The Walking Man (2 page)

Unlike my dad, my mom was a realist, so she couldn't deny her pain. After I became a quadriplegic, Mom always tried to serve me with a smile, at least in the beginning, but her cheeks were often wet from crying.

Before I became a burden, my mom was infinitely happy. Perhaps due to the death of her father when she was twelve years old, my mom didn't sweat the details. She knew how to address the needs of her children without being oppressive, allowing my brother and me to grow into the persons we were supposedly meant to be. She was definitely not one of those moms who invented tragic scenarios so she could warn her kids not to break a leg or get an eye poked out. She sought fun, within proper limits, while taking good care of us. We always had fresh food, good clothes, and we went to Disneyworld, or the equivalent, at least once a year. Hal and I were delighted to be Mom's kids.

As a patient, I was too self-centered to notice the signs of my mom's depression, but now they're obvious to me. Mom's slide into oblivion began the minute I was installed in our living room. My first and greatest mistake had been letting Mom give up her world to care for me. She quit her part-time job at the Apple General Store, abandoned her book club and even stopped knitting—her favorite hobby. Within a couple years, the phone stopped ringing, her smiles had subsided, and the humming of show tunes was replaced by sighs of despondency.

During my home stay, difficult incidents were too many to recall; most involved attempts to move me. A typical disaster occurred one day during a summer heat wave when our house lost power, causing the temperature in my room to quickly climb to one hundred degrees. In response, without the help of my brother Hal, who was at the town beach with his buddies, my mother tried to transfer me to my wheelchair on her own. Her objective was to take me outside and cool me down with a garden hose; I'm ashamed to say I was bitching up a storm at the time.

The maneuver required hauling me from my bed and depositing me into my wheelchair, which involved a quick lift, a turn, and then a push. First, my bed needed to be hand cranked to place me in a sitting position. Next, the panel on the receiving side of my wheelchair had to be removed. Then, my wheelchair needed to be locked into position, parallel to my bed. When the setup was complete, I then needed to be snatched under my armpits, lifted, and quickly slid into my wheelchair. The move required both strength and agility. My mother was five foot two inches tall and she weighed one hundred pounds. At sixteen, I was already six foot tall. My nickname prior to my decline was the "refrigerator;" I weighed two hundred fifty pounds.

A few hours into the blackout, a neighbor-townie stopped by to inform us that Apple Light and Power had confirmed that the electricity would be out for most of the a day. Being somewhat a self-centered idiot, I used this information to intensify my demands that Mom move me outdoors, by yelling things like: "Come on, Mah, you can do it… Come on, Mah, you're strong… Mahhhh, you gotta get me outta here… Mah, I'm sweating my ass off… Mahhhh, come on, Mah!"

"I don't know, son," Mother responded. "You’re a big boy."

Finally, after a couple hours more of squawking, Mom gave in. She properly set up the bed-to-wheelchair move and then grabbed me my under my armpits and pulled upward with all her might. Amazingly, she actually lifted me out of my bed, but my weight prevented her from executing the follow-on spin move needed to plop me into my chair. Instead, she stumbled backward while pulling me toward her petite body. For a moment that seemed like a year, Mom teetered back and forth under my full weight while releasing guttural moans that suggested she was giving birth. After a couple seconds, Mom started to collapse, so I screamed, "Dear Lord, Maaa! If you drop me I'll die!" In response, Mom somehow mustered the strength to drape me over her shoulder, charge forward, and then slam me into my wheelchair.

In response to Mom's inspired death defying move I said, "Gee, Ma, next time can you pleeeease be a little more careful?"

Mom was too distracted to respond; she'd slipped two discs in her back.

About ten seconds after landing in my wheelchair, the lights came on and the air-conditioning began to hum. Fool that I was, while Mom was still writhing in pain, I said, "Hey, Ma, the power's back! Change my sheets and put me back in my bed."

My mom's back never healed, and I never stopped making demands. I was so concerned about my life support that I never considered the things I could have done to make life easier for her, such as controlling my weight.

During my stay at home, I never once, not for a single second, considered the implications of a walking man's diet on a person incapable of burning an extra calorie. Taste being one of my only remaining sensations, I ate non-stop and constantly demanded food. I could blame Madison Avenue and claim, as a constant TV viewer, I was a victim of Doritos commercials, but that wasn't the case. I ate because it was my preferred way of imposing my existence on others. It was how I said, "Hey, here I am."

The predictable consequence of using food as a means to validate my existence was, quite simply, obesity. Although it's clear to me now that the foremost physical obligation of a quadriplegic is to maintain a minimum body mass, as a teenager I never once considered the consequences of my immense body on others. To me, pounds were life insurance. Sometimes, at night, when I couldn't sleep I would calculate how long I could survive without eating; I estimated if my weight hit four hundred pounds, I could live almost an entire year.

If you can't move, and you're the size of a house, transportation isn't your biggest problem; rather, it's bedsores. Stationary skin, under weight, perceives itself as being injured, so the body's wonderful immune system attacks it, creating potentially fatal skin ulcerations called bedsores. The only way to prevent a bedsore is to constantly move so your body will believe it isn't dead and subsequently calls off its self-destruct mechanisms. As a practical matter, this means that quadriplegics, especially heavy ones, need to be rolled every few hours, or they will die within a month or two. In my home-bound world, this meant at least six times a day—with the help of my brother Hal, Mom had to pull up on my sheets to roll me from one side to the other. I can remember like yesterday, the thousand times I screamed in the dead of night, "Hal, Mom, get your asses out of bed and roll me!"

The only partial mitigation for my inexcusable treatment of my mother during my days of homecare was my age; I was a teenager. And like most teenagers, I was smart enough to be lethal, but stupid enough not to fully recognize the obligations of adulthood. So to my great shame, I considered my mom more of a robot than a sentient human. To me, my mom was put on this earth to serve me. Consequently, as soon as I smelled shit, I called out for a change. And when I was hungry, regardless of the hour, I demanded food. All in all, between the rolling, cleaning, and feeding, an hour rarely passed without me yelling, "Maaaaaaahhhhhhh!"

My demands took their toll.

Four years into my quadriplegia, the care and maintenance of yours truly caused my Mom, a lifelong teetotaler, to reach for the bottle, a decision that eventually led her to experience a breakdown during one of my mid-afternoon feeding sessions.

Every day during my two o'clock "snack," I ate four Jell-O pudding cups. Since I lacked the muscle power required to execute an aggressive swallow, pudding was my favorite treat. However, spooning pudding into me was a challenging and time-consuming task because most often I would regurgitate a mouthful several times before ultimately swallowing it.

This meant my Mom needed to recapture my rejected pudding while it flowed down my chin, before it ended up all over my chest. The process required an exceptional level of hand-to-eye coordination but, when executed properly, it was a thing of beauty: feed, scrape, scrape, scrape; feed, scrape, scrape, scrape; feed, scrape, scrape, scrape…

On the day of her breakdown, per her usual routine, Mom had lined-up four pudding cups on my nightstand, butterscotch as always, my favorite flavor. My guess was Mom was drinking vodka because I couldn't smell anything on her breath. Regardless, her impairment was obvious; the first scoop of pudding filled both my nostrils causing me to sneeze. My sneeze covered most of Mom’s face with brown-yellow emulsion, mostly pudding. In response, Mom went wild, burying my entire face in an inch of pudding until I could no longer breathe.

Fearing imminent death-by-dessert, I somehow mustered the strength required to form a blowhole in my pudding mask, which allowed me to yell, "MOM, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!"

In response, without the assistance from my brother Hal, Mom rolled me on my side and stuck my pudding spoon where the sun don’t shine. Then, she gave me the middle finger while exiting my "living room"—never to return. In response, I said something I'll regret forever…

Later that day, my dad informed me that Mom had hurt herself, but she was going to be okay. He then said he would take care of me.

"Son, Mom needed some time away from you," Dad said with tears in his eyes. "You'll see her again soon."

Twenty-four hours later Jimmy Something-or-other showed up and drove me to Leicester County Hospital, one hundred miles west of Apple, just far enough away to make regular family visits impracticable.

Chapter Two

Leicester County Hospital

On my back, raised three feet high, and parallel to the ground, my head was immobilized by a "transport strap," and I could only look up as Jimmy Something-or-other pushed my infamous gurney up the ramp to the main entrance of Leicester County Hospital. I couldn't get a very good look at the place but I saw enough to know the building was big, old, and well kept. From the corner of my eye, I also caught a brief glimpse of the entry landscaping, a lawn that looked like a golf course green and a driveway lined with orange chrysanthemums. The main section of the building was a four-story brick and stone structure. It featured a massive entry archway constructed of large, carved brownstones. The stones were rough hewn yet perfectly interlocked as if they'd been assembled with the help of technologies far more advanced than a hammer and chisel. The building reminded me of the Apple Library, which was constructed right before the Civil War, so I figured Leicester County Hospital had been treating the "ill" since the mid nineteenth century. I was right; it opened its doors in 1846.

Within minutes of my arrival, I learned to the left and right of the "old hospital" were two wings. Each wing was fifty yards long, fifteen yards wide, and three stories high. Both structures were identical and housed the functional components of the facility. They were composed of large single pane windows and tan bricks, similar to the bricks Catholics deployed to build parochial schools back when nuns and faith existed. Time and acid rain had randomly oxidized the bricks causing varying degrees of hideous brown staining—but this ugliness was more than offset by the wing's windows, which were spectacular.

Originally commissioned to ensure patient privacy, each window at the hospital featured an exquisite etching. On one window there was an Indian Chief on horseback, spear in hand, hunting a buffalo; another depicted a man chasing a child; a third a ballet dancer mid-pirouette. In all, more than one hundred figures in motion adorned the wings of the Leicester County Hospital, home to two hundred fifty-two quadriplegics.

Initially built as a residence for the broke and/or insane, the founding name of Leicester County Hospital was The Leicester County Pauper and Insane Asylum. Located atop a hill that would be have been called Mount Everest in Iowa, the hospital was situated at the junction of the Wachmacallit and Hossiwhassit rivers between the Berkshire Mountains and the border of New York State in the small town of Shyshire, Massachusetts. To white people, Shyshire is most famous for making farmers' boots, otherwise known as ‘shitkickers.’ To Native Americans, Shyshire is considered holy ground because it was the site of several Indian massacres—settlers slaughtering Indians, not vice-versa.

Leicester County Hospital was sited in Shyshire because Shyshire was the only town in Massachusetts that openly accepted payoffs for welcoming operations nobody else wanted including: insane asylums, nuclear power plants, prisons, chemical plants, and hazardous waste dumps.

The town's aggressive zoning practices, often referred to as ‘Shyshire Tradeoff,’ eventually led to a quarter billion dollar trust fund which enabled the perpetual operation of several Shyshire institutions including Leicester County Hospital which never missed a payroll or charged its residents a dime.

Overall, the vast majority of Shyshire's citizenry accepted their town's cash-for-hazard proposition for it ensured long-term employment even though the dangerous nature of many jobs resulted in a shortened lifespans. There weren't many old people driving Buicks around the streets of Shyshire, and everybody seemed to like it that way.

When Leicester County Hospital was originally built, much was made of the hospital residents, which included people alternatively described as lunatics or maniacs. Its most famous detainee was Hungry Jack Foster, a fur trapper who chopped up and consumed his family of five during one particularly tough winter.

During the Great Depression, the mayor of Shyshire used the hospital's notoriety to secure extensive public works' funding, which he used to build a ten foot high concrete wall around Leicester County Hospital's three hundred acres. The wall, lovingly referred to as the 'Great Wall' by the people of Shyshire, kept the soup flowing until Shyshirites found real work after World War II.

Most of the Great Wall was composed of a concrete-gravel mix that was poured during subzero weather. This mistake eventually caused the exterior surface of the wall to erode, leaving behind a vertical mass of gravel, which was a surprisingly good visual complement to the hospital's rural setting.

The main access road to Leicester County Hospital was also built in the 1930s, though, unlike the Great Wall, it was intentionally beautiful. Designed by a German graduate student from Boston University, the road was inspired by a Nazi propaganda film that followed Adolph Hitler's motorcade as it zoomed down an Austrian boulevard. The tree-lined access road featured two extra wide lanes and a median strip containing equally spaced oak trees. Over the years, the branches from the median's oaks had become intertwined with limbs from trees that lined either side of the road. The entanglement gradually created a three-mile long tunnel that was dark and cool in the summer, causing it to become a destination hiking-trail for the few citizens in Shyshire who lived past sixty-five.