourette’s. They hadn’t really hit their mid-nineties-on-every-talk-show stride yet.
Looking back, I really was quite the spastic little freak. I mean, long before I licked my mouth until I drew blood, I was quite the little thumbsucker, and went NOWHERE without my blankies. Calling me obsessed with them would be gentle.
I used to keep track of how long I rubbed the satiny edges of each blanket, regularly rotating them, so that none of them would end up with too little attention. Even the ones that didn’t have a fabulous “Good Part”-where the one end of the edging was sewn over the other, creating a fabulous sensation when rubbed between the thumb and forefinger-got just as much time as the others.
Although my brain is made of cotton candy, and remembering simple things like returning phone calls and what the names of my good friends are can be almost impossible, I have a crystal-clear recollection of the first day that my father told me that I was not to bring my blankets to church with me. I was raised Methodist, and they’re pretty chill about most things, but my father wasn’t. Perhaps it was a weaning thing, like thumbsucking, but it didn’t go over well. I was in tears, and a year or two later, when my father took my blankets and hid them in his armoire, I would sneak into his bedroom and jam my hands deep into the drawer, rummaging to sneak a few seconds with a “Good Part” before I got caught. I later smuggled them to St. Louis, where my mother lived, and now they live in my closet.
But blankets and thumbsucking hardly rank high on the OCD freakout child scale, do they? I’ll tell you one that does: pudding. Pudding at camp.
I couldn’t have been more than nine, as my mother was still living in the Mansion House apartments in St. Louis, when I went to a summer camp every day. I want to say it was something put on by Forest Park, but I could be wrong. In any event, it was a “special treat” day for us, and we were going to be finger painting.
With pudding.
This was going to be “fun” because it meant that we could paint and then lick our fingers. Maybe I felt a little nervous as I dipped my fingers into the pudding and smeared it onto the wax paper…it’s hard to remember. What I do remember is what happened when we were finished, and all the kids were licking their hands clean.
I couldn’t do it. It was repulsive. It was Filthy and Sticky and Wrong to lick this pudding from my fingers. The muscles in my arms went tight as I tried to ignore it and just get it over with…but I couldn’t move. The counselors swooped in, each one telling me it’s okay, it’s only pudding, you eat pudding all the time, it’s not real paint, do it benjamin, do it, just put your fingers in your mouth, do it, stop crying and do it, do it, no crying, do it.
I was shaking violently as they practically forced my hand to my mouth. I stuck out my tongue and touched it to one of my fingers-chocolate-and then broke down into a new round of violent sobbing. I want to say that they told my mother about the “incident” but my recollection is fuzzy. Funny how my brain remembers the things it should least want to remember and ignores the rest. Needless to say, I never wanted to go back…but I did.
It’s interesting-vaguely-that that particular aversion has stayed with me. I’m usually okay about it, but on occasion, I freak out when I get some food on me, or some paint, or other similar things. Like dog noses and tongues. Yech. Immediate freakout. Good thing we have about thirty kitchen towels for me to wipe my hands on after I’ve washed them and before I’ve used antibacterial gel. I go through two to four of ‘em a day. Gotta keep ‘em fresh and clean, you know…you’ve just got to.
b
Current Music: “Madame Flora’s Breakdown” from Gian-Carlo Menotti “The Medium,” with Maureen Forrester as Madame Flora
What the would you think if you saw that kid in the flesh? Is he sick? Was he in an accident? Did his parents do something to him?
Yeah, it’s a picture of me, from about sixteen or seventeen years ago. Yeah, I’d been in an accident, a bit of a bike wreck. The wound over my eye is the one that resulted from that. The rest of ‘em?
My tongue did it.
Sounds pretty disgusting, right? I mean, how many times does somebody have to lick their lips to actually erode the flesh enough to draw blood? The answer is nearly every waking minute. And every time, I was told I needed to break that habit.
Welcome, kids! It’s time for another story of benjamin’s Neurological Stew Head.
I know my mother’s reading this, so I need to get this out of the way here at the start: I don’t blame you or my dad for not “doing something” about this. It was the early eighties, for heaven’s sake. People didn’t really talk about OCD and Tourette’s. They hadn’t really hit their mid-nineties-on-every-talk-show stride yet.
Looking back, I really was quite the spastic little freak. I mean, long before I licked my mouth until I drew blood, I was quite the little thumbsucker, and went NOWHERE without my blankies. Calling me obsessed with them would be gentle.
I used to keep track of how long I rubbed the satiny edges of each blanket, regularly rotating them, so that none of them would end up with too little attention. Even the ones that didn’t have a fabulous “Good Part”-where the one end of the edging was sewn over the other, creating a fabulous sensation when rubbed between the thumb and forefinger-got just as much time as the others.
Although my brain is made of cotton candy, and remembering simple things like returning phone calls and what the names of my good friends are can be almost impossible, I have a crystal-clear recollection of the first day that my father told me that I was not to bring my blankets to church with me. I was raised Methodist, and they’re pretty chill about most things, but my father wasn’t. Perhaps it was a weaning thing, like thumbsucking, but it didn’t go over well. I was in tears, and a year or two later, when my father took my blankets and hid them in his armoire, I would sneak into his bedroom and jam my hands deep into the drawer, rummaging to sneak a few seconds with a “Good Part” before I got caught. I later smuggled them to St. Louis, where my mother lived, and now they live in my closet.
But blankets and thumbsucking hardly rank high on the OCD freakout child scale, do they? I’ll tell you one that does: pudding. Pudding at camp.
I couldn’t have been more than nine, as my mother was still living in the Mansion House apartments in St. Louis, when I went to a summer camp every day. I want to say it was something put on by Forest Park, but I could be wrong. In any event, it was a “special treat” day for us, and we were going to be finger painting.
With pudding.
This was going to be “fun” because it meant that we could paint and then lick our fingers. Maybe I felt a little nervous as I dipped my fingers into the pudding and smeared it onto the wax paper…it’s hard to remember. What I do remember is what happened when we were finished, and all the kids were licking their hands clean.
I couldn’t do it. It was repulsive. It was Filthy and Sticky and Wrong to lick this pudding from my fingers. The muscles in my arms went tight as I tried to ignore it and just get it over with…but I couldn’t move. The counselors swooped in, each one telling me it’s okay, it’s only pudding, you eat pudding all the time, it’s not real paint, do it benjamin, do it, just put your fingers in your mouth, do it, stop crying and do it, do it, no crying, do it.
I was shaking violently as they practically forced my hand to my mouth. I stuck out my tongue and touched it to one of my fingers-chocolate-and then broke down into a new round of violent sobbing. I want to say that they told my mother about the “incident” but my recollection is fuzzy. Funny how my brain remembers the things it should least want to remember and ignores the rest. Needless to say, I never wanted to go back…but I did.
It’s interesting-vaguely-that that particular aversion has stayed with me. I’m usually okay about it, but on occasion, I freak out when I get some food on me, or some paint, or other similar things. Like dog noses and tongues. Yech. Immediate freakout. Good thing we have about thirty kitchen towels for me to wipe my hands on after I’ve washed them and before I’ve used antibacterial gel. I go through two to four of ‘em a day. Gotta keep ‘em fresh and clean, you know…you’ve just got to.
b
Current Music: “Madame Flora’s Breakdown” from Gian-Carlo Menotti “The Medium,” with Maureen Forrester as Madame Flora