I was heading for the carport one morning when my right arm stopped working. I was working pretty hard myself, so I thought nothing of it, just continued hobbling to the car, tossed my crutch across the front seat, bent my paralyzed leg out of the way and positioned my two functioning limbs, left foot and left hand, on the disabled controls. I didn't give two thoughts about the arm on the way to my job. The drive was long, and life was short, and I had other things to worry about. My wife had walked out 10 months before. I had just declared bankruptcy. My broken hip, shattered in a fall from a hot tub, was almost mended. And the last thing I was going to worry about was some stiffness in my right arm. Probably a spasm.
The spasms had started 25 years before, almost immediately after the ambulance crew had lifted me from the asphalt of a Berkeley street, my spinal cord hopelessly shredded, my body stunned into paralysis. In the months that followed, particularly the months after leaving the hospital, the spastic flailings of my paralyzed limbs pushed me toward a new identity. An injured hand didn't move. But a grotesquely crippled hand did.
I had observed this in the sixth grade, across the blacktop where Ronald wandered during recess. He was a fifth grader, so naturally we never met. Ronald's cerebral palsy gait set him apart from the yelling playtime hordes. With limbs bent like a figure fashioned from pipe cleaners, Ronald tottered around at recess, lingering at the edge of games. His facial expressions, successive grins, grimaces, smiles and frowns, switched on and off like a broken neon sign. When his hand rose above his head, wrist bent and fingers askew, I sensed he was excited, but I rarely got close enough to hear him speak. His words emerged from the mouth of some straining beast. I spent recess trying to feel normal, to forget my parents' nightly battles and my brother crying himself to sleep. The last person I needed to know was Ronald.
At age 21, I had to know Ronald. Just out of hospital and back on campus for a final term, I limped between classes on one crutch and one leg, trying to subdue my fingers. When I hobbled too fast, reached too far or strained too much, the paralyzed fingers of my right hand jerked wildly, knuckles bent, wrist flexing. My involuntary gesticulations gave me the grotesque and incoherent body language of people who were, well, spastic. But not the imagined, funny kind. There no longer was a funny kind.
People I met invariably stared at my hand. There was no stopping the fingers, and there was no stopping the stares. Both had to be endured. Eventually, I learned to quiet the flailing fingers by pressing the hand to my side. Later, I learned to quiet myself, to look in the eyes of those who were looking at me. Perhaps I was more a novelty than a grotesquerie. The fingers would stop shaking when they were ready. And when people were ready, they would stop staring. You had to be ready for them to stop. In fact, you had to be ready before they were.
Spasms come in all shapes and sizes. Some involve trembling and jerking. Others extend a limb into a rigid pole. On the morning when I hobbled to my carport and noticed my unbending arm, the explanation seemed clear. A strong extensor spasm had locked the arm straight. My neurologist had different ideas. He pointed to an x-ray of my old neck fracture where bone spurs were compressing my nerves.
The arm lost its power, my body lost its balance, and soon I was an electric wheelchair. At least I had the job. At least the carpet was clean. To make sure, each morning I eyeballed the shiny acrylic. The new wheelchair ran over plums on the sidewalk, picked up oil on the pavement and deposited ugly stains on the rug of my new bachelor apartment. The heavy wheels had even compressed the pile. Twin carpet troughs lead from the front door to the bathroom. The other set branched right to the kitchen.
Then the carpet cleaner came. He hauled in a machine. He foamed, he rinsed and, in the end, emptied buckets of black water into a drain by the carport. After it dried, the carpet was clean and stiff as a newly mown wheatfield. I couldn't afford the carpet cleaner. I couldn't afford anything. And yet, a clean carpet was like a clean slate. It was beyond cost. It was fresh, in a chemically, synthetic sort of way. It was a fresh start.
I needed a fresh start, particularly in the mornings when the day seemed empty. Outside, my neighbors bounded down the stairs. Their lives were all about careers and day care and buying homes. I was buying time. Soon my life would start again. Meanwhile, there were small achievements, things set right. One of them was the carpet. And doubtless there were others, although I could not remember one at the moment.
Preparing to emerge from the shower, I took time and took pains. It was essential not to fall. Seated on a plastic bath chair, I swiveled my legs over the edge of the tub, tested the slipperiness of the wet floor, then stood. Standing set my paralyzed fingers and, more important, my paralyzed right leg into the usual spasms. The foot shot downward. A little spring in your step. A little extra neuromuscular spring. Not to mention the right side of the foot twisting upward, then nosing the toes into the bathmat. Abstract, really, the sort of thing you pay a good choreographer for. Maybe even the foot's swelling and purpleish blotches, for the most avant-garde dance piece ever. The puffy footed stomp of the blood-collecting lower extremity in extremity. Radical proposal to an arts foundation. Heh heh.
But for now the issue was shower safety. And after decades, I was on top of this. The spastic repertoire contained only so many jerks and bends. The right leg would shoot out so far, the foot would bounce up and down so long. Then the spastic limb would give up. And I would take a step. Then another.
Until I was seated in my wheelchair, drying my hair, then my feet. I had a routine. And, no, it was not necessary to fold down the wheelchair footrests just to roll into the kitchen and make tea. I could hold up my bare feet enough to prevent them from dragging on the carpet. And even when I couldn't, it didn't matter. A little foot dragging never hurt anyone. I clicked the wheelchair into forward motion, in effortless battery-driven transition from bedroom to kitchen, paralyzed right foot dragging ever so lightly over the clean, nappy acrylic. A rather deft maneuver of whipping the chair hard right, then slipping left around the dresser. Microprocessor-controlled, most people thought, but most people weren't technical writers, were they? And I knew, for I had written about them, that microcontrollers had brought the joy to joysticks.
Fuck, I ran over my paralyzed foot. Pinned by a swiveling caster, pain sent it spasming. I saw the leg jerk up, knock against the chair frame and wedge. Oy fucking vey. I couldn't look. How did I do these things? Not paying attention to an unfeeling limb?. Whose position I couldn't sense, a foot neurologically lost in space. Now broken or badly bruised?and wedged against something. All it took was a moment's inadvertence, inattention and stupidity. Life was hard that way, and I should know better.
I looked down. The paralyzed foot sat where it should on the footrest. Eerie. As though I had hooked the unmoving leg with my good arm and lowered it there. Which I hadn't. Nor had I unfolded the footrest. It had been folded up. A shiver. I hadn't done this, or had done it and forgotten. Brain tumors started this way. A paralyzed foot did not lift itself, unfold its own footrest? No.
Maybe. The swiveling front caster had twisted the foot right. Pain made it spasm. The spasming leg jerked left. It knocked the folded footrest down. The heel caught in the foot guard. A fluke occurrence.
No damage, no lasting pain. And no blame. The last part was the best. OK, make tea, make haste and make it to work on time.
Eerie stillness. As though the moment needed tending to. Very well, the foot had blindly jerked its way to safety. Thank you, God. Now may I go? A door slammed, a car started, gravel crunched on the driveway and the morning remained immobilized.
Do I have to sit here like some woman in Nogales who sees the Virgin Mary staring up at her from a tortilla? I checked my watch. The drive to work took half an hour. Given the statistical opportunity, a leg could jerk free, under its own power, and land where it should. A power ugly, inexplicable?and we need all we can get.
Is that okay? Have I honored the moment enough?
No, but it's a start.
