Finished reading Cohen’s Beautiful Losers today. Hence my heading. It’s a gleefully rutty mess, a guttural love song of human error, not so much a Canadian novel as a European novel, so it’s forgivable to quote it.
Randal’s made a new friend at school, Vivian. Red hair. Tattoo of a butterfly skeleton on her wrist. Shoulders as broad as football uprights. She’d heard his (my) joke and, although she’s in a wheelchair, she found it funny. Said it was her kind of humour. When she was here visiting I told her about my work and how I hope it’ll help and she emailed me this morning and asked me to come to a meeting for her wheelchair group in two days. I replied that I’ll be there. Within ten minutes she replied back saying they’re excited to have me. It’s mostly teenagers and young adults, with a few real adults. The age group, Vivian said, is fourteen to fifty-two, with most of the group leaning toward the younger end of the scale.
Disability, like war or abuse, blurs the lines of age like rouge and Botox never can. The distortion is internal and results in either a buoyant sense of discovery, because just about every experience is new and thrilling, or an iron depression, because nothing interests you. Sometimes both occur, amounting to a crippling bipolarity, a tragic hesitancy. Over time you withdraw from life because you simply can’t make up your mind on how to feel. Your disability is no longer the issue then. It’s how you think.
Vivian asked me to read from my article. I’m hesitant. (I realize the irony here. Shut up.) I just don’t know if it’s ready. I’ve read it over and over looking for a place, a crook in the elbow of my prose, to inject a heroin shot, something that’ll turn my ideas into a drug, because that’s the only way they’ll work. That’s the only way they’ll spread, is if they become a fix. I don’t want a Manson family of cripples (though having several female sex slaves is enormously appealing). I want my ideas to work. I want them to flood some previously untouched rind in people’s brains with a charged, awakening crackle, as though they’ve been slammed with gospel. I want canes and crutches to be raised like M16s. I want wheelchair users to roll like tanks into crowded rooms. I want tongues as loose and jittery as mine to hop around the earth like fish suddenly turned amphibious, hollering instead of gasping, chanting instead of croaking. I want the growls and grunts and yips and huffs and shouts and warbles of all my floppy-mouthed comrades to be taken as calls to arms, as wondrous philosophy, as the voices of our times. I want disability, Dexterity, to be known as the ideal condition of the twenty-first century. Here’s hoping that I’ve enough breath in me to infuse my work with the full vivacity of a cavalry bugler.