In Autumn of 1994, driving my Honda toward San Francisco, just passing the Sir Francis Drake "cutoff" on highway 101 at Corte Madera, I suddenly experienced a terrible flash of pain in my crotch. "Wasp!," I screamed. That would be: the edited version. I barely made the next exit without stacking ten cars, whipped onto a frontage road, skidded to a stop in a parking lot, then like an enraged badger, dug into my Levis ready kill that pest with my bare hands, only to find ... nothing: Absolut Frankfurter. No bee, yellow-jacket, black widow, brown recluse, or black hairy scorpion. Nothing. I was 53 years old and this hurt so bad I did not care if I died right there. So I cried right there.

Then I "got it," and I might add, without paying Werner Erhard one street dime. Deep in my bohemian beer belly I knew it for sure, that this was "phantom" pain from age five, from a botched circumcision by a "quack" doctor --- hitting me now, 48 years, not to mention, sixty miles an hour late. Finally one day, I called my eighty year old mom and asked her about it. Almost five decades later, the first words out of her mouth, "oh my god we never should have done that to you, I am so sorry".

Her openness speaks well of her.

In 1945, when I was five, and in the hospital for a tonsillectomy, my parents had me circumcised as well. With no preparation, no word, before or after, just oops, then silence for fifty years. I came out of the anesthetic in a hospital room, throat afire. I remember chrome bed rails. I was caged. It hurt to cry. Crying made me cry. The nurses said I could have all the ice cream I wanted. Heroin. I needed heroin. A NOTE to worldwide medical professionals: ICE CREAM AND TONSILECTOMIES ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE! 

Thank you.

Mom had to leave the hospital.  I still remember her going, and how much I wanted  her to stay. The doctor probably told her to go, I don't know. She promised to come back as soon as possible. The pain in my throat was so horrendous it took awhile to notice the pain in my groin. Soon though, my fingers located something strange there. A large bandage. Probing brought stabs of pain. I knew my tonsils had been "taken out".Had they taken ... more? I was terrified. Enter Treadwell, our family doctor. He checked my throat, then pulled the bed covers aside and without a word, leaned over my groin and began removing bandages, while I watched him snipping with blunt scissors. Then ... quite suddenly, Torquemada ripped the adhesive tape away in one big yank.

The pain was blowtorch hot, just like my throat!

Double wham!

Treadwell should never have let a child see that mass of gore. In those days doctors said children experienced pain differently from adults. Bullshit. That ghastly tomato-bulb of violet iodine and red blood, covered around with black stitches as repulsive as wart-hairs on a crone's nose.

Then everything changed dramatically. "I" suddenly shifted into an out of body space, one glowing yellow with mystical light and no pain at all. No sound. Just complete relief.  I remember it clearly, even to this day, as if some sweet healing angel reached out and caught my soul in her arms and gave me release.  

My next memories are post traumatic. "Incident In Horror Hospital" kindled in me a recurrent dream. Simply: the arrest, detention, torture, trial, judgment and final sentence of my childhood. Sometimes the dream came twice in the same night.  It was terrifying not to mention exhausting. Always identical --- home alone --- hiding from a crone dressed in black, looking like a Halloween witch, but I knew she was real and utterly evil. She gripped a butcher knife in one hand, and moved from room to room calling my name,"I'll find you David wherever you are. You can't hide from me and when I find you I'm going to cut off your thumb!"

In the dream I always hid behind dad's big chair in the living room, pulling myself into the smallest Houdini bundle I could make, longing to sink beneath the carpet, both thumbs gripped tightly inside my fists, then those fists rammed hard beneath my chest.  I  KNEW she would find me and cut my thumb off. Then at the last second, always, I knew, it was "... that nightmare," again.

I remember fighting the bed-clothes like a netted tiger, wrenching myself awake, gulping air. My parents used metal blanket clips, not unlike something you might find in a hardware store, to fasten the corners of my blankets down, which were then tied to the headboard, to prevent me from throwing them off, which only added to the torture of feeling trapped. I was a bed-wetter too, living with the indignity of a rubber bottom sheet, cold in the morning. I remember waking up at times from the nightmare, somehow turned all the way around in the bed, so that my face was pushing into the the tight sheets at the foot, or the side, fighting for air, trying to dig myself out, feeling bound and terrified. 

Thirty years later my daughter, River, called one day to say she had a vivid dream (vision) the night before where she took the knife from the "thumb witch" and killed her with it. Wow. Thanks River!

After all that "trapped in bed" experience, it is no wonder to me at all that I ended up making "space" paintings.  

Yes, honestly, there were times in my life I wanted to howl over Treadwell's grave like a yeti screaming satanic Enochian curses at the full moon. I wanted dig him up and stomp his skull in the dirt.

Hell, I finally forgave my old sawbones, not to mention the donkey he rode in on backwards, along with the whole frickin' world, and during that process of letting go, letting God, discovered the only good thing I could think of at the time about aging.

Time.

That's all ––– TIME.

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