April 2006 Archives

Now that we had television, the full significance of 1955 California was flooding into our home and a single word, a new word, was on everyone's minds and on every kid's lips: Disneyland. Adults had moved heaven and earth to build the Magic Kingdom. And now the place had opened. Actually, Disneyland had opened in the sense that the Orient had opened for Commodore Perry's fleet. The place was itself an opening, like the Northwest Passage. It led somewhere, beyond and beyond, even if one couldn't exactly say where. It led out of Banning. That was the point.

Of course, I had been there on opening day. Not exactly "there," but the day had appeared live on our new television set. Balloons, billions of them, rose like a flock of liberated planets over the Sleeping Beauty Castle. Millions of kids, fortunate enough to live in and around Los Angeles, streamed over a bridge and into the enchanted land. The allure, and the frustration, of this event came to me as I sat in front of our new Magnavox, trying to discern one thing from another. This big TV set had replaced its tiny-screened predecessor. And now a gigantic antenna, guy wires buttressing it against the wind, swayed aloft over our home. Down below, where the signal became manifest, a constant rain of fluorescent snow drifted down the screen. Los Angeles was simply too far away, and its TV signals too weak, to coalesce into a solid portrait of the events transpiring in Disneyland. The real images came at me on the covers of magazines. The fact that I had seen it happen as it happened, then got the real pictures later, made the whole thing feel like what it was. News.

I can't remember if my brother helped me pester our parents. I may have mounted this campaign all on my own. Disneyland. Disneyland. When were we going? How soon? Time was passing. It had been open for weeks. Now more than a month. Now two months. Three. I was getting older. Soon school would be out. And as my life wore on, I would have to live with the knowledge that for months after the opening of Disneyland, I still hadn't been there. I kept telling my parents about it. How there was a jungle river with crocodiles so real that visitors screamed at their sight. I knew this was true, because my homeroom teacher had been there and told us. She had been there, and I hadn't. And the spaceship. Maybe it didn't really take off, but you would never know it, the way it felt, all the blasting and launching and lift-offing. Although I was beyond the sandbox stage, there was still a large square of sand beyond the clothesline. And spurred by desperation, I headed there after school and constructed a topographic replica of the theme park, complete with its five lands.

In retrospect, the psychic overhead must have been considerable. Which is why it was such a good thing that my parents announced the long anticipated visit. To Disneyland. And, incredible beyond words, on a school day. On that day, I would not be wandering across the greasewood fields toward the bus stop, but staying home, climbing into the two-tone Pontiac station wagon, and heading for Anaheim. The whole thing was almost beyond words.

The day started like any other. Up. Breakfast. My brother and I were ready for the car by 8:30. But my mother seemed to regard the day like any other, more like a job than an adventure. I stood by the front door, looking down the hall toward my parents' bedroom. I was a sentinel. When were we going? Loud talk emanated from my parents' bathroom. Yelling. My father should be going to his office soon. I was surprised he hadn't left. After awhile, my mother emerged and found me and my brother standing by the door to the outside, to the day, to Disneyland. She seemed surprised to see us. Her face looked care worn. She was tired. We hadn't even left. My father came after the bathroom. He had soap on his face and was holding his razor. He waved the razor while he spoke to my mother, sharply, fiercely. He was breathing heavily, water dripping down his face, and he was telling her something, something she should know. She closed her purse with a snap. Let's go, she said.

The highway took us to Riverside, and then down past the river, the river that Riverside was beside. The Santa Ana River. At certain times of year, there was actually water in it. And this was one of those times. I hung my head out the window looking at the sparkling rivulet in the middle of the canyon of willows and cottonwoods. Water, live water, in a real river. Everything was not a desert, and this proved it. Water gave life. It took the sandy flats of the Santa Ana Canyon and ensured that they were full of green things. It flowed, my father said, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Where we weren't going today. I asked my mother. No, she said. After awhile we pulled over and my mother unfolded a map. Katella Avenue. We were going to be looking for this avenue. My mother drove through a huge grove of orange trees. Then another. I spotted it first, the spike of the Disneyland spaceship. It loomed above the orange groves, reigned over the parking lot. And the rest was a mystery, a high berm of earth separating those outside from those inside. A train rumbled along the berm, blowing its steam whistle. My God. We were here.

Inside, the asphalt expanses were empty. The sky was unaccountably gray. This wasn't rain, just the sunless condition of being near the ocean. Fog. I hadn't counted on this. Emptiness and grayness. My mother asked a hamburger vendor in Tomorrowland where the visitors were. It's a weekday, she said. In Adventureland, we stared at mechanical monkeys and rode the riverboat through unconvincing rapids. The sky had a morose, somber feel, and the lack of people made the three of us, my mother, my brother and me, seem like an odd grouping. We rode the teacups, my brother and I fighting about how to make the ride go faster. We went back to Tomorrowland. The Autopia beckoned. Kids were driving cars, real cars, and the only requirement involved size. You had to be a certain size. This meant standing under a sign. If you were tall enough to touch the sign with your head, you were ready to drive the Autopia. I eyed the sign. Maybe. Marginal. Which was slightly embarrassing, because I was eight years old. Definitely old enough for this, but embarrassingly short. In December I would be nine. Old for the Autopia. It was now or never. Stand under the sign and see. I was more than tall enough. Afraid. I was always afraid. And embarrassing to have even hesitated walking up to the sign and climbing into a car. Which I was doing now, the steering wheel padded with foam rubber, me strapped in like a baby fighter pilot. I roared off, terrified at the noise, surprised at how close to the ground the little cars sat. I turned to the left, and the car cooperated. A kid passed me on the right, then another. I was doing something wrong. I was going too slow. I pressed the accelerator and was going too fast. Another turn. Then a narrow space, and another kid passing me. He had a demented look in his eye and scraped his car against mine. At last it was over. Too loud. Too fast. Too scary. My brother watched me climb out of the low car. I straightened up and tried to manage something like a swagger. He was too little for this sort of thing.

My mother was sitting on a bench. She hadn't seen me going around the Autopia. No one knew what the experience had been really like. I had just been driving around and around like anyone else. Now she was talking to someone on the bench beside her, laughing sharply, probably being what my father called sarcastic. She looked at her watch. It was time, almost, to go home. My brother and I stalled the process, looking at old cartoon transparencies in the gift shop. Now priceless, the animation studios sold them as virtual discards in those days. I turned the rack, wondering what I would do with a small picture of the witch from Sleeping Beauty. The day was over, but I didn't want to go home. I couldn't quite admit that the grayness and the lack of people had been disappointing. There was another grayness looming over my family, and it was beginning to pervade everything. Even the Magic Kingdom.

All the way to Sonoma County I felt the bittersweet novelty of it, going away for a weekend, on my own, driving two hours in a car, on the freeways, wife at home, throwing caution to the neuromuscular winds, on and on. It was raining just enough to make the whole thing exciting. Excitement being pretty easy to come by when you're a middle-aged quadriplegic who has been pondering this 80-mile trip for over two years. Driving having become a major undertaking. Stamina being increasingly in short supply. Anxiety and fear of the unknown already nibbling away at the edges of the world. So, before the world shrank to the borders of Menlo Park, California, my suburban home, I decided it was time to hit the road, spend a weekend away from the wife, be one of the guys.

I am not very transportable. My body moves less and less, bends less and less. While my requirements seem to get increasingly strict. A low table, placed beside the bed, on the right side, where with a skilled reach, I can grab one of two plastic urinals in the middle of the night. The bed itself must be near a bathroom, just in case eliminatory needs demand more than bottles. A shower with more handrails then a submarine. And so on. In his Sonoma duplex, my friend John had none of these things. It was clear from the first night, when we finally got around to the topic of sleep and arrangements for paralyzed guests. And I realized there was no way I could get into John's custom plywood raised bed in the corner of his living room without help. And there wasn't a chair of the perfect height I require to take off my leg brace, pants and shirt. What was I going to do? Because if there's anything enjoyable about a weekend with the guys, it's the unceremonious, unaesthetic, rough-and-tumble spontaneity of being on one's own. But having someone practically carry you up his stairs, take off your shoes and socks for you, lift you into bed, all of that just isn't the average male's idea of an independent weekend on your own. And since being an average male is the ultimate goal of this quadriplegic, my Sonoma weekend early on was looking like a step backwards into living in a care facility. I was beginning to see it unfolding, John helping me get my socks off, holding my hand while I stepped into the shower, standing by to make sure I didn't slip. All of it, a reminder of my utter dependence, and the impossibility of breaking free and doing anything truly spontaneous and vagabondish on my own.

Thank God for John's DVD of the Trailer Park Boys. The latter are the heroes, and the title characters, in a Canadian TV series, a pseudo-documentary set in a Nova Scotia trailer park. The Trailer Park Boys, both of them, had just emerged from 18 months in prison, serving a sentence for something more stupid than lucrative. Now they are out, and getting their lives together, which consists of thinking about junior college and arguing about who gets to sleep in whose car and how to come up with the cash to start growing dope. Life being what it is, these dreams get melded together. One of the lead boys ends out growing dope in the backseat of a friend's car, the front seat being his bed. Anyone can feel superior to the Trailer Park Boys. It's a superiority that makes the liberal in me cringe, for it is all about class superiority. I am more successful, don't do that sort of thing. One of the Trailer Park Boys goes through his entire lower middle-class day with a rum and coke in his hand.

But on this weekend, in this enclave for 1960s refugees like me, with dope being at hand, I soon reached a biochemical state that put me right in touch with the Trailer Park Boys. Stoned, my ambitions collapsed to the level of theirs. Time passed without meaning or purpose. We went out to eat. We watched TV. The Trailer Park Boys. In the end, John leveraged me into bed, removed my socks without a word, and the room spun the way rooms do in the dark when an addled brain is having its contents soothed and reduced by chemical inputs. Just like the Trailer Park Boys.

In the first year or so after my injury, when I was a remarkably spry post-rehabilitation quadriplegic who still walked with a crutch and could sit in a car long enough to drive to Los Angeles, I visited friends there. I crashed on one sofa, then another. I got into showers all alone. I went to someone else's sofa. I used another shower. These were friends, or friends of friends, and everyone was glad to be there, glad to see me, glad to help. And, in retrospect, they most probably felt rather horrified and helpless in the face of my injured state. What I remember about that visit to Los Angeles, or maybe it was a couple of visits, was my horrifying loss of independence. Everything was difficult. One sofa was too hard, and one was too soft. One shower was too slippery, another too hard to climb into. So I figured out elaborate maneuvers, some relatively dangerous, to accomplish things on my own. All of which took enormous amounts of time, a fact doubtless observed by my hosts, but ignored by me. Anything for independence.

But at John's, none of this was possible. Yes, he helped me into the shower, stood by while I fumbled around inside, held the shampoo bottle and squeezed it for me. But this didn't matter. The rainy day had acquired the fatiguing clarity of dope. Moments were unfurling, one after the next. From showering, to dressing with John's help, to thudding down the stairs and getting in my wheelchair. While John muttered something about destroying the plastic control knob. How had John, or how could anyone, wreck the knob that steers a crippled person's wheelchair? Carelessness, of course. John had been careless. You couldn't trust people. You shouldn't trust people. People are knob wreckers. Except that with a role model like the Trailer Park Boys, you know that you are in guy space, actually in friend space. And in this space someone can hear you scream. So go ahead and scream. Unless you don't need to. And you really don't need to when John, your friend, this same one who just helped you dress and shower, already has his carpenter neighbor working on a custom replacement for your precious wheelchair knob. So, lighten up. And, by the way, get a life. Except that you've got one. And it's a lot like the Trailer Park Boys' life. A Boy's Life. And by the way, let's have breakfast.