Stories
Years later--but years ago, still– I used to lead therapy groups in the forensic unit of a state psychiatric hospital. Men and women serving time in the state correctional system, who were discovered to have mental illness, would be sent down from the clanging iron of the prison to deal with the conundrum that, if they would only get well, we would send them back to prison.
To get the group talking, as a first step toward thinking, one of the warm-up exercises I used was to ask the guys to recall a story they had been told as a child. Sometimes we would enact those blood-thirsty tales in psychodrama, with the characters and the character’s alter-egos played by the other patients. I can remember occasions where a recidivist paperhanger, now serving five to ten for his counterfeiting, would be chirruping the hidden, motivating thoughts and feelings of the wolf in Red Riding Hood, while a generally withdrawn citizen doing twenty to life for murder would intently whisper warnings into Red Riding Hood’s hood.
Because of two people I’ve known, both named, “John,” who liked it unusually well, I think of the tale of the Three Little Pigs as John’s.
Grandmother was in the habit of sitting down--afternoons and evenings, nap-time, snack-time, bed-time and in sick-bed--to tell us all stories, good and old, out of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop and such American dramas of colonial history as Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia with a loaf of bread under his arm. He was laughed at by a young girl, whom he later married. From this I took the moral that you should never be seen eating a loaf of bread in the public street; while my little sister drew a lesson on the danger of laughing at strange boys.
But the story, for which my brother, Johnny, would literally fall over backwards, was the Three Little Pigs. When the Big, Bad Wolf BLEW the house down, he’d go over backwards in a gale of laughter. Every time--and Grandmom was not that robust an old lady. We used to have to scout the location in which we heard this story for dangerous drops and delicate lamps, for my Dad could blow him right over in a complete back-somersault.
In my psychodrama group, John was a little man, curled together inside layers of loose clothes with an elastic waist band and no shoe laces. He was hardly able to talk when he came to us from prison. In all likelihood, he had been raped in the pen, but we could not get him to talk about much, especially that. He finally came sufficiently out of his shell to reveal a modest enough understanding of the world. Even his delusions were unformed and inexpressible. But they were fading; that was the main thing.
He was not the first and he was not the last grown man who shyly revealed that he did not know any stories. Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks were news to him. Br’er Rabbit, Orphan Annie, the fox who called the grapes sour, the foot-prints which all led into the lion’s den and the genie in the bottle were a revelation. None of the group minded hearing a precis of the various tales. Some liked the stories for their own sake; some would do anything to get out of talking themselves; some enjoyed helping tell the tale. And I thought it a sort of civic duty to see that everyone had heard at least a few bed-time stories before he died. The stuff on TV would hardly help a person to sleep.
On John’s behalf, then, I launched into the tale of The Three Little Pigs and How They Built. I do a pretty good wolf voice, if I do say so myself (I studied at the foot of masters and I have testimonials from my brother and sister), so the group paid close, if not respectful, attention. John, for his small part, sat sideways in his chair, listening out of the corner of his eye, more or less. The critical comments, snide asides and cat-calls with which the rest of the audience ornamented the telling went right by John. One thing he was good at was ignoring things. When the House of Straw pig took refuge with the House of Twigs sibling, you could see the relief on John’s face. When the wolf blew them out of house and home, you could see his over-sized garments like flags in the wind. When the wolf landed in the pot of boiling water, he actually smiled. And at the end, he slowly allowed, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a good story, though.”
We tried hard to fill that little skin--with food, so that the clothes wouldn’t seem so loose; with pills, so the thoughts in his head wouldn’t seem so loose; with advice, so that his couple of notions on how to go about getting along in the world would not rattle around so loose; and we tried to fill that infinite void, his empty heart--with stories and mood stabilizers--so that he would not curl so weakly over the hole inside. I lost track of that John when he returned to prison and I don’t know what good the Three Little Pigs may have done inside that soul built on sand so perilous-near the tide-mark, but I can’t imagine they didn’t do any.
To get the group talking, as a first step toward thinking, one of the warm-up exercises I used was to ask the guys to recall a story they had been told as a child. Sometimes we would enact those blood-thirsty tales in psychodrama, with the characters and the character’s alter-egos played by the other patients. I can remember occasions where a recidivist paperhanger, now serving five to ten for his counterfeiting, would be chirruping the hidden, motivating thoughts and feelings of the wolf in Red Riding Hood, while a generally withdrawn citizen doing twenty to life for murder would intently whisper warnings into Red Riding Hood’s hood.
Because of two people I’ve known, both named, “John,” who liked it unusually well, I think of the tale of the Three Little Pigs as John’s.
Grandmother was in the habit of sitting down--afternoons and evenings, nap-time, snack-time, bed-time and in sick-bed--to tell us all stories, good and old, out of the Brothers Grimm and Aesop and such American dramas of colonial history as Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia with a loaf of bread under his arm. He was laughed at by a young girl, whom he later married. From this I took the moral that you should never be seen eating a loaf of bread in the public street; while my little sister drew a lesson on the danger of laughing at strange boys.
But the story, for which my brother, Johnny, would literally fall over backwards, was the Three Little Pigs. When the Big, Bad Wolf BLEW the house down, he’d go over backwards in a gale of laughter. Every time--and Grandmom was not that robust an old lady. We used to have to scout the location in which we heard this story for dangerous drops and delicate lamps, for my Dad could blow him right over in a complete back-somersault.
In my psychodrama group, John was a little man, curled together inside layers of loose clothes with an elastic waist band and no shoe laces. He was hardly able to talk when he came to us from prison. In all likelihood, he had been raped in the pen, but we could not get him to talk about much, especially that. He finally came sufficiently out of his shell to reveal a modest enough understanding of the world. Even his delusions were unformed and inexpressible. But they were fading; that was the main thing.
He was not the first and he was not the last grown man who shyly revealed that he did not know any stories. Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks were news to him. Br’er Rabbit, Orphan Annie, the fox who called the grapes sour, the foot-prints which all led into the lion’s den and the genie in the bottle were a revelation. None of the group minded hearing a precis of the various tales. Some liked the stories for their own sake; some would do anything to get out of talking themselves; some enjoyed helping tell the tale. And I thought it a sort of civic duty to see that everyone had heard at least a few bed-time stories before he died. The stuff on TV would hardly help a person to sleep.
On John’s behalf, then, I launched into the tale of The Three Little Pigs and How They Built. I do a pretty good wolf voice, if I do say so myself (I studied at the foot of masters and I have testimonials from my brother and sister), so the group paid close, if not respectful, attention. John, for his small part, sat sideways in his chair, listening out of the corner of his eye, more or less. The critical comments, snide asides and cat-calls with which the rest of the audience ornamented the telling went right by John. One thing he was good at was ignoring things. When the House of Straw pig took refuge with the House of Twigs sibling, you could see the relief on John’s face. When the wolf blew them out of house and home, you could see his over-sized garments like flags in the wind. When the wolf landed in the pot of boiling water, he actually smiled. And at the end, he slowly allowed, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a good story, though.”
We tried hard to fill that little skin--with food, so that the clothes wouldn’t seem so loose; with pills, so the thoughts in his head wouldn’t seem so loose; with advice, so that his couple of notions on how to go about getting along in the world would not rattle around so loose; and we tried to fill that infinite void, his empty heart--with stories and mood stabilizers--so that he would not curl so weakly over the hole inside. I lost track of that John when he returned to prison and I don’t know what good the Three Little Pigs may have done inside that soul built on sand so perilous-near the tide-mark, but I can’t imagine they didn’t do any.