Later in the summer I received a Braille card from Fidelco, a guide-dog school near Hartford, which said I had been accepted to receive a guide dog. It had been my mother’s suggestion to apply for a dog. She had seen a man walking with a sleek powerful German shepherd and had told me they looked graceful together. I held the card from Fidelco in my hand, missing my mom and missing the fact that she would never see my dog, whose name was written in Braille on the bottom of the card: “Wizard.”
Usually guide dogs are given to blind students as they leave for college. People first have to be prepared to work the dog every day and be responsible enough to feed and groom it. I was only sixteen when I met Wizard, a sleek black and tan German shepherd. Ironically, Wizard was the youngest graduate of Fidelco’s program and I was the youngest recipient in its history. He had a long smooth body with a long snout like a wolf’s. His coat flowed all back in one direction and he had little tufts of hair like a cowlick where his leather harness rested. Dave Darr, my instructor, told me that Wizard had spent the first fifteen months living with a foster family, being housebroken, learning to heel, sit, and stay, and generally enjoying his puppyhood. I know it must have been hard for a family to give up a beautiful dog like Wizard, but perhaps they took solace in knowing that Wizard was going on to do very important work. Guiding for a German shepherd is about at the level of being the president of the United States for a human, except instead of protecting the population from foreign dictators, nuclear strikes, and inflation, Wizard would protect the life of one blind guy from collisions with fire hydrants, telephone poles, and overhanging tree branches.
For the first step in our training, Dave put an improvised harness and leash over his back. I walked around the neighborhood, feeling a little silly as I pretended Dave was the dog and told him right and left and halt. Next I walked with the harness around Wizard, with Dave about eight feet behind me, also connected to the harness by a long cord. If Wizard tried to bolt out of my grasp, he was ready to reign him in. On my first solo walk, Wizard, sensing immediately he was no longer connected to the safety line, ran my thigh squarely into a fire hydrant. It gave me such a charley horse I doubled up in pain, lying on the sidewalk, Wizard’s bad breath steaming in my face. I imagined him saying, “Get up, tough guy, want to go for round two?”
Dogs aren’t born with an inherent fear of traffic. At first, they aren’t quite swift enough to associate a two-ton, moving vehicle with the unpleasant sensation of pain. So, Wizard had to be taught to fear the road. This was accomplished by Wizard and I standing on the edge of a curb, with Dave hiding around the corner in the Fidelco van. Then he whirled around the corner, and as he sped past me, only a foot away, I gave Wizard the signal to step off the curb. “Forward!” I said, and just as poor Wizard followed the command, I pulled him quickly back by his harness and scolded him by saying, “Bad dog.” After a whole morning of Dave’s squealing-tire near misses, with me yelling out, “Forward!” Wizard began to disobey me, and this was just the point. I needed to be the one to decide when to cross a street, but if blasting jackhammers or blaring sirens impaired my hearing, and I gave a “forward” as a car sped by, Wizard needed to know he could refuse my command.
Working with a guide dog was a lot harder than I originally thought. Getting where I wanted to go wasn’t as easy as saying, “Wizard, take me to McDonald’s, the one on First and Main.” Wizard didn’t possess a magical intuition, like a guide dog I had seen on a Sunday night Disney movie. The dog in the movie seemed to be smarter than the blind man he was guiding, and the two seemed to communicate through mental telepathy. Wizard was far from omniscient; we struggled to communicate. Dave told me, “You are the big picture guy and Wizard is the detail man.” I had to know where I was going. In downtown Westport, when walking from the record store to the movie theater, I knew to walk down the hill, cross five streets, and soon after a sharp decline, to begin telling Wizard to, “Find left. Find inside,” waving my hand in the direction I wanted Wizard to look. Wizard couldn’t distinguish between the door to the movie theater and the door to anywhere else, so often I gave him the left command too early or too late and he would bring me to the door of the sub shop, or the bookstore, or the mini mart. From there, it was my job to notice the smell of books or bread baking, the ring of a cash register, and the absence of popcorn, assess my mistake and decide whether I needed to go farther or backtrack. The process involved a lot of trial and error and a lot of wrong doors, but it also opened up worlds of opportunity. When Wizard and I cruised around downtown streets with a group of guys, no longer did my heart beat with trepidation. Using a long white cane was perfectly respectable, but with the distracting noises of jackhammers, car horns, and other pedestrians, I couldn’t hear my friends’ footsteps well enough to follow. So this forced me to take an arm, which was OK if it was my brother’s or dad’s, but hanging on to the arm of a male buddy definitely cut down on the cool factor, especially if girls were around. In this scenario, however, Wizard was my secret weapon. All I had to do was to command Wizard to follow, and he would stick to a person like a bad odor.
During my guide-dog training, Dave tested Wizard’s skill by trying to lose us in a shopping mall. For half an hour, he weaved crazily through a maze of clothes racks and glass counters, up and down escalators, and in and out of small stores. But Wizard wasn’t even fazed. He simply lowered his head, flattened his ears, and it was obvious to me as I followed his zigzagging motions through the stiff metal and leather handle of his harness, he thrived on exactly this kind of challenge. He wasn’t a dog; he was a following machine, a green beret in the ranks of guide dogs. Near the end of the exercise, Dave gave one last supreme effort to ditch me by darting left into a bathroom and hiding in a stall. I heard a nearby child ask, “Mommy, why is that guy running away from the blind man?”
Wizard couldn’t be beaten, however. He made it to the bathroom door before it even swung shut, sat down very businesslike in front of the stall and pointed his nose in Dave’s direction. Then he rolled his head up and let out a high-pitched yawn as if to let us know his following skills hadn’t been remotely stretched. Dave was silent for a moment as he peeked through the crack in the stall and then, realizing he was found, began chuckling and speaking softly, almost to himself, “Good boy. That’s a very good boy.”
Wizard knew lots of other commands as well: find the stairs, find the curb, find the escalator, and my favorite, probably because I taught him this myself, find the chair. Coming into the school bus or into class, I always found it awkward to feel around for an empty chair. So, I set an empty chair in front of Wizard while we were home one day and said repeatedly, “Find the chair,” and then gently pushed his head down so it lay on the seat. Now in the classroom, Wizard, spotting an empty chair across the room, would charge with purpose toward it and lay his head down, wagging his tail with gusto. My favorite pet trick was when he picked up spare change that I had dropped, by sliding it around with his nose until he was able to pop it up and get hold of it with his mouth. Then, he’d proudly hand it to me, all slobbered and slimy in my hand.
After long days of training, Wiz and I would play fetch in the cul-de-sac below my house. Even during downtime Wiz never took anything lightly. He played as intensely as he worked. My dad described to me his unblinking eyes, dark and wolflike, as they followed the tennis ball in my hand. Then I would throw the ball as far and high as I could, and Wiz would bound to the right spot beneath the falling ball and, like a professional outfielder, circle around, his burning eyes following its descent, and snatch the pop fly from the air with a quick leap and flick of his jaws. Afterwards, we wrestled in the driveway. Wiz and I faced off and he would spring in and out of my reach as I tried to catch his paws and roll his body to the ground. When I got hold of him, he’d escape with an explosion of writhing twisting movements, and we’d face off again, Wizard letting out little playful grunts and growls under his breath. Wiz’s long snout would lunge menacingly at my wrists and hands and, only centimeters away, he would pull back enough that I would only feel the soft delicate pressure of his teeth and lips around my skin. When I finally held him fast, he still wouldn’t give in, and I could feel his sinewy muscles wriggling and twitching beneath his fur. Then I’d pick him up in a fireman’s carry, his belly resting on the back of my neck and his paws held in my hands. With Wiz still snapping and howling in delight, I’d spin us around and around, like a professional wrestler about to finish off his opponent with a body slam. After a few minutes of spinning, when we were both thoroughly dizzy and I felt ready to fall over, I’d lay him down gently on his back. Just as he felt my grip slacken, Wiz was up again, leaping, lunging, snapping, and barking. Often I was so into the game, I’d lose track of time, and afterwards, we’d both lie on the ground, panting and nearly lifeless. Sometimes I’d lie on my back with my head resting on Wiz’s side as he licked the salty sweat off my hand.
Wizard accompanied me everywhere, through the hallways of my high school, to wrestling matches, and, a few months before high school graduation, on a Friday-night excursion to New York City. Wiz and I rode the train into the city with Chris and Bret, another friend, who both borrowed one of my extra long white canes so they could get the Metro-North handicap fare: $4.50 versus $8.00. They closed their eyes beneath dark sunglasses so their facial movements wouldn’t give them away and swayed through the narrow aisle, clumsily swinging their canes and bumping their shins. The turbulence of the moving train kept bouncing Bret into people’s laps, and at the end of each passenger car, where the aisle became wider, Chris would get disoriented, walking around in circles and careening into walls. Eventually, I got tired of waiting for them, so I had them form a line, each holding the shoulder of the person in front, with me like a mama duck, leading the procession. Imagining the commuters watching from their seats, I chuckled, a little chagrined, knowing we looked like a cross between the three blind mice and the three stooges.
After Wiz laid his head on an empty seat and we sat down, the conductor came by to sell us our tickets. Chris and Bret reached into their pockets and thrust out an unorganized wad of crumpled bills. The conductor plucked out the $4.50. “Here’s your ticket,” he said very slowly and a little too loudly. “Will you need any help off the train?”
“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’ll take care of ’em.” The bills in my wallet were arranged in order from biggest to smallest, with twenties folded in half horizontally, tens folded in half vertically, fives folded in thirds, and ones not folded at all, so I was able to hand the conductor the exact change. Perhaps because I was the only one not wearing sunglasses and because I made a habit of facing a person when talking to them, the conductor asked me, “Are you wanting the handicap fare, too?”
I wanted to say, “Hey pal, if you haven’t noticed yet, I’m the only one here who’s actually blind,” but instead I laughed, figuring I’d take it as a compliment.
In New York City we tried to get into a nightclub. The private cop at the door didn’t question our poorly made fake IDs, but said bluntly, “No dogs.” I tried to explain that the dog is not a pet but considered my eyes. I explained that Wizard would slip under a chair and wouldn’t even be noticed, but this explanation had absolutely no effect. “The dog will scare customers,” is all he replied. I even took out a small pamphlet that clearly stated the law that guide dogs are allowed into public establishments, but that just made him angry. “Don’t show me the law. I’m an officer of the law, and if you give me any more lip, I’ll throw you in jail. I don’t care if you’re blind.” I desperately wanted to keep arguing the point but was afraid this approach would eventually lead him to taking a closer inspection of our puny seventeen-year-old frames and our lame IDs. We walked away, but then snuck around to the back door, knocked, and told a bouncer that the officer in front told me that it would be easier for the dog to get in this way. The bouncer escorted us to a table. On the way, women kept approaching me asking to pet the dog. When we sat down, Chris said, “Put Wizard a little in the aisle, so women’ll see him. I know his job is to guide you around, but he’s also a major chick magnet.” The plan worked beautifully and we were seldom without admiring women, who, while walking by our table, found Wizard to be the perfect icebreaker. I suppose women figured anyone with a beautiful German shepherd at his side couldn’t very well be an ax murderer.
“Oh, he’s so precious.”
“Oh, isn’t he gorgeous.”
“What a handsome boy.”
As each new woman approached, I invented new responses. “Thanks for the compliment. The dog’s pretty cute too. You can’t pet him; he’s on duty, but if you’re cute, I might let you scratch me behind the ear.”
My ego got a boost when one girl sat down with us and really seemed interested in me. “Most guys are just interested in how a girl looks, but beauty’s only skin deep. You,” she said with passion, “see through a girl’s outward appearance. You see into the soul.” I was pretty sure that being blind didn’t give me special X-ray vision into the soul, but I didn’t fight her assessment. Then she asked me to dance, and as her meaty hand clamped down on mine to lead me to the dance floor, I started getting suspicious as to why she was so interested in me not seeing her. The girl was inexhaustible, through a dozen songs of Madonna and The Culture Club, flinging me around the dance floor, even grinding and undulating with me against the wall, her squatty legs bent and midsection barreling forward like a sumo wrestler.
When she finally led me back to our table and left, I leaned across to Chris and whispered, “You’re dead!”
Chris cracked up, high pitched and hysterical. “What was I supposed to do, say right in front of her, ‘Dude, run and hide before it’s too late’?”
“You’ve gotta give me a clue whether a girl’s good looking or not, but it’s gotta be subtle.” I thought for a minute and then said, “When a girl comes over, you walk over and shake my hand like you’re saying hello. If you shake my hand like this,” I said, grasping his hand in a traditional handshake, “then it means she’s average. If you shake my hand like this,” I grabbed Chris’s hand by interlocking our thumbs and wrapping my four fingers around the top of his hand, “it means she’s hot.”
“And what if she’s a dog?” Chris asked.
“Then this.” I curled my four fingers and hooked them around Chris’s hooked fingers.
For the rest of the night, the handshake worked without a hitch. A girl would approach; Chris would interrupt, “Hey dude, how’s it going?” while giving me the ugly shake. Then I’d say, “Yeah, the dog, he’s great alright, except sometimes in really crowded situations, he just goes ballistic, snapping and biting. It gets kind of ugly. He’s only done it a few times though,” and magically she’d be gone in a few seconds. Another girl would approach; Chris interrupted with the same greeting while giving me the hot shake. Then I’d say, “One thing about being blind, looks just don’t matter much to me. I try to see into the soul. So tell me. Where’re you from?”
While I was buying a round of beers at the bar, some guys sitting nearby wanted to know how I could tell the difference between bills. They were clearly drunk, so I thought for a moment and said, “I can smell the difference. . . . Ones are made from pine trees, fives from oak, and tens from birch.” I guess they weren’t as drunk as I had thought and one said, “I don’t believe that. You’re gonna have to prove that one, buddy,” already whipping out some bills. Chris and I excused ourselves for a moment to take a leak and when we returned, they handed me a bill. “Well,” I said. “If you really don’t think I can do it, how ’bout we bet a round of beers?” They agreed readily, handing me bill after bill, in no order or pattern. Some new, some old, some smooth, others wrinkled. Each time, I’d hold the bill flat up against my nose, taking in the deep aroma. Then, I’d roll it up into a tube and place it directly under my nostril, breathing in again, and finally, I’d take the bill and rub it vigorously up and down my cheek.
“Why’s he rubbing it like that?” one of them asked challengingly. “I thought he smelled it.”
“Shh,” Chris commanded. “He’s got his ways.” Actually, Chris had no idea why, and I didn’t either, except for thinking it might serve as a distraction for what was happening under the table. For each bill, Chris’s foot tapped mine: once for a one, twice for a five, three times for a ten, et cetera. As I identified five different bills in a row, the group of guys grew more amazed and Chris and I got drunker. On the way out, we brazenly stumbled past the officer at the door who, no doubt, was wondering just how we had gotten in. “Don’t worry, officer,” I assured him. “I’m not driving.”
* * *
I graduated from Weston High in June of 1987. I had been accepted to Boston College, a few miles down the road from the Carroll Center for the Blind. While at the Carroll Center, I had explored Boston and was enthralled by all the elevators with Braille numbers beside each button, the trolleys, called Ts for short, which could take me all over the city, and the thousands of other college students from over two hundred other universities. BC had an adaptive-technology center with computers that had Braille displays and voice synthesizers, powerful Braille printers, and Kurzweil machines that worked like scanners and converted printed text to synthesized voice.
On the evening of graduation, Mrs. Reddy, my guidance counselor, gave me an extra cap for Wizard. I put it on his head, but he constantly shook it off. I had rehearsed the walk from my seat in the audience to the steps of the stage, across it, and down the set of stairs on the other side, so that Wizard would do the route automatically. When I heard my name announced, I got up and said softly, “Forward, Wiz. Find the stairs.” At the bottom Wiz stopped and positioned his body perpendicular to the stairs, so that my first step was lined up straight. At the top, we took three steps to where I heard the closed sound of a body to my left, reached out, and found the principal’s hand. As I took my diploma, the audience clapped and cheered. The sound lasted for a long time, as long as it took Wiz and me to cross the stage and reach the other stairs, Wiz to pause and me to say, “forward,” and us to carefully climb down and reach my open seat. When it was time for all the seniors to throw their caps in the air, I reached for Wizard’s cap, but he had already flung it off again, becoming the first in our whole class to carry out the tradition.