For most of my life, I had one goal: don’t get found out. I was a covert stammerer (or stutterer). Nobody realised I had a speech disability, because whenever I felt I was going to get stuck on a word, I switched it or stayed silent. I appeared fluent by avoiding certain sounds, words, situations and people. You’d never catch me on the phone. In restaurants, I ordered what was easier to say, rather than what I wanted. At school, I skipped any class where I might have to read aloud. On top of that, I was a shy, geeky redhead with braces who was bullied relentlessly. Not even my family knew I stammered. I believed I would never have a good job, a relationship, or a way out.
What changed that was not therapy or a chance moment of inspiration. It was a weird song blasting from my dad’s car radio in the summer of 1995.
You have probably heard it. Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop) was a global hit, broadly dismissed as cheesy, disposable pop. Its singer, Scatman John, was a mustachioed, balding 52-year-old in a fedora, considered another novelty in a decade full of chart-topping gimmicks. But John Larkin – to give him his real name – was a lifelong stammerer. Unlike me, he couldn’t hide it, so he embraced it and alchemised his broken syllables into scat-singing. An avant garde jazz pianist with zero interest in the charts, he agreed to record a pop song on one condition: that he could try to reach kids with lyrics about “stuttering” and self-esteem. “Everybody stutters one way or the other,” he sang. “If the Scatman can do it, so can you.”
Sitting in the passenger seat of the car, I didn’t hear a novelty track. I heard a man joyfully singing about having a stammer and not letting it hold you back. Plus it was a banger. This is for me, I thought. I was hooked. I bought all his albums and singles and listened carefully to his lyrics, which spoke to outsiders and misfits like me.
Two years later, we got dial-up internet at home. I searched an online directory of email users and found “John Larkin, jazz musician, California”. Could it be him? I had no idea. But by then, my mental health had declined. I wrote a long, desperate email and hit send.
John – still at the height of his fame – was performing for 300,000 people at the Sounds of Frankfurt festival in Germany. But he read my email and recognised it as a cry for help. He replied, promising he would get back to me. Days later, he kept his word, and we sent messages back and forth. It was like a dam bursting – all the shame, fear and anger about my speech came pouring out. He was kind, respectful and encouraging. Then, when I told him I was terrified of the phone, he asked for my landline number.
‘If the Scatman can do it, so can you’ … Scatman John (left) on German TV in 1996. Photograph: United Archives/Frank Hempel/Shutterstock
That afternoon, the phone rang – and for the first time in months, I picked it up.
“This is Juh-Juh-Juh-John,” said the California voice at the other end. He was stammering so heavily it took him a few minutes to introduce himself, but I already knew who it was. My favourite popstar had called my house.
I listened to him in awe – he was stammering openly, without fear or shame. And he skipped small talk to ask how I was feeling. John was an abuse survivor and a recovering addict; he knew all about the danger of toxic shame. Hiding would steal my life, he told me. Feeling brave, I let myself stammer – just once. I felt as if I could hear him smiling down the crackly transatlantic line.
“Ah!” he said. “It’s so b-b-b-b-beautiful to hear you stutter.”
After hearing that I began to dismantle my long-held belief that I had to sound like everyone else. The message I’d received from society and the media was always the same: stammering was a defect to be cured, pitied, or overcome. I didn’t yet know that it was neurological – a speech difference rooted in brain function, impervious to willpower. It was not my fault, John reminded me, and I didn’t need to be ashamed.
Shy, geeky, bullied … Gina Waggott, 16, in 1997. Photograph: Jon Dolan
He pestered me to join what was then the British Stammering Association and is now Stamma. And I began to “find my people” – others who understood what I was going through. But I continued to reach out to John when things got tough, and he would always answer, no matter how busy he was. During my first week of university in 1999, feeling anxious and stressed, I called him. His wife, Judy, answered and told me the cancer I knew he was fighting was now terminal.
Shocked, I blew my entire student loan on a plane ticket to Los Angeles the next day. I was warned he had stopped recognising people. But I walked in, and he lifted his head and smiled. “Oh my God, it’s you! It’s you!” he said, and reached out to me. I spent four days by his side, holding his hand.
John died six weeks later. He was 57. It took me many more years, but now I stammer openly and advocate for others. I try to be the kind of positive representation John was, paying forward what he gave me.
Today, his strange 1995 track is barrelling towards a billion streams. Almost nobody knows they are listening to the MTV generation’s most radical act of disability pride. But I do. Whenever I hear those rapid-fire syllables, I’m transported back to that phone call, and to the remarkable man who gave me back my voice.
Scatman John: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Unlikeliest Popstar by Gina Waggott is published by Bloomsbury (£21.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK, Childline is available on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978.
