Cockeyed

by Ryan Knighton

  So, why go to New Orleans, then, or anywhere? My only answer is this: self-delusion. I always think travelling this time will be different. I always hope it will get better. Every time. Maybe I could be conned into having a different experience—that’s my hope. That was my hope in New Orleans and my hope for my relationship with Jane, too.

  The first morning of our trip, we left the hostel and cut our way across the small patch of lawn beside the entrance. We debated breakfast as we left. Jane wanted beignets at Café du Monde, and I wanted catfish as fast as humanly possible, especially if we could get it at Igor’s Bar, Grill, and Laundromat. I mostly wanted to see who the hell would be in a bar, grill, and laundromat at seven o’clock in the morning.

  Not two or three steps across the lawn, Jane let out a screech and bolted for the sidewalk, her knees lifting as she ran. In her blurry shape I remembered images I’d seen in high school biology class, some bit of film footage of a Jesus lizard getting up the speed to run on water. I, on the other hand, froze in my tracks and awaited further instruction.

  It’s a funny difference in blindness. If I’m alarmed, my flight-or-fight instinct short-circuits. I can’t run, of course, not without jacking up the amount of danger I’d be in. But I can’t fight, either, because, well, fight what, where, and how? So, when alarmed, I paralyse in position, then wait, like the passenger I am, for instructions. My method doesn’t work very well. Sometimes I have to remind people that I’m still in a holding pattern. This time, Jane, too busy screaming, had forgotten me.

  “What! What what what?” I said. I was glued to my spot and unsuccessfully scanning about for clues. “You gotta tell me what’s going on!” Snakes, I worried, if it’s my luck, it’ll be a snake. Jane’s sprint had taken her to the sidewalk, where she seemed to feel safe. Safe from whatever I was hanging out with.

  “What, what, what?” I reminded her.

  “Bugs! Around you on the ground. Really big!”

  I looked down at my feet but don’t know why. I couldn’t see anything, not even in the clean tunnel of my good eye. All I could make out was a blended spectrum of green and brown and yellow. Grass? Grass laced with brown bugs? Brown grass with yellow bugs? Which is worse? Nothing seemed to be moving.

  “Hey, guess what?” I said, bringing my face closer to the dirt. “I don’t see them.”

  A man exited the hostel and walked past me along the walkway, the proper path to the sidewalk.

  “They’re cicada shells,” he said. “They look just like live ones, but they’re molted shells.”

  “Could have fooled me,” I said.

  I gave into beignets for breakfast to help calm Jane’s startled heart. In return, we ate dinner that night around the corner at Igor’s and closed the day there, courting deception one last time.

  I wanted to stay out late and long into the night. We were in New Orleans, after all, and the people we’d met at Igor’s were travelling to Vancouver, of all places. Conversation is something I can have and enjoy. Blindness doesn’t matter. But Jane’s body and character didn’t share my sociability or pleasure in a long sit and a long yabber with strangers. Although we helped each other with our disabilities, we didn’t always lead one another to a mutual sense of belonging. Jane wanted to go back to the hostel, but I protested we should stay at Igor’s. She was bored and wanted to go. Soon, I said, but what she meant was go, as in go now.

  Conversations in loud places like Igor’s didn’t filter well in Jane’s hearing aids. The background and the foreground blended, sometimes one taking over from the other. Jane inevitably felt outside the group, not part of the exchange or able to track what was said. I remember how, that night, she would say something, make an observation, and be met by people’s confusion. Why does she repeat things we talked about a minute ago? Why does she suddenly talk about chess when we’re talking about jazz? Unlike my cane, Jane could hide her hearing aids under her hair, and, often to her detriment, she preferred to keep it that way. Our new bar-buddies didn’t know what to make of her. A couple more times her elbow ribbed me, indicating it was time to go, but I pretended not to notice.

  True, it was insensitive, but I’d been bored earlier for hours while she looked at knick-knacks. You can only touch so many saxophone lamps or paddleboat snow domes without beating them against your head. I figured, selfishly, it was my turn to do my thing. I wanted to talk with people and sit, two things I can do well. This way we’d be, you know—square. The fight was on. A silent one.

  I got up to plug some money into the jukebox. No better way to suggest staying. Jane didn’t offer to help me, which wasn’t our usual routine. Stubborn, I followed the last few bars of the Monkees until I felt the jukebox in front of me, fingered the coin slot, put in my money, and pressed three random selections. I couldn’t read the play list, which Jane would normally have helped me with, but anything was better than the Monkees. My first song kicked in. “Daydream Believer.”

  I found my way back to our table, irritable and ready to stand my ground. Jane got the last word, though, and won the argument. She’d up and left while I was picking songs.

  If I was sighted, that would have been fine with me. Our hostel wasn’t far from Igor’s, just down the street several blocks and a couple of turns, in fact. Then it occurred to me I had no more detail than that in my mental map. I couldn’t find the hostel on my own. I knew how Scrooge McTourist must have felt. Jane had hijacked the argument and forced me to go along with her.

  I excused myself, left what I guessed to be enough to cover our bill, and chased out the door. Jane waited just outside, certain I’d follow, but I didn’t know that. I made it to the corner before she let me know she was right behind. The street was as black as our mood, and I resented the dark as much as I resented my reliance on Jane.

  We walked in a silent fury, her stride taking her slightly ahead. Her distance refused me her guiding elbow, but I was happy not to take it. Then a voice from behind me yelled something. Footsteps hustled after me. I stopped and turned to face two large shadows as one of them crowded me and spoke.

  “Yo, man. Whatcha got?”

  I shrugged. “Huh?”

  The other shadow elaborated, very loudly. “He asked you whatcha got, man? Fuckin’, whatcha got?”

  The two shadows crowded closer. They either had a poor sense of personal space, or they were deliberately jostling me. I couldn’t say for sure, but I had a hunch. Then again, people often think I’m deaf because I’m blind. Strangers will press close to my face and holler phrases such as, “You are doing very well at walking!”

  “Are you asking what I’ve got?” I said. “You mean this?” I held up my cane. “It’s for the blind.”

  I’m not entirely stupid. Something felt wrong, even threatening. But asking me “Whatcha got?” was ambiguous at best. I hoped I could answer the question with my cane. The crowding worried me, but I couldn’t determine what the intentions of my two shadows were. Facial expressions often complete these pictures.

  I’d been mugged once before, but never as a blind man. More accurately, I’d received an amateur thumping from some yahoo when I was fifteen. He, too, started with a cryptic question I couldn’t follow.

  My friend Chris and I were walking home one night when a gold Camaro zoomed past us, then locked its brakes, and backed up in a hurry. We knew that wasn’t good. We hoped it would keep going, but the car parked beside us, in the middle of the street, the engine still running. In a suburb like Langley a gold Camaro is never a good sign, nor is any car that bothers to back up to you and your goth-loving, pointy-toed shoes. You can’t run in those things, which was often a problem when I was fifteen.

  A long-haired guy in a leather vest and a beer shirt burst from the Camaro and slammed the door. I could hear Iron Maiden on his stereo. Leather vests were another one of Langley’s more popular bad signs.

  “Where’s the fight!?” he shouted, both declaring and asking at the same time. Chris and I couldn’t tell what this guy was gett
ing at. “Where’s the fight? The fighting-fight?!” he shouted.

  I made the mistake of floating an answer. “I dunno?” I said.

  Then he showed me where the fight was. Duh, it was here and now. I could smell sour booze breath as he got in my face. He closed in enough to grab me by the head, as if about to pull me in for a nice kiss. But instead of coaxing my lips towards his, like they do in the movies, he slammed my chin into his raised right knee. Several times. Bobbing for kneecaps. A Friday night in Langley.

  In New Orleans, when those two shadows asked me what I got, that Camaro memory tore through my body. The crowding reminded me of Mr. Camaro, as did the weird use of a question before a possible drubbing. My answer, I supposed, would begin whatever violence or theft was about to happen.

  And why does it have to be so manipulative, anyway? It’s like someone asking you, “Hey, do you think the garbage needs to be taken out?” when they really mean to say, “Hey, take the goddamn garbage out.” Or, it’s like when somebody asks, “What are you going to do about it?” but it really means, in certain circumstances, “Go on and hit me first, please.” If my two shadows just outright said, “Give me your money,” I would have. But, no, instead we danced with semantics, and I offered them my white cane. In the end, their “Whatcha got?” probably saved me. And the fact Jane was there.

  Before they said anything about my cane, or how spiffy it was, or how it wasn’t what they were after, I felt Jane’s hand snatch my elbow and pull. We walked quickly, and that is a hard thing for a blind person to do with any conviction or grace.

  We scooted around the corner a couple of blocks. When Jane couldn’t see them anymore, we resumed our usual pace, this time with my hand on her guiding elbow.

  “What the hell was that about?” I asked. “I think they wanted my money or something. They asked what I had, and I said this was my cane. But I don’t think that’s what they were asking.”

  Before I could say anything more, I heard footsteps coming from behind us, again. Fast footsteps.

  My shoulders hunched the way someone might brace themselves against an oncoming dump truck. Jane turned when I froze, saw my shadowmen, and bolted. This time, in her own self-preserving haste, she forgot to take me with her. The two men were on either side of me all over again. They still had issues with personal space.

  “Hey, man!” one of them yelled, although they didn’t need to get my attention. “You gotta understand somethin’, know what I’m saying?”

  I nodded, but I hadn’t a clue. I figured I would soon enough.

  “We, like, didn’t know y’all couldn’t see nothin’, like, bein’ blind and all, and so we just wanted to say sorry, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “No problem, no worry,” I sputtered.

  “Yeah,” the other voice said, “sorry about that shit. You look like fucking some normal guy, you know what I’m sayin’? You look like just some guy, and we didn’t mean to get into your shit or nothin’. You don’t look like a blind guy, you know that?”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “And I respect your peoples and what you got to deal with, man. We cool?”

  My people and I were cool. The two men patted me once on the shoulder as they left, as if we were buddies, or I was a pet.

  Although I was fine, that night didn’t sit well with me for the rest of our trip. Something had, in the end, been taken from me, something very small. A strange kind of dignity, maybe. In its place remained an alien resentment. I know it seems daft, really, but how does one get justice for not having been mugged? It’s a real question, although not a high priority. For what it’s worth, I learned this much—even commonplace violence and social dangers can’t give me a fair shake. Discrimination feels like discrimination, even when it’s for the best. My generation has been so socialized into our rights and so schooled away from discriminations of any kind, I didn’t know how to be thankful. Thank you for stereotyping me. Thanks for excluding me from your violence, although I’m a relatively affluent tourist. Gratitude for being spared is something of a double bind. I wanted to lose. I wanted to lose like everybody else in order to keep that bit of dignity.

  Somewhere there’s a picture of my trip to New Orleans. Jane and I took a tour of the bayous on our last day. We’d heard about a guy named Sirus who operated a shrimp boat and ran a little tourist junket on the side. First he’d check his traps, then take you into the maze of ancient waterways where, at some point, he’d stop his big flat-bottomed boat and coax some alligators into the water. Marshmallows were his preferred bait. He also had a pet gator he brought with him on the trip. You could hold it.

  I got on the boat and looked around for his pet but couldn’t find its shape. That bothered me. A lot. The last thing I needed was to step on an alligator or to poke it with my cane. It was a big boat, though, with lots of benches, coils of rope stacked here and there, and all sorts of traps and equipment under tarps. The alligator could be anywhere.

  Later, while the eight of us who’d paid for the trip ogled at the few alligators Sirus had coaxed from the banks, he walked behind the wheel of the boat, pulled away a blanket and picked up his five-foot long pet. I couldn’t see what he carried, but I figured it out when the Texan woman next to me shrieked and launched into prayer. Apparently she hadn’t read the whole brochure.

  Sirus calmed her down and explained that the reptile was his pet. “Lady, she’s a tame.” He repeated, “Lady, she’s a tame.”

  “But it looks so real!” the Texan exclaimed.

  Pets are, for some, a set of unreal animals.

  “She is real,” Sirus said and tried to hand the gator to our praying Texan. She refused. Sirus turned to me. “How about you?” he asked. “You wanna hold her?”

  Before I could answer, I had an alligator in my arms. The tail drooped down under its own weight. Sirus’s pet felt like a bag of muscle. A very fine bag of muscle. It suffered the indignity of us all with an ancient patience I could only envy.

  “Let me take a picture.” Jane began to fumble with the camera.

  I didn’t want to betray how uncomfortable I felt, holding this thing, but the camera got it out of me. At home, Jane would describe the photo. She said that the alligator and I look like we’re both smiling, but we aren’t. We wanted to get our time together over with and do it before anybody got hurt.

  So did Jane.

  That Was There, This Is Here

  People ask me what I hate most about blindness. A good answer would be blindness. I hate blindness most about blindness, but that’s usually not what folks are after. Pick something, they say, something specific. Pushed to choose one big-time irritant, I’ll go on the permanent record with public washrooms. They’re a consistent disaster. On a good day, the public john for John Q. Public only proves, once and for all, hell is made of porcelain.

  Let’s say I’ve got a kindly waitress on my arm, one who’s willing to make the long march with me. I know I should be relieved for the guiding hand, and I am, yet my gratitude is smothered by how excruciating it is, at the age of thirty-three, to have someone take me to the can. Maybe at seventy or eighty I could accept this as a fact of late life. We all hope the golden years will soften our pride, but I doubt it. Nonetheless, it’s downright impossible to look and feel okay when, beyond the age of four, you must ask around for help with a potty trip.

  But asking for help isn’t what I worry about most these days. Getting through the door alone, that’s the real pressure point.

  The drama of approaching the men’s room with a waitress on my arm is somewhat like a first date. At the door we’re faced with the awkward problem of how to say goodbye, or whether we will. While I’m thanking her for the help, we’ll both wonder if we’ll shake hands and call it a night, no invitations inside this evening. Or, she will worry aloud, “Do you need me to follow you?” Or I will worry she’s worried about this, and so on and so forth goes the neurotic ping-pong.

  My anxiety is justified. I’ve learned there�
��s no underestimating the verve with which some people will play Good Samaritan to the disabled. Even though I insist I don’t need a hand beyond the door, sometimes this is mistaken for shyness or a silly desire not to be an imposition, particularly an imposition on a stranger who makes eight bucks an hour delivering burgers to tables, not blind men to urinals.

  It’s no problem, really, I assure her. Just point me in the right direction, I say, and send me in the room, white cane swinging. If nobody’s in the men’s room, I’ll crash around and find the urinal myself. What I won’t mention is that the only danger in going it alone is determining if I’m in front of a urinal or between two of them. I could feel for the layout with my cane, but a cane doesn’t tell me if I’m connecting with the outside or inside edges. The best proof is in running a hand around whatever is in front of me. Just think about it.

  I’m sorry to say, but that’s where I draw the line. Admit it, you wouldn’t run a hand around a urinal either. Standing in front of my best guess, I take my chances, and I’m sorry for the occasional misjudgment. You have to draw the line somewhere, preferably with a stick and not a finger.

  Misjudgments remain a less humiliating prospect than the alternatives. Once a waiter dragged me by my arm through the door and into the washroom and swung me into an empty stall. “No need! No, there’s no need,” I pleaded, but he hauled me through the busy washroom with cheery assurances. I don’t know what I did to deserve such kindness. It’s hard to be snarky when someone is aiming for helpful. Yet, when he chirped, “Here you are. If you need anything else, I’ll just be waiting right outside the door,” who could possibly go?

  When it comes to the men’s room, I realize I’m doomed to a lifetime in the Freudian twilight zone of toilet training and independence. Most of the time, all I wanted was directions.