Rev. Blowhard and Tank Top Tina

"...(P)aralyzed limbs may not particularly limit a person's mobility as much as attitudinal and physical barriers. The question centers on 'normality'. What, it is asked, is the normal way to be mobile over a distance of a mile? Is it to walk, drive one's own car, take a taxicab, ride a bicycle, use a wheelchair, roller skate, or use a skate board, or some other means?”

 -- Prof. David Pfeiffer, Ph.D, internationally recognized scholar in the field of disability studies, and polio survivor

 

Although it pains me to admit it, driving a car remains an acid test of human normalcy in American culture. You are what you drive. You drive, therefore, you are.

Dear reader, before you attribute my distaste for automobile dominance to being too gimped up to operate a vehicle, let me put that to rest. I own a wheelchair lift-equipped mini-van and I drive it daily. I’m grateful for it. But I wish everyone – myself included -- had numerous, high-quality transportation options besides driving a car.

I think my ambivalence began the summer I learned to drive. I didn’t feel ready to take Driver’s Ed when I turned 16, so I waited until the summer after my freshman year of college. I enrolled in a course taught by a sweaty, little strawberry-blond man who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn and preached to a fundamentalist congregation on weekends. He taught classes in a seedy storefront space in the dying downtown of formerly robust Rust Belt city. My classmates and I sat at beaten-up desks and perspired while Rev. Blowhard shouted continuously for no apparent reason.

My friends, who already had their licenses, told me stories about the nauseating films they’d seen in Driver’s Ed. There were tales of tough-guy high school ballers who tossed their cookies in the trash can while watching “Highways of Agony” and “Mechanized Death.” So, I was filled with dread when the sweaty preacher man fed the leader for “Signal 30” into his 1950s-era reconditioned projector. Then I had an epiphany: each minute of amateur footage of teenagers with crushed vertebrae screaming in pain meant one less minute of being preached at.

After several weeks of classroom instruction and gore porn, it was time to get in a car. My instructor, a pleasant middle-aged woman with a penchant for tank tops, picked me up at my house. I was anxious but also excited to get out on the road. This was an important milestone in my young adult life!

As we set out, my instructor held the steering wheel with her left hand. “OK,” I thought. “She’s letting me get warmed up. She’ll let go soon, right?”

Uh, no. We drove around for 45 minutes while Tank Top Tina kept a white-knuckle death grip on the wheel. Keep in mind we were doing 25 mph on dry, flat Ohio streets, not screaming down the Mokee Dugway in a blizzard.

I was befuddled. None of my friends had mentioned this. Neither my instructor nor I broached the subject. We simply pretended like this was normal, a construct I was all-too familiar with.

I told my parents when I returned home. This resulted in my mom calling Rev. Blowhard, who agreed to come to our house to discuss “the situation.”

In other words, to discuss the driving school’s baseless trepidation of teaching a gimp girl to drive.

‘Cause, you know, them cripples can’t be trusted not to crash into a brick wall.

When the Sweaty Rev arrived at our house, I was seething with rage, but containing it like the good, little demure girl I was back then. Was.

My mom and the Rev engaged in an awkward conversation in which they danced around the elephant of ableism trumpeting its trunk in front of them. The Rev. refused to say I couldn’t be taught to drive, yet dodged any direct answers to my mom’s questions. The conversation concluded with him swerving off on a tangent about how a spinner nob on the steering wheel would solve all “my problems.”

That was the last I ever saw of the Good Rev or Tank Top Tina. Since I was 18, I didn’t need a driving school certificate to get a license. Over the next couple weeks, my dad patiently taught me to drive and I passed both the exam and field test on the first try.

I’ve driven ever since. But I still wish the world was full of wheelchair-accessible trains, trams and taxis so I had more choices.

Choices are good.

Professionally Crippled

Denial and acceptance seem, at first blush, to be polar opposites. Or perhaps two sides of the same coin.

As a kid, I figured you either completely accepted something, or completely denied it. The light switch was either on or off, with no shades of gray in between. Decades later, I eventually realized the irrationality of such an extreme viewpoint.  I began to see that one could indeed accept certain layers of something, yet deny others. Such as a disability.

Since I was about 10 years old, my disability had become visually obvious. I could walk unassisted sometimes – wheelchair on the sidelines – yet there was no denying I was disabled.

Arthritis had irrevocably claimed me. I had the classic look of a 1970s-era juvenile rheumatoid arthritis survivor. Should you meet anyone of my era who had severe JRA, our look is unmistakable. We have very small chins because of jaw joint damage. Our faces simply didn’t grow fully. We can’t turn our necks so we follow things with our eyes only. Our shoulder width is narrow. We struggle to raise our arms, which are short. Our hands are small. Our fingers are twisted, gnarled.

A JRA survivor’s gait is more of a side-to-side motion, rather than one of forward strides. If our hips were affected – especially if they were replaced – our lower backs are arched and our buttocks stick out. We have knee contractures that keep our legs perpetually bent.

With all of these undeniable physical changes, you’d think my acceptance of my disability would be complete. Yet when when I started using a wheelchair more often for mobility, I would sometimes find myself jumping hoops of rationalizations.

“I can still walk a little bit, so I’m not as disabled as those other chair users,” I thought.

One thing I tried to avoid was looking – as I called it – “professionally crippled.” While I couldn’t actually define the term “professionally crippled,” I knew it when I saw it. Kind of like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s take on “obscenity.”

The professionally crippled of the world tricked out their wheelchairs with beverage holders and bumper stickers. They didn’t discreetly hide their wheelchair battery chargers or reacher sticks or even urinals. They left things spread out for anyone to see. They cared more about convenience than appearance.

As I began my second half-century on this Earth, I still like to look my best. But now I value convenience and ease and lack of hassle more than ever. Part of it stems from just being older and a bit more depleted of energy. Plus, with age, comes wisdom and the ability to sort out what really matters and what doesn’t.

Time has also eroded away some of my underlying layers of denial. You might even say I’ve moved up from amateur to professional rank. I’ve learned to embrace my disability identity. It’s who I am. I’ve earned it. I own it. And I refuse to be ashamed.

SCREAM ALL THE TIME

Once upon a time, I sincerely answered the stupid questions of others with nary a whiff of sarcasm. Yes, I find it hard to believe myself. But I can recall some of those moments from my youth when I thought it was my duty to educate others about my disability. Or even about disability in general. I figured that -- as a gimp girl -- I must be a positive gimp role model for the rest of society. Why, hadn’t the non-gimps allowed me to use their marginally-accessible restrooms and attend their marginally-accessible schools and struggle to find marginally-accessible housing? I had a debt to repay!

I recall a particular episode when I was a college freshman. My university offered free physical therapy for students with disabilities. It was after a PT session that I found myself at the student health center waiting for a van pick-up back to my dorm. And who should join me but Crazy Debbie.

Now, I didn’t know at the time that her name was Crazy Debbie. I learned that later after I described her to someone who knew her. All I knew was that she was a soft-core -- minimal Mohawk ‘do with no face piercings -- punk chick who introduced herself as “Deb.” (For those younger readers who are incredulous about the absence of piercings, keep in mind this was spring 1983. Back then, we thought Michael Jackson’s one glove was rad.)

Crazy Debbie started up a conversation with small talk, followed by a question I’d been asked a million times before: “What’s wrong with you?” Ask me that question today and you’re likely to end up prying my European-size 35 hand-made in Italy out of your butt crack. But back then, I responded with a gentle smile, followed by my fact-laden canned speech about rheumatoid arthritis:

“Auto-immune disease…no known causes or cures…new diagnosis in the U.S. every 30 seconds…blah, blah, blah.”

But before I got too far into my spiel, Crazy Debbie blurted out: “Isn’t that the disease where you just scream all the time?”

It’s possible that was simply a sincere question from a crazy person. I’m pretty sure, however, it was the punch line from a punker who thought she was getting over on a naïve little girl from the ‘burbs. I responded with a polite, serious answer about how the pain sometimes made me scream. But even dopey little 18-year-old me knew I’d been had. I was glad when my van ride showed up shortly thereafter.

I have no idea what Crazy Debbie is up to these days. Perhaps she’s a bobo CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Or maybe she’s now a grandma living in a double-wide in a backwoods holler somewhere.

Crazy Debbie, if you’re reading this, just remember: you never know when I’ll be wearing my Manolos.