Crashing Through (3 page)

At school, things were just the same. Mike took tetherballs to the face and dodgeballs to the groin. He bloodied his nose, cracked toes, and broke fingers. While running to first base in kickball, he stepped on top of the ball, fell backward, and bashed his head on the pavement. He was unconscious for twenty minutes and rushed to the hospital. When he returned to school the next week, he played again.

School would have been a breeze for Mike were it not for resource instructor Medina. Some teachers were willing to excuse the blind students from assignments, but if Medina found out he would step in and force the kids to do the work anyway. He might ask, “Where the hell is your homework?” Some kids would bellyache or ask why he cared about their schoolwork if their own classroom teachers didn’t. “Because you should care,” Medina told them. “That’s what it’s all about.” Some parents objected to that kind of talk—they did not think a caretaker should confront a child already so challenged. Ori Jean told Mike that she and Medina connected.

Mike liked the other blind students. In ways, they were family, their resource room and teacher a common bond. But he didn’t necessarily understand them. Many chose to eat their lunches inside rather than go to the playground with the sighted kids—how could they not want to move? A lot of them walked tentatively, as if bumping into something was the worst thing in the world. Some of them had never even gotten lost.

One of them became Mike’s close friend. Mark Pighin was exceptionally bright and witty, and he liked the things Mike liked. Neither broke down when Medina got fed up with their excuses and told them, “Don’t give me that bull.” Soon Pighin’s family was inviting Mike to join them on their two-week summer vacations, a tradition that would last for years.

The match between the boys wasn’t obvious. In Mike’s view, Pighin was coddled by his parents. They would cut his meat, guide him by the arm even in familiar areas, lay out his clothes.

On a Pighin family vacation, Mike got the idea to explore the shuttered upper floors of the old lodge at which they were staying. He and Pighin made it to the musty attic. Pighin refused to go in—he was afraid there were rats inside, an animal he believed to be three feet long. Mike knew Pighin couldn’t leave without him so he went inside, followed by his terrified friend. Pighin kept talking about the rats. Mike, unable to resist, bent down and pinched his friend’s ankle. Pighin let out a bloodcurdling scream. The adults came running. When he could speak, Pighin told them he’d been bitten by a rat. Mike couldn’t believe his good luck—he was scot-free! But a moment later, he admitted to the pinch and prepared to accept the consequences. It was worth it to Mike. The attic was like an unknown world to him. At least he had gone and looked.

Even as Ori Jean raised Mike to embrace his blindness, she continued to hope that he would see. She had researched eye surgeons since the family had arrived in California and found perhaps the best in the world, Dr. Max Fine, just twenty-five miles away in San Francisco. On three occasions when Mike was in grade school, Fine transplanted corneas into his right eye (his left eye had been too badly damaged to try). It never worked. When Fine told Ori Jean after the last operation that nothing more could be done—now or ever—she exhaled. No longer would she have to go through that cycle of hope and disappointment.

By 1962, when Mike was nine, things started to strain in the May house. His mother had given birth to a fifth child, a girl named Margie, amplifying the demands on her already hectic days. Bill’s drinking, a constant murmur in their lives, began to roar. He lost jobs and was unable to support the family. He fought with Ori Jean. One day, while climbing on the roof of his house, Mike found a bottle of bourbon hidden in a gutter. Bill had sworn that he hadn’t been drinking. Mike showed the bottle to his father and said, “You lied to me! Here’s your liquor!” then smashed the bottle on the ground. Bill exploded and went after his son. Mike ran into a nearby orchard and scrambled up a tree. Bill demanded that Mike come down, but Mike refused and stayed and stayed until Bill ran out of fuel and walked away.

Mike could feel his father drifting away. This was not the same man who had invented their secret system for walking: a distinct squeeze of Mike’s palm one way to indicate an up curb, another to indicate a down curb. The system allowed Mike to walk freely, but the best part was that it came from his father’s mighty hand. Even as Bill’s drinking worsened and plunged his family into near poverty, Mike knew he loved his father because he still loved to hold his hand when they walked.

Bill continued to come home drunk, sometimes at seven
A.M.
and with lipstick on his collar. Fearing that he might hit the kids with his car, Ori Jean called the police and had her husband committed to the Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. It would be the first of several monthlong involuntary commitments. Ori Jean took her children to visit Bill every weekend he was there, bringing sandwiches for picnics on the hospital’s manicured grounds. Mike and Diane felt terrible for their father. There were weird people all over the hospital, and their father wasn’t weird at all.

The world was too interesting, however, to allow Mike time for such distractions. As he advanced through grade school almost everything fascinated him, and it all had to be investigated. In fourth grade, he signed up for the safety patrol class and showed up for training with the rest of the hopefuls. They were a half hour into the class before the instructor realized what was going on and pulled him aside and told him that a person had to be able to see in order to help children cross the street. The same news was delivered to Medina, Mike’s resource teacher.

Medina asked Mike what he thought they should do. Mike told Medina that he knew he could be a good crossing guard. And he said he couldn’t stand the idea of not getting a chance. Medina told Mike to go to the principal to make his case, and that he would back him the whole way.

The principal scarcely understood what Mike was asking—he wanted to do what? Mike outlined his plan: he would listen for cars the way he did when he crossed the street himself.

“You’re blind,” the principal said.

“I can do it,” Mike said.

“You have to be looking for cars, not just listening,” the principal said. “It won’t work. Sorry.”

Medina stepped forward. He argued that there were teachers already present during crossing time. And he talked about Mike.

“I know this kid,” Medina said. “He can do it.”

The principal said he would take the case under advisement.

The school called Ori Jean and informed her of Mike’s crazy idea. She told them it didn’t sound crazy to her. A few days and many meetings later, the principal gave Mike a vest with a bright triangle shape on the front. The next Monday he was holding up a stop sign and escorting children across the street.

Near the end of grade school, Mike asked his mother to let him ride a bike by himself to downtown Walnut Creek. It was a three-mile trip in traffic. Her stomach twisted with visions of rushing ambulances and bleeding heads. Her mind flashed back to the emergency room in New Mexico. Every maternal instinct she had screamed against the idea.

“It’s important to stay on the right-hand side of the road,” she found herself saying as tears rolled down her face. “If you hear a car or truck, just stop and pull over. If it gets to be too hard, don’t be afraid to turn around and come back. And don’t be afraid to be afraid—it’s important to know when you’re afraid.”

Ori Jean knew that Mike wouldn’t turn back. Standing at the mailbox, she watched him pedal down the driveway, around the culde-sac, and over the top of Kevin Court. And then she couldn’t see him anymore.

An hour passed. Two hours. Something had to be wrong. Ori Jean got into her car, but when she went to leave she thought about how it might hurt Mike’s feelings if she were to come upon the scene, how it would seem that she hadn’t believed in him. She stayed home and vacuumed the living room, then vacuumed it again. After three hours Mike walked in the door. “Hi, Mom,” he said, then went to wash up for dinner. She never asked him about the trip—she didn’t want it to seem like a big deal.

At home, Bill’s drinking worsened. To support the family Ori Jean took a full-time job teaching Spanish at a suburban Oakland school. Her annual salary was less than $5,000. Still, when she brought her children to the grocery store or to the park, she wore earrings and jewelry and made herself as pretty as she’d looked in Chile, when she’d been the daughter of wealth and had servants to brush her hair. She dressed her kids smartly for school and in their Sunday best for Catholic church. In public, there was no sign that the St. Vincent de Paul charity had brought groceries to her house for Christmas that year.

For fifty weeks of every year since Mike had been seven, Ori Jean had immersed him in the sighted world. For the remaining two she sent him to the land of the blind.

Set in the Napa foothills, Enchanted Hills was a summer camp for the visually impaired. It urged independence in its campers. Kids could hike, row, camp out in tents, explore, even get lost, all according to their appetites. Ori Jean had discovered the place in 1961 and enrolled Mike straightaway, sometimes soliciting churches and kind souls for funds. It had felt like home to him ever since.

In the summer before junior high, Mike began to do things at Enchanted Hills that most campers wouldn’t consider. He rode horses into areas no one had probed, hiked off the map, negotiated paths paved in poison oak. He described a plan to counselors whereby he would hike away from camp for hours on known trails, then return as the crow flies, up and down through canyons and streams. The counselors drew the line at that one, but none doubted that Mike would have tried. They could not see his eyes behind his drooping eyelids, but when they looked at the way his head tilted upward while conceiving a plan, they could see the pioneer in his heart.

At summer’s end, Mike and the other blind students from Buena Vista Elementary matriculated to Park Mead Intermediate. Nick Medina went with them. That meant no whining for another two years. Mike felt lucky. Medina seemed sure and constant, the way Mike tried to feel when the world got too big. It felt good when Medina said, “If I hadn’t kicked your butt you wouldn’t have gotten that A.” It felt great when he said, “I like you, Mike.”

Math and science spoke most directly to Mike, though he made A’s and B’s in all his courses. He remained mostly shy and quiet in class, as he had been since kindergarten. Though he spent much of his day among sighted students, no one teased or bothered him—he wasn’t a tattler or dorky, just blind. He continued to take notes and write papers with a braillewriter, a clackety-clacking cousin to the typewriter that used pins to push braille letters into paper. When Mike walked down the halls the ten-pound steel machine swung wildly from his noodly arm. The sighted kids learned to scatter fast when they saw him coming.

The playground remained the epicenter of Mike’s schooltime passion. He continued to crash into poles, fences, and classmates, even losing consciousness in a head-on collision with a football goalpost. Kids wondered how he could charge so fearlessly knowing it was just a matter of time before he bashed into something else, but to Mike that was just the point—he already knew the worst that could happen, and it didn’t seem bad at all compared to the feeling he got from running.

By 1965, the five May children were old hat at minding themselves. Ori Jean left early on weekday mornings to teach eighth-grade Spanish, while Bill slept off benders between jobs he couldn’t keep. Diane and Mike babysat their younger siblings, cleaned the house, and prepared meals. Mike’s specialties included casseroles, spaghetti, and tacos, the messy fruits of the cooking course Ori Jean had insisted he take.

The kids got along well, considering they shared two bedrooms and a single bathroom. Each believed that the others received favored treatment; all watched vigilantly to make sure Mike didn’t invoke blindness to do less than his full share. No matter how many times Ori Jean asked, the kids seemed not to remember to keep the floors clean or to put things back where they belonged. Much of Mike’s home life was spent sprawled over toys or demanding to know, “Who moved my stuff?” His siblings had a collective response: “Not me.”

They also knew the best ways to have fun with a brother who couldn’t see. Diane, Theri, and Patrick mixed up Mike’s blue and red socks, sending him to school with mismatched feet. They gave him dog food and told him it was breakfast cereal. They mastered the silent arts of pushing their brussels sprouts onto Mike’s plate during dinner and stealing bites of his pie at dessert. In hide-and-seek they were not above pointing him in the wrong direction; in Monopoly they paid pennies on the dollar when he passed Go. Soon Mike developed countermeasures, such as taking inventory of his dinner and asking for seconds on dog food.

As he neared the end of junior high in 1967, Mike could feel his home life start to shake. Bill was out of work and drinking more than ever. Sometimes he didn’t come home. The family’s priest urged Ori Jean to divorce him. She tried four times but was never able to see it through.

Bill’s fuse shortened with each of her false starts. The kids tried not to hear the fights, but already they knew the dialogue by heart, especially the part about how shameful it was to give up. One night, Bill threatened to hit Ori Jean. Mike ran into the room, stepped between them, and went into his boxing stance, his fists turned upward in the style of the old bare-knuckles fighters.

“Don’t you dare hit my mother!” Mike screamed.

The display shocked Bill. He stood there for a moment, taking in Mike’s scrawny body and quivering lip. Mike remained in his stance. Finally, Bill backed off and walked away. Ori Jean threw him out and filed for divorce days later. She was thirty-nine years old and the mother of five children, ages five through fifteen.

In the months after Bill had gone Ori Jean blew up occasionally. Tears streaming down her face, she’d yell at her kids, “You guys, your rooms aren’t clean, the kitchen’s dirty, you’re fighting, I’m trying to go to work and take care of you all, but I’m not going to be able to keep it together unless you do better to help me.” Mike thought about his mom a lot during those days, about how she drove the kids to four different schools, how she kept finding ways to send him to camp, how clean she kept the house even when he could hear her crying. And even then, he thought, “She’s brave.”