No Turning Back

by Bryan Anderson

  I pulled up and stopped. The guard stepped out of his hut and approached my car. I took out my military ID card with two fingers, handed it casually out the open window, and avoided eye contact with the guard as I offered it to him.

  He didn’t take my card or even look at me. Instead, he pointed to the side of the road. “Pull forward for random inspection, please.”

  I froze for half a second, and then I put away my ID and shifted the car into gear. As I pulled over and parked it, I mumbled to Nick, “So, dude . . . ready to go to jail?”

  Nick was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. “Fuck, man, what’re they gonna do? Look at us. Can they possibly make our shit any worse than it already is?”

  “Dude, if I’ve learned anything in the Army, it’s that shit can always be worse.”

  I parked the car, popped the hood, and opened the trunk, but I was careful not to open any of the doors. The guard walked up, circled the car, and said, “Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle, sir?” Then he opened the door for me.

  Or, should I say, for us.

  Nick and I stared up at the guard with what I can only imagine were the two dumbest, most stunned-stupid expressions in all of history. I’m pretty sure I actually said, “Duh . . .”

  The guard looked back at us, frozen just like we were. He didn’t say anything for close to half a minute—not a single word. Nick and I knew we were in some seriously deep shit, so we kept our mouths shut.

  Finally, the guard blinked, shook his head, looked around, and said, “Shit, man, you guys made it this far . . . Just go. Just . . . go.” He shut my door and waved us through the gate.

  “Hell, yeah,” I said. “Hit it, Nick.” He pressed on the gas and we took off.

  Ever since then, I’ve wondered what must have been going through that guard’s mind. Imagine being that soldier working the gate at Walter Reed at half-past midnight, the only person on duty at that post, when you discover two disabled soldiers—two guys who were both blown to shit in Iraq—working as a team to drive the same car. We both had valid driver’s licenses. How would you even call that in?

  “Um, dispatch? I’ve got two guys with zero legs driving one car. Please advise.”

  I used to be an MP, and even I don’t know what the charge would be. Driving without legs? I can see some prosecutor paging frantically through the criminal code and coming up empty. “Well, it doesn’t say the driver must actually have legs. Or be in control of the pedals.”

  Call me crazy, but I bet that would make a great plot twist on an episode of Law & Order.

  This next story isn’t funny, but it is pretty amazing, so I’ve just gotta tell you about it. When Mark Kirk, who’s now a senator for Illinois, was still a representative, he invited me and my friend Timmy to President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address. He also wanted me to help with passing a bill to raise money for a disabled veterans’ memorial on Capitol Hill. The bill was called the American Veterans Disabled for Life Commemorative Coin Act. The idea was that there would be a special one-dollar coin minted to honor veterans who had been disabled in the line of duty, and it would be sold for eleven dollars, with the extra ten dollars for building the memorial.

  He took me around to different congressmen to try to get them to back the bill. I would just tell my story and explain why I thought disabled veterans deserved a memorial. During a meeting, one of the congressmen got up and left, right while I was talking. I wondered what that was about, but then I figured, Hey, these are busy people. After about five minutes, he came back and said he’d support the bill. He was kind of a heavy hitter on Capitol Hill, so once he declared he was backing the bill, a lot of other people jumped on board, too.

  It took a while, but eventually, the bill passed both houses of Congress and the coins came out early in 2010. Later on, Kirk told me that the reason the congressman had left the meeting was that he’d been so moved by my story that he’d teared up, and that kind of sealed the deal with that guy. So Kirk said the bill got passed basically because of me and Gary Sinise, who’s the spokesperson for the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial.

  I felt proud that I’d been able to help accomplish something really important. It helped me understand that even after we’ve been knocked down by the worst that life can do to us, we can recover and still do things that are important to us, and enjoy the ride while we’re doing it.

  And sometimes, it’s precisely because you’ve been through something terrible that you later get the chance to do something wonderful. Our lives will be what we make of them.

  Later that spring, I got a call from Luzerne County Community College in Pennsylvania, asking if I would be their commencement speaker. I said, “Sure,” even though I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I’d never given a speech and didn’t think of myself as a speaker, but I’m always up for a challenge. Besides, I’d talked to congressmen, so I figured I had some experience. I’d just started working with Pride Mobility, and Dick said, “We’ll have the speech written up for you.”

  I thought, Okay, great, I’m all set. They sent the speech to me a couple days before I was supposed to give it. While I was on the plane out to Pennsylvania, I looked through the speech more closely. I started crossing out whole paragraphs: Nope, I’m not saying this. I started writing key phrases of points I wanted to hit. The original speech had a lot of good points, but they just weren’t written the way I would say them. I revised everything and got it down to what I wanted to say. Everything seemed under control.

  Then came the day of graduation. I was at the venue, I had my prosthetic legs on, and I’d been given a gown and a sash, the whole works. The ceremony was in the Wachovia Arena, and as all the graduates started coming in, it finally hit me that there was a few thousand people there. I looked around, saw a JumboTron hanging in the middle of the arena, and realized there were video cameras. This thing was a whole lot bigger than I had imagined and seemed to be getting bigger every second. Then I heard them call my name.

  I stood up, and I was kind of freaking out. That’s when I looked out across the arena and saw myself on the JumboTron. Holy shit! I stared across the sea of people as I walked across the stage. It felt like I wasn’t blinking. I stopped at the podium, looked down at my speech, and thought, I don’t want to do this.

  But then my Army training kicked in. I had agreed to do this, so I was going to do it. That’s how it had been for me in the Army. After a couple years in, I didn’t want to be in the Army anymore. I knew I wasn’t going to do that for the rest of my life, but I’d made the commitment and I was going to honor it. There were things in Iraq that I didn’t want to do, but I just had to.

  Standing at the podium, I knew this was just one of those times. I told myself, You have to do it.

  I looked down at my speech again, and I realized that everything I’d written down, I didn’t want to say anymore. Shit. Shit! I turned the pages facedown, looked up . . . and I just started talking.

  “You guys have accomplished something that not everybody does,” I said, “and now it’s the next step. But your work’s not over yet; success isn’t just going to come to you. You still have to go out and find jobs, and do what you want to do. You have to go out into the world and live.”

  I talked for ten or fifteen minutes and that was it. I got away from that podium. What a relief.

  Afterward, members of the faculty came up to me and said, “That was amazing, that was the best speech we’ve had in thirty years.” So, that’s how I got started doing public speaking, and I got an honorary doctorate out of it. I’m a doctor of public service, if you can believe that.

  Giving that speech by the seat of my pants turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. If I’d really thought about it beforehand, or known how overwhelming it was going to feel, I might not have gone through with it, but I’m so glad I did. It’s just another example of how good it is to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone. You’ll never ex
perience something new if you don’t try something new. It sounds obvious, I know, but just think about how many times you’ve shrugged your shoulders at something you’ve never tried before and decided not to do it for no other reason than that. You really don’t know what you’re missing, and it may be something really cool.

  When Alive Day Memories was done, HBO flew five of us guys that had been in the documentary out to Beverly Hills for the premiere. We all went to a big HBO party, and it seemed as if everyone who was on HBO was there. I saw all kinds of actors, including the casts of Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and John from Cincinnati. The place that hosted the party was amazing. There was a pool that had spouts of fire coming up out of it. I’m not sure why you’d want flames shooting out of a pool, but somehow it fit in with California and celebrities.

  I had my prosthetic legs on, so I left my chair parked in a corner somewhere and walked around. I saw a bunch of the guys from Entourage standing together: Kevin Connolly, Kevin Dillon, Adrian Grenier, and Jerry Ferrara. I went up and introduced myself, and they were all really cool. Me and the two Kevins and Brian Van Holt, one of the guys from John from Cincinnati, ended up hanging out together through the whole party. The rest of the Entourage group left early.

  We were all sitting together when we saw James Gandolfini come in. All the actors started talking about Jim and how awesome he is. There was just something about the way they talked, I finally looked at them and said, “Wait, you guys don’t know Jim?” It turned out the Entourage guys had never met him. So I told them about working with him on the documentary and how he was just a big teddy bear.

  Then I said, “Hold on. Let me introduce you.” I got up and walked over to Jim and said, “Hey, I got some people who want to meet you.” So I brought him over and introduced him to the Entourage people, which was awesome.

  Later on the two Kevins and me were sitting by the pool, and they said, “We’ll give you a thousand dollars if you push Jim into the pool.”

  I said, “Really?”—kind of sarcastically, not believing them. Just then Jim walked by, so I stood up and put my hands on him. I said, “I just got offered a thousand bucks to push you into this pool.”

  He looked at me, looked at his drink, then said, “Let me have another drink, and then I’ll split the money with you.” We laughed and left it at that.

  When that party ended, we didn’t want to stop, so we headed over to the club in the hotel next door for an afterparty. I didn’t want to walk anymore, so I’d taken off my legs and jumped into my wheelchair. Jim pointed at my legs and said, “Let me get those.” He grabbed them and started walking along, carrying one in each hand. As Jim, the two Kevins, and me and my friends Timmy and Eliot headed toward the club, this woman came down the sidewalk and passed in front of us, but didn’t notice who any of us were. Jim looked back at us with a shit-eating grin—then he ran up to her and started kicking her in the ass with my legs.

  She kind of freaked out and turned around: “What the hell?!” Then she saw it was James Gandolfini and was like, “Holy shit, Tony Soprano!”

  He likes doing crazy stuff like that. At the Washington, D.C., premiere, he said he needed to smoke a stogey, so I went with him to have a cigarette. Five of us ended up out there. Jim looked around at all of us and said, “I’ll be right back.” He went into the hotel lobby and started dragging out two big cushy chairs. So a couple of the other guys went and got some more and we sat out there on a street corner in D.C. smoking and drinking until some hotel employees came out and busted us.

  Some people just don’t know how to have fun, I guess.

  Anyway, back to Beverly Hills.

  Later that night, we were in a back room of the club at the hotel, and Kevin Dillon said, “Hey, we should all do shots of Patrón, bro!” Everyone agreed, so he got the waiter and had them bring over the shots. Then he jumped up, grabbed one of my legs, and ran away with it.

  I sat there and thought, All right. Kevin Dillon just stole one of my legs. When he finally came back with it, he had filled it with beer, and he passed it around and we all drank out of it.

  What can I say? That Kevin Dillon is a classy guy.

  So much stuff happened to me after I appeared on the cover of Esquire that I can still hardly believe it. In the article, I’d said I wanted to be a stuntman and an actor, so after it came out I got a call from a guy named Douglas Crosby. He was a stunt coordinator, and he said he was working on a new Mickey Rourke movie, The Wrestler. Douglas wanted to give me a shot to see if I’d be able to do the job. He’s a great guy who likes to give people in bad situations a chance to break out of them. He asked me to come to South Philadelphia, where they were shooting some scenes for the movie at the Alhambra Arena. He brought me out there for two days in February 2008. We worked from four in the afternoon until four in the morning both days.

  It was a scene in which Mickey’s character, Randy “The Ram” Robinson, is wrestling at this semi-underground event called Combat Zone Wrestling, or CZW, and they do crazy stuff. They call it “ultraviolent wrestling.” This wasn’t all staged for the movie; this was one of CZW’s regular events. We were there filming before, during, and a little bit after the real deal. When we got there, Douglas brought me up to meet Mickey Rourke and Darren Aronofsky, the director. And Mickey was like, “He’s a soldier? All right, cool. You know what? I got you now, you’re with me, you’re taken care of, that’s it.” And he kind of took me under his wing for the couple of days that I was there.

  Then we sat around talking about what we could do to work me into the movie. We spitballed a few ideas. In the scene, Randy the Ram was supposed to hit the other wrestler with a folding chair—a classic wrestling move, right? I think it was Douglas who said, “Do those legs come off? Can we hit somebody with one?” He knew my personality, knew that I’d want to do something crazy.

  I was like, “Yeah!” So we decided to use one of my legs instead of the folding chair. I’d be one of the people in the audience, and I’d give Randy the Ram one of my legs. At first, Darren Aronofsky was worried we’d break it, but I told him they’re made out of high-tech material, that there was no way they’d break. Then he asked Mickey what he thought, and Mickey said, “Let’s go for it.”

  That was it, we just talked about it, and then we started shooting in front of the real crowd that was there for CZW. When I offered my leg to Randy the Ram, the crowd started chanting, “Use the leg! Use the leg!” It was really cool to see how it was done. We shot it like three or four different times.

  When we weren’t shooting, I’d sit off to the side of the set, and Mickey and I would bullshit with each other. He asked me about what had happened to me, so I told him all about that. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time together since I was there for only a couple of days. But I can’t thank Douglas enough for that experience. It showed me that there really are people out there willing to help and give others a chance at doing something new.

  Later that year, in December, I was invited out to Los Angeles for the movie’s premiere, where I actually got to walk the red carpet next to Mickey. Marisa Tomei was at the premiere, of course. I hadn’t gotten to meet her during filming because she wasn’t part of the scenes I was in, so she wasn’t there. So, at the premiere I told Mickey, “Hey, I want to meet Marisa Tomei. Can you introduce me?”

  He said, “Sure. We’ll go find her after the show.”

  Then, just as I was sitting down before the show, Marisa Tomei was standing in the aisle, barely three feet from me. I was sitting with Randy “The Natural” Couture and Gina “Crush” Carano—there were all kinds of wrestlers and extreme fighters there. It was cool to be sitting with them, but there was Marisa! She was talking to somebody, and I really wanted to just reach over and tap her on the arm, and say, “Hey, I’m Bryan Anderson, I just wanted to say, ‘Hi, I think you’re awesome.’” But I didn’t, because I thought, Mickey and I will go find her afterward, and I don’t want to interrupt her.

  After the show, Mick
ey and I searched the whole theater for her, but the place was packed, and we couldn’t find her. I don’t know, maybe she had left. He was bummed about it, maybe even more than I was; he’d really wanted to introduce me to her.

  Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Or maybe it’s meant to be at a different time. That’s how I try to deal with everything: If it’s supposed to happen, it happens, so no need to worry about it.

  Besides, how can I complain? I got to hang with Mickey Rourke!

  I mentioned earlier that I once dated a girl who worked at one of our dealers’ stores. Our first date really was a wild ride, and you need to hear the whole story. I’ve done a lot of trips for Pride Mobility, but back in the summer of 2008 it was my first road trip for them. I was going with Dick and Dan Pickett, one of our corporate representatives. We went down to Knoxville, Tennesee, to visit one of our dealers, do a meet-and-greet, and record some media spots. After we had finished with all the official stuff, Dick and I invited the dealership owner and some of the employees out to dinner. Among them was a young woman, Casey, and she was really nice.

  We all had a good dinner, and afterward I asked Casey and another employee, Jessica, if they wanted to come back to my hotel to talk some more and just hang out for a while. They said yes.

  So, we all went back to the hotel, part of a low-budget chain, somewhere in Knoxville. It was the kind of place where there were two floors, all the doors opened to the outside, and the second floor was ringed by a balcony. When I checked in, I had asked if they had any smoking rooms. The clerk said, “Yeah, but they’re on the second floor.”

  I said, “That’s fine.”