Gooney Bird

The burden of self-reliance

In seventh grade, at age twelve, I developed what my grandmother would call “a new wrinkle.”

I had been sent into our old, musty, dusty basement on an errand from Mom or Dad. As I passed through of the anteroom where Dad kept assorted nuts and bots in baby food jars, the urge hit me: wouldn’t it feel good if I cracked my neck? I wasn’t trying to imitate a hanging. I just thought it would feel…nice…if I gave my head a little jerk to the side.

Crrraacck!

By golly, it did feel good! Kind of the way it felt when the Dad’s chiropractor gave my head a sudden twist to relax all those battened-down subluxations. The feeling was one of release, of a weird mastery of my own body.

It felt so good, that naturally, I did it again.

And again.

That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Like a chronic itch, the compulsion to crack wasn’t satisfied by scratching it.

As I left the basement, I wondered: could I hide my neck twisting from my family? They were perceptive not miss something so out of the ordinary. I needed a strategy. I knew I could hold down the urge to crack for a few minutes. So if we were all watching TV and I felt compelled to crack, I’d find a reason to go into the kitchen or the bathroom. I’d give in to my urge, then rejoin the family.

That went well until nighttime and the sure refuge of bedtime darkness.

But school during daylight was another matter. In parochial school, students, especially those in the upper grades, didn’t just wander off into another room when they felt like it. We were pretty much bound to our desks for reading of writing assignments unless given permission from “Sister” to do otherwise. And such permission usually required actively leaking a bodily fluid. Not easily granted. I would, somehow, have to crack at my desk.

I managed to hide the cracking for a while, doing it slowly so as not to arouse suspicion. But during one episode, Sister Frances, our seventh grade teacher, happened to be looking my way from her perch at her desk in front of the class . When I looked up, she was staring at me with a wide-eyed look that was somewhere between horror and disgust. I froze, the heart’s elevator dropping several stories in an instant. I expected to be call in front of the class to explain, but she said nothing. I lowered my gaze back at the school work I was doing and tamped down the urge to crack. When class ended, I expected to be kept behind for a scolding or an interrogation. But she just let me walk out with my classmates. I guess she thought that her dirty look was enough to straighten me out.

Luckily, most of my classmates ignored me — the silver lining of being at the bottom rung of the ladder of popularity. But one of the girls, Cheryl C., at the tender age where compassion and decorum had yet to be established in her young mind, didn’t. Cheryl was small and dark for a French kid, and feisty. She often tussled with the nuns about the supposed shortness of her skirt.

She caught me cracking while we kids were in the hall between classes.

“Gooney bird!” she announced. I flinched internally, hoping no one else had heard.

No one had but me. I thanked the unseen clouds of angels for their protection.

God knows where she got the monicker, but I understood exactly what she meant: a bird that stuck out its head and neck in a comical spasm. I had turned myself into a ridiculous cartoon character. Diagnosis delivered, Cheryl wheeled away toward the next class. My habit, I realized, was doing nothing to raise my miserable social standing. Even among the class outlaws.

After school, I walked two blocks home, hoping to put the unpleasant day behind me. Mom was seated at the kitchen counter, paying bills. As I passed her, I unexpectedly cracked by neck. She saw.

“You look like a gooney bird!” she chirped, amused. If I had hoped for a kindly intervention by my RN mother, I realized then that I wasn’t going to get it. I skulked away to do my homework and try my damnedest not crack.

Days went by. The cracking didn’t subside. Every day I cracked was another day that one of the class bullies would discover my secret. I was sure that would be the end of me. So, I made decision: I had to stop cracking. And if I was going to stop, I’d have to do it myself. Teachers, classmates and family were clearly not going to step in and help.

I decided that I would allow myself one crack per hour during school. I cracked, then spent an interminably long sixty minutes watching the classroom clock, suppressing the urge to crack until the minute hand touched 12. The task took all my willpower as the compulsion was so strong and the promise of relief so tempting. The holy martyrs would have been proud. When a new hour arrived, I gratefully, and surreptitiously, allowed myself a stealthy crack.

Amazingly, after a few hours, the urge to crack disappeared. My steely resolve had trained my brain to forget its need for the pleasure of cracking. I was cured! Now I only had to endure the ordinary boredom of class and the day-to-day indignities of the schoolyard at recess time.

It was a pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless.

The hot iron presses
Sharp lines in a pleat
But in smoothing out wrinkles
Leaves scars of its heat.