The Walking Man (5 page)

I was totally miserable. I said, "fuck" every other word and yelled all the time without provocation. I treated my fellow quadriplegics with disdain and complained bitterly about the slightest inconsistency in my care.

The only people I treated like human beings were my volunteer feeders and readers. And, I was only kind to them because they represented my best chance at catching the flu, a three-day sickness for the walking man, but a ticket to the daisy bed for your average quadriplegic. I distinctly remember the day a young man from Shyshire entered my room with a hacking cough. After he sneezed in my direction three times without covering his mouth, I was certain the flu would ensue and I'd be dead in under a week. But I never got sick. Besides being quadriplegic, I was perfectly healthy. In fact, for the next thirty years, Dr. Bonjour annually proclaimed that I was the healthiest patient at Leicester County Hospital.

The source of my depression and related bad behavior was matricide, pure and simple. After Hal told me my mother died in a "car accident," I lost it. I instantly knew he was lying. When I was twelve, we had a neighbor that blew his head off with a shotgun. Everybody said it was a "car accident." The guy had six kids.

I can still recall our conversation:

"Hal, tell me what happened to Mom, or I'll never speak to you again."

"It was a car accident."

"Bullshit, Hal. Tell me the truth," I demanded.

"She started the car in the garage with the door closed, then fell asleep. It was a car accident."

"When?"

"Right after the pudding incident."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You know," Hal said with a slight stutter. "Because you can't walk—we didn't want you to feel—guilty."

"Fuck you, Hal," I responded.

Being a twenty-year-old selfish idiot, I immediately convinced myself that Dad and Hal's deception in hiding my mom's death was a heinous act that warranted my endless scorn. So for the next eight years I refused to speak to them. The few times a year they would visit, including Christmas and Easter, I would stare at my ceiling, refusing to acknowledge their existence. Nothing they could say could convince me to speak. I considered myself a man without a family.

Looking back, my overreaction to my mother's death validated my family's reasons for hiding her "accident" from me. Just as Hal and Dad had suspected, Mom's death caused me to be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt. At first, to deal with my shame, I tried to make excuses, but I always concluded I was twenty years old; I should have known better. While Mom cared for me, signs of her depression were obvious, but I chose to ignore them and instead focused on my own selfish needs. "Mom, clean me! Mom feed me!" An hour never passed without me screaming her name.

The more I thought about my culpability, the worse I felt. During the four years that Mom took care of me, I never gave her a gift or suggested she take a vacation. And most shamefully, I never said, "I love you." In fact, I hate to admit this, but the last words I said to my mother, the person who brought me into this world were, "Get back here you fucking cunt and clean me up!" I called my mother, a woman who loved me unconditionally, "a fucking cunt." Some acts just cannot be forgiven. Some words can never be taken back.

In retrospect, I now realize my motionless condition caused me to feel entitled. I thought being a quadriplegic made me special and obligated those who loved me to serve me. "Look at me I can't move, you need to take care of me." I now know I had it backwards. As a man, I was obligated to act in the best interests of my family. I should have freed my mom to live her own life. Instead I took advantage of her, knowing she loved me too much to ever commit me to an institution.

I'm older now, but I've never lost the hurt from doing the wrong thing. I should have insisted on being sent to Leicester County Hospital the day after I planted my face in the bread aisle at the 7-11. The sad fact is, that in the 1970s a quadriplegic man, especially a teenager, did not belong at home. The equipment simply didn't exist to make the burden of taking of care of a two hundred pound motionless man a reasonable proposition. Consequently, albeit unintentionally, my determination to live sucked the life out of my mom, I may have been confined to a bed, but I was just as lethal as a walking man.

~ ~ ~

During the decade following my mom's death, my life was dominated by self-loathing and my ongoing battle with Arthur Slank. It was my darkest period. It was the 1980s.

For staying alive, the Leicester County Hospital gave each patient a few dollars a week; most of my partners in bed-based living used this money to purchase candy from the hospital's commissary. Most often the candy was given to volunteers as a way of saying thanks, a practice highly encouraged by Dr. Bonjour and the hospital's staff.

On more than one occasion, Nurse Judy and others encouraged me to spend my money on Milk Duds or Snickers. Inevitably, upon receiving such advice, I would always agree to purchase a large amount of candy if my advisor would agree to stuff it into my mouth until I choked to death. I would then suggest the purchase of a dozen sticks of Laffy Taffy
or several king-sized bags of Sugar Babies.

Eventually my "negative dialogue" and my generally foul attitude got me listed as "incorrigible" and placed on a "suicide watch." In the walking world, this meant they took away your belt and shoe laces; in Leicester County Hospital, it meant something else. If things got bad enough, you might get what you wished for…

After arriving at LCH it took me six months to save enough money to buy my own television and VCR. I got the set from a charity run out of MIT that equipped video players with voice-activated remote control units especially designed for quadriplegics. It was my first encounter with technology for the handicapped. I considered it magic.

Along with the TV set I bought the entire works of
Tom and Jerry: Volumes Two through Ten
. Serendipitously, my purchases arrived one day after
The Very Best of Tom and Jerry: Volume One
failed after its eight hundred tenth viewing. A techy kid, nicknamed "The Truth," a volunteer from Shyshire High School, installed my "AV system." As instructed, he placed it in the middle of 302's sole dresser directly adjacent to Arthur's old school TV set.

When we first met The Truth was a classic punk-nerd. He had a sidehawk (one side of his head was shaved) with bleach-blond hair. He had multiple layers of acne. He was tall and heroin-addict thin. He always wore violent T-shirts that said things like 'Better off Dead!' He spoke like words annoyed him. And, he considered George Lucas God on Earth.

"So, how did you get your nickname?" I asked.

"I came up with it," he said. "My goal in life is to be like a computer because they never lie."

"The Truth," I said. "I like it."

"Thank you," The Truth said. "I follow digital technology because it's the path to perfection."

"So, I guess that means you love computers, huh?"

"I sleep with an Atari," The Truth sheepishly admitted.

After completing the installation, I asked The Truth to play one of my videotapes.

"I will process your request," he responded.

"They're in the top drawer of my dresser."

"Understood."

"
Tom and Jerry
," The Truth said, as he accessed all my worldly possessions. "A most entertaining cartoon about a cat and a mouse, I love
Tom and Jerry
."

"Me, too!" I yelled. "I looooovvvvvve Tom and Jerry!"

I heard Arthur sigh.

Victory is mine! I said to myself. It was just a matter of time.

~ ~ ~

Although I hated Arthur Slank, he was a worthy adversary. He could out-swear me and he was an infinitely clever man. On more than one occasion, he found a way to physically harm me while maintaining plausible deniability. Not an easy thing to do when you can't move; the man was an evil genius.

Slank's best move occurred one Mother's Day during the peak of black fly season. For those of you lucky enough to live in a warm and barren place, a black fly is a tiny flying insect. The female of the species requires blood to lay her eggs, so they like to bite humans. The bite of a black fly causes swelling and itching like a mosquito bite, but ten times worse.

Every Mother's Day there was a big party in the basement of Leicester County Hospital. The mothers of all the patients were invited. The party featured a buffet prepared by Chef Royalston and mother-themed music sung by the renowned Shyshire Choir,
Danny Boy, Mamma Mia, Your Mamma Don't Dance—
shit like that. Everybody on Three East, including all the patients and the entire staff, attended the party. Except for motherless me; I refused to go.

It wasn't unusual for Arthur Slank or me to launch a gas attack, so I initially didn't suspect it was the start of a more foul play. A superior gas attack requires both methane and odiferous particulate matter. We both had our secret formulas, often a combination of beans, eggs and a can or two of stale beer. On the day in question, Arthur got dressed to the nines with the help of a volunteer and then let one rip. It was his all-time best, the rottenest of rotten eggs. As the volunteer gasped, Arthur apologized and then asked the young Shyshirite to crack the window. I immediately objected, but the desperate volunteer would have none of it.

"Jesus Christ! You gotta be kidding me, man," he said. "We gotta air this place out!"

A minute later, the window still open, Arthur departed for the party telling his helper to shut the door behind him as he left "so my dear roommate can get some rest."

The first black fly landed on the tip of my nose. She waited awhile before biting me, perhaps anticipating a swat. I still had feeling in my nose so the bite hurt, and it was insanely itchy. After the chomp, the fly exited the window, only to return with her extended family. For the next two hours, several hundred lady members of the Shyshire black fly community bit me several million times. When Nurse Judy returned from the party, I was not a recognizable human being. I was a mound of swollen flesh. The black flies had bitten every part of my body, including my eyelids and tongue. I thought Arthur had killed me and he would have if some asshole hadn't invented Benadryl.

Arthur blamed the young volunteer for the incident, so he got off without indictment. I spent two days in intensive care at UMass Medical in Worcester, Massachusetts, before making a complete recovery. Upon returning to my room, Arthur was waiting.

"Itchy?" he asked.

"Well played, Master."

"Truce?" he suggested.

"Master, only one of us is getting out of this thing, alive."

"May the better quadriplegic win."

"Touché."

~ ~ ~

About midway in my stay at Leicester County Hospital, 1995 to be exact, I began to wear a set of vision goggles, which were connected to a camera on top of my MacIntosh computer. The camera could zoom in and out and swivel three hundred sixty degrees, literally providing me with eyes in the back of my head. When my main man, The Truth, installed the unit he wished quadriplegia upon himself, so he could justify the purchase of a matching unit. He was then in his mid thirties at the time and still a virgin - not by choice.

No longer limited to a narrow field of vision, things like room décor began to matter to me. Accordingly, I retained Plaid on Plaid, Shyshire's hottest (and only) interior design firm, to keep my room looking just right.

Since my room was only six hundred square feet my design options were rather limited, plus because I was still considered a "guest" of the hospital I had to respect the tastes of the ever-present Juliette Dritch. Nonetheless, I did have enough room to express my expanding interests in technology and literature and my devotion to my one and only.

Not being a big fan of corkboard, I eventually decide to cover my walls with floor-to- ceiling shelving. I fill my shelves with photographs, Apple computers, past and present, and my library, which included the works of Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Forbucks, and others. In addition, I maintained a "shelf of honor" where eight by ten inch pictures of my heroes stood: Mom, Hal, Steven Jobs, Ray Kurzweil, and Ronald Reagan. Eye-level shelving was reserved for photos of the love of my life. There were over one hundred images of her, and I wished I had a million more.

Before I get to my special one, my bet is you are wondering why Ronald Reagan's face sits on my shelf of fame. The answer is he hangs out there because one of his actions played a vital role in connecting me with the walking world. In 1982, his decision to cut funding for the homeless and infirmed, typical Republican fare, caused a temporary hiring freeze at Leicester County Hospital while it adjusted its endowment to ensure the continuance of superior care. Ultimately, to make ends meet, Reagan's action forced the hospital to employ inmates from Leicester County Correctional Facility, two of whom eventually became my emissaries to the outside world. There names were Smitty and Rodrigo, but more about them later…

As mentioned above, the middle shelf on my wall commemorated the biggest thing in my life for it contained pictures of a party I attended in 1986 with the love of my life, Maria Rivera. Each day, sometimes for hours at a time I scan Maria's shelf to re-capture the feeling I experienced when Maria first entered my room. It happened eight years into my stay at Leicester County Hospital. Maria was a nineteen-year-old recent graduate of Shyshire High School, at the time.

Before I met Maria, I had heard of her in passing for her beauty was often a topic of conversation among some of the younger male volunteers who fed us dinner on Sundays. Maria had been a regular reading volunteer at the hospital since she was seventeen. She was initially assigned to read to a blind eighty-year-old from One East. The guy was apparently incapable of spreading the word of Maria's beauty because he was what some nurses called the "living dead," a patient who by choice, or fate, said nothing.

When the old man officially died, Nurse Judy told me my name was pulled from a hat and given to Maria, the standard way the hospital assigned "reading buddies." I could tell she was white lying; I knew she'd made the arrangement.