Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  By 1965, the five May children were old hat at minding themselves. Ori Jean left early on weekday mornings to teach eighth-grade Spanish, while Bill slept off benders between jobs he couldn’t keep. Diane and Mike babysat their younger siblings, cleaned the house, and prepared meals. Mike’s specialties included casseroles, spaghetti, and tacos, the messy fruits of the cooking course Ori Jean had insisted he take.

  The kids got along well, considering they shared two bedrooms and a single bathroom. Each believed that the others received favored treatment; all watched vigilantly to make sure Mike didn’t invoke blindness to do less than his full share. No matter how many times Ori Jean asked, the kids seemed not to remember to keep the floors clean or to put things back where they belonged. Much of Mike’s home life was spent sprawled over toys or demanding to know, “Who moved my stuff?” His siblings had a collective response: “Not me.”

  They also knew the best ways to have fun with a brother who couldn’t see. Diane, Theri, and Patrick mixed up Mike’s blue and red socks, sending him to school with mismatched feet. They gave him dog food and told him it was breakfast cereal. They mastered the silent arts of pushing their brussels sprouts onto Mike’s plate during dinner and stealing bites of his pie at dessert. In hide-and-seek they were not above pointing him in the wrong direction; in Monopoly they paid pennies on the dollar when he passed Go. Soon Mike developed countermeasures, such as taking inventory of his dinner and asking for seconds on dog food.

  As he neared the end of junior high in 1967, Mike could feel his home life start to shake. Bill was out of work and drinking more than ever. Sometimes he didn’t come home. The family’s priest urged Ori Jean to divorce him. She tried four times but was never able to see it through.

  Bill’s fuse shortened with each of her false starts. The kids tried not to hear the fights, but already they knew the dialogue by heart, especially the part about how shameful it was to give up. One night, Bill threatened to hit Ori Jean. Mike ran into the room, stepped between them, and went into his boxing stance, his fists turned upward in the style of the old bare-knuckles fighters.

  “Don’t you dare hit my mother!” Mike screamed.

  The display shocked Bill. He stood there for a moment, taking in Mike’s scrawny body and quivering lip. Mike remained in his stance. Finally, Bill backed off and walked away. Ori Jean threw him out and filed for divorce days later. She was thirty-nine years old and the mother of five children, ages five through fifteen.

  In the months after Bill had gone Ori Jean blew up occasionally. Tears streaming down her face, she’d yell at her kids, “You guys, your rooms aren’t clean, the kitchen’s dirty, you’re fighting, I’m trying to go to work and take care of you all, but I’m not going to be able to keep it together unless you do better to help me.” Mike thought about his mom a lot during those days, about how she drove the kids to four different schools, how she kept finding ways to send him to camp, how clean she kept the house even when he could hear her crying. And even then, he thought, “She’s brave.”

  After graduating from junior high, Mike announced his intention to attend the local public high school. Las Lomas High, however, did not accept blind students. Administrators said that Mike would be better served by a school fifteen miles away that had resources and staff for the blind. Mike told his mother that he wanted to go to school with his neighborhood friends and that he needed no special resources. He told her he wanted to live in the real world.

  Ori Jean petitioned the school. It would be two years before mainstreaming laws hit the books, so administrators were free to refuse her, and they did. She maneuvered, cajoled, charmed, and threatened. She talked to lawyers. Mike could picture his mother taking off her shoe and slamming it on the table if necessary. When September rolled around, he was in. He would be the only blind student in the school.

  Not everyone was ready for the invasion. The gym teacher reassigned him to study hall. The woodshop teacher threw him out despite the care Mike took in examining the pickled finger in a jar the teacher had passed around as a warning to the careless.

  In class, Mike adjusted to learning without the help of a resource teacher. Courses like geometry and geography proved especially challenging, but he made his usual A’s and B’s. He hung out with friends from his neighborhood and made new ones from his classes. People on the playground got accustomed in a hurry to his crashing-through style of play. The flurry of Mike’s new world, however, was overwhelmed by a storm unlike any he’d experienced so far.

  Girls.

  He’d had crushes as early as fifth grade, the stuff born of a class-mate’s giggle or the sound of a cute first name. But this! Overnight, the wonder and mystery and promise of a woman’s body suggested itself into every fold of Mike’s awareness. It called to him from the hallway breeze of freshly shampooed hair, the distant conversations of senior cheerleaders, the brush of a girl’s wrist when she reached to pass back a quiz. During his freshman year, Mike could scarcely conceive a thought that wasn’t hourglass-shaped.

  He desperately wanted to touch a woman, not just for the pleasure he was certain it would bring but because he so fundamentally depended on touch for his construct of the world. Without touch, objects remained just ideas, and Mike wasn’t interested in rubbing up against an idea. Yet he dared not approach a woman for this purpose. He felt too shy to move in directly, too disconnected from the visual clues that signaled consent to know how to advance more discreetly. He considered grabbing a girl’s breast outright; no one would blame a blind guy who apologized and said he’d been aiming for a doorknob. He knew people who had done that. But as deeply as he desired the contact, he also considered the tactic beneath him. If something great was going to happen to Mike he didn’t want it to happen because he was blind.

  If Mike was not yet to know a woman by touch at least he could dedicate the entirety of his mind to the matter. He listened intently to his friends’ talk about girls and asked for detailed descriptions of those who intrigued him. His pals went to the heart of the matter: topography, hair, legs, walk, face, topography. They brought around Playboy magazines, and though their descriptions lacked detail—“She’s naked. She’s riding a bike. Her boobs go across two pages”—they overflowed in unabashed admiration, which to blind eyes could be the most vivid description of all.

  Still, these were just words—how could a person hope to conceive an idea about these wondrous boobs if he could neither touch nor see them? Mike yearned for the life-sized, anatomically correct dolls he’d heard schools gave to kids in magical lands like Sweden. Instead, he purloined his sister’s Barbie doll and went to work, running his fingers over her naked curves, associating all he’d heard about a woman’s body with her 39-18-33 measurements. Mike knew that the Barbie lacked the textures and details that caused his friends to howl at the moon. But no matter how much he handled his doll, he could not begin to imagine the nature of those nuances, even as he suspected that they were the best parts of all.

  His imagination filled in the gaps. Often, his notions were wildly inaccurate, but it didn’t matter—when joined with things he knew directly (silky hair, pretty smells, soft hands, lilting voices) and primed by his friends’ worshipful descriptions, it added up to a construct of arousal and beauty every bit as real to him as images were to the sighted. As Mike’s life continued he would use those ingredients—imagination, reality, and the power of others’ passions—to understand much of visual beauty. Even at fourteen, Mike suspected that imagination might be the most important of them all.

  Mike’s sophomore and junior years flew past him. He carried a 3.5 grade point average in his classes and excelled at math and science. At home, the kids took care of themselves while Ori Jean completed a master’s degree and began a full-time job as a high school counselor.

  When a neighborhood friend named Mark Babin encouraged Mike to join the wrestling team at school, he charged in, training and dieting until his five-foot-six, ninety-five-pound body looked like a comb. H
e made varsity in sophomore year. At one tournament, officials misspelled his name, listing him as “Miko May.” His teammates said they were going to circulate a rumor that he was an incredible blind wrestler from Japan. “I like that idea,” May told them. “That way there will be two mystiques about me.” His coach, Ed Melendez, didn’t flinch at keeping Mike on the team, and pushed his blind wrestler physically and emotionally. By the time Mike reached senior year he would be six foot one and 149 pounds, and would win about half his matches, almost all by strategy and stamina.

  When Mike wasn’t thinking about girls or wrestling he was bouncing himself off the ionosphere. He had fallen in love with the hobby of ham radio when Rob Reis, a friend from an electronics class, had explained how a person could talk to others across the world using just a box of tubes and wires, a microphone, and an outdoor antenna. Mike tried it and was hooked. His conversations with people in Afghanistan and London and Vietnam were fascinating. But the idea of becoming a solo explorer spoke to him. Once he realized he could reach into new worlds otherwise impossibly far away, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to make it happen.

  One day, Mike and Reis traveled to Santa Cruz to visit a ham radio enthusiast who was rumored to have a 175-foot tower in the mountains. The structure was every bit of it. The man told the boys that they were free to use his radio but that a beam atop the tower needed adjusting. Mike volunteered for the job. He climbed into the wind with no belt or ropes or other support gear, swaying four feet in every direction as he made it through 50 feet, 100 feet, 150 feet—the equivalent of a fifteen-story building. At the top he adjusted a sixty-six-foot beam while the wind moved the tower like a metronome arm. He was terrified—a false step would cost him his life—but he couldn’t stop thinking about the places he would reach once he got that antenna pointed right.

  At home, Mike announced his intention to build his own eighty-foot antenna. Ori Jean wasn’t sure if he was serious. She became convinced when he began mixing cement for the foundation in the backyard. She pushed a million nightmare scenarios out of her mind as she watched Mike put up the first ten-foot section, then the second. By the time he was teetering at forty feet, she could no longer stand it.

  “I have to go away from here,” she called to Mike. “I can’t stand to watch you go up any higher.”

  “Okay, bye,” Mike called down.

  Ori Jean got in her car and drove away. Even that night she wouldn’t remember where she’d gone. When she returned home there was an eighty-foot tower on her property and a kid in the garage talking into a microphone, saying, “This is WB6ABK. Is there anyone out there? Where have I reached?”

  By the time Mike turned seventeen he had mapped out the next four years of his life. He and his friend Reis would study electrical engineering at the University of California–Davis, about an hour’s drive from his home in Walnut Creek. Blind electrical engineers were rare, which was one of the reasons he wanted to do it.

  Status as a high school senior did little to advance Mike’s romantic ambitions. His friends didn’t fare much better than he did in love, but they had one incalculable advantage over him—they could drive. It didn’t take long for Mike to conceive the myriad ways in which a car conferred freedom. And when freedom was at stake Mike could not stand still.

  One day while visiting a blind friend from camp, Mike suggested that they have a look at his parents’ motorcycle, a smallish Honda 90. His friend showed Mike how to start it. Then Mike had an epiphany: if they could just drive it to the school grounds they could ride gloriously unimpeded around the track. Mike got on the front, his friend on the back. They turned off the engine, listened for traffic, then started the bike and drove across the street. They repeated the procedure numerous times—engine off, listen, engine on, ride—until they arrived at the school. On the track they began to circle slowly, getting a feel for the arcs of the turns. Soon they had the Honda cruising, opening the throttle on the straightaways. A police siren wailed. Mike managed to stop the bike. His heart was pounding.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” the police officer asked. “It’s illegal to have a motorcycle out here.”

  He turned to Mike.

  “Let me see your driver’s license.”

  “I don’t have a driver’s license,” Mike said.

  “Well, then, we have a big problem,” the officer said.

  “I’m blind,” Mike said.

  “You were riding a motorcycle.”

  Mike showed the officer his braille watch. It took a moment for the man to digest what had occurred. Then he told the boys he had to call this one in, that they could have killed someone. He kept lecturing, kept promising to tell their parents, kept mumbling words like “blind” and “unbelievable.” The officer finally walked the boys and their cycle home. He didn’t tell their parents. He didn’t call it in.

  Weeks later Mike was in his driveway admiring Diane’s brand-new Datsun 510, purchased for $57.59 a month in department store wages, her baby. It pointed toward the street. Warning bells sounded from every logic and reason center in Mike’s brain. But he had only a single thought: I need to drive.

  He got in the car, lowered the window so he could hear where he was going, and turned the key. The engine, the same one that murmured during rides with Diane, seemed to thunder over all of Walnut Creek with Mike behind the wheel. He released the parking brake, put the vehicle into gear, and began rolling out of the driveway. He’d negotiated the space a million times before—on bicycle, skateboard, roller skates, in full sprint—but the upcoming ninety-degree left turn suddenly seemed a stranger. Mike kept driving. He wobbled through the turn, his stomach in his throat, and began the climb up Kevin Court, listening to the echoes made by tires against curbs and whatever cars he prayed were not oncoming, adrenaline fighting his hands, no plan for how to return but certain he had to keep going, clutch popping, now the street was narrowing, he could hear it, but he wasn’t done driving, he wasn’t done going, he stepped on the gas and now the car was cruising, it was in front of him and running away from him, but he wouldn’t let go, and then he pushed the pedal or he lost his nerve or the car stalled but halfway up the street the Datsun’s engine died and the only sound left was Mike’s heaving breath bouncing off the car’s sweaty steering wheel. When he found Diane, he apologized for parking her car in the middle of the street and told her it seemed like he’d driven a very long way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As August temperatures pushed near 100 degrees, May engaged the afterburners on his business plan. Shuttling between cities, he secured a major investment from a Colorado businessman and recruited a top engineer to refine the GPS software. He registered as a California business, signed distributors, and hired an office manager. When he needed a name for the business, he looked for a word or phrase that got to the heart of what his product offered blind people—the ability to find one’s way independently. He chose Sendero, the Spanish word for “pathway.”

  The business grabbed at him around the clock: liability insurance was too expensive; the unit’s $3,500 retail price remained prohibitive; the software had moods. When he found time for leisure thinking he used it to diagram new plays for Wyndham’s soccer team or conceive chapters for the serialized stories he told Carson before bedtime. Dr. Goodman’s offer of new vision six months ago seemed a million miles away.

  May’s family was equally occupied. While Carson and Wyndham pinballed between activities, Jennifer piled up paint samples and met at home with her interior design clients. Ordinarily, her business conversations were background din to May, but lately he found himself listening a bit differently. He took note when she described a wallpaper pattern as “restless.” He stopped typing when she told a client that a fabric seemed to dance. His curiosity surprised him—he knew that Jennifer spoke this way and he loved it about her. But he’d never stopped to listen so closely before.

  And he kept listening. At the dinner table one evening, someone commented on the steam rising fro
m a bowl of spaghetti, saying that they could “see right through it.” That idea fascinated May, even as he told himself, “I’ve known that about steam all my life.” He paid attention to a discussion between Carson and Wyndham about the many ways in which a person could write the letter G.

  August got even busier. So it was interesting to him when he found himself reaching for his telephone one morning and dialing the University of California–Davis Medical Center rather than a potential investor or supplier.

  “I’m calling to see if you or the doctors there know anything about a new kind of stem cell transplant surgery that’s supposed to give vision to the blind.”

  A staff member asked May to repeat the question. He ran through it again.

  “Stem cell?” the person asked.

  “I think so,” May said.

  “We’ll have to call you back.”

  When they called back, the staffer said that no one at the center had any idea about a stem cell surgery of any kind, let alone one that caused the blind to see.

  May called Stanford University. Same answer. He tried renowned East Coast eye institutes. Nothing.

  The news made sense to him. May had been told by his lifelong ophthalmologist, Dr. Max Fine, that nothing could be done to restore his vision, now or ever. When Fine died in 1989, the New York Times noted his fifty-seven years of experience and called him “a pioneer in corneal transplant.” If anyone knew May’s prognosis, it was Dr. Fine. He had been especially clear about the “now or ever” part.

  In mid-August, May and Jennifer joined members of her family for a weekend getaway at a hotel. May welcomed the respite. On the first evening, everyone gathered for a short boat ride. Onboard, the conversation quickly turned to a group of elegant passengers nearby. Jennifer’s family described these people as “bronze, narrow, and Italian-designed,” and said that the moonlight “chased the women’s jewels.” Jennifer noted that the wispy hems of ladies’ dresses “lapped at the breeze” and that men “lit cigarettes with flat gold lighters and shaped their arms into triangles so their dates wouldn’t slip.” A moment later, Jennifer’s sister Wendy made a discovery.