by Robert Hoge
My professional trainer, Kerry, would get cranky at me when I wasn’t trying hard enough, and gave me plenty of praise when I did something well. By the time I had been swimming for a month or so, I was ready for my first challenge.
One day at the start of February, Kerry said, “Guess what, Robert?”
“What?”
“I’ve got a Ronald McDonald watch at home,” she said. “When you can swim half the length of the pool, I’ll give it to you.”
“Wow,” I said, and I knew immediately that I must have that watch.
I imagined it to be the best possible watch in the world, and when Kerry brought it to show me at my next lesson, it was just as good as I’d thought it would be. It had a big round face and a shiny black band. And right there in the middle was Ronald himself, red and yellow and smiling and watchy.
By the end of February, it was time to try. I’d been swimming for about eight weeks and was making fair progress. I was on my way to being drown-proofed. Well, drown-proofed if I happened to fall into a pool conveniently only wearing my swimming gear and without my heavy artificial legs on.
I still had that moment of terror when I let go of the side of the pool or was released by someone holding me up in the water. Gripped by a split second of fear, realizing the only thing supporting me was the water, I’d start paddling madly to get somewhere, anywhere that didn’t give me this strange feeling of falling-but-not-falling. The paddling would start me moving and I’d still be floating, so I’d calm down enough to realize that if I just kept going, everything would be fine.
Kerry took me out to the middle of the pool and pointed me toward the side. I stayed floating, supported by her hands.
“Ready?” Kerry asked.
“Ready,” I said.
Then I was falling through the water. I started to sink—legs first, then down to my waist before I remembered to swim. I started windmilling my arms forward, pulling myself through the water. I was swimming! All on my own! Halfway to the side I remembered to pull my head out of the water, release the breath I’d been holding, and gulp down some more air. As I drew close to the edge, I was getting tired. As much as I wanted the shiny goodness of the Ronald McDonald watch, I felt like I didn’t have the energy to make it, and about three feet from the edge of the pool, I stopped.
“Why did you stop there?” Kerry asked.
“I’m pooped,” I said. “Can I have a little rest?”
Kerry gave me one of those looks that said, “If you’ve got enough energy to stop and say you’re pooped while treading water, you’ve got enough energy to finish.”
I kept going.
When I reached the side of the pool, Kerry asked if I wanted to try again.
“I’ll stand in the middle of the pool, and if you can reach me, you can have the watch, okay?”
“Okay.”
I sucked a few breaths of air in, then put my right leg straight up against the wall and pushed off to get a bit of extra speed. Then I started to swim and in no time flat I’d reached Kerry in the middle of the pool.
“Well done, Robert!” Kerry said.
Mom cheered from the side.
“There’s one problem,” Kerry said. “I didn’t think you’d make it all the way today, so I didn’t bring the watch down to the pool with me.”
My bottom lip dropped for a second, until she said she’d send someone up to the house to get it. By the time I was out of the pool and had dried myself, the watch was there, bright and new and as Ronald McDonaldish as could be. Mom made me get dressed before I could put it on. I waved it around and held it in front of her face.
“This is a real good watch, isn’t it?”
Mom nodded.
She let me wear it in the car to school. When I got there I rushed ahead to show my teacher.
“Sister, Sister. Look what I got.”
She half smiled and nodded. “You are a spoiled boy, aren’t you?”
“Robert, tell Sister why you got the watch,” Mom said.
I told Sister Marie Patrice about the swimming lesson and how I’d made it halfway across the pool without anyone helping at all and that I’d been given the watch as a reward.
“Well, Robert, I think you deserve it, then.”
Mom said good-bye and made me give her back the watch so I didn’t lose it at school. That was kind of sad, but at least I could put it on as soon as I got home and show Dad and my brothers and sisters and tell the whole story again and again.
I’d learned how to swim well enough to make it about fifteen feet on my own. Now all I had to do was stop getting quarter past the hour and quarter to the hour confused and learn how to tell time properly.
The Guardian Angels kids had been going to Iona regularly to swim in the pool there. Not me. Disabled by land, disabled by sea. After my success at Hollands, I asked Mom if I could start swimming with the rest of my classmates.
“Please, Mom,” I said.
Mom talked to the teachers one morning when she dropped me off. She told them about my lessons and said Dad would come down whenever he could. The teachers told Mom they were happy for me to join the others, and she came to find me in the playground to give me the good news.
When she told me I hollered and ran to tell David. It was a small victory in the battle to be less different from everyone else.
11
Friends and Enemies
The operations the doctors had done on my face over the years started to pay off. I made new friends at school and at home. Some kids were quick to see how different I was, but many others seemed not to notice, or at least not to care. I wasn’t the most popular kid in school. I didn’t have people rushing to spend every possible second with me at lunch. But I wasn’t totally shunned and ignored either.
David and I were still friends, but I made a bunch of new ones too. Chief among my new school friends were Robert Firmin and Robert Webb. For a while we became the three Roberts—referred to as Robert H, Robert F, and Robert W. I had an easy connection with Robert F. Before a growth spurt, he had been of average height and a bit awkward. We both loved books and stories about stars and distant planets and spaceships. At Guardian Angels we’d started hanging out, talking about space and astronomy. Robert W was fun to hang around with too, but I think the main reason I wanted to be friends with him was because his name was Robert. After all, it wouldn’t have been the three Roberts if there were only two of us.
• • •
There were friends at home as well. Manly West was still a young suburb when I was growing up—especially compared to nearby Wynnum. There were a few kids my age living right near our house. They were all girls, but that didn’t matter to me. There was Cassandra, who lived next door, and down the road were Belinda and Evelyn. Evelyn’s family didn’t have a lot of money, and sometimes Mom would send us down to her house with tins of food. Often it was canned beets, which suited me just fine, as I thought they were horrid and we always had so much of them.
To me, Cassandra was the most important. The others would come and go, but Cassandra and I were constants. She was the only child of a couple living next door, so she was always happy to get out of the house and play. She was even happier to come and join in the loud chaos of a large family like ours. Cassandra and I would spend whole afternoons chasing each other around one backyard, then over the fence into the other. We’d bounce on her trampoline for hours on end. She would run up and down the sidewalk and I’d go up and down the road on a skateboard, artificial legs off, propelling myself forward with my arms. We’d play with Legos—she always had more Legos than me, but that was okay because I had a much higher proportion of space Legos, and if there was one thing you needed to build spaceships, it was space Legos.
We’d grab the old transistor radio her parents had given her, go outside at night, raise the antenna, and point it at the stars. Right at the bo
ttom of the AM dial, just when you almost couldn’t turn it any further, we’d pick up strange signals, rhythmic electric pulses that could only be one thing: UFOs.
Cassandra would sometimes turn up at our back door and politely ask Mom or Dad if I was home and would like to play. For my part, I’d go down to the fence between our two houses and yell, “Cassandra!” as loud as I could, a human megaphone.
Because Dad was a shift worker and would often start work early the next day, we’d have dinner at 5:30 or 6 p.m. and listen to the news. From 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. was TV-viewing time for Mom and Dad. Without fail, the television would be switched to some news or current-affairs program. Much to my horror, this meant missing shows like The Goodies and especially Doctor Who. I’d go over to Cassandra’s house right after dinner so I could watch Doctor Who.
We’d listen, sometimes scared, for any familiar-but-strange alien signals. When the show finished I’d head home so I could have a shower and get ready for bed.
She was my best friend for a long time, even when I became a typical boy and was afraid to admit it.
Together, Cassandra, Evelyn, Belinda, and I had plenty of adventures. A few years in a row we sold grapefruit on the corner. They were picked from a tree in Cassandra’s yard. We made signs and moved a table onto the sidewalk. Given all our efforts—tree-climbing, grapefruit-picking, sign design, and drawing—we priced the grapefruit at fifty cents each. I decided the best form of advertising was to stand on the corner of our street and yell at the top of my voice, “Grapefruits for sale!”
I think in the first year we sold a grand total of one grapefruit. Next grapefruit season we were right back at it, though—picking, making signs, and selling. Again, my chief duty was to stand on the corner and yell at the top of my voice, “Grapefruits! Grapefruits for sale! Get your grapefruits!” The first day we had no luck, selling a total of zero grapefruits. We went home dejected.
Next morning we assembled to give it another go. It didn’t look like we were going to make our fortunes in grapefruit sales that year either. Then someone walked up and asked how many grapefruits we had. Cassandra said we had about a dozen, in various stages of ripeness. The customer asked if she could buy all of them for ten dollars. Absolutely, we said, after conferring with each other for exactly three seconds. A whole ten dollars! That was a fortune to us. The neighbor handed over the money and we handed over the grapefruits, happier and richer than we had ever been in our little lives.
Things changed when we told Cassandra’s parents. We were excited and asked if they could take the ten dollars and split it four ways for us. Concerned that the neighbor had spent so much on our enterprise, they decided we should go and give half of it back. Suddenly our fortune was only half a fortune, but give it back we did. I think they must have thought the poor lady had only bought all the grapefruits to shut me up.
• • •
The three girls were a little younger than me, and they seemed to adjust to me pretty quickly. Young kids are naturally very accepting of new and different things. The kid with a squishy nose and strange legs isn’t that surprising when you’re three years old and you hear stories about talking bears sitting at a table eating porridge. It’s only as kids get older that they start to know what’s normal and what’s not.
We used to congregate on sidewalks, in backyards, and at a nearby park to play on the swings and scheme and scamper along the local creek, building bridges and trying to catch the small fish in the little stream. The girls would do cartwheels and I’d practice handstands without my prosthetics on. One day when I took my legs off, Evelyn pointed at them.
“Oh! What happened to your feet?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Who chopped them off?” Evelyn asked.
“No one,” I said.
“Did you chop them off?” Still with the questions.
“No.”
“Did the doctors chop them off?”
“No.”
“Were you born like that?”
“Yes.”
And we kept on playing.
Other questions weren’t always quite so easy to answer. Sometimes I’d get asked, “How did you lose your legs?” As if I’d left them on the bus and they were waiting to be reclaimed from the lost and found.
Outright sympathy could be just as frustrating. Sometimes passersby would tilt their head and deliver an undeserved smile. “Look at the kid limping along the sidewalk,” the smile would say. “Isn’t he wonderful/inspirational/amazing.”
There were some things I just couldn’t avoid when it came to my disability.
The first was knowing I’d need to work smart during my life because I wasn’t going to be able to work hard physically.
When I came home from school with a bad test score, Mom would look at me sternly and Dad would say what he always said. At various times Dad had been a meat worker, a cane cutter, a forklift driver, and a lawn-mower man. He knew I had a different path.
“Robert,” Dad would say, “you’re not going to be digging ditches for a living. You’ve got to try harder.”
The second was that I seemed to have more of a sense than most kids about the physical space surrounding me. The way I experienced the physical world was always changing. If you have two artificial legs, sometimes you’re short and sometimes you’re tall. Sometimes you experience the world on all fours, jumping from place to place. Other times, you have your legs on and operate the way the world intended, except when you stumble or your legs start aching fifteen minutes after you’ve put them on.
The third thing was that there weren’t a lot of people like me I could look up to. Men are meant to be strong. We are supposed to be powerful. Dad and Michael and Gary were tall and broad-shouldered. Most of the men I saw on TV were built well and active too. There were no disabled role models for a young boy trying to work out what sort of man he could become.
Those issues didn’t have simple answers. I’d have to work out how to make my own way in the world.
12
We All Fall Down
It was July 1979 and the American space agency, NASA, had a problem.
The first space station it had launched was about to fall to Earth. Skylab, a 77-ton, 26-meter-long chunk of metal, had orbited Earth for six years. Scientists onboard had successfully conducted hundreds of experiments and undertaken thousands of observations. About one hundred and seventy photographs of the sun and the Earth were taken. Astronauts did forty-two hours of spacewalks.
But by the mid-1970s, Skylab was in trouble. If its orbit wasn’t corrected, it was going to crash to Earth. For a while NASA had planned to use the new space shuttles it was building to repair Skylab and boost its orbit, but a delay meant they weren’t ready in time. Skylab was on its own. And it was falling down.
There was tremendous media interest about Skylab falling to Earth, certainly enough to capture the attention of a boy who was about to turn seven and had already started dreaming about the stars. It was expected to crash somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Surely that meant there was every chance it could crash into Australia, I thought.
NASA couldn’t be sure, but I was. It was going to hit us.
Luckily, David and I had a plan.
The parts of Skylab that fell to Earth would—conveniently—fall on the bathroom block at Guardian Angels. The entire school would—conveniently—be inside the bathroom block at the time. I’m guessing at this stage that it was the boys’ bathroom, but we—conveniently—skipped over some of those details. Anyway, Skylab would crash into the school, we’d all be in the bathroom and the crash would—conveniently—collapse the entrance and we would be trapped. If everything went to plan, it would be a convenient convenience.
With everyone at school trapped inside, there would be no one to rescue us, and we’d need to find our own way out.
David and I worked out that I wo
uld give him one of my artificial legs, which he would use as a battering ram. He could then smash the debris and rubble out of the way and free us all. We were so prepared, we even had detailed engineering diagrams—in crayon—of what the rescue would look like.
But that wasn’t the way things went down.
Instead of landing on Brisbane, Skylab broke up, with some parts falling into the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Other major parts rained down hundreds of miles east of Perth. Almost two thousand five hundred miles away in Brisbane, my chance to be a school hero had crashed and burned as well.
• • •
Flaming chunks of metal crashing from the sky weren’t the only things falling down in the late 1970s.
Like most schools, Guardian Angels had an annual field day. The fact that I had no legs did not excuse me from participating. Apparently, if God did not want me to race, he would not have given me artificial legs.
For sports day we all trekked to Iona, where Michael and Gary both went, and where I would presumably end up too. Iona had several sports fields of its own—more than enough room for the few hundred students from our small elementary school.
There were events like tunnel ball and tug of war, but the real highlight was the sprints. I was entered in the hundred-meter sprint along with all the other kids. It was as compulsory as soggy tomato sandwiches at snack time. Catherine was still at Guardian Angels, so she came along to race as well, and Mom and Dad were both there to see us run.
Dad was unsure about me competing. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me to run—quite the opposite. He was just concerned about me being made into a spectacle.
But Mom was insistent.
“I know Robert can’t win,” she told Dad at the time. “But he can get in there and try.”