Ryan White - My Own Story (5 page)

Right about the time when we started using Factor at home and I didn’t have to rush off to the emergency room constantly, my mom sat Andrea and me down separately, and told us she was asking Dad to move out because she wanted a divorce. I can’t say I was real surprised. It already seemed like a long time since any of us had seen Dad. He was always out with his friends. He never seemed to have a couple of hours to stay around and hang out with Mom, Andrea, and me.

After Dad moved out, he didn’t call us. When we asked him why, he said, “Well,
you
never call
me
.” A few times, he came to pick Andrea and me up to spend the weekend at his new place. But instead of staying with us, he would leave us with his parents, and go off with his friends. Staying with our other grandparents wasn’t so bad. They didn’t have a dog, like my mom’s parents, but Dad’s father did have an antique car. Sometimes he’d go to a rally with other old cars, and we’d see him in a whole parade of them, going down the street in Kokomo.

Actually, staying with Dad could be a whole lot worse than when we were left with his parents. Once Andrea and I were sleeping over with Dad at his new place. Dad got us a frozen pizza for dinner, which was fine with us, and put it in the oven to heat up. Meanwhile, he decided to take a short nap on the couch. Well, the pizza heated up, all right—in fact, it was burning up. The living room was filling up with smoke, and we couldn’t wake Dad! Remember, Andrea and I were only five and seven—a lot smaller than Dad. Finally, we got him to get up, and we all stumbled out of the house.

After that, we told Mom we didn’t want to stay with Dad anymore. Andrea said, “It’s boring. He’s never there, and there’s nothing to do. I don’t want to see him.” I agreed with Andrea about the boring part, but I did miss Dad. One evening he said he was coming over. I sat out on the front porch waiting for him until about eleven o’clock, when Mom finally made me go to bed.

If my hemophilia was hard on Andrea, maybe it was hard on Dad too. Or maybe there was something else that bothered him. I’d like to ask him about that sometime, just so I know.

I’ve always been smaller and weighed less than other kids my age. That’s why I’m careful about clothes—I try to wear loose jeans and sweatshirts so I don’t look so skinny. I’ll never play football or basketball or baseball—any of the sports that kids my age play. Once I even asked my doctor for steroids. He explained that they weren’t very good for me and he wasn’t going to give me any. We live in a place where sports are important, but I’d like to remind Dad that there
are
plenty of other things I can do. And I could tell him that once I got to be famous, and started meeting stars, I found out that most celebrities are short.

The strange part is that Dad didn’t dump us completely. You hear about fathers who abandon their kids and never send them any money. We hardly saw my dad, he didn’t seem to want to know us at all, but we had enough to live on because he always paid child support. And when I’ve gotten sick, his insurance has paid my hospital bills. That counts, as far as I’m concerned.

Most of the time I can’t be bothered thinking about the past. I figure, if things have been bad, that means you have something to look forward to, right? But sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the other Wayne had gotten through to my mom first, before she married my dad. Maybe I never would have been born, but maybe I could have had another father and a whole different life. In Georgia, or someplace else.

I know my sister wonders too. Maybe five or six years ago, a long time after my parents had gotten divorced, Andrea decided to try to find the first Wayne. Without telling my mom, she called information in the Georgia town he was from. She told the operator all she knew: Wayne’s full name, and another clue—his father owned a casket company. But Wayne wasn’t listed. Maybe he moved. My mom says he had a bad heart, so he might even be dead by now. He never did call her again, even after we started getting splashed all over the news.

About three months after my dad left, Mom did get re-married—to another man she worked with at the plant. I guess her second husband—his name is Steve Ford—liked her a lot, because she ended up getting a job at Delco that he was supposed to have. Steve is a great big, cheerful guy with a bushy beard. People are always telling him he reminds them of Kenny Rogers—and he does look just like him. It helps that Steve likes country music and dancing the two-step. He’ll drive as far as Louisville, Kentucky, way south of here, to try out a new dance joint he’s heard about.

The other thing that Steve likes is Mustangs—mostly because of his name. He’s always driven a Mustang, and I never had any trouble talking him into taking me to car shows. He taught Andrea and me to drive, and he even ended up giving Andrea one of his old Mustangs. She has her eye on the one he has now—a convertible!

Steve lived outside of Kokomo in a little country town called Windfall that makes Kokomo look like New York City. So when Mom and Steve got married, we moved there to live with him. Andrea and I played together a lot because there weren’t many other kids around.

Indiana’s a windy place, especially in the winter. Windfall gets its name from all the tornados that pass through—even more than you usually get in the rest of the state. Since everything around Windfall is flat, and there aren’t any tall buildings, you can see the sky in every direction. When a tornado’s on the way, you can see its black funnel stretching from the storm clouds on the horizon to the ground below. The tornado’s moving all the time, and usually looks like it’s coming straight at you! It gets very dark out, and it looks like the whole earth and sky is being sucked into the funnel.

The best thing to do in a tornado is to go down into your basement or your root cellar. In
The Wizard of Oz
Dorothy didn’t do that, and look at all the trouble she got into! Our house in Windfall didn’t have a cellar, so we just stayed indoors. One time a tornado struck our house. It roared like a freight train coming through, moving all around and under the house—like we were going to be lifted up into the sky! Mom, Andrea, and I lay on the bathroom floor, but there wasn’t room for Steve, he had to stay out in the hall. In the end the tornado pulled the back wall of the house out six inches, and then moved on. We had a pretty close call, I guess. When I was almost sixteen, Andrea, Mom, and I were out in California with my grandparents when there was an earthquake at seven o’clock in the morning. Our hotel swayed for twenty minutes, the power went off, and we could see cracks in the walls of our room! My grandparents wanted to get on the next plane home to Indiana, but I thought the whole thing was pretty exciting. An earthquake that’s 6.5 on the Richter scale with twenty-one aftershocks doesn’t happen in Kokomo.

I would say that tornado was the most excitement we ever had in Windfall. But Andrea would disagree with me, because while we were living in Windfall, she started roller skating. All thanks to Steve: He liked to skate, and at first he took both of us along with him. I thought skating was okay, but as soon as Andrea laced on her first pair of skates, she was in love. She bugged and bugged Mom for lessons. At first, Mom thought she ought to switch to ice skating, but Andrea said, “There’s no ice rink here, and all my friends roller skate.” Then the teacher said she wouldn’t take Andrea because she was too young—only seven—and she should wait ’til she got better. Andrea just said, “That’s why I want lessons.” Pretty soon both Mom and Steve were taking turns driving her down to the rink for lessons on weekends and skating practice after school up to four times a week.

I should have mentioned that for many girls in Indiana, roller skating is about the same as the Indianapolis 500. See, you can do just about anything on roller skates that you can on ice skates—all the fancy jumps and spins and figures. The movements even have the same names as in ice skating—the double flip, the lutz, the salchow, the axel, triple mapes. Roller skaters look just as graceful and glamorous as ice skaters. They get to wear glittery costumes and headgear with sequins and feathers. Mom designs Andrea’s costumes—sometimes they have to drive all the way to Chicago for the right material and trim—and a friend of Mom’s sews them.

Skating’s harder on roller skates, because you’re on two sets of wheels on a smooth, wooden rink. You don’t have blades with edges that cut into the ice. On ice your skate blade turns easily; with rollers, you have to position yourself on the edge of your wheels to turn. And each skate weighs as much as eight pounds—much more than ice skates! Roller skating isn’t an Olympic sport yet, but lots of fans are working hard to make it one. In the meantime there are tons of local and regional competitions and national championships to go out for. There are even world championships, and roller skating is in the Annual Olympic Sports Festival and the Pan-American Games.

Andrea set out to be a champion. I took some lessons too, and went out for some figure skating and dance contests. But I couldn’t compete in singles events because skaters fall all the time. I mean
all
the time. I had enough trouble with bleeds without taking up roller skating.

But Andrea didn’t fall—at least not when it counted. She kept taking lessons, she kept practicing, she started to win and she didn’t stop. Soon she had skating ribbons and trophies all over the walls of her room. She wants to win the national championships—she went for the first time only a year after she started skating—and she’s been out to the U.S. Olympics summer training camp in Colorado Springs. And she and Mom got to spend more time together: Most of the time Mom drove Andrea to skating practice, and then to meets. Andrea loved having Mom there to watch her, and they hung out with the other skaters and their parents. My mom says she always knew that one of her children would be famous. For a long time she thought there would be just one: Andrea.

I wasn’t as lucky in the athletics department as Andrea. When I was eight, I was all set to go out for the Windfall Little League. Grandpa had a cow, but Mom paid no attention. The coach put me in the outfield where he thought I couldn’t get into very much trouble. He told me, “Don’t charge the ball—let it come to you.” One day a ball came at me. I waited for it, like the coach had said, but it hit me square in the mouth. I began to bleed. The coach was much more frightened than I was. I did what I always did when I got hurt: I told him to call Mom. She came and picked me up and gave me some Factor in the kitchen at home. I hated having to leave the game, and going to school with a bandage on. What a disaster! As usual, kids kept asking, “What’s wrong with you now?” But I wasn’t scared. I had no plans to quit baseball.

The Windfull Little League Team, 1981. Ryan is in bottom row, far left.

Then came another game when I was playing first base. A line drive came right at me, and hit me in the stomach. I fell back like a tree you’d chopped down. I wasn’t hurt, but the ball knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t move, but I could see the whole team crowded around, looking down at me, shouting, “You hurt?” The coach ran up with a towel in case I was bleeding. That
was
scary. I quit at the end of the season. I was never going to be an athlete, and I decided I had to learn to live with that.

W
E SEEMED
pretty well settled in Windfall. My grandparents weren’t so close by to worry about me. But in 1982, when I was eleven, Mom and Steve decided to divorce. Like Dad, Steve wasn’t home much. But after Steve and Mom separated, and she moved back to Kokomo with Andrea and me, Steve didn’t disappear the way Dad had. He called us every week, and he came to see us every Sunday and mowed our lawn. Lots of times he still drove Andrea to skating practice, and he took Andrea and me skating at the rink in Kokomo, though I paid more attention to the pinball machines. After I got AIDS, he always visited me in the hospital when other people were scared to come near me. When my friends asked who he was, Steve would laugh and say he was my unwed stepfather. He has something like twenty or thirty nieces and nephews, so he’s used to being the official baby-sitter. He and Mom talked on the phone constantly, about everything, like brother and sister. They were so friendly that people asked Mom why they didn’t get back together. Mom said the point was they
were
like brother and sister, not husband and wife.

Even though I couldn’t play baseball, and my mom was divorced, I felt like I had a pretty normal childhood. Mom had to be two parents in one, but lots of kids in Kokomo had single mothers. Women could support their families on their jobs at Delco, so they didn’t have to stay married if they were in bad situations. Andrea and I never felt out of it at school. We went away on vacation—once my grandparents took us to the NASA Space Center—just like other kids. And you’d never guess I had hemophilia unless I told you. Andrea might tell you not to play rough with me, but I never would. If I got hurt, I called Mom, and she drove home and gave me some Factor in the kitchen. There wasn’t anything to worry about. So I couldn’t figure out what was going on when Grandpa started fussing about my Factor.