Ben

I have spent the majority to my 26 years in orphanages, reformatories, prisons, and mental institutions. I had four oboe teachers and each one fell into an irrigation sluce and drowned. I'd tried explaning to my social workers that I hated double-reed mouthpieces. I pleaded with them not to make me take lessons on any instrument in the oboe family, which aslo includes the English horn, the bassoon, and the double bassoon. But nobody listened. I hated the other children. Especially the ones whose parents could afford to provide proper orthodontic care. I had to gnaw constantly. My incisors grew four to five inches a year: if I'd stopped gnawing, my lower incisors would have eventually grown until they pushed up into my brain, killing me. Over the years, I was treated for a slew of psychiatric and behavioral problems: dyslexia, depression, excessive anxiety, obsessive-conpulsive disorder, alcoholism, illicit drug-abuse, obesity, eating disorders, exhibitionism, persistent aggressive and violent behavior, and hyperactivity conbined with severe attention deficits. Yet there was a voice within me that said: Someday you will be concidered the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America. And I listened.