The Walking Man (12 page)

The next day, Hal bought me six thousand, five hundred forty shares of Apple stock. The transaction date was October 3, 1990.

I have never sold a share.

Now you know why a picture of Steven Jobs hangs on my wall of fame.

~ ~ ~

Comforted by the relative certainty that the men from Triple J would keep Maria safe, I next went to work—at the urging of my beloved coach Smitty—on straightening out the mess that was my life. Smitty started the process, in a formal planning session, by asking me to list three things I wanted to do in my lifetime.

"You can't get anywhere unless your goals are set in stone, so take your time," Smitty said. "Setting a goal is more important than chasing it."

"I don't need any time," I told him. "My three goals are, marry Maria, marry Maria, and marry Maria."

"Very good!" Smitty said. "There's nothing more powerful than a man who knows what he wants. Now we need to make a plan."

I tried to speak, but Smitty kept talking.

"First off, you need to lose one hundred pounds and then learn to walk again."

"Hello, walk again?" I said. "It would be easier to find a cure for cancer."

"Bullshit," Smitty said. "You need to walk again. You told me your spine isn't severed. You said your fucked-up immune system crippled you. You need to unfuck your immune system and start walking."

"Is 'unfuck' even a word?" I asked my shockingly assertive 'life coach'.

"It certainly is," Smitty informed me with a smile. "It resides between 'unfruitful' and 'unfulfilled' in
Webster's Dictionary.
"

~ ~ ~

My main concern about losing weight was breaking the news to my dear friend, Chef Royalston. I wasn't sure how he'd take my decision; I was his favorite diner. I asked Nurse Judy to back me into Chef Royalston's office so I could face the issue straight on.

"Royal," I said.

"Yes, my dear friend," Chef Royalston responded.

"I'm a blob," I said. "I'm dripping fat. I weigh over three hundred pounds. It takes two nurses to roll me. And even Smitty groans when he picks me up. I need to lose weight."

"Nonsense," Chef Royalston said. "You're a healthy young man."

"Royal, I need to lose one hundred pounds. So I have decided to become a vegetarian."

"A vegetarian," Chef Royalston indignantly responded, "a person that doesn't eat meat?"

"That's correct."

"Not even pâté de foie gras?" the despondent chef asked.

"Not even pâté."

"Oh, my, my," Chef Royalston said.

A minute of silence passed.

"You know this means I must become the greatest vegetarian chef in the world," Chef Royalston said. "I'm never half in."

"I know."

There was a moment of silence.

"Fish?" Chef Royalston ventured.

"Not even fish."

Chef Royalston fidgeted with his rear view mirror as his body stiffened. A minute passed, then his shoulders relaxed.

"It's about time somebody did something about lentil soup," he said.

"The stuff tastes like shit."

"You're not giving up on the wine, I hope."

"Never!"

"Ahhhh, very well, my dear friend," the suddenly invigorated chef said. "Vegetarian it is. Now go. I have a busy time ahead. I need to learn how to make tofu taste like roast beef."

~ ~ ~

The first three months of my diet were hell on earth. The problem wasn't the food. It was the portions. Tiny servings of tasty vegetables made every fat cell in my body groan, "Why?"

True to his word, Chef Royalston quickly mastered vegetarian cuisine, creating one dish more delicious than the next, day after day. He made a spicy black bean burger with salsa sauce served on a toasted honey grain bun that made a regular hamburger taste like Alpo. He glazed nuts with honey and then added them to yogurt along with blueberries plus other mysterious crunchy things; the resultant parfait was more delicious than an ice cream sundae. There were ultra-yummy vegetable quiches, a variety of homemade mac and cheeses, and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing with whole berries that could make any green leaf taste like "buttah."

Every week, my weight was measured by the amount of water I displaced in the wing's bathtub. It took me two years and a month to break the two hundred pound barrier. To celebrate the achievement, Smitty drove me to the Chestnut Hill Mall outside of Boston to purchase a new wardrobe. The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the mall was the distinct lack of Ford pickup trucks in its parking lot.

"Smitty, it appears the working man has little interest in Brooks Brothers," I observed.

"That's because they don't know what they're missing."

Despite being upscale, the mall seemed to lack adequate handicapped ramps, but inside, the people were pleasant and deferential.

"Look, Mommy," one little girl yelled. "There's a man in a wheelchair. Maybe if we give him a quarter, he'll sing a song."

"Don't get too close to him, dear," the mom warned her.

Being a man, I hated shopping, so I bought everything quickly and then made a quick exit. My purchases included a traditional navy-blue pinstripe suit with a deep red tie and white shirt, Republican fare from the aforementioned Brooks Brothers. I bought a pile of Steven Job's turtlenecks from the GAP, a couple Cashmere sweaters from Needless Markups, several pairs shoes, two Nike running outfits, a dozen Izod shirts, plus a couple of high-end wrist watches, being quadriplegic was all about measuring time.

Smitty was delighted as we exited the mall. "Looking good will make you feel good about yourself," he said. "Like Nurse Judy says, 'dress is about dignity'."

"You're right," I said to Smitty. "Clothes make the man."

"Damn straight."

"Smitty," I said. "Why do you always wear a ten year old Patriot's jersey covered with burritos stains?"

"What can I tell you," he said. "I talk a better game than I play."

I led Nurse Judy and Smitty to believe my clothing purchases were strictly about my desire to comply with their good advice. But all along I had an ulterior motive. I was about to embark on a minor PR campaign aimed at an audience of one.

~ ~ ~

If fame can occur within a small town, Gabrielle Smickers was the most famous person in Shyshire. Gabrielle wrote a thrice-weekly advice column for
The
Shyshire Tattler
and an occasional feature article about some interesting person, place, or thing. Gabrielle's column was called
Dear Gabby
. She was also the person responsible for the outrageous headlines that made
The Tattler
a notable entity within the fourth estate.

Most often,
Dear Gabby
offered relationship advice to Shyshire's lovelorn, usually in a comical vein. Gabby once encouraged a desperate teenager to treat her acne with a rotary sander, and on another occasion she divided the town's population into democrats, republicans, and people who'd had oral sex with the mayor.

Juliette Dritch was always interested in promoting the hospital's good works, so she occasionally contacted
The Shyshire Tattler
to suggest a human-interest story that showed Leicester County Hospital in a good light. At my urging, Juliette Dritch contacted Gabrielle Smickers to suggest a story about a fifteen-year resident that had just lost one hundred pounds due to a vegetarian diet. Since Gabby weighed more than a Dodge Caravan and had tried every diet known to man, she agreed to write the article, which was to include "before" and "after" photographs of me.

The interview took place in my room. I decided to downscale my planned formal look and went with a casual sports jacket and a pink Izod shirt. During the interview, I babbled about the awesomeness of Chef Royalston and talked of my favorite foods, causing Gabby to emit a visible stream of drool on more than one occasion.

Ultimately, the text of the story was of little interest to me. What mattered were the photographs that accompanied the article. My "before" photograph was a picture of Maria standing beside me at our Halloween Party. I was dressed as Frankenstein, but looked like the Blob. My "after" picture looked like a headshot of an aspiring soap opera actor. I had perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect clothes and a perfect smile. I was sitting in a regular chair in front of my wall of fame, which included a discernible and strategically placed image of Maria.

When my story was published, Gabby dropped me a note saying my handsomeness had garnered three marriage proposals from her readers. She then asked if I was interested in having popcorn fed to me at a movie.

The photos appeared in the Living Section of the
Sunday Shyshire Tattler
above the tagline
The Vegetable Who Eats Vegetables
. I knew Maria would see my pictures. I was hoping they would inspire a visit, or at least warrant a spot on her refrigerator door.

Chapter Eight

Muscle Soup

Unfortunately, my stunning good looks did not result in any form of contact from Maria. Thus, as Halloweens passed, I was forced to deal with the reality that, at best, to Maria I was a fading memory. Nonetheless, I maintained my spiffy appearance and proceeded to pursue the next phase of my game plan, hoping someday to walk back into Maria's life.

During the 1990s, losing weight was easier than gaining knowledge, especially if you couldn't move. As such, my research into my strange paralysis consisted of sending Rodrigo or Smitty to Boston once a month to get me textbooks and then paying kids from Shyshire High School to read them to me. My access to information was so limited that it took me five years to learn enough biology and chemistry to gain a rudimentary understanding of the human nervous system and the million possible ways to fuck it up.

Things began to change in the late Nineties, when The Truth began hooking me up with the latest gizmos for the handicapped, including a machine that converted text-to-speech invented by an M.I.T. techie-futurist-entrepreneur named Ray Kurzweil, another member of my wall of fame.

"So, my young Padawan," I would say to The Truth, knowing the Star Wars term for apprentice annoyed him to no end. "What do we have here?"

"It's a device that will read a text file to you," The Truth said. "You just click on the file and it reads the text to you through your earphones."

"Amazing," I said. "Let's give it a try."

"I've arranged a demonstration. The system will now read
The
Great Gatsby
to you," The Truth said as he plugged my earphones into my motionless head.

"Awesome," I said. "
The Great Gatsby
is my favorite."

"I know," the Truth said. "The voice may be a bit annoying at first. But I'm sure you'll get used to it."

The Truth then activated the system and departed Room 302, leaving me to enjoy my favorite novel.

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice…"

The words were discernible and definitely
The Great Gatsby
, but the tone of the narrator was unbearable. It took me a few minutes to realize it was the voice of Jar Jar Binks, the bumbling Gungan from Star Wars I; by far, the most annoying character ever to appear on the silver screen.

The Truth had brought new meaning to the term "passive aggressive."

After he returned to my room, laughing to the point of tears, The Truth adjusted the voice of my narrator to sound like David McCullough and I soon found text-to-speech increasing my rate of knowledge acquisition by an order of magnitude, for, unlike my beloved human readers, my little text-to-speech device never tired of reading to me, or made excuses to leave the room when I launched an involuntary gas attack.

I was so pleased with my text-to-speech device that I was certain its magic could never be surpassed, but then The Truth installed a companion technology on my Macintosh and I became a virtual super man. It was a small microphone attached to some amazing software that converted my speech to text.

Speech-to-text enabled me to control my computers and send messages anywhere in the world via the Internet. At first, I voiced simple text messages to a limited audience of techies. But then the HTML coding standard was adopted and the worldwide web was born. Soon, speech-to-text was enabling me to communicate with anybody, any place, any time.

The web, without a doubt, was the single greatest thing that ever happened in my life, with the exception of meeting Maria, of course.

Although most of my partners in static living assigned value to the web for its ability to provide a semi-anonymous forum for talking dirty to walking folks, to me, the web was a miracle because it finally enabled me to hook-up with researchers who shared my interest in muscle-nerve connections. With speech-enabled web, within seconds of making a request, I was able to access obscure information, such as the geometries of dopamines and acetocholine receptors. Relatively overnight, I became a more competent neurologist than any man with a Ph.D. after his name.

Sadly, the more I learned, the more I understood how little mankind knew about the human nervous system and the ultra complex immune system that occasionally decided to attack one of its vital components. I soon found honest researchers responding to the majority of my inquiries by typing: [We don't know].

Having tapped out the available knowledge base related to the neurology of muscles, I soon began spending more time with The Truth—exploring all things digital. As the importance of the Internet became apparent to the common man, technology improved and prices dropped. Soon, websites and magazines were published with high-definition color photographs of the latest computers, servers, and routers. Technology had become a swimsuit model and The Truth and I became techno-buddies as we gawked at the pictures of the things we had to have while arguing over who was the greater nerd, thus deserving of a certain Star Wars nickname.

I must admit, for a brief time I so loved the worldwide web that at times I almost forgot about Maria. I woke each day excited about further connecting myself, and my fellow partners living the bed life, to the outside world. Soon, funded by my expanding Apple fortune, Room 302 had a rack of computers with high-speed access to the internet.