The Walking Man (9 page)

"You, Grace Kelly?" Maria laughed. "Got any pictures?"

"Unfortunately, I do."

Maria spent the next five minutes rummaging through a pile of photographs located in the top drawer of my dresser. When she finally found the Princess Grace photos, she laughed so hard that she started honking.

"Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, Buddy." Maria smiled while still intermittently laughing. "I was just elected chairman of the Halloween Party Committee and there are going to be some big changes this year."

"Really?"

"Really," she assured me.

"What do you think of attending the party as the Frankenstein's?" Maria asked. "You could be the monster, and I could be your bride."

"I don't know, Maria." I smiled.

"Come on, it'll be fun."

"You going to wear the bee hive hairdo with the big white waves?"

"Of course," Maria said. "The bride of Frankenstein wouldn't have it any other way."

"Low cut white gown?"

"Yup."

"Then I'm in."

Like most citizens of Shyshire, Maria was a doer who never settled for an average outcome when a little extra work could produce excellence. I once asked Maria what drove her and her townsfolk to be so exceptional and she responded that a strong work ethic was engrained in all Shyshirites. She also said everybody in Shyshire believed in helping the less fortunate.

"Like me?"

"No, not like you, Buddy."

She then mentioned her town had yet to receive a viable TV signal via cable or antenna.

Maria refused to tell me any details about the party, but she visited me ten days in a row before the big event. I knew she'd met with Juliette Dritch and Chef Royalston several times, but that was all I had learned. The day before the party, she entered my room covered with mud. It was pouring out. I'd never seen a bigger smile.

On the day of the big party, the northeaster from the prior day had sucked every water molecule out of the sky, leaving behind nothing but crystal clearness; an October evening for the record books. Folks eagle-eyed and educated could see Saturn without the aid of a telescope, and the lights of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were visible though they were over fifty miles away.

Maria arrived in Room 302 two hours before the party to get me ready. She was in costume. Maria's Bride of Frankenstein outfit led me to believe there is a level of beauty that cannot be attributed to testosterone or symmetry. It made me realize there's an indescribable quality of radiance that few people have that is captivating in a dangerous way—for it forever displaces all thoughts of all others and leaves a man subject to a life of want.

I'm not sure how she did it, but Maria made me look like a Hollywood-quality Frankenstein. She glued two bolts to opposite sides of my neck that looked real despite being composed of Styrofoam, and she made an incredible Frankenstein wig that perfectly fit my head; à la Boris Karloff, it included a bloody forehead scar, a Neanderthal brow, and forehead staples to prevent brain leakage. To round out my outfit, I wore a black T-shirt and a black linen jacket. I was fairly certain that at an average quadriplegic Halloween party, my costume would have stolen the show, but nobody could focus on me due to the presence of my beautiful bride.

Maria wore a low cut white gown that appeared to have been fashioned from a silk bed sheet. Her lips were glossed red. She'd taken her natural black hair and somehow teased it into a vertical shrub that was highlighted by two white implants. Huge, gold loop earrings hung from each ear. There was green eyeliner and fake lashes, long enough to swat a black fly.

Maria's outfit was perfectly hideous, but what made it stunning was the constant state of good humor it imparted. Maria knew how to laugh at herself and throughout the party she howled with delight as members of the Leicester County Hospital community complimented the Frankensteins on their stunning good looks. I'll never forget catching Maria's smiles from the corner of my eye as she introduced me to her admirers, which included every man in Shyshire who had a pulse.

"Please allow me to introduce my husband," Maria would say.

In turn, I would growl and groan, more Quasimodo than Frankenstein.

"Don't mind him," Maria would add. "He's made from spare parts and he has two assholes."

Before we left Room 302 for the party, Smitty helped Maria decorate my wheelchair with black drapes that covered my wheels and hid my catheter and urine bag. The Truth then attached some voice-activated green LED strips to my side panels, which responded to the word "boo" or eighty-decibel shrieks. Finally, Maria attached a sign on the back of my wheelchair that read "Just Married;" I heard the letters were bloody red. And of course, there was a string of tin cans.

Never, in my wildest dreams could I have predicted the party scene. At six o'clock, dinnertime, two hundred fifty-two quadriplegics were wheeled out to the back courtyard of Leicester County Hospital. Floodlights borrowed from the Shyshire Eagles' football field lit up the yard. There was a fifty-yard long banquet table; five pigs were roasting on open spits. There was a circus tent that contained a dance floor. There was a bounce house, horses, and an enormous Ferris wheel. There was a stage and two bands: one young with musicians dressed like zombies; and a big band wearing orange tuxedos, with bandstand placards that read "Boo!"

"I can't believe this," I said.

"You inspired me," Maria said.

"A bounce house and a Ferris Wheel, I can't believe this," I repeated.

"My ideas, I must admit," Maria said. "This year, you're not going to watch the party, you're going to be the party."

"Wow," I said, too amazed to utter any word that had more than one syllable.

The meal before the fun was exceptional even by Chef Royalston's standards. There was a honey-glazed ham so delicious that it temporarily removed all thoughts of vegetarianism from my brain. A spiced apple cider was served, laced with nutmeg and cinnamon plus another mystery ingredient that left an amazing after-taste; I later learned the sensation was caused by the addition of several gallons of Dom Perignon Blanc. The accompanying root vegetable medley contained carrots, yams, potatoes, beets and turnips. Each vegetable was chopped into matching quarter inch sized cubes that were individually seasoned and evenly grilled on each side. There was also an appetizer of goose pâté served on homemade crackers that looked like Triscuits but tasted like Beer Nuts. And for dessert, there were brownie sundaes featuring Ben and Jerry's vanilla ice cream, fresh roasted pecans, and a fluffy orange-colored marshmallow sauce, which, if ever released to the general public, would instantly eliminate the market for whip cream. It was the first time I ever let Maria feed me and she was the most considerate feeder I'd ever had. She displayed infinite patience and always delicately placed each food morsel into my mouth, ignoring the base human compulsion to finish an unpleasant task as quickly as possible.

Following dinner, coffee was served to give us some time to digest our feast while imparting the caffeine required for us to handle a night of partying "out-of-bounds." We shared coffee with Chef Royalston who drank with his back to us. He was wearing an all-black chef outfit featuring randomly distributed pumpkin pins. The coffee was the best coffee I ever tasted, prompting me to launch my usual inquisition.

"Royallllll," I said.

"Colombian beans, hand-picked by yours truly, and roasted to perfection using a gold-lined brass kettle to limit oxidation, followed by precision hand chopping, no mechanical grinding. The sugar was produced from freshly cut cane imported from Puerto Rico and the cream was made from milk hand-drawn from Gertrude, my personal range-fed dairy cow."

"You have a personal dairy cow?" I asked.

"Yes, she lives in the family room of my apartment," Chef Royalston said. "Please don't tell my landlord."

"I see." I smirked. "Pardon my French, Royal, but you have to be fucking kidding me. You travelled to Colombia to pick coffee beans?"

"Yes, young one," Chef Royal said. He slipped his U.S. passport over his shoulder to Maria. "For my doubters."

The Halloween Party had no set order of events and there were no self-appointed leaders using megaphones in an attempt to control what could be best described as pleasant pandemonium.

After I assured Maria that the brownie sundae was holding down my meal, we proceeded to the bounce house. A bounce house is an inflatable structure famous for replicating the feeling of a moonwalk. The bounce house at the party was modified to enclose a steel ceiling structure that was used to support harnesses designed to enable the paralyzed to experience bounce. Each harness was attached to a ceiling beam via an adjustable bungee cord, which enabled each quadriplegic to jump in unison with their partner. The option to simply be tossed into the air by a couple of the Shyshire High football players also existed. Maria and I jumped for about ten minutes before we'd exhausted ourselves from laughing; the main moment of hysteria occurred when Maria attempted a back flip, hair and all, and somehow landed on my shoulders. The collision caused a bounce that nearly sent Maria through the roof of the inflatable fun house and me through its floor.

After the bounce house, we decided to slow down the pace and join about sixty other quadriplegics on the dance floor.
The Young Zombies
were taking a break so the
Boo Band
was leading the merriment by performing highly orchestrated line-dancing songs. We joined in while the Macarena was in progress.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have attended a wedding reception lately, the Macarena is like the Hully Gully, or the Hokey Pokey, but slightly less evil. It involves lurching back and forth while swiveling your hips like Elvis Presley. Since yours truly and my ilk could not swivel, our dancing partners controlled our motion with jerky pushes and pulls on our wheelchairs. It may sound crazy, but the movement of synchronized wheelchairs produced a level of musical rapture not dissimilar from the feeling induced by a Bruce Springsteen Rock n' Roll medley, or watching John Travolta dance to the beat of
Saturday Night Fever.
I left the dance floor drenched in sweat, more from the excitement than the exercise.

After the dance, Maria and I went horseback riding. Although the horses had one hoof in the glue factory, they were still discernible stallions capable of supporting a quadriplegic and a "riding buddy." I don't know how Maria had pulled it off, but like everything at the party, the horseback riding was perfectly planned to maximize fun. The horses were channeled through a couple of split rail fences where a hoist was employed to load and unload quadriplegics who were locked into a special harness designed to fit each horse. The whole contraption was ingenious, and a major hit. Not in my wildest dreams could I have ever considered riding a horse even if it was a slow trot to nowhere.

After the horseback ride, Maria and I chatted at one of the many circular tables dotted throughout the party site. Our conversation was lit by a jack-o'-lantern centerpiece that sat on a fluorescent green tablecloth speckled by mini candy bars, including Mr. Goodbars, my personal favorite. Ghosts that refused tips served drinks while women dressed like murdered cigarette girls (hatchets in their foreheads) offered Halloween-themed appetizers, including smoked road-kill on a stick and something tasty that looked like eyeballs.

While
The Young Zombies
played raunchy ballads and hard driving anthems about bad mothers, fast cars and loose women, causing a good bit of naughty dancing, Maria and I tried to talk. Our conversation was free flowing. Our main topics were our families and the big party, when we were not laughing at others' expense.

"Do you think Juliette Dritch and Dr. Bonjour are getting it on?" Maria asked.

"I doubt it," I said. "But they're both mysterious and uneasy, so I can imagine them having sex with pretty much anyone or anything. Why do you ask?"

"There's a guy on the dance floor dressed like the grim reaper, and he just slipped some tongue to a hottie in a
Dora the Explorer
costume, and I think Dora is Juliette Dritch."

"No way."

"Way." Maria laughed while she turned me toward the dance floor.

"God damn," I said. "I think you're right."

"Dora definitely looks like Dritch," Maria said. "But it's impossible to tell if the guy is Bonjour."

"It's him."

"How can you tell?"

"Just a guess," I said, careful not to disclose the source of my certainty. The Grim Reaper had a pillow under his arm.

The highlight of my life occurred toward the end of the party, a few minutes before midnight, when Maria and I did the Ferris wheel. The wheel was situated perpendicular to the end of the plateau that constituted Leicester County Hospital's main property. Being so, its rotation provided an illusion of ungrounded flight from twelve to five o'clock. By the time Maria and I got our turn on the Ferris wheel, the wind had picked up slightly, so when the wheel stopped to load and unload my motionless friends, we would sway ever so slightly, like a baby cradle being pushed by a new dad's toes.

My most special moment occurred when Maria and I were rocking at the top of the Ferris wheel. We were tossing the usual BS back and forth at each other, laughing as always, when our rambling dialogue was suddenly interrupted by a shooting star. The awesomeness of the spectacle caught us off guard, triggering a moment of silence that I inexplicably ended by saying, "I love you, Maria."

"I love you, too, Buddy," Maria said, as she planted a kiss on my forehead. "I hope you enjoyed your party."

Chapter Six

Johnny Bash

A couple weeks passed after the Halloween party before Maria visited me again. Words cannot describe how much I missed her. When she arrived, she had the usual newspapers and magazines with her but she also had a package tucked under her arm.

"Buddddyyy," Maria said. "I've got something special for you!"