I was either nine or ten. So it was either 1972 or 1973.
The first time I saw the blood in the bathtub was the middle of the night, when I was peeing. There was a shower curtain but my mom hadn’t pulled it over. I didn’t know what was going on, but that isn’t weird when you’re a kid. Mostly, or at least very often, you experience and observe things you can’t categorize. They just happen. Sometimes you later come to understand. That time my mom stayed out on a date with a man much later than usual, and she explained that she’d gone to watch “special Swedish movies,” she may have attended a swingers party. It took decades for that one to click into place.
It wasn’t every night. Then again, I usually slept through most nights, so maybe it was. But it was there—the blood—my mom’s blood—several more times, always at night and not ever in the morning, until I asked her about it. Her exact words, I don’t remember, but she confessed she was sick, she wasn’t feeling better, and it was coming from inside her. From her private parts. Neither for the first nor the last time, I assumed the parent role. “Why haven’t you been to the doctor?” I asked. Yvonne, always French and even more fatalistic, quoted Voltaire’s famous description in a letter to his friend Nicolas-Claude Thiriot dated 8 October 1760 of a hospital as a hellhole “where an eternal contagion reigns, where the sick, piled one on top of the other, give each other the plague and death.” To certain French people of my mom’s generation (and older), you went to the doctor in order to get sick.
I pestered her until she relented and succumbed to medical attention. The grapefruit-sized fibroid responsible for the bleeding would have to be removed, in conjunction with a hysterectomy, requiring a week-long stay at Kettering Memorial Hospital. As an adult, I know that, even if left untreated, fibroids are rarely a matter of life and death. (I’m not advising that.) She either knew that or misunderstood the doctor because she was much better at talking than listening; she told me that she might die that week. Which, strictly speaking, was true. It always is.
During her hospitalization, my mother informed me, I would stay with the Wrights, a family she’d gotten to know at church. (This was south of Dayton, home of the Wright brothers, but I don’t know if they were related. It’s a common name.)
The Wrights were a big, loud Catholic family with few rules and, as far as I could determine, few routines. There were, like, seven or eight kids, and they shared four beds, sometimes mixing and matching. Dirty clothes were flung down the stairs to the corner of the quarter-landing to await Mrs. Wright’s ministrations, which might occur any time, or not. The kitchen was full of Wonder Bread and Hostess products. Dogs yowled, cats mewled, phones rang at all hours, the console TV was always on, typically without an audience. It was the polar opposite of life at the Rall household, composed of me and my mom, c’est tout. My mom’s house (it was, as she often reminded me, her house, not mine) was a temple of beige furniture and glass tabletops on white wall-to-wall carpeting, buttoned up tight, everything in its place and, if momentarily requisitioned elsewhere, to be instantly returned to its appointed position, on pain of a backslap of her bony hand in case of violation.
If not for the fact that my mom might die—she put the odds at 50%—I might have had a gala time, as they say in India. As it was, even a boy my age couldn’t savor the chaos with my brain full of worry about my future. If my mom died, I doubted my dad would want me—big career, dating too—or that, if he did, he’d be pleasant to live with. He was stern, looming, cold, believed in spanking and availed himself of the practice in the six hours a week he saw me during court-ordered visitation, and no kid’s idea of fun. That left the Wrights, assuming they’d have me. Why not? At eight or nine kids or whatever, one more would hardly be noticed. I might be able to slip by unnoticed.
The Wrights were kind and relaxed, but I didn’t click with any of them. That was on me. I didn’t and don’t connect with most people, and anyway, I was too terrified of my mom—my entire family—dying to sit back and enjoy the chemical additives in the endless parade of snacks.
This was midsummer, around 90° and humid as it is in Ohio, cicadas buzzing, and one afternoon I decided to explore the neighborhood in search of non-Wright children to play with, to investigate the lay of the land, and to get out of the house. I walked for I don’t know how long, not taking care to look at house numbers or street signs as one would do when one is not nine or ten, and this was the suburbs and although this development wasn’t cookie-cutter like the Huber Home I grew up in, all the houses were about the same size with similar lots and I realized I was lost.
Lost in the suburbs in the 1970s was not like lost now. There weren’t even payphones, not that I had thought to bring any dimes with me. There was a man working on his lawn. Might he kill me? The thought occurred, but what choice was there? I was a stranger in a strange land.
Sobbing by now, and scared in general and a little of him, I explained my situation. “Wait here,” he ordered, and disappeared into his house. After what seemed like an inordinately long period, he reappeared with a Polaroid camera. “Look at me,” he said, and snapped my picture.
What kind of jerk is this? I remember thinking. What the hell are you thinking?
He took the Polaroid out, waited for it to develop, and handed it to me.
“I know the Wrights,” he finally said, burying the lede, and led me back. It was only about six houses away. I had walked in a square. “Keep that,” the weird photographer told me. “Someday you’ll be happy you have it.”
Happy? To have a record of myself miserable and lost?
Photography, especially the kind society values enough to award, can be a sadistic business. Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photo Migrant Mother depicts a worried and anxious Florence Owens Thompson, a 32-year-old migrant farmworker, resting her chin on her hand while her two older children hide their faces against her shoulders and an infant rests in her lap. The image was shot in a pea-pickers’ camp after the crop had frozen, leaving families without work or food. Lange recalled being drawn to the “hungry and desperate mother.” Thompson hated that the photo made her look defeated.
That same year, war photographer Robert Capa claimed he was in a trench with Republican militiamen near Córdoba during the Spanish Civil War. Soldiers would briefly climb out to fire at a machine-gun position, then drop back down. Capa said he held his camera above his head during one of these attacks and clicked the shutter without looking through the viewfinder, catching a man as he was hit and killed. The Falling Soldier depicts a Republican militiaman in civilian clothes with a cartridge belt, collapsing backward on a hillside as his rifle slips from his hand. The image captures what looks like the exact moment he is fatally shot, with his body arched and one arm flung out. Despite lingering questions about the veracity of Capa’s account, it quickly became one of the most iconic war photographs ever made.
Dozens of Pulitzers have been awarded for photographs depicting first responders saving or trying to save victims, as well as people dying in wars, famines and disasters: Baby Jessica, Oklahoma City, Napalm Girl, 9/11, Death of a Princess, East Africa embassy bombings. The National Geographic image of an Afghan war refugee with purple eyes. Other photographs, like stills of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, as Ray Davies of the Kinks observed, give the people exactly what they want: human suffering.
Do we love it when people cry, scream, bleed, die? I don’t know, but when they do we like to watch.
And I’m no different. Though I’m not exactly glad that photographer took that photo of me when I was scared and vulnerable, rather than simply drop everything and help me find my way back, changing what happened is not a menu item. He did it, I kept it, my mom took it and stored it in a tissue box cover on the toilet tank, and I grabbed it after she died two weeks before the pandemic.
I remember that moment like it was yesterday. My fear, my anger, my provisional relief, how hot it was, how alone I was.
How alone we all are, always.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the creator of the new collection “No More Mr. Nice Guy: Cartoons on War, Empire & Other Delusions.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
