I remember some things about the accident, like the sound of tires screeching and everything going black. I came to with an elderly woman standing over me, asking if I was okay. I told her yes, tried to get up, and immediately fell back down. An ambulance came, and I tried to explain to the EMTs that this couldn’t be happening to me. I had to go back to school and take my Coloring Queer final (yes, that was a real class I took). “Sit still,” an EMT scolded me. “You’re going to hurt yourself even more if you keep moving around.”
I had been living under the assumption that bad things didn’t happen to gay people with cerebral palsy, but a few moments after arriving in the ER, my condition worsened when I lost the ability to move and feel my left hand. One second I was doing jazz hands on the gurney and the next it was totally frozen. “It’s just a nerve contusion,” one doctor assured me. “You’ll regain movement and sensation in a few days.”
After two days and a series of misdiagnoses, it was revealed that I had compartment syndrome—a semi-rare condition that can develop after the body experiences trauma to a compartment of muscles. When that car smashed into my elbow at 45 mph, it caused pressure to develop in my forearm that was cutting off the oxygen supply to my muscles. This can result in a whole boatload of things, including amputation, but for me it meant a permanent, major loss of function in my left hand. Eight years after my accident, I’ve undergone six surgeries and had a skin graft. I can’t handwrite, tie my shoes, or give decent hand jobs (although, to be fair, who knows if I ever could). Basically, I am just a little more disabled than I was before. And even though I’ve never been totally able-bodied—I’ve never walked without a limp, I’ve never been flexible—my condition before the accident seemed manageable because I never knew anything different. This, however, was something else. This felt like the world was robbing someone who didn’t have much to begin with.
After leaving the hospital, I moved to Los Angeles and took the semester off from school to recover. Sensing that I might be spiraling into a depression, my dad sent me to a gay shrink. “He’ll empathize with you more,” my dad explained as he drove me to my first appointment. “You know, because he also likes dudes.” I arrived at my shrink’s office—which was on the corner of Cock Ring and Poppers in West Hollywood—not knowing what to expect, but I immediately became suspicious when I saw a sexy glamour head shot of my therapist in the waiting room. “That’s strange,” I thought to myself. “Do therapists normally take sensual head shots?” Shrugging it off, I entered his office and laid eyes on the man who was going to bring me catharsis.
Holy shit. No, no, no. This can’t be right. My shrink, Adam, was stunningly gorgeous. He had piercing blue eyes, a sleek haircut, and was wearing one of those sophisticated outfits that was supposed to be conservative but wasn’t actually because it was a size too small and seemed to deliberately show off his spectacular gym body. My penis was doing jumping jacks at the mere sight of him, which is why I knew instantly that this wasn’t going to work. I would never let myself open up and ugly-cry to someone that good-looking. Instead, I’d try to put on a show and pray that one day he would take pity, bend me over the couch, and screw the depression out of me. “Hey, Ryan.” Adam shook my hand and motioned for me to sit down. “What brings you here today?”
“Um, not much,” I stammered, suddenly self-conscious and pulling the hair out of my face.
“Not much?” Adam gave me a confused look before checking my file. “Your father told me you were hit by a car a month ago.”
“Oh, yeah,” I laughed nervously. “That. I guess things have been pretty heavy.”
“Are you depressed? You’ve gone through a major life change, so I would expect you to be experiencing some feelings of despair right now.”
“Maybe? Gosh, I don’t know. Tell me about you! How long have you been a therapist?”
Adam paused and looked me dead in the eye. “How are you doing, Ryan? You can tell me. That’s why you’re here.”
I shifted in his $10,000 leather chair and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Well, okay. If you really want to know, I’m convinced no one’s ever going to want to have sex with me again.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I have cerebral palsy and now I’m one-handed. Being with me would be like having sex with a fidgety lobster claw.”
Adam smiled. He had great teeth. “Ryan, I can already tell that you’re an attractive, bright individual. I guarantee you that you’ll find someone.”
“Really? You think I’m attractive?”
“Sure.”
“And you think someone would actually want to see me naked after all of this mess?”
“Why not?”
“Wow, great!” I beamed before getting serious. “So do you know who specifically would sleep with me? Like, did you have anyone in mind or are you just speaking generally?”
“Um, generally, Ryan.”
“Oh.” I sunk back into my chair. Fantasies of us holding our adopted baby, Moppet Azul, on a safari in Africa were dashed to hell.
“So, besides feeling undesirable, is there anything else you’re struggling with post-accident?”
“Um,” I hesitated. Don’t let him see you sweat, Ryan. Keep it together. The goal is to make him like you. “Nope; I think that about covers it!”
After our anticlimactic first session together (and having one amazing climax alone in my shower an hour later), I promised myself that I’d quit Adam and find a therapist who could actually help me sift through the wreckage in my brain. I could never go through with it, though. Spending time with him was like seeing a hint of a shirtless dancing rainbow in an otherwise hopeless sky. Adam was like my hooker, but instead of paying him to fuck me, I was giving him money to feed me compliments and hand me bottles of Fiji water. If insurance hadn’t stopped covering our sessions, I probably would’ve seen him indefinitely.
Life in LA was not turning into the healing Namaste journey I thought it was going to be. Now that my weekly sessions with Adam were over, I had nothing to do. So I passed the time by eating. A lot. I ate at a Chipotle that was near my apartment four times a week. After devouring a giant burrito, I would then walk to a place called Sprinkles and order four cupcakes, two of which I would eat in a Kinko’s parking lot on Elm and Wilshire. Besides treating my body like a carb Dumpster and deleting 461 days from my lifespan, I also got to know my roommate, Emma. The two of us had met at a house party a year earlier and immediately bonded over our love of astrology and pugs. When I moved to LA, Emma suggested we sublet a place together and I thought, “Why not? This girl seems fun, flirty, fabulous! I mean, we’ve only met IRL once, but I’m sure she’s totally great!” A week into us living together, I realized I had made a grave error in judgment.
“Hey, babe,” she bellowed one day when she entered our apartment carrying a $400 gym bag and her favorite Lululemon yoga pants. “You will not believe how much I just paid for an iced mocha at Urth Caffé!”
“How much?” I asked with the bare minimum of enthusiasm.
“FIFTEEN DOLLARS!” she exclaimed. “Can you believe it?”
“No, I can’t. No iced mocha costs fifteen dollars. That’s actually impossible.”
“I’m not kidding. It really was fifteen dollars. The prices there are outrageous!”
She was right. The prices at Urth Caffé were outrageous, but there’s still no such thing as a fifteen-dollar mocha. I was offended by how unabashedly false her lie was. She wasn’t even striving for authenticity here.
“I really don’t believe you. There’s no way.”
“Ryan, why would I lie?”
Now there’s a question I would’ve loved an answer to. Emma did nothing but lie. She told me she was a nationally ranked tennis player, that she used to strip at Scores, that she had a sugar daddy who sent her money even though nothing sexual would ever happen between them, that Kat Von D tattooed her at a house party, that she was in training for Wimbledon. She was nuts, but
her antics were a nice distraction from the pathetic happenings of my life. Whenever I thought I was losing my mind, I’d flash back to Emma and her delusions about fifteen-dollar mochas and instantly feel rooted in reality.
I needed all the pick-me-ups I could get. Acquiring another disability on top of the one I already had messed with my sanity and moved my self-esteem from “Sometimes I like myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays!” to “I am a disgusting Grendel whose penis might as well be donated to charity.” All my friends in San Francisco were busy moving in together and getting into serious relationships. They were constantly evolving, and even though the accident had given me the chance to start over, too, I was treating my beginning like a permanent ending.
The only way you can recover from a traumatic event is if you admit to yourself and others that you’re miserable. People always feel this pressure to say that they’re in such a good place when they’re actually swimming in a bottomless pit of despair. In order to get past anything, you have to own your misery. You need to write, “THIS DEPRESSION IS THE PROPERTY OF: [insert your name here].” Otherwise, it’s going to stick to you forever.
I lied to my friends about how I was doing, and I slept in a lot; my eyes felt sewed shut by my depression. When I did leave my apartment, I cried in public. I sampled everything on the grief buffet and went back for seconds. During my recovery, I had nothing but time to think about the difficult questions no one likes to give any thought to, like, What do people really want out of life? What keeps them content after their looks fade and they’ve seen loved ones die and they’ve been betrayed? Before you hit your mid- to late twenties, it’s hard to think of yourself as someone who’s in control of his life. It almost feels like your body is a loaner, something given to you to wreak havoc on. These bruises aren’t yours. This weight gain isn’t yours. None of it is real. You can go back to the way things were at the drop of a hat. You can reverse the damage with a good night’s sleep. You can treat people terribly and expect them to still be there for you in the morning.
Getting hit by a car gave me my first taste of the things that were worth valuing. It made me realize how badly I wanted to get better and live a fully functional life so I could love somebody and have them love me back and be with my friends and family and do work that I was proud of and get a dog and lay in warm sheets and watch a matinee by myself and try using a cock ring and watch my best friend get married. I was starting to understand that nothing in this life is owed to me and that it’s quite possible to sabotage yourself if you don’t pay attention.
Of course, all these moments of clarity were brief—I still had many years of being a fuckup ahead of me—but they were strong enough to lift me out of my post-accident fugue. While living in LA, I applied and got accepted to Eugene Lang, a college in New York that’s like NYU but with cheaper tuition and more flannel and cocaine. I was terrified to start a whole new life with a hand that was permanently out to lunch, but moving to New York actually turned out to be the step I needed to take to realize my accident had actually been a blessing in disguise.
When I went to Lang, I majored in creative writing because all I knew how to do was have feelings. Have you had the unique pleasure of taking a writing workshop at a liberal arts college? If not, let me explain how it works. Twenty students sit in a room and jizz all over themselves for an hour and a half. Then at the end of class, the teacher hands everyone a towel so they can wipe the cum off.
Okay, that’s not really what happens. Students read their stories aloud, which are usually about Brooklyn house parties or genocide, and then they get workshopped—that is, your peers tear your story apart under the guise of giving you constructive criticism. The author will get defensive and sometimes cry and scream, assuring us that we just don’t understand her vision, and then class is over.
The girls in a writing workshop usually have weird names like Sandstorm and Aura, and the dudes are usually gay. If, for some strange reason, they’re straight, they worship Charles Bukowski, are functional alcoholics, and will sleep with half the girls in the class before the semester is over. My favorite kind of person in a writing workshop is the shy girl in the corner who doesn’t say a word until it comes time to read her story, and then shit gets psycho.
“Ahem,” she’ll say, clearing her throat. Everyone looks over because they’ve never heard her speak.
“So this story is about a girl named Oxtail, and it’s about rape. And molestation. Because I was raped and molested.”
Everyone’s jaw drops. She starts to read.
“Lick my pussy, you asshole. I was in the woods and it was dark but you found me and you grabbed my tits and I sucked your cock and together we were fucking under the moonlight. And then you offered me heroin and I said yes. So then we did heroin. Oh yeah. I’m on heroin. Feel my pussy. Go inside it. Fuck yeah. That feels good. No, wait. It feels terrible. What the fuck? ARE YOU MY DAD?”
By the time she’s finished reading, the entire class is silent. The girl looks up, and just like that, she’s back to her usual quiet self. “Um, thanks,” she’ll whisper before covering her face with a hoodie. Meanwhile, everyone is struggling to comprehend how something so dark could’ve come out of someone who wears Skechers.
You meet people with conflicting identities all the time in college. One half is the person they’ve always been and the other half is the person they’re actively trying to become. It’s exhausting. College kids aren’t tired from staying up all night studying or partying. They’re tired from not having the slightest idea who they are.
Going to Lang, I was prepared to give up on my quest to become another person and be honest about who I was: the cerebral palsy, the compartment syndrome—all of it. Then I went to a house party and realized I didn’t have to.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but . . . what happened to you?” a drunk girl asked me shortly after I moved to New York. In the background, kids were dancing to Jay Z and having heated discussions about white privilege.
“I got hit by a car,” I told her, sipping from a red cup filled with warm white wine.
Her eyes widened and she covered her mouth in horror. “OH. MY GOD. I AM SO SORRY. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?”
“I ran into oncoming traffic.”
She scrunched up her nose and scoffed. Suddenly she wasn’t so sympathetic. “Why in the hell did you do that?”
“I’m not really sure . . .” I trailed off. This was a story I was going to have to tell for the rest of my life, and I had better get a script figured out quick.
“Okay,” she paused, waiting for me to proceed but when I didn’t, she continued. “So, like, what actually happened?”
“I developed this thing called compartment syndrome and, um, well, it essentially fucked up my hand forever.”
“Wait—your hand? I didn’t even notice that.”
For a brief moment, I was confused. How could she not have noticed my hand? What else was there to notice besides . . . oh. Right. There’s that other thing I have.
“So did it crush your side, too, or . . . ?”
I thought about it for a second. Technically, the car did hit my right side. I even have a little scar on my ass from it. If I told her yes, I wouldn’t really be lying. I’d just be neglecting to tell her the full story.
“Um, yeah. That’s exactly what happened.” I sighed. “That’s why I have a limp. That’s why all of this”—I motioned to my entire body—“is happening.”
With that lie, I remade myself. I was no longer Ryan, the guy with cerebral palsy. I was Ryan, the accident victim.
After that night, I never spoke about my cerebral palsy to anyone. I chalked everything up to the accident and got the opportunity to live my life on the other side of the disabled coin. Can you blame me for doing some creative editing? For the first time in my life I was in possession of some confidence. Shortly after telling the drunk girl my little lie, I hooked up with a boy for the first time in two years. Ryan, the cerebral palsy sufferer, wasn’t wort
hy of getting laid, but Ryan, the accident victim, was. I would walk up to cute boys, limp and all, and start chatting them up. If I had a crush on someone, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab their face in the hallway of my apartment and start kissing them. I had officially thrown my disability into a garbage can on Third Avenue and exchanged it for clandestine make-outs, hazy sex, and a set of Cisco Adler balls. When you’re twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, sex is constantly vibrating off your body and it doesn’t matter if you’re the hottest thing in the world. You’re young, you’re ripe, and you deserve to be picked. That attitude had infected all of my friends, but I had yet to experience it on my own. Now I wanted all the penis, all the love, all the experiences that came with being someone who likes himself.
This confidence continued to stick with me all throughout college, but eventually I found myself slowly regressing back into the insecure person I was before. As wonderful as it was to be able to leave my disability in the dust, it was just a Band-Aid solution to a much larger problem. Lies can boost your confidence, they can get you accepted by a group of friends and get you laid, but anything that’s not the truth is going to fade.
When I look back at college, I think of people like Emma, who wanted me to believe she was a professional tennis player, and I think of Evan, who was so heavily invested in this idea of being cool that he forgot to be a decent person, and I think of Stephanie, who went from an academic to a cokehead in six months. Most of all, I think of me—denying my disability so I could live what I thought would be a happier life. I can’t help but feel so sad for us. We were all under the impression that these reinventions would change us into something better, but they just made everyone more miserable and confused. You can try on different personalities like they’re clothing for as long as you want, but I guarantee that the outfit you were originally wearing will always be the one that fits best.
The more distance I have from my college years, the more I realize that it was like a four-year summer camp where your only assignment is to read Judith Butler and feel emotions. I thought it was real, but it was actually just a very expensive dreamworld. And you know what else is a poor imitation of real life? A diet adult world that’s meant to give the impression that we’re people who are going places. Internships.
I’m Special Page 4