The Best of Me(9)

I fantasized with the nagging suspicion there was something missing, something I was forgetting. This something turned out to be grades. It was with profound disappointment I discovered it took more than a C average to attend Harvard. Average, that was the word that got to me. C and average, the two went hand in hand.

I was sent instead to a state college in western North Carolina where the low brick buildings were marked with plaques reading ERECTED 1974, and my roommate left notes accusing me of stealing his puka shell necklace or remedial English book. I expect someday to open the newspaper and discover the government had used that campus as part of a perverse experiment to study the effects of continuous, high--decibel Pink Floyd albums on the minds of students who could manufacture a bong out of any given object but could not comprehend that it is simply not possible to drive a van to Europe.

I spent my year buckling down and improving my grades in the hope that I might transfer somewhere, anywhere, else. I eventually chose Kent State because people had been killed there. At least they hadn’t died of boredom, that was saying something. “Kent State!” everyone said. “Do you think you’ll be safe up there?”

I arrived the following September and was assigned to a dormitory largely reserved for handicapped students. It had always been my habit to look away from someone in a wheelchair, but here I had no choice, as they were everywhere. These were people my own age who had jumped into a deceptively shallow pool or underestimated the linebackers of the opposing team. They had driven drunk on prom night or slipped off their parents’ roof while cleaning the gutters; one little mistake, and they could never take it back. The paraplegics gathered in the lobby, perfecting their wheelies and discussing their customized cars while the quads purred by in their electric chariots, squinting against the lit cigarettes propped artfully between their lips.

The first quarter I roomed with a fellow named Todd, an amiable Dayton native whose only handicap was having red hair. The quadriplegics had the best drug connections, so we often found ourselves hanging out in their rooms. “The hookah’s over on the shelf,” they’d say. “Right next to the rectal suppositories.” Over time I grew accustomed to the sight of a friend’s colostomy bag and came to think of Kent State as something of an I.V. League university. The state would pay your board if you roomed with a handicapped student, so second quarter I moved in with Dale, a seventy-five-pound sophomore with muscular dystrophy. I learned to bathe Dale and set him on the toilet. I turned the pages of his books, dialed the telephone, and held the receiver against his mouth as he spoke. I dressed him and combed his hair, fed him and clipped his toenails, but I can’t say that we were ever close.

Midway through the term Dale was sent back home to live with his parents, and I moved in with Peg, a fun girl with a degenerative nerve disease. Peg was labeled an “incomplete quad” and liked to joke that she couldn’t finish anything. Already we had something in common. She had come to school to escape her parents, who refused her any beverage after 6 P.M. They complained that at the end of a long day, they were simply too worn out to set her on the toilet. God had chosen her to suffer this disease, and if she had any complaints, she should take it up with Him. This was a nasty illness that left its host progressively incapacitated. Peg’s limbs were twisted and unreliable and had a mind of their own. A cup of scalding coffee, a lit cigarette, forks and steak knives—objects sprung from her hands with no prior notice. She wore thick glasses strapped to her head and soiled sheepskin booties on her useless, curled feet. Peg’s voice was slurred to the point that information operators and pizza-delivery services, thinking she was drunk, would hang up on her. Unnerved by the sight of her, Peg’s professors automatically agreed with everything she had to say. “Good question!” they’d shout. “That’s very perceptive of you. Does anyone else have any thoughts on what she just said?” She might ask to use the bathroom, but because no one could understand her, it was always the same answer. “Good point, isn’t it, class!”

In the cafeteria she was met with frantic congeniality. Rather than embarrass themselves trying to figure out her choice of an entree, they just went ahead and piled everything on her plate.

A person in a wheelchair often feels invisible. Push a wheelchair and you’re invisible as well. Outside of the dorm, the only people to address us would speak as if we were deaf, kneeling beside the chair to shout, “FATHER TONY IS HAVING A GUITAR MASS THIS SUNDAY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO JOIN US?”

Peg would beckon the speaker close and whisper, “I collect the teeth from live kittens and use them to make necklaces for Satan.”

“WELL SURE YOU DO,” they’d say. “THAT’S WHAT OUR FELLOWSHIP IS ALL ABOUT.”

For Peg, being invisible was an old and tiresome story. To me, it definitely had some hidden potential. So began our life of crime.

We started off in grocery stores. Peg had a sack on the back of her wheelchair, which I would fill with thick steaks and frozen lobster tails. There was no need to slink behind pyramids of canned goods, hiding from the manager; we did our stealing right out in the open. Peg carried a canvas bag on her lap and stuffed it with everything she could get her hands on. Canned olives, teriyaki sauce, plastic tubs of pudding—our need had nothing to do with it. The point was to take from an unfair world. We quit going to the cafeteria, preferring to cook our meals in the dormitory kitchen, the butter dripping off our chins. We moved on to bookstores and record shops, guaranteed that no one would say, “I think I see that crippled girl stealing the new Joni Mitchell album.” Circumstances prevented us from stealing anything larger than our heads, but anything else was ours for the taking.