Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [13]
After permanently separating me from the only person who ever loved me (a good and decent woman who was drugged, then mugged, and was still out cold a half hour later), it was now time for the comedy show. The nurse joked that she thought I was “big enough to be twins.” Laughter! The doctor remarked that at least five of those nearly nine pounds had to be in my head. Huge guffaws! Yes, these guys were a riot!
I’ll admit I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby born in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow should we ever have a chance to learn anything outside of our rigid and insular lives. Perhaps one day we might get exposed to something we didn’t quite understand, like a foreign language, or a salad. Our extra cranial area would protect us from such mishaps.
But my head was different than the other large-headed Michigan babies—not because of its actual weight and size, but because it did not look like the head (or face) of a baby! It looked as if someone had Photoshopped an adult’s head onto a baby’s body.
The hospitals in the 1950s saw themselves on the cutting edge of post-war modern society. And they convinced the women who entered their establishments that to be “modern” meant to not breast-feed your baby—that breast-feeding was passé and trashy. Modern women used the Bottle!
Of course, modern was the wrong word. Try evil. They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle—or a can or a box or a cellophane bag—then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature. There we were, millions of us in diapers and blankies, and instead of being placed on our mother’s breasts, bottles were inserted into our mouths, where we were expected to find some sort of pleasure from a fake rubber nipple whose coloring resembled that of a loose stool. Who were these people? Was it really that easy to con our parents? If they could be fooled so easily on this, what else could they be convinced to try? Creamed corn in a can? Chemlawn? A Corvair?
An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable).
I spent a full week in the maternity ward at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint, Michigan, and let me tell you, from some of the conversations I had with the other newborns, no one was digging the fake rubber nipple—and this made us a miserable, cynical bunch, with most of us looking forward to the day when we could strike back at this generation with our long hair, crazy-massive amounts of premarital sex, and Malcolm X. The Bottle created Woodstock and flag burning and PETA. You can quote me.
On the day of my release from St. Joe’s, I was taken outside for the first time and the sun hit my face and it was good. It was a rather warm day for Michigan in April, but I didn’t seem to mind, all wrapped up in a comfy new baby-blue blanket, content to be in my mother’s arms. She and my dad got into the front seat of their two-tone 1954 Chevy Bel Air sedan. My dad started the engine. My mother said she was feeling “too hot.” Me, I was fine.
She suggested that he open up the fresh air vents to cool down the car. And when my dad obeyed, all the gunk that had built up during the winter came spewing out of the vents, and a black, sootlike substance spread all over my baby-blue blanket and me. My little face was now blackened, and I started to cough and wheeze and cry. Take me back to the hospital! My mother let out a yelp of horror, and my dad quickly turned off the fan and began to assist in my cleanup.
Within twenty minutes we were at my first home, a tiny, two-bedroom