Stricken with polio as a teenager and disabled for more than forty years, Lorenzo Wilson Milam isn’t embarrassed to call himself a Crip. “Crip,” he writes, “is the only word I have found over the years that contains the pith and vigor we need to describe our condition. It’s no accident that the most powerful of the Los Angeles street gangs call themselves ‘The Crips.’ They’re born survivors.”
He wrote his latest book, CripZen, because more than half of the severely disabled attempt suicide in the first few years of their new lives, and “I wanted to show my brothers and sisters how to survive — and, in the process, to find love for others and for themselves.” By turns tough and tender, petulant and witty, always provocative, CripZen challenges stereotypes cherished by the “temporarily-abled” and encourages the disabled to face the mirror unashamed.
In several chapters drawn from his column on sexuality for Independent Living, Milam writes frankly about sex surrogates, celibacy, and self-love. Other articles — some of which appeared originally in such publications as Disability Rag, Spinal Network, and Fessenden Review — concern depression, anger, madness, and finding psychological help.
In a key chapter, Milam recommends practicing Zen Buddhism because it emphasizes “spiritual growth and a quiet mind over physical activities and the temporary pleasures of the flesh. The study and practice of Zen should be a natural for us,” he suggests, detailing a fourfold path for survival that includes meditation, autohypnosis, dream work, and out-of-body experiences.
Milan is the author of nine other books, including The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues, Sex And Broadcasting, and The Blob That Ate Oaxaca.
— Pamela Penick
GETTING A LIFE
Mr. Milam,
Re: Your article in Hippocrates magazine.
Your attitude stinks. So you’re a little bit crippled. It’s up to you to put others at ease!
My son has been a quad since 1986. His sense of humor has never faltered. His friends are steady. He owns and works in a sporting goods store. He works with the public every day and doesn’t have your poor-me attitude.
Get a life.
E.L.H.
Dallas, Texas
Dear E.L.H.,
Thank you for your postcard.
The article that appeared in Hippocrates was an excerpt from my autobiography, The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues, a book about what it means to be disabled.
My book was written as an antidote to the Life-Is-Great-No-Matter-What-Happens message that has plagued us since the advent of the good Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The book does indeed contain self-pity, despair, and anger. It also contains hope, joy, love, and finally an epiphany (of sorts).
The book was an attempt to show what the newly disabled go through, steps that are very similar to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of dying: anger, self-pity, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. I suspect the excerpt was chosen by Hippocrates as an example of the anger and distancing that occur when we lose a part of our body — something that is well known to medical professionals but all too often hidden from family and friends.
There are days when your son feels sharp, bright, alive, conquering, in control, full of optimism and joy. These times he no doubt shares with you. So you say his sense of humor “has never faltered.” He doesn’t have a “poor-me attitude.”
From my more than thirty-five years of experience, I would suggest to you that there are times when his humor falters. There are days when, I suspect, he feels despair, angst, the blues. There are days, most probably, when he wouldn’t reveal to you or anyone else his real grief. He keeps it inside. Many of us have to because there is an unspoken demand by the world that those dark thoughts be hidden away.
I’ve never met you, but from having read your crisp condemnation of me, I know you well. You are one of the legions who tell us what we should feel, instead of listening to what we do feel. We have met you thousands of times before, and you drive us up the wall.
I would guess your deepest fear is that your son is, after all these years, still capable of grieving over his loss-of-body. Your fear — perhaps his too — is that if he ever let the truth out, even for a moment, the two of you would lose your silver-lined world. It is all part of denial, a malicious double bind for all of us. It tells us that when we are in the dumps and show it, we are being Bad, as in Bad Boy, or Bad Cripple.
I tell you all this not to make you more angry or troubled than you already are. I know that the accident of seven years ago has deeply scarred both you and your son, and probably others. But you can’t make your son’s life more worthy by demanding that he hide from his pain. It is real, and it is there, and it will be expressed, either directly or indirectly, today, tomorrow, next year, ten years from now — whether you wish it or not. It might surface as bitterness and anger, or as the Roosevelt Syndrome — scaling great heights, smiling, waving to the crowd, becoming SuperCrip, convincing everyone that there is nothing going on inside, nothing at all.
To many that seems to be the Best Way, but in truth, as Hugh Gallagher has shown in his book FDR’s Splendid Deception, the price of denial for all (family, friends, the disabled person) is grievous indeed.
I assure you I don’t want to come into your world like some dark cloud. There are times when we feel great, sometimes despite our bodies, sometimes because of our bodies. After all, we fight a dozen small battles daily — curbs, unyielding doors, unyielding people, loneliness — and our triumphs can be real and glorious.
But what leads many of us into despair is the suspicion that we have to smile bravely at all times, every day, so the world will believe we are not depressed or grieving. As one of my friends says with characteristic understatement, “Being disabled is no piece of cake.”
I urge you to recognize the truth at the heart of us: that sometimes we are sad, sometimes joyful, but never ever “never faltering.” That is a contradiction of what it means to be alive, and there are times when grief must out — as must, ultimately, our acceptance of what we are.
It is very significant that your son didn’t write me and say, “Your attitude stinks. . . . Get a life.” He knows better.
GETTING MAD
I got polio forty years ago. It robbed me of my childhood, changed forever my relationships with my family, my friends, my body, and my psyche, and gave me a whole new world to contend with: hospitals, doctors, physical and occupational therapists, and, ultimately, psychiatrists.
They say there are five stages that the dying must contend with. I suspect for us Crips there may be a few more, like Regret, and Total Exhaustion, and Too Damn Much Pain, and Fake Acceptance.
I figure I’ve gone through them all. Like all of us, I’ve had to grieve over the death of my body, time and time again — each time making way for a new body, one completely different.
From my experience over the years, I have learned, too, that these feelings are not independent beasts that come in the night, stay around a while, and then disappear. Rather, they are ongoing, ever-present tensions that become a part of our lives.
Right now I am angry. I just got back from the store, where someone had parked a Cadillac convertible so close to my car that I could scarcely get in the door. I got some sour vengeance, though: I scratched their nice white paint job with my car door, but I still was exasperated. And last night there was regret: at a party all the kids were dancing like crazy and brawling and jumping about. I found myself, again, regretting (again) the course of my life, the one that had not granted me their grace and ease to move legs and arms and torso about without worry, without thinking, without that infernal plotting and planning how to move from here to there without causing a scene, stirring up all that attention. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told myself, regretting a bit the journey I had been on and being unable to share their stupendous sense of freedom, their easy hilarity.
Of course, there is also righteous and hard-won acceptance. There are times when I accept my body, its fate, and the world I have created with it. But acceptance is tricky, like soap in the bathtub: sometimes you have it; sometimes you think you have it; and sometimes, at times of stress, it just disappears and is nowhere to be found, no matter how hard you search through the murk.
I have long contended that the most profound and oppressive of the banana-bunch of feelings is anger. I will say without any fear of contradiction that it is something we Crips all have. I’ll go further and say that anger is something many of us become experts at hiding. In fact, some of us hide it so well that we don’t even know it is there inside us.
Anger is a form of murder, and like murder, it stays hidden until we ourselves reveal it. As Inspector Poirot says, “A human being . . . cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.”
When I say “anger,” I am not talking about those towering rages that erupt so devastatingly in some of us. Rather, I am talking about the fire underground — that conflagration that eats away at the coal fields for decades, only occasionally volleying forth with smoke, the rest of the time hidden, destroying the vitals. The people in the village deny its very existence until one of the houses bursts into flame.
After forty years of watching myself and my peers, I will offer you a point of fact: we are all angry. Worse, I know only a few who will confess to this anger. Most say, “Who me? Angry? What are you talking about?” Gregory Bateson said that denial was bad enough, but denial of denial is the real soul destroyer.
So what does this mean to you? If you have anger (as I claim you do), what should you do about it? And where did it come from, anyway?
Let’s answer the last question first. Our whole American society is geared toward health, well-being, the Pepsi Generation, beauty, youth, mountain climbing, jogging, perfection of body and soul. It is hard for us to be free from the oppressive feeling that something is wrong with us because we don’t have perfect bodies, we don’t have the ability to go anywhere and do anything we want. They have it, we don’t (and they probably don’t give a toot about us, either). Further, despite what the activists say, there is and always will be a part of us that regrets — for some bitterly, for others more gently — our differences from the rest of the world. (It is also possible that our anger — the deepest, the most unreachable anger — is in place because we know too much. We Crips have been branded, in the most tender part of our souls, with a knowledge of the powerful vulnerability of the body and the extreme fragility of health. Since fear equals anger, our very wisdom terrorizes us into rage.)
How can you know that this rage is there? I offer some simple tests. You can try them on yourself by asking the people closest to you (find those who won’t lie to you when you ask them a direct question) and by keeping a diary for a few months, honestly noting down the following:
1) Do friends or lovers come and go — to the point of not being there when you need them?
2) Do you get drunk or stoned often? (You yourself have to define “often.” You even have to define “drunk or stoned”: even low-alcohol drinks like beer or wine, or regularly prescribed drugs can be a device for hiding yourself from yourself.)
3) Do you show a bitterness in your words — a cynicism, a sarcasm, a down-home nastiness that helps to distance others from you? In other words, are you the life of the party until the party disappears? (Noting down exact conversations and reviewing them weeks later can be very revealing.)
4) Do you get depressed often? (Depression is that dark feeling that makes it impossible to function — the cloud or curtain over experiences, experiences that should be joyful.)
5) Do you get angry when someone says, “You seem a little pissed off”? (That’s a dead giveaway.)
6) Do you ever think of suicide to the point of plotting out the exact method of doing it, even writing out the note you will leave behind?
7) Do you have any of what they call nonspecific illnesses not related to being a Crip (and you have to search carefully, for you and I can blame almost everything on our physical condition): headaches, backaches, stomachaches, vague nausea, inability to sleep — and the real test, recurring nightmares?
8) Are you always, always, always cheerful? (I’m not here to be Dr. Doom, but the eternally cheerful Crips either have achieved sainthood or are lying. If you are in the first category, you shouldn’t be wasting your time reading this. If you are in the second, you should begin serious work on escaping from behind the mask.)
What can we do for ourselves to diminish this anger?
I have always recommended counseling (if you get angry when someone suggests you should see a shrink, that’s another giveaway). Individual counseling with psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers is great — but it may cost more than you can afford. You might look into group therapy, which is the cheapest and can be the best. It means that you will be talking about common problems with your peers, people who live and work daily with the same problems you do.
The reason that shrinks and counseling are still around after a hundred years is because, for many people, they work. And for those of us with expert and intricate systems of denial, they may be the only way out. (Suicide, madness, and continual depression are other ways out, but I do not recommend them as viable alternatives. They hurt too much.)
Don’t worry about whom to see. Take it on faith that will take care of itself. The horror stories about counselings that have gone awry, counselors who are abusers or, at best, simply incompetent, all have an element of truth. But I assure you that these are not the majority. Successful “interventions” (that’s what they are called) are the rule rather than the exception.
For those of us with this unbearable itch called anger (the itch that can be as unbearable as the itch of lust), counseling may be the only way out. Listen to yourself at this very instant. What’s going on in your head as you are reading this? If you’re saying, “That’s not for me” or “I’m not gonna waste three hours (and eighty dollars) a week on talking to some geek,” then you are denying yourself a great chance for freedom. Or, at the least, a retreat from the horror show that emotional pain can bring. By going before the mirror and truly, for the first time, seeing yourself, seeing that scared child lying within, you can open yourself to a whole other life. If you so choose.
GAY LOVE
Dear Mr. Milam,
My name is Phil and I have severe cerebral palsy. I am thirty-one, and completely helpless, except for typing with my head.
I am very sexually frustrated. I have no problem getting my penis fully erect. Since I was thirteen I have been masturbating by lying on my stomach and rubbing myself on the bed or floor. Now it is getting harder for me to move myself enough to come. I really like to come, especially in hot weather. Is there a device that I could buy that would help me to masturbate?
I really like to have my hairy anus rubbed. How can I get a man to do it? I really would like a hairy chest. Is there any way that I can stimulate the hair to grow on my chest?
Any information that you can give me on these subjects would be appreciated greatly.
Thank you for your time and patience, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Phil
Indiana
Dear Phil,
Unlike many of my generation, I feel that love-for-money is not a sin, does not have to degrade a relationship, and is — as a matter of truth — the operating system of so many “normal” social relationships. Indeed, some eminent sociologists have pointed out that marriage is an economic contract, perhaps even a form of classic indenture. Up until the invention of Romantic Love, marriage was seen as an excellent way of binding two fortunes or two political entities together. We cling to this medieval system, because in this most civilized of countries, a wife’s refusal to have sex with her husband is a legal basis for ending financial support and dissolving a marriage.
I bring up the possibility of renting love because there are many of us who, for better or worse, don’t exactly think of ourselves as making it in the Body Beautiful Sweepstakes — especially on the heels of some catastrophic accident or disease. Our passion continues to work in a normal way; it’s just that the standard ways of finding love and lovers are, we believe, impossible.
The courtship/seduction routine (dances, bowling, dating) is too difficult for us. We feel degraded participating in such rituals, and yet our lust is real, and our desire to touch, to be held, is as potent, is perhaps more potent, than before.
Several states have licensed “sex therapists.” These are men or women who for a fee will give love to those of us willing to pay for it as a psychotherapeutic tool. Since the practice is not widespread, you might be more successful in pursuing other routes to fulfilled passion. To find heterosexual lovers-for-a-fee, one has to go no further than the Yellow Pages. In my area, the “Massage” section runs ten pages, leaving little to the imagination. (Oriental #1 Massage: Japanese Body Shampoo. Feather Touch. Very Private Rooms & Soft Music. All this is accompanied by a picture of an Oriental-looking lady with a face of ill-disguised bliss.)
Those looking for gay love may have to go farther afield. You might consider subscribing to a gay publication in the nearest large city and utilizing its personal ads. The Standard Periodical Directory — available in the public library — lists under “Homosexual Literature” more than one hundred gay publications (including those with such fetching titles as Mom . . . Guess What!, Big Apple Dyke News, Fag Rag, and Mom’s Apple Pie). One or two of these encompass your region. I especially recommend the Gayellow Pages at Box 292, Village Station, New York, NY 10014. For ten dollars postpaid, they will send you a listing of switchboards and hot lines around the country, including national and regional disabled gay support groups.
I have always claimed that we Crips are doubly penalized. We live in a society in which sexuality in general is still taboo. But you and I must deal with yet another moral stricture: the unspoken rule that we disabled are not to have sex — or if we do, that we’re not supposed to enjoy it. And if we happen to desire gay, lesbian, or transvestite partners, so much the worse.
These social taboos are virulent and pernicious. Equally so are the ones that live in our heads. If I do not see myself as a whole person, how can I possibly compete in the Sexuality Sweepstakes? Should I even try? It is a devilish hand that our body and society have dealt us, and it is rendered more devilish by our own feelings of wretched self-esteem. We look in the mirror, and what we see looking back at us says, “Forget it! Who wants to make love to that?” That’s the tragedy.
There is a way out. It has to do with belief in Self, the faith that you can be loved. It has to do with vitiating the conviction, so obvious in your letter, that no one wants you.
You are very specific in what you desire. It would be glib of me to tell you that to go for it will be easy. You already have a dozen voices in your head telling you not to do it, not to try — that if you persist, you will probably be humiliated. “Just give up and become celibate,” those voices say. “Why bother?”
But to paraphrase one of my favorite bumper stickers, Crips Need Love Too. You will be hurting yourself if you let shame, fear, and self-destructive attitudes keep you tied down. It might help you if I tell you about my friend Larry, who lives in a small suburb outside Detroit. A nonspecific illness left Larry with the use of only the right side of his body. He was, at least by society’s lights, “severely disabled.” After fretting for six months, he finally placed an ad in a local gay newspaper:
Help the handicapped! Severely disabled fifty-three-year-old wants male lover. Telephone XXX-XXXX.
Truth in advertising always works best. Perhaps that is why the ad brought in more than twenty calls. After evaluating the callers, Larry interviewed three of the most promising. Imagine having over twenty people go to so much trouble to be with you.
The ad did two things. Larry found a lover, but he gave up something in the process. He got rid of some of that shame and fear that all of us have, the voice that keeps babbling in our heads, “You’re never going to find a lover. Don’t even try.” Larry had to short-circuit that voice to place the ad; now he scarcely hears it anymore.
It isn’t foolproof. But there are people out there, I’m convinced, who — for a variety of reasons — see us as desirable, and they are not necessarily fetishists. There are people out there who find our bodies attractive and interesting. Larry’s current lover can’t get over how his pretzel-like legs — they had been so thoroughly stretched in therapy — could be bent hither and yon. “Fascinating,” he keeps saying, moving Larry’s body about for him, gently.
Give it a try. It’s scary. But, without love, what you are going through now may be even more scary.
THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR MANIC DEPRESSIVES ONLY
I had read an article about Rachael in the local paper. They said she specialized in burnout. That’s what I thought I had. It took me a while to figure out the truth, but she probably knew the moment I came in the door.
I drove up to her house on the hill. The front yard consisted of an arty, black wrought-iron fence, a tin-can light fixture, an artificial waterfall (which wasn’t working), and dirty, peeling AstroTurf.
She had poodles — those little white ones with pink ribbons in their hair and yappy barks. “Just like my mother,” I thought. My mother, as long as I can remember, has always had poodles. They fight with each other, get underfoot.
Rachael kept asking me why I was there, and I told her some funny stories about me and my burnout, and right after one of my funniest lines, this tear came out of her left eye and ran down her cheek. I wondered, What have I said wrong? I was looking for a solution to my burnout and I ran into this thirty-five-year-old shrink who has freckles and poodles and still knows how to cry.
Rachael’s mother had polio, just like me. A long time ago they burned out part of her body and soul, and for replacement they gave her all these parts: rods, leather, moleskin, wires, straps, chairs with wheels. Like me they gave her all these parts — along with a fictive heart — to keep her alive. Most people notice the metal and wheels and leather, but they miss the heart job. We get so good at hiding it they don’t even notice.
It’s not like we were doing this for our health, mind you. You know the trips they put on us when they see our crutches and our wheelchairs, see us getting around with our hands. They go on about their uncles or dads or brothers or sisters, about their own failing legs or arms, their operations (sometimes they’ll stop right there in front of the bank and roll up sleeves, raise up the pant legs, to show us the scars). And fifty gets you ten they start in about Jesus, and How Much He Loves Us. The things they do to us, without even an iota of regard, courtesy, or respect for our privacy.
And in counterpoint, there are the things we do to them, not to mention to our own families, and to ourselves. Rachael knew, because she had been there before — with her mother, with all these shields and mirrors, so people wouldn’t be trying to get too close to her with their nonsense.
After all, somewhere in our lives we’ve had to learn a new balancing act. We’ve had to learn to keep people out of our way so we won’t get tripped up. And we get good, most of us: with our words, with a gesture, with a look, we keep things in control. To be in control without appearing to be in control — that’s what it’s all about, right?
At the time of my first meeting with Rachael, I thought these tricks were peculiar to me. They were so much a part of me that even I could barely see them. I figured she couldn’t either. I had spent many years honing them to sharp perfection — the secret craftsman in the dark attic.
It turns out she had seen all this sleight-of-hand before, and the first time we met she was telling me how well I was doing. At the same time, she was telling me how much it hurt. All of us.
After I had been seeing her for two months, I told her my Park Guard story. It was one of my favorite Crip stories. We’re at Desert Hot Springs, Frank and Janet and Leslie and I, and it’s eight in the morning. We’ve been up all night watching the stars in the Anza-Borrego State Park, and we drive to the springs and strip off our clothes, and they help me get into the pool, the warm waters, where we swim for a while — but someone complains, so this Park Guard comes out with his eyes flashing and he says, “No skinny-dipping. Out!”
The others get out of the pool, and Frank reaches for me but I shoo him away. The guard is standing there, and I drag myself out as slowly as possible; it takes me at least five minutes to pull myself over to my clothes, and then slowly, oh so slowly, I get the clothes on — all while he’s watching.
“I could’ve done it in a minute with Frank’s help,” I told Rachael, “but I wanted that son-of-a-bitching guard to suffer.”
“But why did you do it?” she said.
“You’d do the same thing if you were me.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“It’s true. Don’t you see? No, you don’t. All I can tell you is that you would do the same thing if you were me.”
“I think I understand, but I want to be sure you do,” she said. “I’m going to make a sign, and you’re going to wear it for the next twenty-four hours.”
With a black marker, she wrote on a piece of cardboard, YOU’D DO THE SAME THING IF YOU WERE ME. She attached thread to it and hung it around my neck.
To the people I was living with — there in the commune on Third Avenue — it didn’t make any difference. Half of them were going through Est, or Fisher-Hoffman, or some kind of freaky training, so they were used to these nutty things, like the guy upstairs who had to carry a teddy bear around with him for a month. It was the people at the It’ll Do Tavern who worried me. I went there every night at eight for a hamburger and beer, and to play pinball. (It was about all I could do during that Year of the Angst — go to my shrink, eat hamburgers, drink beer, and play pinball.)
“What are they going to say when I come in with this dumb sign around my neck?” I fretted. I almost didn’t go — but then, there was this other part of me that wanted to see what they would say, how they’d react.
I needn’t have worried. They checked out the sign for a full five seconds and then went right back to arguing about the Boston Reds. “What did you guys think about my sign?” I asked Bill the barkeep as he was closing up. “We thought you’d joined a fraternity,” he said. “We thought it was some kind of joke, maybe some kind of initiation you was in.”
He was right. It was an initiation. It just wasn’t the one I had imagined.
In the official lingo of the shrink trade, many of us drag around something called “entitlement.” “You just don’t know — you don’t have a clue,” is what we say to others. They — family, friends, strangers — may try to imagine what’s going on inside us, but they’ll never know. Even my shrink, even with her mother, I knew she didn’t know what was going on inside of me, not really. No one knows what it’s like to wake up in the morning with this body: to move the way we move, to feel the way we feel. We figure we have something special, something they don’t and can’t and will never have.
This specialness gives us certain freedoms. Society awards some of them (special parking, special entrances, special support). We arrogate more for ourselves. I can run that number on the park guard, or be pissed off, angry, and cruel, because everybody else in the world would “do the same thing if they were me.”
I now suspect that entitlement underlies much antisocial behavior — alcoholism, familial violence, abuse (physical or mental), martyrdom. It certainly is the operating mode for a certain type of rage: knife-slashing sarcasm, the emotional violence perpetuated by us on others. We give it to our families, to our friends, and to strangers. And sometimes they give it back to us — in spades.
I didn’t get the message of the sign for a while. It went everywhere with me for a full day and night, and I still didn’t get it. It did get stored away in my brain pan, though. Every time I opened my mouth to say it, the buzzer would go off. I wasn’t sure why I shouldn’t say it — I just knew enough not to anymore. It wasn’t until I got involved in the gun incident that it began to make sense to me.
For the longest time, one of my favorite tricks was the Big Block. It works like this: I go over to the post office, and there’s this guy in his late-model gray Mercedes parked in the Handicapped space. He doesn’t have a sticker or anything; he’s just in a hurry. So I pull in right behind him, blocking his way out. I wait for him to come out of the post office, then slowly, very slowly, I get out of my car. I get over to him — while he’s waiting there, stewing — and I say, “You know, this is always a problem for me. (Pause.) When you park in that space, I have to park way over there. . . .” (I motion to the far end of the parking lot.) And then, not even waiting for his answer, slowly, slowly, I work my way back to my car — your friendly local representative of the Crip Police.
The last time I did it was at the Safeway, a year ago. The guy had a sporty black Corvette. I waited for him to come out of the store. As he was getting into his car, I started into my spiel, but he told me that I had better move my ass out of his way “at once, bro.” There was something in his eyes that sent me back to my car.
As I was backing up, some long-haired drifters decided to take up the cudgel for me. As the Corvette was backing up, they ran over and called the driver several unsavory names, kicking at the door of his car. The driver sped out of there and in three minutes was back with a big .45. The longhairs got out of there fast. And me? When the policeman finally came, I was inside, pretending to examine the Marie Callander pies. My voice was still shaking as I told him my side of the story. I didn’t tell him everything, though. Like the fact that I had blocked the Corvette’s exit. Or that I would never do it again.
I was raised and educated a Quaker. Recently, I have been drawn back to it and, at the same time, developed an interest in some of the more remote Eastern religions. One of the basic tenets of these religions is that the divine lies within all of us (inside me, inside you, inside Rachael, the park guard, the owner of the Corvette, the two long-haired drifters, the cop). He’s not out there somewhere above, yanking on His beard and stewing about us doing wrong. He (or She — accounts differ) lounges about inside each of us, watching, nodding, a part of all our good and bad deeds, not judging, not condemning — just watching.
Another of their tenets is right out of Newton’s Third Law. To every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If I do something good, something good will flow from it. If I do something selfish, cruel, entrapping, an equally selfish, cruel, entrapping action will flow from it, and will ultimately come back to me.
Thus, I may think I am entitled to do certain things, like blackmailing people with my body. But I am a fool to think there will be no kickback. Entitlement is spawned by anger, not by justice, and it will spawn anger.
This doesn’t stop me from feeling pissed off when people pull the old strings. Last week, I drove into the Safeway parking lot, and there it was, a ratty old Valiant parked in “my” place — no disabled plates, nothing.
As I was getting out of my car, a guy in a sporty houndstooth jacket dashed out of the store and opened the Valiant’s door.
“Hey,” I yelled at him, “that’s a disabled parking spot. Can’t you read the sign?”
“Don’t get on my case, buddy.” His face wasn’t any too friendly.
“Yeah, but I need that space.”
“You’re not the only one who needs that space.”
“Oh?” He didn’t look very disabled.
“Yeah, I deserve it too. I’m a manic-depressive, so don’t get on my case, buddy.”
With that he popped into his car and was gone.
And who am I to say that he is better or worse off than the rest of us, has any more or less rights than we do, with all our entitlements?
We’re grateful to Mho & Mho Works for permission to reprint these excerpts. Copies of CripZen may be ordered for $14.95 postpaid from Mho & Mho Works, Box 33135, San Diego, California 92163. There’s a $3 discount for the disabled.
— Pamela Penick
