An hour every other day was spent in sex therapy. I didn’t want to go until I saw the counselor, Margie Bighew, Ph.D., a plump but sensuous Germanic-looking woman who operated out of a tiny windowless cubicle. The place was so small that it seemed as if my nose was between her sizable breasts as she interrogated me with such lines as, “Have you thought about asking that little nurse of yours to sit on your face some night, John?”
A shocking yet wildly exciting thought! The idea of sex was frightening. What was I capable of? Besides, I was still medicated: 10 milligrams of Valium every four hours between me and a mass of fears and insecurities. Still . . .
Dr. Bighew was a great believer in spontaneous behavior. This was, after all, southern California, where either you were sexy or you were asked to leave the state. Still, I sometimes wondered if the doctors and other staff were aware of the exact nature of her advice.
“Why not play a little grab-ass with the nurses? You could always say, ‘It was a wild spasm—sorry!’”
Maybe I should try to make a move. Nah, I was too embarrassed. At the same time I had fantasies of ripping off Margie’s blouse, shoving my face between her tits, and making motorboat noises.
One-on-one in her office, she explained the mechanics of quad sex.
“You don’t have ordinary, psychogenic erections anymore so you have to use reflexogenic erections. You’ve got to put your hands on your stomach just above your pubic area. You massage there and also the inner part of your thigh until you find the correct spot for that day.” I was hoping she’d demonstrate. Instead, she used charts.
“You’ve got to think of sex differently. Maybe you’re not the passive type, but you’ll probably have to have intercourse from the bottom. But the girl will like it anyway because that provides better penetration.”
Of course you can’t talk to a twenty-one-year-old like that and not have the hormones pounding away in his ears. Once she did touch my neck to indicate new erogenous zones. Boy, its a good thing I’m paralyzed or I’d jump right out of this chair and pull her down, I thought. She’d probably touched hundreds if not thousands of other quads and paras the same way, but she certainly did revive my interest in the topic.
In spite of Margie Bighew I was convinced I was out to pasture as far as sex was concerned. I remember reading an article by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, who was paralyzed by a bullet. He had gone on at some length about how anyone with a spinal injury who said he had a decent sex life was a liar.
My occupational therapist was dismayed one day when she found me scrawling a doggerel poem in writing class:
All the same, I was twenty-one and I had got to be good friends with a girl who worked the graveyard shift. We made a lunch date. We explored the grounds, went by the fountain and behind the bushes a little bit. She was very sweet. Scared as I was, I invited her to sit in my lap; I had no idea that this was going to be my M.O. for the rest of my life. She was eager.
Two seconds into the first kiss my foot pedal broke under our combined weight. She fell flat on her ass on the ground and I followed. I cracked my head sharply against the chair, looked up at her, and said, “Now I know that God doesn’t mean for me to have sex ever again.”
Another part of sex therapy consisted of porn flicks showing quads and paras making it with normal girls (there were no comparable films for women in those days). These were the brainchildren of Dr. Sidney Shimkin, urologist. Perhaps Dr. Shimkin had enlisted the support of hard-core movie moguls, or maybe he was just an advanced student of the genre. The films, at least the ones I saw, were grainy, underlit, and complete with rinky-dink canned organ music on the sound tracks, just as boring and depressing as the real thing. One of them showed a quad turning a neat somersault to transfer himself from wheelchair to bed (applause) but in general they were gritty and humorless enough to put anybody off sex for years.
The final item on Rancho’s basic curriculum was driver education—this was L.A. after all. Every other Friday I practiced in a 1966 pink Caddy equipped with a hand throttle and a knob on the power steering wheel. I had no idea at all how to keep my balance in this pimpmobile. Once, while out for a practice spin, I signaled a left turn, cranked the wheel over and fell directly into my instructor’s lap. The Caddy lurched slowly up onto the sidewalk and into a bunch of kids on tricycles. They were too young to read the huge “Caution—Maimed Student Driver” signs on the roof. Luckily nobody was hurt.
The real education occurred between classes, however, as always. We hung on every word of the veterans who visited us, like Larry, a tough para, with a hugely muscled torso above his shrunken child legs, and with racing stripes on his wheelchair. Larry would whip into the ward with his perky, fully-abled wife on his lap. They took me to dinner. “I do anything anybody else does,” he told me. “I go up escalators.”
He did, too. He would drive on, lock his back wheels quickly, and lean forward to keep his chair from falling over backward. Sometimes when he talked to me, he would thrust his chair backward toward the wall, lock his wheels at just the right moment and end up in a comfortable reclining position with his head against the wall. Fascinating.
“Don’t limit yourself by what these therapists tell you—you can’t do this, can’t do that. Take what they have to offer but realize you can learn a lot more on your own.”
Larry demonstrated self-defense, spinning his chair so that a burly attendant, dancing and faking and weaving, couldn’t get in a punch. For tougher situations he owned a gun and knew how to use it. He drove a car, held a full-time job as an accountant, went to nude beaches, you name it.
What about sex? “Every night. I’ve even learned how to ejaculate.”
He and his wife had been married, happily, for five years. She was motherly toward me, took me shopping. Once I saw them leaving the hospital together holding hands. Larry could push his chair and still manage to hold hands. I was very moved by this sight.
“But,” I protested to him once, “you’re a paraplegic.”
“Look,” was all he said. Across the hall was a guy in an iron lung. Other people would feed him for the rest of his life. I became a fighter early on.
At the opposite extreme was Sonny, a guy on my ward who decided to opt out. He spent every free moment with one ear against the pillow and the other shielded from reality by a transistor-radio earplug. His aunt and uncle visited every weekend, but since Sonny was a case of abject despondency, they adopted me instead. I had few visits from relatives, and Sonny’s came in handy. They brought me presents and much encouragement.
Somewhere in the middle was Elwood “You-wanna-buy-some-red-debbles?” Green, whose 13-year-old current wife showed up every weekend with an entourage of two dozen or so brats from Elwood’s several previous marriages and a care package with Elwood’s weekend supply of Mad Dog wine and mixed narcotics. “Git that one off da bed!” he would snap, between chugs. Elwood spent all his time on his stomach poling a gurney along the corridors with a crutch, as if it were a canoe, buying and selling whatever he could get his hands on. He had to use the gurney because, still in rehab, he had already developed chronic bedsores on his ass.
Of all the guys on the ward, I was most fond of Julio Gomez. After eight or ten weeks on the ward, I felt like a big brother to him. Only eighteen, he was very brave. His gunshot injury had paralyzed him on one side only, but had also left him with tremendous neural pain, which he hid during the day behind a big stoned grin. They medicated him heavily at night to stop him from screaming in his sleep.
Julio was born in the Philippines, but had grown up on the streets of East L.A. His mother, who he said was an alcoholic, visited him only once. Julio had never been taught a life of the mind: the gang scene depended on animal macho. “How you gonna load a gun with one arm?” he asked me once. He had lost everything that counted in his world.
When Julio’s friends took him out, he would return with Xs in his eyes, zonked on heroin and booze. At other times he got his stuff from Elwood. We
were all rough on women but Julio was rougher. Some young nurse would say, “Time to get up, Julio.” And he’d say, “Fuck you, I ain’t gettin’ up. Get out of here, bitch.”
The young nurse would go off in tears to Cathy Ball, the head nurse. Cathy would give Julio a lecture. “Julio, you’re in here on welfare. We could easily throw you out.” So Julio would get up and go down to therapy and, half an hour later, throw his hand splint across the room.
Julio never gave an inch. One day he went down to the cafeteria, which was staffed by the mentally retarded, and ordered seventeen cups of coffee. Julio grinned at me as the guy filled up his tray. Mean, but hilarious.
Sometimes I’d see him sitting out on the grass with the light gone out of his eyes and think, He’s not gonna make it. Julio finally O.D.d. His friends on the outside shot him up. Maybe they thought he’d be better off that way.
My own role model was Will, in his late twenties, a good-looking, cynical para who kept a bottle in his locker, chain-smoked, and told no lies to himself or others. He was blatantly angry about his injury and had absolutely no illusions about what it meant for the future. He hated rehab. “These fucking doctors and nurses don’t know what the fuck they’re doin’,” he’d growl, pouring me a shot of Scotch on his bedside table.
Cathy Ball would turn up in the doorway, tactfully ignoring the illegal booze. “Now, Will, you know you’re in the most modern rehab center in the entire world. And you want to leave it?”
“Fuckin-A right!”
“You’ll be sorry. You’ll get bedsores, you won’t learn to drive or do transfers, you won’t have the skills to live on your own.”
“Hell, I can learn all that stuff by myself. Get me the hell out of here. I’ll get my damn lawyer in if you want me to.”
Anger was the cork in the bottle of our repressed emotions. Any woman got a hard time; none more so than the nurse we called Tiny T, because she was a three-hundred-pounder who limped like a gunshot elephant. Hiroki was an athletic, independent para who’d go up and down the halls cutting wheelies in his chair. He hated confinement, so he’d keep the chair by his bed at night, which was strictly forbidden. When Tiny T tried to get it away from him, he wouldn’t let go, and the whale-like nurse just about dragged him off the bed to a chorus of “Ah, fuck you, Tiny T!” One day Elwood Green asked, “You hate me, don’t you, Tiny T?” and she answered, “I don’t hate you. I just dislike you intensely.”
Julio Gomez liked to fuck with Tiny T. “Yeah, Tiny T,” he told her one night, “I’m loaded on reds. What the fuck you gonna do about it? I feel like I’m on the ceiling looking right down on you, you wrinkled old sow.”
But Tiny T was no fool. She knew where Julio got the reds. She strode across the room and ripped open Elwood Green’s locker. A pharmacy full of pills fell out. Elwood sat up on his bedsore-covered ass and tried to clobber Tiny T with his crutch, while the rest of the guys yelled, “You bitch, get the fuck out of here, we all got pills in our lockers!” So Tiny T ran around as fast as a seventy-five-year-old with elephantiasis could and busted everybody’s stash—pot, downers, speed—none of which she had trouble locating. All I lost were some hoarded sleeping pills, chloral hydrate; but Elwood lost about five thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. Even his shoes were full of them.
Any new staff got tested by the guys on the ward, and the acid test was bowel program. Six men in bed are turned on their sides, given laxative suppositories and supplied with diapers. I remember Martha, one young beginner who flunked. After a couple of hours the room smelled like a hog pen. Martha returned from an impromtu sprint to the can to face a double barrage of hooting sarcasm and unbearable stench. She turned on her heel, marched straight to the front desk, and resigned.
Not long after this incident, Love Story was featured as the weekly movie. From all sides came the sound of sobs and sniffles. There in the dark these tough customers were crying. I found myself subject to frequent weeping triggered by the most trivial things.
At Christmas the kids from the children’s ward, in their tiny wheelchairs and dressed in Santa costumes, came by at bedtime to carol us. Their little legs were like commas suspended beneath their twisted bodies. Whatever self-pity we were wallowing in was, for a moment anyway, erased.
Maybe because I was a compulsive extrovert, I was chosen by the hospital P.R. as a model quad, the guy to have on stage at fundraisers or to introduce to visiting bigwigs. I was not averse to putting on a suit and getting the extra attention. A P.R. guy and I would share the microphone and he’d say, “This is John Callahan, a C five-six quadriplegic. This is the kind of wheelchair he needs. He has this mobility . . .” And I would show the kind of strength I had in my hands and arms, do a transfer onto a sofa, and then answer questions.
I never really knew what they were pitching for, but I can guess that on at least one occasion they struck out. Ronald Reagan was the guest of honor. He was then engaged, as governor, in shrinking California’s welfare rolls. Later he returned to haunt me, indirectly, as the inspirer of catch-22 welfare regulations that made it nearly impossible for people like me to earn our own living. At the time, though, I barely knew who the guy was.
Usually I would answer questions, sounding upbeat about Rancho. At one performance I showed a cartoon I’d scratched in occupational therapy. It showed two heads mounted on skid carts at the street corner. In front of each head was cup with pencils for sale. One of the heads was blind. The other head said, “People like you are a real inspiration to me.”
“Kind of gloomy, don’t you think?” asked one visiting M.D.
My real attitude toward Rancho was that I didn’t want to get kicked out early, the way addicts were when they were caught; but at the same time I didn’t accept the prescribed life-style. I spent the occupational therapy sessions writing poetry and drawing cartoons. And I was learning how to drink again, beginning with Will’s Scotch, Elwood’s Mad Dog, a couple of six-packs on the weekend. It wasn’t much at first, but combined with the Valium it began to reintroduce me to the wonderful, isolated world of feeling no pain. Oddly enough, though, I hadn’t consciously missed the stuff.
I was now allowed out of hospital during my free time. When my brothers came down to visit me at Christmas, we went out to a bar and I got blasted and maudlin. I told combat gags that I had written in occupational therapy:
Hey, I haven’t had a chance to stand up all day.
I’m hoping to catch walking pneumonia.
These car accidents aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
I suffer from motion sickness: it makes me sick that I can’t move.
In my fourth month at Rancho my attorneys won a settlement in connection with the accident. I could go out to the 7-Eleven now for a six-pack whenever I felt like it.
One day the urge struck me as I was sunning myself in the courtyard, dressed only in a towel. So I wheeled across the lawn and across the two-lane road toward the 7-Eleven, a half-hour trip each way. I had just gotten up onto the grass lane divider when the towel caught in my spokes and whipped off my lap, jamming the chair’s wheel. I waited for ages, stark naked in the middle of the road at eleven o’clock in the morning, before some passerby took pity on me and pulled out the towel. Thank God this was southern California.
At the end of six months it was time to graduate to life in the big world with an attendant, something I had been dreading for weeks. A social worker named Fanny Gridley was in charge of this step. She was a genuinely tough customer, with a massive jaw and a peg leg that looked like it might be useful for churning butter. She would have looked about right lashed to Moby Dick, giving him the spear as they went down for the last time.
Fanny had the mountainous job of lining up the social-support services for all of us. No one gave her even a hint of the shit we handed out to everybody else. When I would piss and moan about having to leave and how scared I was, she’d say, “Life is Major League, my friend.”
Fanny didn’t approve of Elwood Green, but she
was far too professional to show it. She would just look at Elwood as he poled his way up the hall with his mouth sagged open and his eyes blank, goofing on God knows what chemical. Once I heard her mutter, “Elwood Green. What are we gonna do with you?”
She never really lightened up around anybody, but she certainly understood quads and paras. One morning all six of us decided not to get up. We were going on permanent strike because the staff would only give us one “green tub” bath a month. This involved lifting the bather with a crane into a real tub instead of the usual bed bath. We felt that Rancho could do better.
When Fanny heard about us, she walked across the hall from her little bare office and said, “You bunch of big babies! Get on your asses and get going!” We did. She worked hundreds of extra hours for us, and more for the impossible cases like Julio Gomez, and we knew it.
One other noteworthy thing happened before I left Rancho.
It was a weekend, my next-to-last in the rehab center, and I was alone in the room. My five roommates had gone on pass. It was near midnight, I was sitting up in bed watching TV with my curtain drawn around me. A nurse I had never seen before came in. She was what was called a floater; she replaced whatever nurse had to miss a shift.
When she came in, I happened to be playing with myself. I had a reflexogenic erection. I was caught without anything on and, needless to say, I was not able to quickly reach for a sheet to cover myself up.
“Would you like some help with that?” she asked.
As I remember, she had dark hair, was kind of Italian-looking, sexy, probably a decade or so older than me. She leaned over the side of the bed and began to give me a blow job. Perhaps the rest of the nurses were gone from the ward on a break so that she felt safe; maybe she was just crazy. I was happy about it either way.
Then she opened her dress, pulled down her panties, climbed up on the bed, and mounted me, pouring out her beautiful breasts into my face as she did so. After about fifteen minutes she just pulled away, asking me if I needed more water or perhaps a sleeping pill. Then she was gone. I never saw her again. At the time, I couldn’t believe this had happened. Later, I would find out it was commonplace.
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