by Ed Bethune
What was my secret? I was a bedwetter from the day I was born. I mean, I always wet the bed, not just ever so often, but every night and it was always a soaker that would often seep beyond the protective rubber sheeting on my bed. I do not know why I did it, but I cannot remember a day before I was fifteen that I did not wet the bed. It was not easy to keep my secret, and there were times when I had to be very quick-witted. Once, a friend was visiting and he spotted a pile of dirty linen at the foot of the stairs. Without notice, my friend dove into the pile and spread-eagled himself as if he had just completed a high-dive at the swimming pool. He got up quickly, exclaiming, “That stuff smells like piss!”
I quickly answered, “Our dog pissed on it, she’s got a problem.” After that narrow escape, I redoubled my security effort.
For a little kid, I accumulated a lifetime of experience and a wealth of understanding about the distinct but related subjects of guilt, shame, embarrassment, fear and secrets. I quickly learned to appreciate the old riddle: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? That was the crux of the matter, knowledge. If no one heard it then how could he or she know that a tree had fallen?
If I could keep my secret from the world’s population, billions of people, I could avoid embarrassment, but I would have to deal privately with shame.
If my secret got out, I would have to deal with shame and embarrassment. My classmates were already on my case, calling me “Shorty,” or “Edwin Baboon,” and the one that I hated the most, “Edwin Bathroom.” It did not take a lot of imagination to appreciate what they could do with my secret problem.
Some people argue it is better to fess up to problems than to cover them up. They say there may be taunts and ridicule in the beginning, but those issues will eventually fade into the background. Time, they say, heals all wounds.
That is how the choice framed up to me, from infancy to adolescence. My best friend Billy McMillan was dealing with the embarrassment of being a stutterer. My Dad was dealing with being a cripple. They could not hide their problems and I, in my ringside seat, watched them struggle with taunts and ridicule. I defended them as best I could, but with that firsthand experience, I could not see any advantage to going the embarrassment route.
I chose secrecy and shame. After all, I was not hiding something that was morally or legally wrong. People might see bedwetting as socially unacceptable, but it is not a crime, or a sin.
Shame is a potent emotional state. It is painful and it is hard to work through on your own. I never saw a doctor to learn whether my bedwetting was physical or mental, or to find out if there was a way to fix my problem. My parents assumed, and kept telling me I would “grow out of it” and, besides, we had no money for non-emergency medical advice. Consequently, I will never know for sure why I did it or how it affected me, but I do have some thoughts on the subject. Since I am not a psychiatrist I can only tell what I remember and what I think it did to me.
Short-term shame is not what I had. People with that are lucky. I had a daily dose of shame, the Bill Murray Groundhog Day kind of repetitious shame. I needed a strategy, one that I could deploy each day because lying in a wet bed was my first waking thought for the first fourteen years of my life. My default approach was to look forward and dream of big victories, big adventures, and better times. It is a wonder, looking back, that I was able to deal with my problem without sinking into despair. Au contraire, I turned out to be an eternal optimist. I also, according to those I love and trust, avoided the polar extremes of being an overly strong or weak personality. Perhaps it is because I fashioned a way to cope.
Nevertheless, I could not escape occasional bouts of insecurity, anxiety, and general consternation. These issues derive from self-criticism and shame. I wrestled them down as best I could with doses of optimism, hope, dreams, and more dreams.
One unique by-product of my struggle was that I learned the first rule for keeping a secret—never tell anyone. My family protected me, because it was in their interest not to tell, but keeping a secret from everyone else in the world is hard and it creates a lot of pressure. Oddly enough, I am convinced the lessons I learned about secret keeping helped me later in life. When I served in the U. S. Marines, I got a top-secret security clearance. I was required to read the Navy Security Manual and made the highest grade ever made on the test. The manual instructed Marines how to keep military secrets. I could have written that manual when I was eight years old. Later, as a special agent of the FBI, I dealt with classified information flawlessly, and my legal clients could never have found a servant with more experience and dedication to the importance of secrecy. I know a lot about secrets, and I know how to keep them.
I did face one other challenge as I dealt with my secret problem—the omnipotent Vermilye pressure to will my way to a cure.
My mother, at the time a staunch disciple of Vermilyeism, vacillated on the subject of my bedwetting. Her reactions ranged from loving and forgiving to giving me Hell for not being able to stop. I am certain she did not mean to make it a bigger problem than it was, but I always felt a little extra shame because I could not find a way to overcome a simple, personal shortcoming. I could not summon the necessary portion of Vermilye willpower to stop wetting the bed and that, in my mind, meant that I was a flawed Vermilye. If I could achieve most any goal by the sheer force of willpower then, with ease, I ought to be able to correct a personal deficiency. Only later did I come to realize that I expected too much of myself. I was not flawed, or if I was flawed it was not my fault. It was the Vermilye way that was flawed, but I was not able to see that when I was young. I was yet to learn that I should be anxious for nothing. I would discover that proposition later on, but in my youth, such teaching escaped me.
Thus, I continued my struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable. Should I be Bethune or Vermilye? Should I dream, and let my dreams make me happy? Alternatively, should I try to find happiness by the sheer force of willpower that would, according to Vermilye doctrine, lead to a lifetime of achievement and independence from “them.” To dream, or not to dream, that was the question. Which was wrong, which was right? Can there be a proper mix of dreaming and willing things to happen? Could I do both? I loved my dreamtime, and I know my father loved his. He, I think, used his dreams to escape the foul cynicism that could have possessed him because of polio, a disability that was not his fault. I, similarly, used my dreams to escape the shame that I felt for being an incurable bedwetter. My father’s example was a lifesaver, but I knew there was a big difference in my situation and his. It was not his fault that he was crippled.
I was a bedwetter and, in my mind at that time, it was my fault. These monumental forces, Bethune vs. Vermilye pushed me first one way and then the other. I wanted to achieve great things, but my unsettled philosophy of life was not working. I could escape into my dream world, but I could not get away from reality. I had to deal with a wet bed each morning. I could see the wisdom in practicing Vermilye willpower and I wanted desperately to please my mother and stop bedwetting and reach all the goals she had set for me but it was hard—in fact, impossible—for me to let go of my dream world, a place where I was not flawed and could, and did, accomplish marvelous works. There I did not have to deal with my flaws. It was a comfortable place to be but it was getting me nowhere. The harder I tried to reconcile the competing forces the more I knew that something was missing from the equation. The Vermilye approach did not help me fix my bedwetting problems and my dreams only provided temporary respite.
Vermilye had my mind, but Bethune had my heart.
In my senior years, I am convinced that my multifaceted struggle strengthened me more than it weakened me because I learned to work out my own problems. It was a hard lesson for a kid but as I got older, I realized that I could deal with shame, stress, fear, anxiety, and secrecy and in time, the negative effects of bedwetting dissipated.
I also learned later in life, with the help of my wife Lana, that there is a way to r
econcile the competing forces—Vermilye vs. Bethune. There is a superior worldview, but I was one confused kid, wrestling with what appeared to be irreconcilable forces. It was not a good way to be as I moved into the next, equally complicated phase of growing up.
8
SINKING, SINKING
One father is worth more than a hundred schoolmasters.
George Herbert
After the divorce was final, Mother dated. I once saw her kissing a man in our living room. The image scratched itself deep into my memory. More than sixty years later, it is still there. It will never go away. Mother, as the man held her, was bending her knee and raising one high-heel shoe behind her just like the old-time movie stars did when kissing on the silver screen. I have no contrasting memory of Mother kissing Daddy.
I realized she wanted to have fun, dance, and do all the things she could not do with my father. I do not blame her for it now, but at the time I did not like it. It hurt and confused me greatly. I was angry about the kiss, the separation, and the divorce. I wanted things to be different, but I could do nothing about any of it. My dad, in my mind, was the right man for her and he belonged at home with us. I simply could not understand or forgive Mother for what happened to their marriage and my life. At the time, I did not know how to forgive so I just lived with it.
In May of 1950, I finished the ninth grade and graduated from East Side Junior High School. It was a good school and I did well, academically at least. In the summer of that year, I began to venture beyond home and family. I was fourteen, going on fifteen, and I was searching for something, I did not know what.
I started my summer with the best of intentions.
I was not making much off my paper route, but I had saved enough to buy a car. I was too young to have a driver’s license, but that minor technicality did not slow me down. For the grand sum of $25, I bought a worn-out 1929 Ford A-Model Roadster, a two-seat convertible with a trunk that doubled as a rumble seat. It had many dents and the previous owner had painted the fenders with a brush-coat of red enamel. The canvas top was long gone and the main body of the car sported a green paint job that partially hid twenty-one years of rust and corrosion. I did not care that my “new” car looked like a big Christmas ornament, it ran and it was mine.
Mother was definitely upset, but she let me keep the car because I landed a summer job that required me to have a car. I was going to make $75 a month as the groundskeeper of a city ballpark, using my A-Model Ford to drag a heavy, homemade leveling device over the dirt infield. It was a great job because it only took about a couple of hours each afternoon to drag the field, sprinkle down the dust, lime the baselines, put out the bases, and open the field for play. I had no liability insurance, no driver’s license, and no one to teach me how to drive, but that did not stop me. I taught myself to drive and simply ignored the other two problems. It was going to be a great summer and it started with another promising enterprise.
My friend, Donny Evans, and I conceived a business venture that would take us to the strawberry fields in White County. We planned to leave Little Rock early in the morning, arrive at the strawberry field around 9:00 a.m., and pick berries for a couple of hours. Then, it was our plan to drive back to Little Rock and sell the strawberries door to door. Donny also had an A-Model similar to mine, but his car was in better shape mainly because his tires still had visible tread. My tires were threadbare and one had a boot in it to keep the inner tube from poking through a hole. We sensibly decided to use his car for the eighty-mile roundtrip. It took a little while to find a farmer who would let us pick, and then it took longer to pick two crates of berries than we thought it would. As a result, we did not start back to Little Rock until 2:00 o’clock, the hottest time of the day. By the time we got to Little Rock our berries, exposed to a heavy dose of hot air and sunlight, were wasting away, fast. I had to be at the ball field by 5:00 p.m. to start dragging the field. There was no way we could sell all the berries before they ripened to mush. We wound up losing a full crate, half of our stock. It was a great disappointment because berry picking is hard work and we had hoped to make some serious money. We barely covered the cost of our trip, but I learned a valuable economics lesson: Merchandising is risky. Oddly, that day is one of my fondest memories.
Shortly after the strawberry fiasco, things started to unravel. I found myself in a downward spiral, getting in one jam after another. It puzzled Mother, but it also puzzled me. I did not know and still do not know why I rebelled or why I began to do dumb things.
Delta Lew and me, just before I began my downward spiral. My thanks to the photographer who touched up my snaggletooth. 1950.
The trouble began one day in early June when I was driving on Broadway. A motorcycle policeman stopped me for dodging in and out of traffic. He asked me for my driver’s license and, of course, I had none. I quickly concocted a cover story that I had just bought the car and I was taking it to my mother’s house only five blocks away. I told him I was going to park the car and did not plan to drive it until I got a license, but that I was going to do that soon because I needed the car to do my job at the ball field. I could see he was not buying my story so I tuned up and started blubbering about how my folks were divorced and I really needed to make some money. I guess I found his soft spot because he let me go. It was not a good lesson for me because I drove the A-Model, that afternoon, to my job at the ball field. I managed to duck the traffic police for the rest of the summer, but I found other ways to get in trouble.
I played baseball, of course, but I did not hang out with my teammates before or after the games. I fell in with the wrong crowd, kids from the east side of town who specialized in troublemaking. Together, we found every available way to challenge authority, any authority, every authority. We embarked on a summer of pranks, vandalism, and larceny. Mother and Delta Lew figured out that I was up to no good and they did what they could to intervene, but I was determined to rebel and prove that I did not need, or want, supervision.
I became, virtually overnight, an incorrigible child. Edwin was my name, but mischief was my game. It poured out of me like a gusher of oil bursting out of a new well.
The summer continued, I avoided arrest and did my job at the ball field, I played baseball, I spent the nights at home, and I practiced the fine art of driving my mother nuts. My sister lost patience with me and that bothered me, but it did not slow me down. Thankfully, my flirtation with troublemaking took place before the era of drugs, pot, and other vices. I was hard committed to the idea of becoming a professional baseball player so it is unlikely that I would have fooled around with anything that might have hurt my body, but I cannot say that for sure. There were other ways to get in trouble, and I managed to find most of them.
When it came time to start the tenth grade, my first year at Little Rock Senior High School (the name was changed to Little Rock Central High School in 1955), I was invited to join a fraternity, Rho Iota Epsilon. The fraternity went by odd but arguably accurate Greek letter initials, PIE. My sister was a member of a high school sorority and it was her popularity in the Greek community that led PIE to extend a bid to me. I liked the kids in the fraternity but I continued to fool around with my troublemaking friends.
For the first time ever I failed not one, but two courses, biology and plane geometry. I did even worse in the second semester that began in January 1951. I flunked everything I was taking, got universally poor marks for citizenship, and led the entire school in truancy. I skipped thirty-plus days of class, a record so they say. Mother knew I was goofing off, but she had no idea I was skipping school as much as I did. She was furious at me for playing hooky. She conferred with the school authorities and together they devised a plan. Mother’s fifteen-year-old wild child would attend summer school. In contrast, my sister Delta Lew graduated from high school on schedule.
I protested as strongly as I could. I argued that summer school was for dummies and it would interfere with baseball, the only thing that mattered to me. They d
id not buy my argument but they gave me a choice: I could go to summer school or I could play baseball and repeat the tenth grade. I chose summer school, but I had a secret plan that I did not disclose to them. I would go to class, but I would skip out on those occasions when my team was playing.
Mother scheduled me to take English and plane geometry, required courses if I was to move on to the eleventh grade with my classmates. I did attend class, but not on the days when I had a game. It was not long before everyone figured out what I was doing. The truant officer for Little Rock Senior High School came to all my games, but he did not come to watch. He came out onto the field, took me by the arm and led me out of Lamar Porter Field and back to the classroom. I was charged with several unexcused absences, but as it turned out I was in class often enough to get two C’s on my final report card. I was now eligible for promotion to the eleventh grade.
Shortly after summer school, my friend Billy McMillan got his driver’s license. To celebrate his sixteenth birthday, his parents gave him an almost new 1949 Chevrolet, two-door sedan. I had not seen much of Billy during my summer of incorrigibility, but he drove to my house as soon as he got the new car. He was not one to gloat, but we had grown up together and he wanted to share his moment of excitement. Edwin Spann was at my house when Billy drove up. We piled into the car and headed out for a test drive. We all sat in the front seat. Billy drove, I was in the middle, and Edwin Spann was on my right. We drove all over Little Rock and as it got dark we were way out west on Markham Street, at least five miles past War Memorial Stadium. That part of Markham was a narrow two-lane road through an undeveloped area. It was pitch-dark and we were racing up one hill and down another, headed east back into town, testing to see how fast Billy’s new car would go. I remember hitting ninety miles per hour as we crested a hill near the area that is now the intersection of Markham and University. Back then, University Avenue was Hayes Street, and Hayes was unpaved. To make matters worse, Markham ended abruptly at Hayes. To continue east on Markham a driver would have to make a sharp right turn on Hayes and then a sharp left turn back onto Markham. We were jabbering with excitement about how fast we were going when, all of a sudden, we entered the intersection. It was too late to stop and we were going too fast to make the turn. We plowed into an abutment and the car went sailing into the air and came down nose first in a ditch on the other side of the abutment. The impact was violent and when I realized I was still alive I could not see anything because there was so much dust. The engine was racing and I saw Billy was out cold, his head lying against the steering wheel. Edwin Spann was already out of the car. Edwin found a fruit jar in the ditch and he was holding it under his nose to catch the blood. His nose was flat against his face, but he was walking around and did not seem to have other injuries. My head hurt and so did my left elbow, but shock had set in and the pain was tolerable. Billy was still unconscious.