The day we learned of each other’s existence our family had just recently decided to rent a battered and decaying white Craftsman style house that at the time was already over 80 years old. This vintage residence was located in north central Pasadena on a street corner directly facing Lake Avenue. Lake was and still is one of the most congested roads in the entire San Gabriel Valley. Four lanes of highway running north and south containing hundreds of zooming cars, belching buses, and thundering trucks rattled past that old dwelling day and night. But that fateful Boogeyman Encounter Day we three---me, Edwin, and Vicky---were so far inside the house that the sounds of Lake Avenue were nothing but a soft and distant din.
Having briefly escaped the family adults on this sunny afternoon and today being our first time actually inside this empty old structure that our family had not even moved into yet, the three of us set about exploring together its many drafty rooms. We were peering through windows looking out onto a side street from the master bedroom when suddenly we heard loud, fast moving footsteps rush up from our rear. Completely surprised, we spun around to see that a strange looking man with pale skin and wild blue eyes was suddenly standing behind us, a baleful and utterly intent glare on his face. He stood there for a long several seconds, seeming to tower over us, the very incarnation of a child’s mythological boogeyman. He then bellowed something that might not have been an actual word and proceeded to feverishly unbuckle his belt, as if to take the belt off of his pants.
Scared out of our collective minds, and instantaneously dreading that this terrifying stranger was going to whip us with his even more terrifying belt, we three let out a feral group scream worthy of a horror movie and burst into tears in virtually the same breath. The strange man stopped unbuckling his belt and continued looking at us for several more seconds. He then wheeled right around and rocketed out of the bedroom and the house through the front door as quickly as he had surprised us.
At least several minutes passed before we collected ourselves enough to stop crying. We then tumbled out of the bedroom and made our way to the kitchen area at the far rear of the house to tell my mom, who was cleaning out the wash sink, and who had heard none of the commotion in the other part of the house, about “el hombre” we had just encountered. She continued to scrub the sink as she listened calmly to the encounter we excitedly described to her. Her measured response helped us to catch our breath. She told us to keep the front door locked and not to worry. Her display of Mom coolness settled us down and the rest of that long ago afternoon passed by uneventfully.
Later the same evening, after making a few inquiries in that seemingly invisible way that adults do which can be so mysterious to young children, my mom identified the intruder to us as Rodney, the grown son of a white haired old lady, both of whom lived in the small house right next to the one we were moving into. We were not to worry, she told us. Rodney, who had not realized there was a family moving next door, now knew not to go through the front door of our “new” old house without permission. Retroactive though the proper introduction to Rodney had been, I was reassured.
After we moved, as our family’s first days and weeks in the Lake Avenue house passed by, my initial boogeyman impression of Rodney completely changed. It turned out that Rodney was no boogeyman at all. Instead he was characterized to us by Nona and mom as an “enfermito”, a Spanish diminutive word approximately translating as “little sick one.” Rodney was intellectually impaired. He spoke incomplete sentences with a hard to understand slur, walked with an odd gait, and he stayed home all day with his elderly mom, neither going to work or school. He sported old fashioned Dickies pants, wore what I remember as button up plaid shirts, and he often nodded to himself as he walked. Because we played outside as much as we did, Edwin and I often observed him with his mother, entering and leaving their little house. The times that he saw us he bounced his head up and down, smiled, and waved at us, and we shyly waved back, the precipitous drama of our first surprise encounter in the past.
Looking back now, it is clear to me that Rodney had Down’s syndrome. Of course, at the time, in terms of clinical properties, I could not tell Down’s syndrome from Downey’s detergent. Still, Rodney was the first person with Down’s that I ever knew, and although it would be years before I actually learned what Down’s is as a human condition, I instinctively sensed that Rodney lived a completely different life than the one I myself would ever experience.
One particular feature about Rodney’s differentness stood out to my six year old self in a way that I never forgot. To me Rodney was different in that he embodied a certain kind of freedom. He embodied this freedom in a way I could not and did not. This freedom I refer to was the freedom to publicly and unabashedly express his passion and life interests to the world with not a care for what anyone personally thought of him or how he communicated those passions and interests. Because I did not see myself having or otherwise exercising this same freedom, Rodney’s doing so was a powerful assertion of individuality that I was fascinated to behold.
One way Rodney loved to express his individuality was through classical music. On any given sunny mid afternoon Rodney loved to park himself on the front lawn of his house, which faced Lake Avenue just like ours, stand tall on a makeshift podium, and proceed to offer to the whole flowing river of motorized and pedestrian humanity passing by him his best impersonation of a world class master symphony conductor giving a performance for the ages. To accomplish this bravura effect Rodney hauled out to his sloping front lawn twin giant stereo speakers that he pointed directly at Lake. He piled up next to those speakers large stacks of LP records featuring the greatest hits of classical composers like Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. Rodney then clambered to the top of his improvised podium with a real conductor’s baton that he gripped in his pudgy right hand, and he proceeded to blast his classical music away at maximum decibel level while swaying his body back and forth to the music. As Rodney did so, he vigorously thrusted, jabbed, and whirled his conductor’s baton into the air, directing the violinists, flutists, cellists, oboists, and clarinet players that were visible only in his beautifully oblivious imagination.
Many times pedestrian onlookers huddled in front of Rodney’s improvised musical station to watch Rodney “conduct” his concert of the day. Rodney paid these onlookers no mind. He conducted his concerts with or without an immediate street audience, his face a virtual mask of pure concentration as he synchronized his body to the rise and fall of the musical notes blasting from his speakers. “Las payasadas de Rodney” my mom called it at the time. Rodney’s clown act, in Spanish. Every time she said this aloud, I silently disagreed.
Neither then nor now did I ever think of Rodney as being a clown when he stood on that podium to conduct his music. To me, all the times that I saw him direct his open air concerts, he embodied a living, breathing example of fearlessly, openly, and resolutely exercising the freedom to express one self no matter where, no matter when, no matter with whom, no matter even necessarily why. Rodney truly if unintentionally exemplified a freedom that I have spent the rest of my life trying to achieve for myself and to this day I am grateful to Rodney for this particular legacy he imprinted on my memory.
