October 2005 Archives

Note that if you ever get shot in the spine during a street robbery, there are people who will pay to fly your half-paralyzed self to New Orleans in the guise of crime expert. OK, so you'll have to wait 35 years. So what? You'll get to cross the Mississippi River on the Gretna Bridge, which locals call the Crescent City Bridge and the Federal Highway Department calls I-90, but any sensible person would call spectacular.

So what if two years later, on this bridge to the perfectly ordinary suburb of Gretna, police would shoot over the heads of people fleeing the sewage swamp that had become New Orleans? Never mind that. Because in October, 2003, there was only the present, with me and the driver of the airport van. He was a 70-ish black man, aloof and formal, who couldn't see the flood coming, but knew what it would bring.

I'd never been in the South. I'd never seen the Mississippi. And there it was hundreds of feet below, a night river where sinister half-lit freighters loaded diamonds and nuclear gear for some secret Goldfinger island near the Bahamas.

Hard to say what brings a crippled crime victim to spend three days working with young criminal men. Including black teenagers like those who had shot me in the neck as I walked home from a university library. They had never been caught. Which didn't mean they were free or even alive. Somewhere in Gretna a man I'd met at a conference ran a recovery program for prisoners emerging from Louisiana's notorious Angola State Penitentiary. We agreed, he and I, that it would be good for violent men to see the paralytic fruit of their labors.

All of which explains why, in early autumn in the Deep South, I was turning on the air conditioner in my motel room and watching a white swirl of condensation shoot from the vents. I looked out the window at Denny's across the parking lot. It was a restaurant. There was no other.

Forced to leave my 200 pound electric wheelchair in California, I'd brought a manual version, handy for being pushed by airports attendants, but awkward and difficult to steer with one working arm. Heading for Denny's, I reverted to a technique from my hospital days, shoving myself backwards with my working leg. I wove between parked cars, occasionally turning to see where I was going. I shoved myself backwards up the curb ramp to the sidewalk, to Denny's.

The waitress who opened the door was black. All the waitresses were black, and all the patrons were white. The plastic menu contained nothing that wasn't fried. I ordered the fried fish. I wondered why I had come to this distant place, to spend a solitary evening in a motel coffee shop where everything was sad. The Formica table. The large, doubtless poorly paid waitress shuttling between tables, too young to be so obese. I paid my bill. I slid from the naugahyde booth and sat in my folding wheelchair.

Outside, it was remarkably dark for 8 p.m. I looked up at the stars and saw a boiling blackness of cloud. The curb ramp was steep. I took it slowly, wedging my foot against the asphalt, inching down the incline. A large warm plop hit my neck. I sighed and recalled my London youth, walking somewhere with a friend's father, an elegant Polish Jew. He stopped to brush bird poop from his hat, observing "for the goyim, they sing."

Another warm plop, then another. A flock of birds. I touched my neck. Water. Inexplicably warm. And not falling in droplets, but more like water balloons, way beyond rain. Hundreds of California garden hoses in the sky disgorging tepid contents on the parking lot. Only a few yards from the restaurant now, I pushed hard with my working leg and pulled with my functioning arm. I was sodden within seconds. A wish to stay dry gave way to thoughts of not warping my leather belt. Water was rolling from my pants legs as from a rain gutter. I was a living rinse cycle. I was worrying about my shoes.

In the drowning distance, someone fled the restaurant, bursting through the door, running through the deluge. The waitress materialized. She ran like someone not accustomed to the practice. Someone who had missed out on most of Physical Education and all of girls' soccer. "Here," she said, seizing the handles of my wheelchair. I raised my leg and placed it on the foot pedal while she rolled me fast across the parking lot. She found the curb ramp and now we were up and out of the deluge. Water poured in sheets off the roof of the covered walkway.

I told her she had saved me. "That's all right," she said, "can you get in the room?" No problem, I told her. She looked skeptical. "You got your key?" I stood up and tried to wedge my hand through the pieces of wet fabric that had become my pocket. I gave her the key, and she opened the door. I had the thought, however fleeting, that she was planning to rob me. She pushed my wheelchair inside, dashed into the rain, and I sat in the open doorway watching her flail across the asphalt. All she needed was a little coaching to acquire a stride, lifting the knees, coordinating the arms. But I knew she hadn't had coaching and a lot of other things.

People who have very little often give very much. And it is these people who define humanity. Who carry hope forward like Olympic runners with their torch. And because their flame is feeble and the distance far, they need encouragement. Not suspicious stares from a white guy who thinks he's maybe being robbed.

I did not sleep well that night. The next day, after spending hours in a circle with 40 recently released black convicts, I was glad to return my motel room. I tried to nap. At 6:00 p.m., I stood and wedged the door open with my crutch, struggling to shove the folded wheelchair outside. This disabled-accessible room was designed to drive handicapped persons insane. The high, mounded doorsill blocked the passage of any wheelchair, and the door spring felt more powerful than Moby Dick's flipper. But now I was outside, too tired to care, and it would be clear sailing to Denny's.

A man exiting the room next door offered to give me a push. Denny's? Wouldn't I rather join him at the shopping center across the street? Within minutes, I was ordering a gumbo and staring across a tablecloth at this guy who worked on an oil rig. While I ate the gumbo, he talked about where the oil was and where it wasn't and how tankers had changed. This was why God had invented extroverts, to give the rest of us a chance to eat and think. Spending the day with people who were black and poor, I'd found that all of us had lives. The men's Louisiana accents were almost indecipherable. I felt the exhaustion of learning a foreign language.

One of the men was walking into the restaurant now, a handsome young black kid, not yet 20. He spoke to the maître d'. My oil rig companion leaned across the table. "That boy just came to the wrong restaurant." I was already waving at the kid. We'd just spent an uncomfortable day together and had a sort of bond. The young man smiled at me briefly, took his job application and departed. I thought of how it was to emerge from Angola Penitentiary and find one's way back to simple things, like washing dishes. Different from leaving a hospital crippled, but maybe not so different.

"You know him?" I told my dining companion yes, I'd been in a daylong workshop with black prisoners. He nodded and recommended the bread pudding.