 
|
|||||||||||
              
|
Close Encounters: He reaches for a 'Mister Rogers' good feeling Listening for the meaning of childhood in a special neighborhood Thursday, June 25, 1998 By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It was supposed to have been the healing journey of a fractured lifetime, and it will end as a close enough approximation to be called a success.
It is the story of Joybubbles, and it includes a mugging, a tornado, sexual abuse, a hailstorm, repressed memory, blindness, an arrest, friendship, slapstick, hog dung, and, last and foremost, Mister Rogers.
Not Fred himself, but the hundreds of episodes of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" archived at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences library. The tapes of those episodes are what this was all about.
"Elizabeth Mahoney (the head of the library) says I'm now the only one in the world who has heard the whole series," he said in the stale Oakland apartment he rented for May and June. "Whether that's true, I don't know. I only know that I wanted to hear it. I kind of missed childhood. I had sexual abuse and stuff. I need healing so I'm having my childhood now. I'm 5 years old forever."
He shows a business card with his legal name, Joybubbles, and that he is 5, "Just big for my age." Without the business cards, he could easily be confused for a 49-year-old blind man, if only because that's what he is. He no longer goes by the name he had when he was really 5, about the time he believes he was sexually abused at a school for the blind.
"I went to court and rendered the name I was abused under null and void forever," he said of 1991 Minneapolis civil court file 91-11464. "I never have to say it again."
A few years earlier, he'd started listening to Mister Rogers, which resonated with him to the extent that he resolved to hear every last word of the more than 800 episodes, even at the prohibitive cost of a fearful odyssey to Pittsburgh.
"I didn't know whether I'd make it," he said, "but then I got the best job I ever had."
That would be, uh, hog dung sniffer.
"Yes, he's one of our odor panelists," said Dr. Larry Jacobson from the University of Minnesota's agricultural and engineering department. "He helps us with the measurement of odors. Our research is primarily with livestock. There have been disputes over the intensity of odors from people who neighbor feed lots, and this is the only way to get an acceptable scientific measurement."
To get the position, Joybubbles had to fill out the standard Odor Panelist Consent Form, which explained that he'd get $25 dollars per session, that "some of the odors may be unpleasant," and that, "there are no other benefits to participation."
Like what? Meet the hogs?
"Sometimes it was hard," said Joybubbles, who has lived on Social Security disability checks most of his life, "but I'd think, you know, one more sniff for Pittsburgh! When you're on a mission, things tend to seem less arduous."
After two years, when he'd whiffed enough stuff to build a modest Pittsburgh bankroll, he phoned Pitt's information sciences library with his intentions. Easy enough. Just called them up and said his name was Joybubbles and he was 5 years old and he was blind and he was coming to Pittsburgh on the train by himself after saving enough money from his hog dung-sniffing job and he needed to hear the entire Fred archives, requiring some 10 hours a day for six weeks and would they mind if he brought some puppets?
"We were a little skeptical," said Erin McGlynn, who oversees the Mister Rogers archives. "I checked him out by running a Web search, because, well, he was going to be in this room in the back of the library with me. Just him and me. That's where I found the phone freak stuff."
Long before he became a child in 1988, Joybubbles was one of America's most accomplished practitioners of what was called phone-phreaking. In the early 1970's in fact, he found he could produce a vocal tone that cleared the circuits for long distance calls he made free of charge. Like to Russia. He was arrested for malicious mischief. Though he maintains a fascination for phones, he's now a semiofficial friend of the phone company.
"He calls me all the time," said Linda Julson at USWest, the regional phone company Joybubbles services. "He has this obsession with phones. He gets his information from a lot of different sources. He'll call the Pentagon and get communications about where new area codes are going into effect and he dials them from home and reports any problems to us. He's helping us, I feel, because he finds areas that we've maybe made a mistake in programming. He's got a million stories."
He has few from his first childhood, spent moving constantly from state to state with a father who sold school pictures. Joybubbles figures he has forgotten some things and repressed a lot. His estranged mother, living with his blind sister in Florida, said she never heard of any sexual abuse, but that her son lived at several blind schools in the 1950s.
"It's only something I remembered in the last 10 years," he said. "Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. Someone told me once I should sue and try to get a settlement, but you know, they may have helped take my childhood, but they don't have it to give. My childhood is going on porch swings and singing in the rain and getting muddy and thousands of things. It's coming here and listening to Mister Rogers."
Joybubbles arrived May 1 and immediately began working on a second million stories to share. When he opened the freezer door in his apartment, it came off and smashed his toe. He overflowed his bathtub because someone had left a sock in the drain. He couldn't get the transportation company that was supposed to shuttle him to and from the library to understand his predicament.
"The forms they send me were in ink print," he said. "I read Braille. Then they asked me what my disease was and I said, 'Well, total blindness.' They said they needed a recognized medical term and I said, 'I think if you walked up to the average doctor and asked her what total blindness meant, she'd recognize it."'
When he finally made his way into the library, the first two tapes he listened to broke in the machine. Then the machine broke. Library secretary Mayrilyn DiPaolo "moved heaven and earth" to borrow another tape machine from another university source, Mahoney said.
Then, just as his mission had absorbed some momentum, he got mugged. Taking some trash to the alley behind his building, he tripped and fell. When he got to his feet, someone was going through his pockets.
"I always thought people said, 'Hey, stick 'em up!' They didn't say anything. I didn't say anything. I was just so scared I stood still, waiting to see if I was going to be hit or shot. I didn't report it. I'd be embarrassed to call the police. What could I tell them? What did they look like? How many were there? I couldn't tell them."
The next day, over Joybubbles' objections, the library was closed for Memorial Day, which left him to stew in the apartment. Fear and self-loathing, his on-and-off lifetime companions, hung out all day.
"It's hard not to think the abuse wasn't my fault. I'd think, 'I was 6 years old. I could have gotten out of that blind school where I lived. It's just like when I was robbed. It was my fault for projecting a bad image. I looked vulnerable. The poor robbers. What were they to do?
"I know that isn't true, but sometimes it's hard not to think like that."
The prevention of that type of thought pattern had long been an impetus for listening to the tapes.
"I just kept thinking about the tapes," he said. "Everything else was secondary."
So he'd go back every day. He averaged 70 hours a week from May 4 until he heard the final tapes June 10. Family Communications thrilled him by providing some puppets and the tapes of five Mister Rogers' episodes that have not aired yet.
"Four or five of us just befriended him and would give him a sandwich or something," said Terry Iwanonkiw, a painter from Brentwood who works for the university. "He saw what he was doing as a kind of spiritual thing. There's just a gentle spirit about him."
Early in the listening, Joybubbles asked Mahoney if he could bring a blanket because his library station was directly beneath an air conditioning duct.
"That was a picture," Mahoney said. "Joybubbles with this blanket over his head, with his puppets, singing along to Fred. He's start out in the mornings very quietly, but by the end of the day ... "
He was at his station the evening of June 2, as Pittsburgh was getting throttled by the first tornado in its history.
"Lightning struck the building and set off the fire alarm," public service librarian Ammon Ripple said. "We had to get out, so we walked him over to the parking garage across the street. It was the first time he experienced hail. He was gathering handfuls of it, but he dropped it in the stairwell on the way back in."
The library staff, having both enabled and witnessed this singular life experience, took Joybubbles to the Children's Museum last week. They tell his story in terms of amazed endearment, perhaps not the way they'd speak of a child, but not terribly different from it.
"He has no idea what he brings to people," said Julie Lindquist, a Joybubbles phone pal in Minneapolis. "I met him a real long time ago. He used to have a phone line where you could call up and listen to what he was saying, or talk with him if you wanted to. My grandmother was in the hospital, dying. I got some comfort from him. He helps people out. It's hard to explain.
"The one thing I'd like to say about him is that name, Joybubbles, is so appropriate. He spreads joy. He's an ambassador for joy."
The ambassador heads home on Tuesday. He's really only staying around to finish the frozen dinners and Mountain Dew in his refrigerator.
"When you're 5," he said, "you don't have to make sense."
The payoff for this caper will have to come in the sense Joybubbles makes of what he heard from Mister Rogers.
"The tapes, they were more than what I hoped for," he said. "They were very healing for reasons I don't even know how to explain. They're just a wonderful child development course. I found out what childhood means, how we're all special. I heard thousands of things to think and wonder about. What shape an orange peel is when it's completely flattened out. Different kinds of music. It's just endless. Hundreds of hours I've listened, and it's been more than worth the cost. The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself, and I made the investment with the best teacher.
"I think of him (Mr. Rogers) as kind, as if I told him the worst thing about me I could possibly think of, he would still say, 'You're special and that's OK and I like you very, very much."'
|
||||||||||
