There used to be this big old speaker that my father made himself. It was a box about three feet high and one and a half feet wide and a foot or so deep. I think it was made of cedar—it had that red and white wood look. We used to play hide and seek, and since there was no back on the speaker, you could cram yourself into it if you were small enough.
I don’t know what possessed him to do it, but my little brother had turned the knob on the volume to maximum and then he scratched the needle across a record. The noise nearly made my brains turn to mush and leak out my ears. I must have screamed as loud as the speaker did.
I pulled myself out of the speaker, holding my hands over my ears and crying, except I couldn’t hear myself cry. In fact, I didn’t hear much of anything for the next several hours.
After that, I would refuse to go near that speaker, especially if my brother was in the room or, in fact, in the house. To this day I am extremely sensitive to loud noises. In particular, the high pitched screams of young children. They get into my head and turn it inside out. Thank God my kids never screamed like that, or they wouldn’t be alive today. Either that, or I wouldn’t be alive.