September 2005 Archives

When the San Francisco-bound commuter train rolls into my suburban station, I fit in more or less perfectly. Not that "perfect" is a word that easily applies to someone so neurologically damaged. But let's say that I board with maximum efficiency and minimal psychic footprint. The psychic part is important. Only a couple of days ago when my wheelchair-lift-equipped van was in the shop for repairs, I made a train journey from Menlo Park to Palo Alto, a distance of less than 1-1/2 miles. The express, loaded with commuters eager to get home, was already late when it pulled into my station. The train happened to be one of the few with no built-in hydraulic lift for wheelchairs. Which required the behind-schedule conductors to unlock a hand-cranked lift from its cyclone fence enclosure on the station platform, roll the thing to the train and winch me aboard. I am acutely attuned to such situations. I was taking up their time when they didn't need their time taken up. And worse, minutes later, they were going to have to repeat the whole process in reverse, in Palo Alto. That's what disabled people do. Take up space, waste people's time. And cringe a lot.

But yesterday, I proudly told the conductor that San Francisco was my destination. The end of the line, where it didn't matter how long I took to get off the train. The hydraulic lift came down, I rolled on and ascended. It was an oddly gray day for September, and I was in a gray mood. I busied myself with the newspaper. Stopping at Redwood City, the wheelchair-lift rose with a big man in a big power chair. He shot onto the train, steering somewhat erratically, a cloth cap on his head, sparse graying dreadlocks flopping beneath. The man jerked his way through the door, past me and into the second wheelchair position. I noticed that he carried a boombox. Facing forward with the train, I heard him, then felt him, jockeying his chair into place. Sorry, he said, I bumped you. Do you like music? No, I said, lying. I didn't care for his question, so absurdly general. At this hour, who wanted to hear black music and, doubtless, loud music? He should know better than to play a boombox on our commuter line. We don't do that sort of thing. We have rules. Okay, he said.

I heard nothing from him the rest of the way. I didn't look back. I read the newspaper. The train stopped at Millbrae. It stopped and did not start. The conductor, young and new, was talking on his radio. Aren't you getting off here, he asked me. I gave him a withering look. No. Sir? Sir? The conductor was talking to the man behind me. Are you getting out here, sir? Something rumbled to life, with a yes, and a no, and succession of electric wheelchair jerks. The man edged by me. His cuffs were ragged and his unshaven cheeks thick with mossy beard. A blue plaid blanket, crudely rolled, stuck its pointed ends out of his knapsack. Guess I was asleep, the man said. He was working his way past me, crudely bumping the chair through the narrow aisle between me and the bathroom wall. I watched him descend in the lift, toward whatever awaited him in Millbrae, where subway and commuter trains parked side by side.

Nearing San Francisco, I considered making a lighthearted remark to the conductor. Something about how it pays to stay awake when you're riding a train. But as I eased my own wheelchair, so much more deftly than the black man, into the aisle, I saw something. The man had left his boombox behind. I told the conductor.

A mild, gray day in San Francisco, the summer's end. And if my mood was gray, wasn't I mild as well? I rolled my wheelchair out of the train station and across to the glass-and-steel eminence that has risen in the place of brick warehouses, an RV park and, briefly, a post-tear down and pre-construction encampment of homeless people. An electric bus stopped and I boarded it. The engineless bus made its silent way up 3rd Street, the front seats filling with people speaking Cantonese. After a few blocks, I got off, the hydraulic bus lift dropping me like a skip loader into another waiting throng of Chinese immigrants. Even more Chinese immigrants at the San Francisco City College high-rise a block away, bright eyed, full of hope and filling with English. I took the elevator to my men's group. How long have I been part of this weekly gathering? Is it really 12 years? Later, I headed back down the elevator to the street, certain that I'd face another 12 years. Outside, the day was gray, my mood gray, my life gray.

A Market Street elevator took me to a BART train, where I sat, whooshing and pummeling my way under the Bay, then over Oakland, then under Oakland, then over Oakland again, and through the hills. I got off at Orinda. The high platform overlooked freeways and boulevards and parking lots, and beyond it all, the brown summer hills. Rolling with grasses and California oaks. I was late for a Chinese meal with friends, so I didn't linger. No one else was lingering. The freeway's roar was impelling us off the platform and down to the vehicular ground. I followed the crowd, keeping alert for the elevator. And there it was, one of BART's maddeningly slow lifts. Elevators being an afterthought in the system, added on in response to pushy disabled people who insisted on the right to use the region's subway, may they forever be praised. Though I wasn't really one of them, being a disabled person who fits in so terribly well. Unlike this man, the one half blocking the elevator entrance, junk hanging off his wheelchair. Hair hanging off him, scraggly and derelict. He held his head in his hand, half dozing. It was him.

The elevator door was opening. Did you leave a boombox on the train this morning, I asked. The elevator door was all the way open. Yes, he said, raising his head, alert and expectant. It's in Caltrain's Lost & Found, I said over my shoulder, rolling past him and onto the elevator. The closing doors pinched him out of view. The elevator descended. I was relieved to be away from the man with his poverty and look of wildness. And the closer I got to the ground, to the shiny suburban concrete and my waiting middle-class friends in the Chinese restaurant, the more I wanted to go back and talk to him.

He would probably not harm me. Yes he was ill kempt, vaguely Rastafarian and a clumsy wheelchair driver. But he was no killer. Not that I really cared, for the killers manqué, the ones that left me lying paralyzed on a Berkeley Street, still seemed to be everywhere. I recognized them in the tough black youths I saw that very morning standing in front of the City College building. I hadn't gotten over my anger at black people. Any more than I had gotten over my fear of disabled people. That person I kept seeing in plate glass reflections of store windows, that hunched and frightened cripple wasn't me. I had not become one of them. I had nothing in common with the black man upstairs on the platform. So how could it be that I had the small power, the gift really, to give him back his music? The power to take the elevator back up to the platform and talk to him and make sure he understood. Lost & Found, Caltrain.

But I was already rolling away from the station, over the landscaped concrete bridges, toward Orinda Village. Whatever that was. It certainly wasn't a village. It was a cluster of gas stations and offices and Starbucks and a Chinese restaurant. A village, a true one, includes everyone. People live and work together and look out for each other. Some do better than others. But everyone dies, and the sun rises and sets, in the same place. And even if I'm not poor today, with bad luck and a misstep or two, I could find myself living aboard transit vehicles. And although I've never been without a house, I have been without a home. And when you're lost, it means a lot to have someone find you. Maybe that's the key to finding yourself. And if the crippled black man ever finds me, or I find him, perhaps it won't be on a gray day. Because on a brighter day, having been educated in a life of disability, I may just remember that the derelict black man needs my help and I need his.

In the years after his divorce, my father maintained a household of sorts in the upstairs of his office building in our desert downtown. The building had been a home, a wealthy one in its time, with concrete urns and ample porches, along with a port coucherre. Then it had become a rooming house. When my parents bought it for my father's medical practice, the roomers moved out. They included the gruff man who drove me into town in a school bus, along with at least one manager of the local Fox theatre. When he took over, my father remodeled the downstairs, leaving the upstairs to mysterious old rooms and objects. Antique lamps. Balsa wood model kits, probably given away as prizes by the theater manager. Pine needles from an enormous overhanging tree collected in a porch. The walk-in closets, which had crawl-in nooks in their corners, drew me inside like a magnet. And then as in some prophecy, the old place upstairs, the abandoned rooms above my father's medical office, became a new place, our home. My brother, my father and I resided there.

In the first year, eigth grade, school was literally across the street. The new living arrangements didn't pose much of a commute for my father, either. All he had to do was rise, dress and descend the stairs. This, I noticed, was becoming increasingly difficult. On Saturdays and school holidays I could see how it was, his nurse calling up the stairs for the doctor to please come down. His first patient usually was seen at 9 a.m. My father often appeared around 9:30 a.m. As a boy, my dad's reputation in the town, the Ivy League educated physician in the desert boondocks who practiced a better quality of medicine, swelled my head into believing that perhaps I was a better quality of person. My parents' bitter years of combat undid any true sense of confidence. But I still had this awareness my father's place in the community. Until there was this workday problem of making it downstairs. And his habit, for much of the first year following his divorce, of spending whole weekends in bed. My father doubtless was dealing with his divorce in the manner long applauded by the pharmaceutical industry.

In the mornings, before school, my job was to come downstairs and empty the contents of trash containers in all the office rooms. The receptionist threw huge piles of file folders and forms into her trash. The examining rooms were full of bandages and bloody gauze, needles sometimes sticking through the plastic liners. I made my way from room to room, emptying, putting fresh plastic bags in place. I otherwise rarely saw the office, except on days when I happened to be home, in the summer or during holidays. On those days, I was sometimes asked to bring a file that was upstairs downstairs. Or make a run to the town pharmacy. It must have been on one of those errands that I was walking by an open examining room and saw inside.

A patient was lying on one of the examining tables, a man. His shirt was off, and he was on his back, with something sticking from his shoulder. A broken syringe. I could see this in one glimpse, the jagged glass of the chamber in the base of the metal needle, the latter still stuck in the shoulder of the man who lay on the table looking frightened. My father was looking frightened too, as he emerged from the examining room. We brushed past each other. I headed for the receptionist, whether to pick up something or drop something off, I can't recall. What I can recall was my sense of a life stripped bare. One school chum had told me that my father was making mistakes in his office. I knew that his once thriving practice wasn't as busy. And I knew that many of my childhood dreams had become nightmares. But there were some dreams I was determined to keep alive. And my father, prince of medicine, could not be someone who was breaking needles, scaring patients, scaring himself, scaring me. Nonetheless, I'd seen through the door, into the open examining room. I'd seen the secret of my father's life. And being a boy, I'd seen without seeing. Even when I hated my father the most, and I did for much of my adolescence, I still wanted to admire him for being a professional, for being something. Only as an adult could I connect the broken syringe with my father, the broken man.

So I understand why Americans now watch endless images of New Orleans, the broken city. Along with water breaking levees and people breaking laws. It's because the breaking news drowns out the broken nation. Subsidence and shrinking wetlands and toxic pollution and not enough National Guard or evacuation planning. No, it's really not that. It's the disquieting thought that we are drifting ever further apart. That victims are shooting at rescuers and everyone is too scared to ask why. Even for liberals, even for those of us used to critiquing the national consciousness, this is too painful to watch. It takes an outsider to watch. Like the British tourist who dallied a bit too long in a New Orleans hotel while the storm blew in, then found himself hiking through the city with his wife in search of refuge at the Superdome. He was alert to danger, this Brit. He could feel it in the streets. He could sense it outside the Superdome. One of the six national guardsmen keeping a wary eye on the thousands inside warned him and his wife not to go in. He told the man to work his way sideways to the other National Guardsmen. He got there. The Guard got the couple to another hotel. Eventually they, and other foreign nationals, got airlifted out. "How can they call this a city?" the man asked. "They just told people to hop on their SUVs and abandon hundreds of thousands of poor."

Well, humph. What are we supposed to do?

Follow the rules, for one. Unless our rulers are disparaging the rules. Which means the national breakdown in law and order really began at the top.

In the days after the Iraqi invasion, while the sacking of the Baghdad Antiquities Museum was under way and looters were carting off treasures thousands of years old and worth billions of dollars, I found myself in a curious argument with a close friend. Get real, he told me. The people of Baghdad were pillaging their own museum. They need to get responsible. This "responsible" theme is one of the great Orwellian messages of our American age. There's no arguing with it or its adherents. The best defense is to run for cover, and may God have mercy on our national soul.

The Great Generation, people like my father and mother who before their lives deteriorated did everything to defend the country, those people left a clear message about who was responsible. They gathered in Switzerland, three years after the war, with the US at the lead. Wars were inevitable, they said, but perhaps, just perhaps, mass carnage wasn't. Particularly if we agree on some rules. And the rules that emerged from Geneva, the so-called Conventions, couldn't be clearer. When one country invades another, the invader is responsible for maintaining civil order and security, to whatever extent is possible. Those are the rules. And when a nation succumbs to fear, it stops listening to the rules in favor of the rulers. Which means that in the most genteel and white-collared of ways, law and order break down. One could believe in the invasion of Iraq -- and still believe in the rules. So, rules or rulers? The answer is already oozing out of the New Orleans mud.

I didn't recognize my mother, rolling past her in the dining/recreation room of her nursing home. I could blame my brother, who was pushing my wheelchair. Or I could blame the fact that my mother's hair has been straightened by neglect, her food-splattered clothing not changed. Hard to say exactly what had changed in her. For more than a year her face has been growing taut with that gaunt, frozen, Alzheimer's look. Seeing her but not seeing her sent me into the briefest of freefalls. I recovered, brightened, and chirped a greeting. Hi, Mom. And bye, Mom. Such is our present experience.

Is she dying? Perhaps not more than many of 86. We share a toughness gene. I have survived a spinal cord injury and lasted longer than many would have predicted. She's had more vodka than many probably know. So here we are, near Olympia, Washington. She's in a wheelchair too, facing a television, but not viewing it. She does seem to recognize me and my brother. Oddly, even in the most precious northwest summer, the nursing staff keeps the door to the enclosed, sunny-and-72° patio locked.

The patients, more truly inmates, spend their summer days indoors in a carpeted room, all garish shades of furniture, roaring TV and sounds of the species wandering toward the edge of its natural lifespan and going feral. I have to go down the valley. I have to go down the valley. Down, down, down to the ground, ground, ground, where it's down, down, down. In the valley where I'm going on down. A woman who is 90 if she's a day, recites this for hours on end. She too sits in the big public room where people supposedly have recreation and dining, though these words hardly do justice to the daily proceedings, an enfeebled Marat/de Sade without intermission.

The nurses and attendants are quite kind. I don't make an issue of my mom's appearance. My mother is past caring, and she's getting what's important. Food, protection, another day. I know something of the vagaries of human neurology and wonder how I would withstand this. For my mother, true wondering seems over. No longer standing, withstanding is all she has left.

By now the sinking feeling has dissipated, but the smallest of anxiety pings race through me as my brother takes charge, gets the nurse to open the door, wheels my mother outside to the patio. And I position myself by her, wheelchair to wheelchair, wheel to wheel, mano a mano. How are you, Mom, and what's new? New? Not much. My mother is still there, though she seems to be looking at someone else, and the nuances of conversation have vanished. Everything is flat tones, oddly timed. Still, she's there, and I'm not alone. My brother and I share the secret, that we've been alone since childhood, and "together" has been hobbled out of our adulthoods. Which is to say, we have known mothering in all its aspects.

I try to be jokey. Usually, this is something I easily manage, but not now. I'm holding my mother's hand and tiring of doing this alone. Hey, I say to my brother, let's each hold one of Mom's hands. We do this, and my mother visibly brightens. We are the adults now. We take the initiative. We provide the amusement. We get through this. And being siblings, my brother picks up on the agenda. He asks my mother who she has always loved more, him or me? I do the same, pointing out that my brother was a cute little blond kid, a scene steeler from birth. Both, says my mother. She's there. And so are we. Joking with post-psychoanalytic bravado.

I am wondering how long to stay. I had warned my brother that I wasn't spending all this money and effort to fly to Seattle airport just to make a high-speed dash in and out of my mother's bedside world. Now, I am looking at my watch. Time spent here is emotionally draining. And it is of dubious worth. My mother will forget this moment as soon as it is over. Everything is now, real-time, the moving finger writes, and then we get back on the freeway.

Speaking of freeways, what is my brother's obsession with them? On the drive south from the airport, I knew he was hungry. I certainly was. I got the impression that he wanted to pull into one of the fast food outlets along the way. Well, okay, In-'n-out Burger would have been fine. But the chain has no outlets this far north. He told me that he usually hit Taco Bell for a bean burrito on his frequent trips to my mom. I wanted to point out that he is an executive now, lives in a starter mansion, and can sit down at a restaurant for some face time with his brother. But I didn't want to fight about restaurants just then. With mothering a scarce and priceless commodity bitterly fought over during our youth, maybe it was time to fight for something else.

Which brings us to Cindy Sheehan. She is a household name at the moment. Her household has become our household. The latter being minus one son killed in Iraq. She's been camping outside the President's summer palace in Texas. An interviewer on MSNBC asked her how long she had been an antiwar extremist. The President says her son died at the hands of terrorists. She says her boy was killed by three armed followers of Muqtada Al-Sadr, leader of a Shiite militia. Shiites, if you're a high school dropout in West Virginia, are exactly the same as terrorists. And you believe this right up until that billionth of a second before their bullets bring daylight to your right frontal lobe, producing the distinct impression that these people have lived there for the last 4000 years and you haven't.

So what's the big deal about Cindy Sheehan? There isn't one. And she would be the first to tell you this. The second to tell you this will be Carl Rove's contingent of Swift Boat Mothers Who Aren't Cindy, a.k.a., You Don't Speak for Us, Cindy. Sad to say, theirs became a media nonevent, for the days' real media events are coming from another mother. A mother fucker, if there ever was one. Mother Nature.

New Orleans. If not the storm, the disaster, of the century. That's the trouble with hurricanes. They come waltzing in at any old moment, with all this live-at-11 footage. Leaving remnants of Cindy aglow in our brains. Making Cindy one of the most dangerous terrorists loose in America. Because she won't shut up and stop being a Mom who says her boy didn't die for democracy but for the Great Game of a small band of neoconservative think tankers, all of whom have been quietly kicked upstairs or encouraged to spend more time with their families. And their Great-Game, envisioned as a deft move in the geopolitical struggle for oil dominance, is now morphing into something comprised of one third Beirut, one third the Ayatollah and one third plutonium. The mind refuses to go there. Although leaders are supposed to go there. To "know your enemy." Which is distinct from "know your ideology."

For your ideology, any ideology, is no match for a mother. Trouble is, when mothers get organized, they tend to talk to each other. Even when they don't agree. There comes that awful day when they walk out of their homes on a Sunday morning, defying the Sabbath, or honoring it, depending on one's point of view, and walk together right down the main street. Actually, down the high street, somewhere in Northern Ireland, arm in arm, Protestant and Catholic. Which, when it actually happened, brought an end to a three decades of sectarian war.

As for sectarian war in the Middle East, Iraq for example, well, that's not happening. It's terrorists. And the scary thought is that our president believes this, that these words are actually his ideas, not just demagoguery rolling off his Teleprompter. Meanwhile, my mother keeps rolling around her nursing home. She'll keep rolling for a while. I probably will too. She has this annoying capacity for resignation tinged with self-pity, annoying because I fall into the same habit myself. Still, it keeps us going. Just like something keeps Cindy Sheehan going. And hurricane season keeps going. And Mother Earth, like mothers everywhere, is waking up, aroused by the scent of something as startling as smelling salts. Smelling, and smelling worse all the time.