Chris Gray:  

None of you know of Cathy Kelly, my first love, a half Japanese half Irish beauty in face, grace and in soul, who died in a car accident at 19, or of the amnesia from a skiing accident I had at 13 that caused me to forget her for twenty years, shortly after our family moved to Orange, or about my North Haven, CT life before that, from where racism forced us to move, but it happened and profoundly effected the course of my life. Finally remembering Cathy answered many questions that had always troubled me, least of all being drawn to both a girl named Kate and a girl named Kelly and who both went on to Emerson with me! When I explained it all to Kelly at our 40th reunion, she said, "Her name was haunting you, even before she died!" During that confused period, as with the Down syndrome boy on Life Goes On (remember him?), I came upon a spirit guide, though without the special effect of Chief Dan George to confirm it. The dog, the first husky, met me every school day morning of my sophomore to senior years of high school, kept me in sight from outside pretty much all during the day and shadowed me as I hitched-hiked or ended up walking the seven miles home when I missed the late bus, which was almost every day of the last two years. I built sets and acted for the drama club. It was almost imperceptibly marked with silver gray and had eyes so pale as to appear white and, though I called it œDorg, as in "€œGood morning, Dorg," every day, "White Eyes" was the name I gave the story I wrote in study hall while observing the dog from a distance out the huge lunchroom windows. The story was that I was camping under the stars, on a very familiar neighborhood hillside from several years before in another town, and I had a twenty-two-caliber rifle, a weapon with which I had practiced as a boy scout at camp. As my campfire died and I saw the glint of the embers reflected in a pair of eyes, heard a growl and, finally saw a body propel in the air toward me, I picked up the rifle and fired into the chest of the husky hurtling over my head to, with her dying strength, tear out the throat of the bobcat stealthily preparing to lunge. I came to describe my inspiration, the entirety of her relationship with me, which while subtle and almost otherwise incommunicable, as that dog telling me that story the day I wrote it. Much, much later, I told the story "White Eyes"€ and the true story of Dorg at a storytelling event I held at Down To Earth Restaurant, then open in New Haven, on June 25th of 1979. My audience of two, a couple, looked at each other and told me "€œThat'€™s the story of Sacagawea's Dog Friend", which I had perhaps previously read as an avid biography reader, but of which I had no memory when I wrote "White Eyes". My two audience members, a couple, immediately noticed the similarity and retold me Sacagawea's. Her second dog friend, an animal she did not chose to own but who chose to be with her, also chose to befriend Bill Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. They also hired her husband as a guide, but she had her problems with the French fur trapper who fathered her son. Previously, he had his brother, his sister-in-law, or his sister and his brother-in-law and their baby and her first dog friend living with them. All but she and the baby insisted that she tie the dog away from the baby. Then, while Sacagawea was away, they left the baby alone at their cabin with the dog. Returning, they found the baby and the dog missing. The dog had chewed through his or her rope. They searched and coming upon the dog with blood on its muzzle, they shot it dead. Shortly up the trail, they found the baby playing on the corpse of the dead wolf the dog had killed protecting the child. As I say, the couple had issues. So White Eyes didn'€™t just tell me a story, she told me a story that has been passed down from American dog to American dog for centuries. That is the awesome and stunning conclusion I am left with from this whole experience. And, in my hand, I hold a reminder I hope will keep this memory in my all too faulty and amnesiac brain until the fading of my consciousness in death; a Sacagawea gold dollar coin! Meanwhile, at 16 something else happened! What would you do if you volunteered to be a paid subject in a psychology experiment and they asked you to kill someone? Ah, no fair! You probably already heard this one. New Haven Independent editor and author Paul Bass contacted me about an article he was planning for the New Haven Advocate on the three hundredth anniversary of Yale University. He’d heard, at some point, that I had been a subject in the infamous Milgram experiments at Yale and thought the story might somehow fit into the article. After emailing back the bare outline of my experience, he asked if I had any documentation of it. I had to admit that I have none. I didn’t hear back from Paul after that admission. As a reporter, I suppose that he needed some proof of my claims to confirm the story, either witnesses or documents. I don’t need them, however, because I was there and can testify. This all happened in 1966 and, even had I guessed its significance at the time, it is doubtful that any documentation I held would have survived the interim decades. So, all I have is my memories and all you, dear reader, have is my word that I write the truth as I remember it. The significance of this story came back to haunt me as recently as a week before beginning to write this, while reading a novel, Time Bomb by Jonathon Kellerman. Near the end of the 1990 novel, one character reminds another of the famous psychology experiment where ordinary folks were asked to shock total strangers on the authority of the scientists running the experiment. “And most people did it. Just to obey,” the character continues, and wonders whether he would or would not have been one the obedient ones. In October, I had just turned sixteen and my mom, not content to depend on my own ambition, started searching the want ads for jobs for which I might apply. I, also, fruitlessly applied to every major business on the Boston Post Road in Orange at her direction. I might add that I’d already worked for her consumer research firm as a telephone interviewer for a year, as allowed for by law at the time, so I already did work. One day she came up with a new idea, which she thought would appeal to me. There was an ad for psychological experiment subjects, at $5 an hour, quite a rate at the time. Perhaps, she said, this could be an interesting, on-going source of income. So, I called the number and scheduled an appointment. The location was at the corner of Chapel and Howe Streets, across from the present day Tandor, then the venerable Elm City Diner, on the second floor above the new location of Rudy’s Bar & Grille. I believe the Yale Psychiatric Institute later used the space as its first headquarters. I trudged up the stairs to enter a reception area where a blonde woman with glasses and a ponytail in a white lab coat met me. She introduced me to another “volunteer” (since we were to be paid, I even then wondered at that terminology), whom she said had arrived early and had already completed the first of the two tests we were to undergo. She had me sign a consent form, which I considered to be pretty much just a matter of course. My understanding of psychological experiments was such that I assumed one of the two tests was a “blind”, a test meant to confuse the subjects as to which test was the one actually under study. The graduate school aged woman then conducted a simple four or five minute Rorschach test, asking my responses to ink blotted cards. Even to me, that seemed too transparently the “blind”. The woman then informed us that we were to draw straws to decide which of us, in the second experiment, would be the “experimenter” and which the “experimentee”. I have little doubt that she left out the detail about whether the long or short straw would denote which would be which. It appeared as if either of the “volunteers” had a fifty/fifty chance to be one or the other. To me at least, that meant quite a lot. Of course, I drew the first straw, the one that she said denoted me the “experimenter” and we never drew the second straw. The other “volunteer” was obviously going to be the “experimentee”. Now, she lead us to a larger back room, divided in two by a row of … well, let me try to describe them. You’ve probably read about or seen depicted in a film, if not experienced, a Catholic confessional. Well, for those of us who have been alter “servers” and who sought confession right before serving mass, so as not to be publicly shamed by failing to be able to receive communion over that Saturday night sin, it was a little more abbreviated. We knelt on a portable kneeler that had one of those screens that supposedly shields our identity from the priest attached on a frame above it, next to the priest’s chair. (I mean, why go through the pretense? He knew who you were; you’d just asked to say your confession!) O.K., now take a ‘60s era high school or college foreign language lab desk (you know the ones with the tape recorders and ear phones built in to allow you to practice, “Yo me llamo, Cristobal”) and replace the tape recorder with other, more sinister looking, equipment, but stick in the patently transparent screen where the tape recorder sits. Oh, and the two sets of desks had two very different sets of equipment, but face each other as, thusly, do the “experimenter” and the “experimentee”. And, there was a row of five to ten of these paired sets, sending the message, “This is a just an unusually slow time. This goes on with many people, every day.Ã...Expand for more