BAPIN: BLIND AND DEAF

   By Robert R. Schwarz

"For we walk by faith, not by sight"...   The apostle Paul   (2 Corinthians: 5:7) 

            "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt  in the heart….I am blind, I am deaf—yet I see—yet I hear" ...  Helen Keller

 

"Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him"...Jesus explaining  the real reason why the man had been blind from birth   (John 9:3)

 

                               

[Note: All words attributed to Bapin in this article were communicated either by the tactile American Sign Language or by a seven-key TeleBraille machine Bapin used during interviews with   Bob Schwarz.]

          The 26-year-old man from India kneeled to pray in his dorm room at the University of Arkansas. He was blind and deaf and, unbelievably, soon to graduate from the University of Arkansas with a B.A. degree. From there he was to become an inventor of sophisticated electronic equipment for other blind and deaf people and then to fall in love with a deaf Korean woman whom he married and bore him a son.

But all he wanted now was a companion. Friendly students were always at his side, ineptly signaling their willingness to escort him here and there or perform some other favor, but no one went the distance of true friendship. So he prayed for a close friend.  

            Anindya "Bapin"  Bhattacharyya  was born deaf in the India farmland village of Telari, 20 miles south of Calcutta . Here, where paved roads and vehicles were absent, 85 per cent of the population was illiterate and lived in poverty. Fortunately, his parents were well educated teachers and knew how to handle his deafness.  "At age two, "Bapin writes," my mother taught me how to speak Bengali, my native language. She used many artistic ways to describe how to make the sound of a letter by moving her lips and had me feel her throat for vibrations."

            When six, Bapin was placed in a public school classroom.  "I faced many difficulties at this school because the pupils took advantage and made a mockery of my deafness. They would guffaw at my misunderstandings while I struggled to lip-read and comprehend what the teachers were saying. The teachers also were not aware of the situation and let it continue. At that time I was too innocent to deal with the situation, therefore, I became intolerant and behaved naughtily. The school got disgusted and expelled me after six months. I headed back home in the village."

            Two tragic events followed which were to prepare Bapin for his arduous journey to adulthood. He was blinded in one eye from an accident while digging soil and was soon to lose his other eye  by a cruel act of a rugby team mate who had become  inflamed with jealously over Bapin's  being appointed  team captain. As the two boys sat around a potato roast one night, the teammate scooped up hot ashes and threw them in Bapin's face. Bapin was confined to his home for four years and gradually became totally blind.

            "My blindness frustrated me because I did not understand how to express my problems, and became angry and mischievous," Bapin recalls. "I often would sneak out of the house to make trouble while everyone was having a siesta. I would sometimes throw hay through my neighbors' windows. Other times I would lock their doors from outside by hooking up chains, which meant no one could come out. Although I was troubled as a child, I found a little peace in creative expression. I developed a hobby by using manual skills to make statues of Indian gods and goddesses through woodworking and ceramics. Since my mother was a talented artist, she always offered to paint these statues for me."

The family for four years searched unsuccessfully in India for a school equipped to educate a bind- deaf-blind student. Then, through the efforts of a persevering father and an aunt, Bapin in 1983 received a scholarship for the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Airline tickets for father and son to America cost the father one full year's salary. My father accompanied me to be my translator from English to Bengali. All I knew was English alphabet letters and a few words such as 'I love you,' 'I want to go to the bathroom,'  'I want to eat,' and, 'I want to go to sleep.'  The enormous step in taking a journey halfway around the globe was an awakening adventure, "Bapin later wrote in a biography. "My life was completely changed--from a life of darkness to light--when I came to Perkins.   

      "Upon arrival at Perkins and entering my dorm, the first question I was asked, was whether I wanted to live alone or with my father. I told my father that I wanted to live by myself to force myself to learn English. From the next day on, I rolled up my sleeves to learn English, Braille, and sign language at the same time. My father also learned Braille and took courses to acquire new knowledge about how to work with deaf-blind children.

"I started to see a different world by meeting other students who also were deaf-blind, which encouraged me to adjust to my deaf-blindness. I never imagined from a village with a large population living in poverty and illiteracy that there could also be people in similar situations as myself who existed on this earth. The only drawback was that I could not communicate easily with these deaf-blind students because of my limited sign language."

Bapin's father agreed to return to India and leave his son under the guardianship of Bapin's English teacher. During Bapin's  years at Perkins and a subsequent year at Gallaudet University , a  liberal arts university in Washington, D.C., Bapin developed a strong interest in helping blind and deaf people . "My enthusiasm to achieve higher education also continued," he said. A few years later he became the first deaf-blind student at the University of Arkansas, which even before the Americans with Disabilities Act, had been committed to providing equal access and opportunities for students with disabilities. "I persuaded the university to hook up Braille in the computer lab."

But now, a few years later, when he is kneeling in his college dorm and asking God to send him a companion, Bapin's prayer is repeatedly being compromised. He fears that his Hindu parents in India would be profoundly angered when—and if—he told them he had recently converted to Christianity.  He is also perturbed because of his inability to forgive the boy who had blinded him years ago.

Two past scenes rush at him… he is a boy  talking   about God with his Hindu  family…Then in college…  he is seeing those two boys from the church in Little Rock  who stop him  for a moment of fellowship,  and he tells him  them of his dilemma with his parents; they take him to lunch and everybody talks  for  hours; he hears them say,   "God is first before anything else. Don't worry about your parents. God will work in their hearts, too."

Two Sundays later, when the pastor invited anyone who wanted to "accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of their life" to come up to the altar, Bapin walked up.

 "It changed my life overnight," he said. "There was so much peace. I began to pray, to ask God to 'see' and 'hear' for me."

A few months after Bapin made his "altar call", he forgave the soccer teammate who blinded him. This was followed by his parents rejoicing when he told them that Jesus was now his "new Father in heaven."  All that remained was the companion.      

Several weeks before Bapin was to take final exams at the U. of A.,  he learned that his outstanding student work had earned him a scholarship from the National Federation of the Blind, and that  caught the attention of a local Lions Club,  a member of  the world's  foremost supporter  of  Leader ("seeing eye") dogs.  Bapin's new friend would be a yellow Labrador retriever named Chica, a $19,000 gift from the Leader Dog School for the Blind in Rochester, Michigan.  This gift required, however, that both dog and master successfully went through 24 days of arduous training.  Bapin was ecstatic.  But no one, not even the school's expert trainers, expected the kind of setback that would test Bapin's mettle.  

I first met Bapin and Chica in the school's dining room.  I was there on a magazine assignment for "The Lion," the official publication of Lions Clubs International, which had employed me for 14 years as manager of leadership development.  There were seven or eight round tables at which sat 22 blind men and women from all over the United States and several from Spain.  At their feet quietly lay their Leader dogs, heads between paws. Several hours earlier in another room, these people had gone through a gamut of emotions as their dogs were led to their side and, for the first time, they leaned down to pet their new companion.  One blind man went to a piano and began playing as his dog lay at his feet.

Bapin, carrying his Telebraille, and I went to outside to get acquainted. He had jet black hair and a forehead prematurely bald; he stood no more that five-foot-eight and walked briskly and, for someone without sight or hearing, with exceptional confidence. (An interpreter for 125 blind students later commented, "Bapin can read Braille as fast as a secretary can type, whereas 85 percent of blind Americans can't read Braille."  

We were joined by Keith MacGregor who, I was told, was likely the world's only guide dog trainer in the world skilled in tactile signing for the blind-deaf.  Keith communicated with Bapin by grabbing Bapin's outstretched palm as a notepad and then pressing   press hard with a finger to "write" word signs.  At the end of a day of signing,   Keith's shoulder was in pain—a common occurrence for tactile signers—forcing him to call in a substitute interpreter for Bapin. 

            Training for Bapin and Chica begins shortly after 6 a.m. when all dogs are taken to an outdoor run to relieve themselves. The dogs have already received a several weeks of preliminary training and a exhaustive screening process that began soon after they were whelped.  An hour later, a training cadre of 72 men and women attired in khaki shorts maneuver students and dogs out to the 14-acre school complex that had evolved from a 1939 one-farm-house operation.

Bapin and Dinah during training
at the Leader Dog school

The training is done gently yet with the precision of military drill, which then was under the overall direction of the school's director Bill Hansen, a retired Air Force colonel. Students and dogs learn hand signals: "forward," "left," "right," "sit," "down," "stay," and "walk faster." Leader dogs must learn to guide their masters away from oncoming cars, construction zones and other dangerous obstacles.  The dogs are challenged to acquire "a sense of responsibility" for their masters while crossing a traffic intersection or leading them away from objects that overhang their walking route. It is critical and often painfully slow for master and dog to learn what to expect from each other.

 I asked Keith if Chica knew that Bapin is blind?"  He said he believed that Leader dogs know something is different about someone who can't see. "The dogs are used to making eye contact with the person who raised them for several months," he said.  "When we trainers here turn out backs on them, they bark. When we turn around and face them, they stop."   

Except for meals and some R&R time for Chica, Bapin and Ken train until the day concludes with a lecture at 8 p.m. Everyone rests on Sunday. Students may go to church, but without their dogs.

Six days into the training, Bapin begins to worry whether he has passed those final college exams he took only ten days ago. (He will pass them).  A malfunction in his Telebraille adds to the stress. He doesn't know he's about to face a major crisis.

 Keith notices that Chica is refusing to lead!  And Bapin appears as if he's not sure what Chica wants to do. He—mistakenly --expects her to walk in a straight line like a robot and never   to pause to sniff something.  

  Keith speculates --but doesn't tell Bapin—that Chica is either over-reacting to the strangeness of human deafness or that she is still attached to Keith, who was her preparatory trainer for five months before Bapin arrived.  Solving this problem is urgent, for both dog and master are now facing being washed out.  

                 Two days later Keith learns that Chica is Bapin's very first experience with any dog! Bonding with a dog is emotionally alien to the young man from the Indian village.  "I was slow to understand what a relationship to a dog really means," Bapin later explained.  "I had never felt this kind of emotion for an animal. I found myself loving her, yet I didn't keep a balance between this love and her need for discipline."

 But the insight came too late. Chica was washed out and likely would never again be trained to be a Leader dog. "I was hit hard and I missed her," Bapin recalled.

            Nevertheless, Bapin waxed joyous when the school, realizing the uniqueness of this training failure, decided to give Bapin one more opportunity. Chica was replaced with Dinah, a 21-month-old, 64-pound yellow Lab; the school had received her three months ago from an individual who had diligently raised her as part of the school's volunteer puppy program.

Bapin , Keith McGregor, Dinah

            Dinah and Bapin train well together and eventually bond, a process which normally requires ten days but can take 21 days for a deaf-blind student because the dog then never hears any voice command from its master.

         Yet more is required before these two can graduate.  Up to and including the final test, Keith will watch for any sign of dog and master being unable to trust one another. "This trust," Keith says, "can be  a life or death issue when,  for example, both are about to cross a busy  street intersection  but  their instincts  are  demanding different behaviors.  Trust can be difficult enough for a blind person, but for a person who is also deaf, it sometimes seems impossible."  Keith, who has sized up Bapin as "a very independent person,"  hints that he will have to fail both Bapin and Dinah if they can't develop  this mutual trust.

Bapin and Dinah take a walk
 in Rochester, Michigan

            For their final test, Bapin and Dinah are driven to downtown Rochester—a traffic-laden city on this Saturday afternoon—and dropped off at curbside. Keith and I exchange an anxious glance as Bapin and Dinah begin to navigate down the sidewalk. All goes well, even as Dinah skirts his master around an overhanging park tree.

The two now approach a busy intersection. Keith has purposely not told Bapin that this intersection crossing, unlike the right angle crossings at school with which Bapin and Dinah have been trained, must be crossed diagonally.  

            Dinah halts at the curb and sits.  Bapin reflexively pauses for a few seconds then commandingly tugs the halter for Dinah to proceed straight ahead. Dinah refuses; she tugs to the right, towards the diagonal crossing.  Bapin firmly pulls her back. Keith winces at this clash of wills; he has invested much with this pair night and day for more than three weeks. It would be for naught if Bapin got his way with the dog.

For a nervous, brief moment, I recall one afternoon when I observed seeing Bapin and Dinah both taking a nap on the young man’s bed. Had Bapin again allowed affection for his companion to compromise his primary role as master?  

Again Dinah tugs to the right.  Bapin obviously believes Dinah is confused, and that he must do the leading. For a long moment, Keith and I watch as Bapin seems to be frozen in thought.    We do not breathe.  

Then, as the professional Leader dog she had been trained to be, once more Dinah   leads Bapin towards the diagonal crossing. Bapin follows her.  

***

      Nine months later, Bapin was working full-time as an adaptive technology instructor at the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths & Adults in Sands Point, New York. "He can take a computer apart and put it back together again," a supervisor told me during a follow up conversation I had with Bapin. In his internet-posted biography, Bapin wrote that it was his dream job, " a perfect opportunity for me to move ahead in my life where I can bring myself  at the hands of every deaf-blind worldwide who is hungry for golden opportunities."Bapin now attended parties, took buses here and there to visit friends, and shopped.  Dinah was never further than a tug on the halter. (On one of Bapin's Facebook wall, half of his 146 listed friends posted him a   "happy birthday" greeting.)

I didn't hear from Bapin  until I emailed him eight years later, asking for an update on his life and, of course, Dinah's . "Right now," he replied, "Dinah is resting on her bed in one corner of my office."  The two had just returned on a jet from a conference in Los Angeles. "She loves flying all the time. She even went to Kolkata (Calcutta) with me twice, and all of my family members loved having her there.  Dinah is now ten and a half and loves going to work all the time, so I don’t know when she will be ready to retire." He also mentioned that the dog's spleen had to be removed because of a benign tumor.  

                        On April 4, 2008, in an email sent at 12:40 a.m. to more than 50 friends, Bapin, now working in the San Francisco branch office of the Helen Keller Center, related how Dinah had collapsed a few hours ago due to a cancerous tumor around her heart. "Today, Dinah led me home from my office, which was l2 blocks away….she ate her dinner and soon thereafter collapsed. I am praying and hoping for a few more days Dinah can enjoy living." 

            Dinah spent a few days in an animal hospital, and then was brought home. Another email followed: "I came home during lunchtime to check on her. Dinah still greets me when I get home, and she gets excited with the tail wagging hard, the usual Dinah. I took her outside for her to do her business. She dragged me to walk around an entire block…"    

            Dinah's veterinarian said the dog could collapse at any time.  Her medical bills so far had personally cost Bapin $3,500. Wanting his companion to live out her last days in a familiar environment, Bapin took Dinah back to New York to stay with his former landlord and co-worker at the Helen Keller Center. To avoid Dinah being left without him too long, Bapin, from May until October, flew monthly from San Francisco to consult with the veterinarian. Buoyed by an prognosis, Bapin emailed me on May 30: "She has not yet shown any decline in the guiding skills as she tries to guide me even on her leash when I am using my cane."

            In October, Bapin posted on his webpage: "It's very sad to let you know that Bapin's

pet daughter, Dinah,  passed away on October 14th. She collapsed at 3:45 p.m. as my co-worker James Feldmann was trying to make her stand up from her bed under his office's desk. She would not stand up and needed to be lifted onto a cart by two other colleagues, John Baroncelli and Robert Pena. She was taken to Robert's car and driven away to the Animal Medical Center in NYC. The doctors found that the fluids in the sac around Dinah's heart filled up again. They had to flush out the fluids but 15 minutes later the fluids filled up fast. There was no other option to curing the tumor and Dinah's primary doctor recommended to have her put down. James and Robert were at the hospital with Dinah and I was in my office here in San Francisco. I was on the phone with the doctor with an interpreter and we talked for a long time. We all decided to let Dinah go at 6:30 p.m. Dinah will be cremated and her ashes will be put into an urn."

***

            Physically adjusting to daily living without a Leader dog was slow,  difficult and especially demanding  for Bapin , for he now navigated solely with a cane; and  demand for  his technical  skills at the  Center increased with  his new role as a trainer for deaf and blind people. Among his several innovations at the Center were Braille-capturing radio instruments that emitted emergency notices on National Public Radio to individuals like himself. 

He continued to travel extensively—with a new kind of companionship: "When you are deaf-blind, technology is an ever-present companion. I travel with a laptop for e-mail, phone and Internet access. I use a G.P.S.-equipped Braille Note note-taker to get information about my surroundings. To communicate with others, I have a Screen Braille Communicator with two sides: one in Braille, which I can read; the other an L.C.D. screen with a keyboard, for someone who is sighted."

 At several of the conferences to which Bapin was invited to test his new adaptive technology products, he had been running into a deaf Korean woman, Sook Hee Choi. "We were developing feelings for each other," Bapin told me over the telephone.  Then came the big news in an email: "I am now engaged to get married. Sook Hee lives in San Francisco and works at the Lighthouse for the Blind there, and she is a wonderful woman! A wedding date has yet to be fixed. Do you remember that I told you at the Leader Dog School for the Blind that I wanted Dinah to help me find a woman? Now, many thanks to her for finding me a girl!"

Sook Hee accepted Bapin's invitation to accompany him to India to celebrate his brother's birthday. That same year, the couple were married in San Francisco city hall.  Eleven months later—on Sook Hee's birthday-- Bapin became a father. They named their son Navin.

***

Bapin, Navin, and Sook Hee
 eating out

            Today, when the 40-year-old  Bapin   leaves  work as supervisor of technology  at the Helen Keller Center branch  office in San Francisco, he boards the train  for a 35-minute ride to El Cerrito , a Bay Area suburb he describes as "middle class."  On the way, he sometimes ponders the prospect of starting up and managing his own adaptive technology company.

After a five-minute walk from the station, he is at the front door of his "very old" two-bedroom apartment. There he is met by his 42-year-old wife and two-year-old toddler Navin, who, according to Bapin,   speaks more than a little of English, Korean, and Bengali, his father's native tongue.  Hook See's mother lives with them.

"It is like any other house, "Bapin will say, "…stove, oven, microwave oven."  There is an alarm system which vibrates his pager when the phone or doorbell rings or if there is an intruder.  Bapin may spend some time before dinner doing woodwork, such as the laundry room cabinets he made. Or, he, Hook See, and Navin might go pick vegetables from their backyard garden.  Or the family may before bedtime entertain their wish to someday take an ocean cruise.  

            On Sundays, Bapin and his Catholic-raised wife may go to an interdenominational church service; churches are at an inconvenient distance from their home.  

The author interviewing Bapin
during the Leader Dog training

I asked Bapin about domestic challenges or disappointments. "I can't see my son running around, so my wife and mother-in-law have to keep an eye on him." I also asked if Navin senses that his father is blind and deaf. "I don't believe he understands I'm blind, but he knows to clasp my hand for me to get him something. He knows he needs to guide me.  He has good social skills."   And a replacement for Dinah?  "Perhaps" is all he says.

During one of our interviews, Bapin remarked,  "No one of us should give up on anything, but  rather have strong faith in God and ourselves. I have a motto I'd like to share: Persistence, Ambition, and Enthusiasm…You will be surprised at how much progress you will make no matter what the difficulties or weaknesses are."  Whatever guides Bapin through his visual darkness and silent world was stated loudly and with enlightened vision in an early email to me: "I am a blind- deaf person and I want to make full use of my skills and give of myself." At the bottom of his message was a quote from the founder of Opus Dei, Saint Josemaria Escrivá: Don't let your life be sterile. Be useful.

THE END

rrschwarz7@wowway.com

©2011 Robert R. Schwarz

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Shrek in Hell's Kitchen

By Robert R.  Schwarz


"My grace  is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness "

Jesus speaking to the apostle Paul  ( 2  Corinthians: 12:9 )

          The physically strongest man I ever knew was Casey "Bull" Callahan, whom I encountered in a darkened hallway one afternoon in a Hell's Kitchen rent-control building a few blocks from New York’s Hudson River. That was in 1961, and Judith and I had been married a few months and were about to visit a friend there on West 59^th Street. The hallway air was dank and musty, and the center floorboard buckled as we walked.  "Thank God it’s not midnight,” Judith nervously quipped. 

            We suddenly saw Bull Callahan emerge from the darkness.  Judith grabbed my arm.  The man coming at us was at least six-foot-four and fleshed out at a likely three-hundred-pound. His forearms reminded me of ham hocks.

 Now only  a  few feet from us,  I saw he was  mulatto, perhaps 30 years old,  and had  a  well-proportioned , massive  head and neck.  I nudged Judith  to the right so he could  pass without any fuss and , as he did , I glanced up; this man's  eyes locked on ours and   instinctively  scanned  us for  friend or foe.  And then, reading us as    innocents abroad—which we were Hell's Kitchen--Bull flashed a convivial smile and politely waved us around him.   In passing, I had a silly impulse to pay some small tribute, a toll. "How's it going, big guy?” I asked. Judith's foot immediately came down on mine.  The brief encounter was enough for all of us to vaguely sense something promising about our mutual   chemistry. 

A week later we again encountered Bull in the same hallway as he was opening his triple-locked door.  We casually exchanged profiles, and I got the impression that Bull seldom got this close to suburbanites like Judith and me. Nevertheless, Bull insisted we come to his party that weekend.  It was the sort of adventure we had been waiting for.

            Saturday night we were knocking on Bull’s door, uneasy about the kind of company we'd be interacting with.  Even with Judith's colorful over- worn   dress and my gabardine slacks aged with shinny spots and my drip-dry shirt with a frayed collar, we were concerned about being overdressed.

 No one came to the door.  We finally opened it ourselves and took baby steps into a party crowd of at least 30 people of all ages.  Half of them--those dressed more stylishly than Judith and I — were sitting somewhat rigidly as they sipped drinks in a small living room with a hideaway bed.  The other half—those in clownish shirts, motorcycle boots, Army surplus shirts, and so forth—sat in the kitchen pouring gin and bourbon for each other.  A latticed wood screen separated these two rooms.  Judith and I took our positions with the sippers.  Bull's  cell of friends had so  distinctively divided themselves  into these two rooms that   Judith and I later  labeled Bull's  party as a gathering of  " The "Goodies and The Badies."  Bull, of course, was humorously aware of this irony. Nothing about raw human nature escaped him.   

            Judith and I shook a few hands, but introductions were drowned out by Johnny Mathis—whom Bull adored—singing at top volume from a concealed cassette player.  At the kitchen table with a half-empty Rock and Rye bottle in front of him, sat Bull, holding court.  He was bare-chested and mugging a glass of straight rye. For the first time I saw his face fully lit.  Bull had short, black curly hair and a boulder of a face with a nose sans septum (a casualty from his days as a strike-breaker on New Jersey docks) and several concave scars on his right forearm (a casualty from an arrest during an armed robbery, for which he served hard time in a Massachusetts penitentiary—and later again there for the same offense).  Depending on the crowd he wanted to schmooze, Bull would tell you he was   half Afro-American or half Brazilian or half Irish (Black Irish, that is) or half something else, which I can't remember. (Yet I would later see Bull’s little finger deftly bring a cup of tea to his mouth and, with perfect decorum, nibble on Judith’s scones during one of her artist soirees in our apartment.   And, with precise diction and an animated Bostonian voice, I more than once heard him philosophize about his past felonies — never to be committed again, of course. About this he was gravely serious, not contritely so, rather it was a confession of youthful stupidity.  )

             Bull rose from the table, exposing a huge Buddha-like belly.  That night he was in true Rabelaisian form, giving   street-savvy advice to his coterie on easy sex, easy money, and easy living.  Bull obviously did not like hard work and usually found someone to do it for him in exchange for a gift of unknown source. Bull kept these "gifts” deep in the kitchen closet, which he opened once that night just for me.

"Go in. Take what you want," he said.

My hesitation exasperated him. “Mother of Pearl, it's free!" he scolded.  Seeing my disinterest, Bull shut the door quietly and returned to his chair and the fawning company of a few street urchins, a red haired sociopath parolee from Riker's Island, and a gay here and a lesbian there.  No one in the kitchen, I observed, could manage remaining in place more than a few seconds. Three or four times, all the fluttering and yakking froze in midair   when Bull erupted with his signature   giggle that ascended to a crescendo of   raucous laughter. Then someone a few minutes later   would whisper a tidbit  into Bull's ear and  another rollercoaster of laughter began.  The vocabulary was rich, an "unstaunchable flow of imagination and invective," as an author once described a gathering of passionate friends he observed.  

For hours Judith and I maneuvered back and forth from the living room to the kitchen , from eavesdropping on Beatnik radicalism  and jokes about petty thieves,  to participating in  "clever talk" among the  actors, artists, and  wannabe novelists. We finally settled in the “Goodies” room. There we noticed how differently the "F" word was articulated in conversation.    Whereas the "F" word we often heard among the "Baddies” in the kitchen was always spontaneous and said with perfect diction, our "F" words in this room sounded robotically programmed. .

When the booze vanished so did the party and Bull grew maudlin. Judith and I left wanting Bull to be our friend, our interpreter in Hell's Kitchen, and, if need be, a bodyguard. 

Our friendship formed naturally in the weeks ahead. Walking with us along Ninth Avenue, Bull, wearing  undersized slacks  with the front button often missing and feeling  equally constricted by his  red ( sometimes  blue ) checked shirt,   Bull could  charm the meanest looking  vendor into giving us a  bargain price.  His mind worked with lightning speed and his colorful, brassy  vulgate   introduced Judith and I to a sub-culture which, in years ahead,  was to widen our perspective of humanity. After reading a few of his letters and random notes, I encouraged Bull to take up writing fiction.  I'm sure he could have written droll tales as entertaining as those of the great French novelist Balzac.

But Bull could easily intimidate people, especially pedestrians.  Sometimes,  while "escorting"  Judith and me to the cheapy  meat markets on the lower West Side,  Bull would squint his eyes and give his best  scowl at people, who then  quickly ceded  us the  right-of-way. When outside his habitat, I think Bull was uncomfortably   aware of an appearance that could easily intimidate and therefore distracted people from it with a buffoonish scowl. Bull did his best to live outside the dimension of time (quite a feat when living in Manhattan), even if it meant forgetting to show for an elaborate dinner Judith occasionally prepared for him.  He ignored this oversight of protocol and any other with a simple, "Yeah, I know it was important."  He said this so tenderly that to wait for further explanation was unthinkable.  Trying to understand Bull’s motives for doing or not doing anything was often futile.

***

    It was a hot September day and Judith and I were helping the Salvation Army resident carry boxes down from our third floor apartment and  load them into  our recently purchased , used Plymouth station wagon .  Impatiently waiting inside the vehicle were a panting German Shepherd and two Siamese cats. We were hoping our vintage   Plymouth would survive the drive to my parent’s Arkansas ranch. (After after two years of Hell's Kitchen,   we were pining for country living.)  The night before we had had exchanged farewells with Bull, who spent at least 20 minutes mocking country living and another five minutes questioning our sanity. The thought of ticks and noiseless nights spooked him. Then he wrapped his big arms around us ,  kissed both of us on the cheek, and with solemnity, said softly:  " I like you , just for who you are. " (Empty words, I thought then. Yet, his simple, cliché-sounding compliment—I never would fathom it-- was  to strangely prop up my integrity whenever I  doubted I had one   and or  felt it slipping. )  As he opened our  door,  our friend of sharp contrasts, let loose with his characteristic giggle. This time—for shock value he loved to give-- he purposely  made it sound demonic . "I'll pray for you ," he said. Then he fiendishly  giggled again and left. 

We might have stayed , if only long enough to be there when Bull became successful, to then shout at him that he was not as free and mighty as he thought, but never so much a  condemned prisoner.

***

       Judith and I are sitting  in the living room of an apartment in a depressed neighborhood of Chicago's  South Side.  We have  responded  to a phone call from a woman who said she was the wife of  Casey   Callahan ,  our dear  friend  from we haven't heard in seven years. 

      Waiting for Bull to arrive, my wife and I are uneasy.   By nature we are middle-class suburbanites and no longer Hells' Kitchen denizens—but have never missed an opportunity to boast about our "survival" there. We notice the unmatched furniture surrounding us and the ceiling incapable of aging any more. I am wondering, without a good reason, if I can still relate to Bull as a friend. 

            "Bull  will be so happy to see you," his wife Lillian,  says.  "I couldn't say everything over the phone when I called because the children were here. But I will now before they get home from school. "

      We learn that soon after Judith and I had left New York, Bull married Lillian, a former fashion model who had fallen on hard times; they now had three children:  Gloria, Matthew, and Charles.

       Lillian,  a tallish, large-framed woman   nearing 50,  brings us tea—still moving with  a model's flair.   She impresses us as  generous and gentle, and in her voice I detect  a humble  woman , perhaps  capable of   "long suffering" (a Protestant phrase I had  recently picked up).

        "I had to leave Casey there," she continues, and adds  that she dislikes  the name Bull.  "Casey was being abusive to all of us, especially when he took drugs."  She meant cocaine.  She tells us that after she and the children left Bull and went to Chicago, he  began  managing a porno movie house off Times Square and,  for the first time,   was legitimately making a lot of money and presumably feeling like King Tut.

     A year  ago,   Lillian had  decided she'd take another chance with Bull; he  had since written that he was off cocaine  and missed the kids and was sorry for his past  behavior, especially his   ogre-like shouting fits that had for years  rattled his family's bones.  But it had taken  until now  to budge our  Shrek buddy out  of his  Gehenna  ( a hellish Old Testament name for a dumping place for unclean  matter  continuously  in fire ) near Times Square .    I don't  think anyone ever knew what truly motivated Bull to surrender his Pleasure Island to the dictates of  caring for a family, especially  in a land so alien from his  Hell's Kitchen.  Yet I was positive that within  the invisible world of his   procrastination  must have occurred a battle  of life or death proportions.  Then  Bull suddenly appeared one morning on Lillian's doorstep,  grossly overweight with Type One diabetes.  He soon was at hard labor as  a school janitor , mopping up classroom floors and cleaning toilets.

     Lillian now says  Bull is committed to both job and family.  Something in her voice, however, hints that warfare for her husband is still being waged.             

       The kids come home. We meet the youngest, Charles, and the oldest, Matthew, and Gloria,  who has become our godchild without our knowledge—a typical Bull breech of protocol. They  have  inherited their  father's effusive behavior , and they warmly   hug Judith and me . Within an hour we are deep in  companionship.  

            I walk to the toilet, crossing  the living room's hardwood floor with a  sag here and there and indissoluble  spots  from  remnants of old varnish. Cracked linoleum is spread over the  kitchen floor and the sink is  full of mismatched dishes.  I hear water  dripping defiantly from the sink faucet . I am smugly aware of the fact that my wife and I have a passport back to our tidy suburban home .  

            We hear Bull opening  the front door.   Judith and I  go to him, exchange bear hugs and  cheers that instantly transport us back for a moment to the Goodies and Badies party in Bull's  New York pad. Bull is more Shrek  than ever, still a gentle giant,  just as commandingly  loud and bullish. I joke about his streaks of white hair. "What the f… do you expect for a guy 59," he says, and  moves abruptly to an armchair and crashes down , all 300 now- plus pounds. I  notice  he limps.  Though I see a man living out his epilogue of a riotous life,  I also see a trench-fatigue soldier not yet emptied of unruly passion. Oddly, I feel boastful of the fact that I have a friend who, despite all, can still take down any man on the street.

            Charles leaps unto his father's lap of heavily stained  coveralls and  Bull, with face spotted by the grime of his occupation, plants a wet smacking kiss  on both of his son's  cheeks.  We are anxious to see more of  the  Bull  we knew in Hell's Kitchen but  Bull  has not yet collected  himself.   And so we wait while he forgets his workday and reconnects to his home;  he rubs a  big , calloused hand up and down Charles' face.  Judith will remark later how she then looked at Bull's  bone-deep weariness  and saw  sadness mixed with   anger in his eyes.

            Lillian brings in glasses of water.  I try for rapport with Bull   but say the wrong thing:  "How'd it go today, big guy?" 

            He frowns and retorts bitterly:  "Cleaned l8 shit bowls. You wanna know more?" 

            Lillian calls to the children:  "Matthew, Gloria, and Charles, show Aunt Judith and Uncle Robert how well you play your instruments."

            Gloria comes with a banjo,  Matthew  with a flute,  and Charles an oboe more than half the boy's height. . They play  a piece from Mozart. Lillian and Bull beam.    Judith and I surmise that  no little sacrifice was made for the instruments and music lessons. Charles hits a sour note. Bull shouts disappointment:  "Mother of Pearl!”  His father's outburst freezes Charles' face for a moment.              

After the music stops,  Bull once again  is  making our brains dance with  laughter as he , with psychological insights and  metaphors embellished with vulgarities,  describes the silliness of people he daily encounters on public transportation. He, too,  laughs  from the depths of his now considerably expanded Buddha belly. It is an egalitarian moment for us ;  all socio-economic  boundaries are erased.  Bull is  still sweet Shrek, and once again I see the  Bull from whom I can  learn more about the universal—albeit rough edged-- fullness of being human.   

Lillian brings out a two-pound box of Fannie May "second day “candy . "None for you, Casey, and you know why."  Bull takes four pieces anyway. Lillian tells us how much the family loves  fresh  asparagus and strawberries .

“Yes, we do, too, " replies Judith.   "But I won't pay their prices out-of-season. "

A memory of  Bull as  our  bodyguard when  Judith and I walked the Hell's Kitchen streets at night for fresh air, stirs me to say:  "Bull, I want to hear why you really  left New York."  

            Bull frowns, and I have learned that this frown means he will be at his sincerest.

 "I had a dream one night in Times Square," he begins.  "I was hanging nude, upside down from a hook in a slaughter house and someone was flaying me.  The next day—and I swear to sweet Mary (he was raised Catholic)   this is the truth—my apartment building burned down."  He pauses and roars with laughter salted with profanity-- intended, of course-- to delight  Judith and me.  "You should have seen the rats run out—thousands of them!" 

 From our Hell's Kitchen days, I also learned that whenever Bull thinks  his  listening audience might   suspect  him of fabricating a tale, he runs an index finger under his eye and invokes the name of Jesus.  So now, with that  finger under his  eye , he adds:  " I was sitting on the toilet when one of them came up the pipe and bit me.  Sweet Jesus!"               

Driving home that day, I say to Judith: " Bull's dream, according to Carl Jung,  is  what the primitive people would call the Big Dream. "

"I still have goose pimples,"  Judith says.

"I think he was losing his soul in  that dream."

"He's still fighting for it, isn't he, Robert ?"

***

We continued  to visit  the Callahan family during the next six months. In our home ,  Judith made sumptuous dinners for them ,  serving her favorite meals on a table  decorated with fresh cut flowers and   napkins she had stitched.  Bull  came close to swooning.  An evening in our home  was a reprieve from the common stress  of daily living   faced by the Callahans and other disadvantaged families Judith and I knew. As one crisis was about to be resolved, another popped up without warning.  We saw that much  of this stress could be avoided  with foresight and planning, but there never seemed to be time for something as abstract as that.  Frustration  for Bull and Lillian intensified  when   Gloria, not yet out of high school ,  told them she was in love with  a neighborhood teen, a gang member, and when  they observed   Charles  buddying around with "bad dudes."  Then there was a constant  threat of a utility being turned off or  the weekly  food budget going bust and  Bull's  diabetes and the abdominal insulin shots being  skipped . His left   eye  had recently  lost most of its  sight when pierced by a  nail he was yanking  out from a classroom ceiling.  It would have been difficult for me to fault Bull had he sought relief in drugs. He didn't.

On a Saturday afternoon when I knew Bull would be alone, I drove to his apartment and invited him  for  a walk around the block.  I had no agenda; I just wanted to hang with him for awhile.

"Not today, Robert," he said. "Gotta save fuel for Monday." 

I teased him until he grabbed me by the nape of my neck steered me down the stairs. 

We walked for perhaps 30 minutes.  I was suddenly spirited by a thought, stopped walking, and turned to him.  " Bull, I want to ask you something. "

He also stopped and was strangely silent,  his street instincts warning him of a confrontation.  

 "You ever been baptized?"  I  asked. My words echoed in my head,  making me nervous.  I had never put this question to anyone, let alone Bull , and I had no idea where I was going with it. 

            "I  don't think so,"  Bull  said.  His tone was surprisingly casual. My next words just blurted out.

"Look, would you mind if we prayed together?" 

 Recalling in the next second, how Bull's religious sentiments through the years had been expressed with mocking humor, I felt my throat go dry.

My  good friend, however, simply  nodded his consent. Nothing more was said; it was  as if the scene had been  scripted by God's grace before I had  left home that day.   As we turned back to Bull's apartment,  I became aware of how  precious this evolving event could be for both of us and that nothing or no one could stop it from playing out.

            Still in mutual silence, we went to a darkened bedroom in Bull's apartment. I kneeled down at the bed , then Bull  did. I first asked God for a good prayer, then asked Bull to open his heart to Jesus  and just talk to Him—about anything . "Silently if you want," I said.  In a whisper Bull was  sure to hear,   I asked God for His love and mercy for Bull and his family.  I felt that at stake for Bull,  now and forever, was  an eternity with or without God , in   heaven or in hell.  

For a long moment we remained   motionless,  silent. In that silence, I am certain that, unheard and unseen, a violent, winner-take-all  war was being waged in and around Bull . The Flesh, World, and Devil would give no quarter , no armistice.    My friend  could  win  only if he, in a paradoxical sense, would now surrender his entire self to a  Power beyond all his senses  and allowed It to fight for him.  Bull  was free to say yes   or no , one death or another.

***

Afterwards and for the next three months, Bull  remained strangely silent about that afternoon. I believe that God loved him unconditionally and that Bull was moved by that grace-filled love to say yes to God. My assurance of that, of course, is beyond my senses.  

Three months later, Bull ate a half box of candy  after dinner , went to bed and never woke up.  

***

  Judith had a red  Irish rose delivered to the funeral . When I went to the casket and saw

my Shrek friend  lying in an ill-fitted suit and drab tie,  hands clasped around the rose, I wept. An appropriate eulogy never came to my mind. Perhaps the most fitting words any memorial for Bull's  were  written    2,000 years ago by a man who had delivered scores of Christians to  execution and who, in subsequent years,  experienced much personal strength and yet profound  weakness. To the Romans,   the  apostle Paul wrote what would later  aid in turning the ancient  world  upside down: For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want….Miserable one that I am ! Who will deliver me ….?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. "

           

***

I saw Lillian and the three children only twice after Bull died, and that was ten years later.  All were still living in Chicago; Lillian was coaching models  part time and sharing an apartment with her younger son. Gloria had married and then apparently divorced  her husband, who moved to Viet Nam.  She owned and operated a small tavern.   And Matthew was a bookkeeper for a supermarket.    

            Though I never considered Bull a role model, he left me  a legacy  that often spurred me to small but significant achievements as a journalist  and, later, as a leadership development manager for a large  international volunteer service organization.  Thanks to the memory of Bull's twilight years, I came to believe, contrary to modern thought,  that  people can and do change. It's not a revolutionary thought  but it does provide hope for us "weak" people.

           

THE END

rrschwarz7@wowway.com

©2011 Robert R. Schwarz 

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WHEN THEY WERE WEAK, THEY WERE STRONG

By Robert R. Schwarz

preface to an upcoming series of articles

               "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness"    

             Jesus speaking to the apostle Paul  (2 Corinthians: 12:9)

Many years ago I was dismayed by the death of two friends whom I had considered paragons of human strength—emotional, physical, and intellectual. Their deaths left me confused about what should define human weakness and strength. Now, decades later, I am impelled to resolve this confusion by reporting—I am a former newspaper editor—on the lives of eight unique people who appeared to the world as anything but paragons of strength.

First, a brief word about those two friends: One friend, whom I shall call Dillon, was a college varsity wrestler and cross-country runner who later wore captain bars as a U.S. Infantry paratrooper during the Korean Conflict. He married a smart, classy woman who lovingly bore him three children and saw that they were raised on a good ole fashioned regimen of American morality and patriotism.  Dillon became vice president for an international consulting company, managing several hundred employees.  According to Dillon, drinking with boys was part of the job. "You find out what the competition is doing at the hotel bar," he once told me.  Dillon could come home at 3 a.m., fall asleep on the living room floor watching television, then rise at 6:30 a.m. with full steam for work.  "Dillon has amazing recuperative powers," his wife would say.  After twenty-five years of riding the corporate high, Dillon's "powers" were not recharging so quickly. "I can stop drinking anytime I want", he explained in a huff to his wife after walking out of his first and last AA meeting.

One afternoon Dillon , his wife and I were sitting in my home making arrangements for a funeral.  I knew of the reoccurring troubles Dillon’s drinking had brought to his work and family life. I turned to him and, as if asking an academic question, said: "Dillon, would you sacrifice anything for the love of you wife?"   He thought for a moment before realizing he was being confronted about something that was off limits, bad manners. "Oh," he said, dismissing my question as unworthy of much thought, "you mean the drinking."  e said He  He said no more, and, unfortunately,  neither did his wife or I .  But the point was made: Though you love your wife dearly, Dillon, do you have the courage, the guts to do something extremely vital to your family's happiness?  

     A couple of years later, Dillon , now separated from his wife and drinking a tumbler of vodka before noon, sat down one day to measure the combat zone he was in. The mind that once sorted out directives for cadres of managers and handled the self-sacrificing logistics of raising two daughters and a son, was not about to think that Dillon, for the very first time, could not help himself.   Next, he tried to rise from his chair but couldn't.   The legs which at college could run three miles in less than 15 minutes and which once could   seize the ground after a chute drop from ten thousand feet up, had suddenly become paralyzed.  Dillon—I know God loved him-- died a few weeks later.  

My other friend was Dr. Rudy Sunburg, a psychiatrist whom I met in an interview for a series I was writing about a mental health center.  He was 42 then, a tall, balding, cigar-smoking good ole North Carolina boy with an I-like-people personality. Rudy had a hearty laugh which compensated for the barely tolerable puns he told to staff and patients alike. Everyone wanted claim friendship with Rudy.   He was a fun-loving father to a Mexican boy he and his wife had adopted soon after Rudy had left a successful general practice for psychiatry.  We and our wives bonded during the years Rudy and I served on    the board of a county mental health association.

Rudy was a card-carrying atheist, a fact which seemed to bother no one, that is, until Rudy was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. My wife and I often visited Rudy in his home.   Pain had forced him to sleep in a hardback chair at night, facing the back of the chair and resting his head on folded arms.  A few days before Rudy was hospitalized, I looked for an opening to say what I knew must be said to a good friend.  I waded in:  "Rudy, what if you're wrong about God and everything.  At least cover your bases and—".  I was still too young in the faith to know what next to say.  Rudy politely listened, then smiled.  He had heard it all before.

 The next week I visited Rudy at a Chicago hospital Lutheran General Hospital. Still the atheist,  Rudy  joked about the morphine which constipated him so much that it required a nurse—a friend of his-- to  give him relief by hand.   A Jewish lady chaplain entered, and we all talked and made witty humor.  Though Rudy was expected to easily go several more rounds with his foe, he died— quite unexpectedly, I thought--the next day.

Later, I couldn't help but ask myself: Had Rudy  not ever  been  aware of  the love of God ? Did he believe he was facing the absolute end of him—forever?  If so and if he saw his last days without any meaning and without cessation of horrible pain…I couldn't bear to carry this thought any further. I now understood, in my gut, why hope was a necessary virtue.

 A colleague of Rudy’s, who also was a pastor, wrote a book for strong-willed people who were sinking into a final abyss. Its title, Let Go and Let God, I unwisely thought then, was wimpy.   
            So, my definitions of human weakness and strength have gradually reversed themselves with aging. Now, at 76, expressing my empathy—or lack of it--for so-called weak or so-called strong individuals has, it seems, put me at loggerheads not only   with the culture of the  middle-class suburb in which I live, but with that of the world. I take no pride in this stance, for it is neither unique nor rare—just unpopular. 

The eight people I now write about (and loved, though not nearly as much as I should have) are becoming an endangered species.   There is Bull,  an ex-felon and Shrek-like character whom   my first  wife and I palled with in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York ;  Bapin,  a  brilliant  blind-deaf  man from India whom I met during his training with a Leader Dog; Philip, a modern-day hermit, when he's not stocking furniture at the department store that has benefited for his 45 years of selfless loyalty and  honesty; Aji  and Fadme,  a poverty level   man and wife who emigrated from Iran to escape religious persecution and a hopeless economic future;  Karl and  Lucy,  friends who care for each other's mental and physical afflictions; and my brother, Lester,  a disabled  veteran who has survived five decades of paranoid schizophrenia , much of it in   spiritual warfare.   I have begged off from profiling myself as either weak of strong for dread of my wife chastising me for both understatement and overstatement.

My personal need to  redefine human strength and weakness was also prompted when I recalled the inner strength of those " weak" people  who, despite being brutally clubbed and chewed by police  dogs,  kept on  marching in Selma , Alabama. I reacted the same upon rereading an account of those defenseless men even more brutalized in Gandhi's 1930 Salt March.  And then there was the Wall Street Journal    article that appeared a few days after Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs. In describing  the SEAL's training  as the hardest training in the world , where only 10 to 20 percent of trainees  graduate, Lt. Cmdr. Eric Greitens , himself  a SEAL   in the U.S. Navy Reserve, wrote: " Almost all the men who survived [ his own  training class ] possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more that a 'fist' of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose."   

While my eight friends made no bloody freedom marches nor were forced to the limits of human endurance, each I believe, deserve Purple Hearts. Though it might appear that in writing this I have tiptoed into waters of discourse  too deep for me,  know that  I chiefly  want to  give recognition ,  to sing a song  to my eight friends .  No one ever has nor likely will do this. My enthusiasm for writing this report is not too unlike that of what I imagine some old wagon train scout had experienced   when riding back with news about the trail ahead.

 

             I have changed some names, places, and dates. This liberty and a few others, I assure you, do not significantly alter facts or meaning.

 

THE END

rrschwarz7@wowway.com

©2011 Robert R. Schwarz

             

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