The Moth by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

stuttering. One of them is sing, and I couldn’t sing. The other is you can talk to animals and not stutter.
    So every day I would come home from the special class, which all the other kids called the retarded class, and I’d go straight to a closet in my room. I had a little dark corner of that closet. And I’d go into the closet, and I’d close the door, and I’d bring my pets—New York–style pets (hamster, gerbil, green turtle, a chameleon, occasionally a garter snake), and I would talk to them. I would talk fluently to them, and I’d tell them my hopes and my dreams. I would tell them how people were stupid because they thought I was stupid.
    And the animals listened. They felt it. And I realized very early that they felt it because they were like me. The animals, they had feelings too, they were trying to transmit things also. But they had no human voice, so people ignored them, or they misunderstood them, or they hurt them, or sometimes they killed them.
    I swore to the animals when I was young that if I could ever find my voice, I would try to be their voice. But I didn’t know if that would happen, because I realized that I lived in two worlds. One world was the world where I was normal, with animals, where I could speak, but the other world was the world of human beings, where I couldn’t.
    My parents didn’t know what to do, but they did everything. They tried hypnotherapy, they tried drug therapy, they sent me to many kinds of psychologists, but nothing really worked. I got through grade school, junior high school, high school, and eventually college by learning tricks stutterers learn. Learning when to not speak, learning to avoid situations, learning just to not be around people. When I did have to speak, then I would prove to people that I was not only like them, but I was better than they were. In academics, I excelled. I got straight A’s in everything. In sports, I joined the wrestling team and the boxing team, and I helped take all my teams to the state championships. Everybody always said I was an up-and-coming athlete, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even like it. I was just a very, very frustrated young man who had to find an outlet for his anger.
    By the time I was a senior in college, I had never been out on a date, I had never kissed a girl, except for my mother, and I had never spoken a completely fluent sentence out loud to another human being.
    About midway through my senior year in college, my parents learned of an experimental new program in Upstate New York, in Geneseo. It was very intense. They had to send me away, and I was essentially locked away for two months. The program was for severe, severe stutters, and it was very expensive. But they would do anything for me. So my father sold something very dear to him in order to send me there.
    That clinic changed my life. It taught me two very important things. One of them was that I was a stutterer, and I was always going to be a stutterer. There was no magic pill, and I was not going to wake up one morning as I had always dreamt and be a fluent speaker. But the other thing it taught me, the more important thing, was that if I did what they were teaching me at thisclinic—which was to mechanically control my mouth, the airflow—if I worked hard, I could be a completely fluent stutterer.
    I worked hard, and it was unbelievable. For the first time in twenty years, I could speak. I could speak! In twenty years I had never been able to voice everything inside of me. Now I could. It took a lot of work, because while I was speaking I had to be thinking about hard contacts, airflow, this and that, but it didn’t matter—none of it mattered. I was a fluent speaker now. Life would be different. I would go back to school, and they would accept me.
    I returned to finish the last half of my senior year, and things were different—on the outside. I could speak. But nothing had changed on the inside. Too much had happened for that. I was still the