Scrape, Scrape

I just spent almost 3 hours trying to find a wheelchair-accessible hotel room in London.  The experience, virtual, of course, left me vaguely infuriated.  Did my web browsing produce a room?  Not exactly.  There is a strong candidate, a high-rise in Kensington which, I recall from doing the same web search a year ago, seems to be a favorite of British disabled users.  The very fact that I have tilled the same accessibility ground so many times annoys me.  The fact that so little has changed over the past year annoys me even more.  For there is not much to say about wheelchair accessibility among London hotels, except that some are and some aren't.  Some are more expensive than others.  Some are closer to the West End.  I mean, really, what is at stake?  Does a person with a real purpose in life, any significant things that need doing, have three hours to squander on something so trivial?

The 20-story Kensington hotel I currently favor would have me far from the English National Opera, but close to my London roots.  I cannot tell if the latter are shallow or deep, having grown for less than four years, four decades ago...but whatever the root structure, I grew there.  London is the place where I recovered.  From my shooting, from my childhood.  It is where my true life seems to have begun.  Do I go back there to pay it homage?  Or simply to enjoy it?  And do I really enjoy it at all, in view of the hardships any visit to London seems to entail.

Cabs.  I can just see myself in the West End streets, late at night after dinner or a show, trying to flag down a ride home.  That's why the 'home' is so important.  There is no cabbing to a hotel in Bloomsbury, say.  Kensington?  Just the opposite.  I don't know.  Three hours.

Marlou is quite an expert at luring London cab drivers over to the curb, only to spring the news on them that sorry, but you have a passenger in a wheelchair.  Here he comes now.  Moments before, he was hiding in the shadow of that streetlight.  Now he's not.  He's headed your way, and I...Marlou...am chatting you into the next phase of things, which involves getting out of your cab and complying with what ultimately are EU regulations concerning accessibility for disabled people.  She's pretty good at this.  But she's not going to be there.

This fact alone may leave me feeling a bit depressed.  The psychology of abandonment is always with me, it seems.  No, it's not rational.  I could return to California with Marlou and get on with any number of enjoyable things.  London?  I would be back soon enough.  London, the place where I came to grips with loss.  The whole place is permeated with it.

This hotel in Kensington, cab-dependent though it is, is only a few streets away from where my relatives lived.  I got to know my British family there, got established there, tried on the idea of staying and eventually found my own bedsitting room nearby.  So, yes, a few weeks from now I could roll out of my hotel room and, within minutes, stare blankly at the brick townhouse recvalled from the 1970s with the three floors and endless steps.  Then do something else.  Meet friends or cousins.  Get a cab.  There's a strange disconnect between the London of Middlesex and the London of my mind.  I suppose I try to bring them together, but this is mostly impossible.  There's always a tension between being here parking my wheelchair by a fountain in Kensington Gardens, and being there, in the past staring at the same distant gardens from a bus.

I walked in those days, walked everywhere.  How I did it seems mysterious.  But the reality was simple and immediate.  I closed the door on my bedsit and began descending an enormous flight of stone steps.  In those days, I was so preoccupied, so emotionally caught up in the reality of my new crippled life, that details eluded me.  It took me quite awhile, weeks or months, to realize that the paint symmetrically scraped from the wall to my left in the stairwell, the marks at elbow level, were the result of my crutching.  For stability, I leaned my crutch-bearing arm against the wall, and the jagged aluminum tubing dug into the plaster.  Scrape, scrape.

At the bottom of the stairs I checked for mail.  It fell through the slot in the front door, and various residents of the house picked it up and placed it on a large wooden table beneath a huge beveled mirror.  The latter must have been the only remnant of furniture and decor from the days when this had been a family house.  Now, it was something smaller and more fractured, a place where I shut the huge oak door behind me, gripped the black wrought iron fence and turned right up the footpath.  For this was the way to the tube station.  Click, click.  Twist, lean, twist, lean.  I got there in only five or 10 minutes.  Coins in the slot, me in the lift, the door shut by a London Transport Jamaican in a blue uniform, and down and down to the level of rumbling.  Which wasn't, of course, the level of the tube trains.  No, that was another flight of stairs down.  The train pulled in, I stepped on, and so much for Holland Park tube station.

Wheelchairs were actually banned in the London tube system, their presence illegal, until the mid-1990s.  Actually, I can see why.  But I was far from using a wheelchair in those days, or so it seemed.  Now I am so far from using the London Underground that the past seem separated by...I don't know.  Maybe it's separated by the big West London parks, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and Holland Park.  I used to live just off the north side of the big swath of greenery, and now I'm staying in expensive hotels in Kensington, just off the south side.  And when I lived there I used to look south in my mind, toward all the urban action in Kensington and the West End.  If I get a hotel room there in June, I'll be looking north toward my relatives' old place in Abbotsbury Road and my bed sit in Norland Square...stupefied and amazed at the passage of time.  In a wheelchair and weighing more and focusing more on the end of life than the beginning and, with a bit of effort and some discipline, still capable of being grateful that I am here at all.s