Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

by John Callahan

  In Fanny Gridley’s office soon thereafter I finally had to face an introduction to Al Muller, my first live-in attendant. He was a tall, overweight man with dyed black hair, a goatee, and a sour, tight-assed smirk. I noticed he had an uneven gait as he walked down the hall with Fanny; I felt like asking him if he wanted to steady himself on my wheelchair.

  However, I was determined not to be a burden to my family. Here was the person I’d be living with for the foreseeable future. I had an awful sense of fear and apprehension. I’d actually been trying to delay my release from Rancho, because I knew the party would really be over once I was away from the support system of the ward. Now I was sure it would.

  Al got a week of training at Rancho before the inevitable morning when he pushed me, suitcase on my lap, across the parking lot to his old Dodge. As we set out on the four-mile drive to his apartment in an industrial slum in Santa Ana, he turned his vodka breath on me and asked, “You like auto racing?”

  Chapter 5

  Al’s apartment in Santa Ana resembled the honeymoon suite in a cheap motel. I was the unwilling bride. Two chipped concrete steps led up to the front door, and two chipped concrete steps led out the back, trapping me as effectively as if it were the maximum security block at San Quentin. Were I somehow able to levitate myself and my chair out to the sidewalk, I could see miles of factories, warehouses, and seedy convenience groceries, which discouraged tourism.

  The door opened onto a kitchen too small for me to turn my chair around in. Beyond was a living room the size of its couch and TV. To one side was the bedroom, which Muller had divided into two little cells separated by a screen, and a bathroom I never entered because the door was far too narrow.

  In one of the sleeping cubicles was the main attraction: an ancient crank-operated hospital bed. Muller had been tending his seventy-year-old brother, a paraplegic, who had recently died of emaciation and bedsores. I often thought of him, lying where I now lay, on the same bed, under the same naked light bulb.

  Getting out of bed, and set for the day, which I would spend parked in front of the kitchen breadboard, took three hours. Instead of a team of experts, one sixty-six-year-old retired machinist was available to wash me, see to the bowel program, get my catheter on right—if twisted, it swelled up like a water balloon and leaked—and get me dressed. At that time I had to wear brown hospital support stockings, a corset to help keep the blood from pooling in my stomach, and plaster wrist braces to keep my tendons from stretching. Rolling me back and forth, in the bed, Muller struggled with all this paraphernalia and exhausted himself. Finally, to get into the chair, I hung from a trapeze while he swung me over. Usually I landed wrong, pants all twisted and riding up into my crotch, white shins exposed. I learned years later to buy trousers one foot too long.

  Right off the bat Muller started complaining about having to do the bowel program every day. “My brother Richard only shit once a week, fer Chrissake!” I tried to imagine what Muller had done with the results. Had them barged out to sea, perhaps? The thought surfaced that maybe Muller had stopped feeding Richard; but I repressed it.

  There was no possibility of a real bath, since I couldn’t get to the tub. I got a bed bath and I washed my hair—or tried to—in a pan placed on my lap. There was no way I could get it clean. When my head itched, he would rub witch hazel into my scalp. “This’ll help, fer Chrissake!”

  Then Muller would worm my chair into the tiny kitchen and pull out the breadboard, which was my table. Conversation during this time generally revolved around Muller’s sense of himself as an urbanite forced to deal with a hick. He had immigrated to the big city from Yuma, Arizona, sometime in the 1930s.

  “What the fuck do you know, you’re from the sticks! Now a man like me, I once saw Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, fer Chrissake!”

  “Oh yeah? How are we holding out on beer?”

  “Yer not listening, fer Chrissake!”

  Finally, he would leave me alone to stare across the courtyard at the next apartment. I had no desire to read a book, to write, or to draw. A couple of times Muller lowered me down the steps so that I could sit in the sun for an hour. Nearly every day for six months I sat by the breadboard with my cigarettes, which he had to light for me, until it was time to go back to bed. This is going to be my life, I thought. Sitting, smoking, and trying to make conversation with an old redneck whose chief cultural interest is stock-car racing. I felt like Sylvia Plath’s The Hanging Man:

  A vulturous boredom

  Pinned me to this tree.

  Beyond the wall, on another breadboard every afternoon at precisely three o’clock, someone went chop chop chop, chopchop chopchopchopchopchopCHOPchopchop, cutting up fish for a family of newly immigrant Japanese.

  The apartment on the other side was inhabited by at least a dozen Mexicans. Their sounds were screaming and wife beating. Except for me, everybody in the complex who could speak English was over sixty, which put a damper on my social life.

  In midafternoon, Al Muller would go shopping, leaving me alone with the third occupant of our home, his sixteen-year-old Yorkshire, Chopper.

  You can never move in on an old dog. Chopper ignored all my attempts to make friends and gave total attention to his master. With Muller gone, he became very nervous. He would bark at anything, at atoms circulating in the air. If Muller was gone for two hours, that’s how long Chopper barked. The sound reverberated off the bare walls and, along with the naked overhead bulbs, made me feel as if I were being softened up for questioning by the KGB.

  Even with Muller at home, Chopper was always at the edge of canine paranoia. Once or twice a week the Arrowhead Water man delivered our drinking water to the porch at 6:00 A.M. (you don’t drink the tap water in L.A.) and Chopper went absolutely berserk. He wanted to be young again, so that he could jump through the wall and bite the guy’s head off. I love animals, but I used to pray for seven seconds during which I would stand up, walk across the room, and strangle Chopper by hand. Then I’d sit down, fulfilled and happy to be paralyzed for the rest of my life.

  After a couple of hours with the dog, during which I couldn’t light a cigarette, Muller would come back with a pint of vodka for himself, a six-pack of Coors for me, and Rice-A-Roni for both of us. Rice-A-Roni was Muller’s favorite dish, so, just to simplify life, he cooked nothing else. One day he would add some hamburger, the next some tuna, and so forth. Can’t we just once have Rice-A-Roni with pheasant under glass? I thought.

  After dinner he moved me into the living room, my beer on my lap, and he sat on the couch with his dog and his screwdriver, and we watched TV. He always insisted on Baretta. “I went to the same dentist as Robert Blake, fer Chrissake,” he’d slur bitterly every night. At that time I didn’t have the emotional or physical resources to wheel myself into the bedroom, to go off by myself and draw or read. So I sat with my jailer. I’d watch him sink lower and lower as the night wore on and so would I: I was still taking so much medication that a beer was the equivalent of a double martini. On the other hand, I couldn’t get too drunk: I had to make sure Muller, who was after all a tired old man, got me into bed before he passed out himself. On the other hand, I couldn’t get drunk enough: it took a whole six-pack to face the loneliness of that old bed under that bare bulb, that cell with the door left ajar in case I needed anything—provided, of course, that Muller was still functional enough to help me.

  No amount of alcohol could help me with “pronation.” To prevent bedsores I often had to sleep facedown, pillows lifting me just enough off the bed to breathe. Lacking the muscles to arch myself up, I was constantly on the edge of suffocation. On my back and with the bed cranked up, gravity was in my favor; pronated I couldn’t move at all. To experience this for yourself, lie facedown and get a large man to stand between your shoulderblades while two others pin your arms. Stay like that for eight hours.

  It was a big day for me when my folks sent me a little transistor radio so that I could listen to rock ‘n’ roll at night in be
d. For the first couple of months at Al Muller’s I had just watched planes going by through the little bedroom window.

  Every week Al drove me back to Rancho for four hours of physical therapy. It was heaven compared to his apartment. One day, without telling him, I begged Fanny Gridley to get me out of there, and she arranged to transfer me to a nursing home. Muller flew into a rage when the van pulled up to take me away. I felt triumphant.

  I lasted two days. The place smelled like the toilet in a bus station. I was in a three-bed room. On one side was a psychopathic black para, arms the size of your thigh and meaner than hell. On the other was a ninety-eight-year-old who communicated by blinking. The man in charge was a homosexual named Nightingale. After the second night I rolled myself down the hall to the pay phone and called Al Muller.

  Muller gloated, and I was forced to grovel. To get even, I then hired an extremely snotty black teenager to drive me around the city once a week in a purple GTO. We’d cruise slowly through Watts while he explained the sights in a dialect that only occasionally sounded like English. Once, I mentioned that the traces of red polish on his nails seemed odd, and his answer came through clear as a bell:

  “Not if you’s a drag queen, Cal’han.”

  My family had pleaded with me to come back to Oregon after Rancho and I’d refused. I was going to make it or break it in L.A. Yet I found myself virtually locked up in a town where I knew no one and where I was isolated from everything, literally crying myself to sleep some nights, with nothing to look forward to but another day in Muller’s four-by-four kitchen.

  When, five months after my first introduction to Al Muller, my parents tried to persuade me again to move back to Oregon, I had very little resistance. My maternal grandmother lay dying in a nursing home administered by the Benedictine abbey at Mount Angel, Oregon. I could be a comfort to her. I let myself be shipped north.

  MOUNT ANGEL ABBEY stood on the top of a hill in the lush Willamette Valley south of Portland, with a 360-degree view of its own hop fields. Monks always find the most beautiful place to build anything. Around a fifty-yard square were arranged brick classrooms and dormitories, chapels and the abbey church, and a world-famous library designed by Eero Saarinen. The abbey grew its own food. It milked its own cows. It had its own carpenters, plumbers, electricians, teachers, porn shops (just kidding!). It seemed as self-sufficient as anything in the Middle Ages.

  The nursing home, in the nearby town of Mount Angel, was run by Benedictine sisters. They were tough and efficient, like my teachers at Saint Mary’s Academy. So, as nursing homes go, it was outstanding; but it was still a place of death. The only persons not senile or terminally ill were myself and a Vietnam veteran about ten years older than me who was a spectacular amputee. He was also an alcoholic. His parents had talked him into moving to Mount Angel from the big VA Hospital in Portland, in the hope the nuns would control his drinking. We latched on to each other immediately.

  Toby had been hit in the legs while on a long-range patrol and the only treatment he got for days was first aid. Later, osteomyelitis had set in, and his infected legs had had to be amputated, clear up to and including the hip joints. They fit what was left of him into a prosthesis called a “bucket,” a fake set of hips and legs that sat in his wheelchair permanently dressed in corduroy pants, shoes, and socks.

  Because of the extreme nature of his amputation Toby was prone to bedsores and could only sit in his bucket a couple of hours at a stretch; most of the time he had to pull himself around on a gurney. Nevertheless he joined me in raising as much hell as possible. I had the part-time loan of an electric wheelchair, and we played “Choo-choo Train”: he’d hang on to the chair and I’d tow him and the gurney up and down the long corridors at top speed. The game ended when we swept around a corner one evening and totaled Sister Allison and her medication cart, which was loaded with everyone’s bedtime dose of Valium and saltpeter. Toby slid off the gurney and landed on his back. He looked up at Sister Allison, who was trembling with rage, and remarked, “Sorry, Sister. My horse threw me.”

  The home was visited periodically by the Rebeccas, a Catholic women’s service organization. There were always twenty or thirty extremely senile patients restrained in their wheelchairs in a row along the corridor near the nursing stations, and the Rebeccas, many of whom looked like candidates for the nursing home themselves, would pass along this line of vegetables shaking hands and dispensing cheer. Toby and I took up positions at the end of the line and joined in the handshaking, slobbering and drooling down our cheeks.

  The nuns, who were RNs, quickly came to disapprove of us, once they found out how much we were drinking in our room. They tried to ban our liquor. But we had allies among the young student nurses. I was especially careful to cultivate the girls on the night shift, who had the keys to the icebox and could bring a snack for me (or, for that matter, be a snack for me).

  Since I always had a few bucks from the insurance settlement I’d won after the accident, I could always get liquor. The janitor would be cleaning my room and I’d say, “Come on, Jake, why don’t you take me downtown and I’ll buy you lunch?” and we’d have lunch, after which I’d say, “Jake, just stop here at the liquor store for a moment, will you? I want to get a pint.” Of course I couldn’t pour for myself. If Toby wasn’t around and I couldn’t find one of our student-nurse friends, I had to sweet-talk an aide who didn’t know about the house ban.

  “Hey, Doreen, help me with this, will you? It’s been a long day.”

  “Well . . . I don’t know if I really should.”

  Later everyone wondered who Callahan had talked into helping him get drunk again. It wasn’t long before Toby and I were called into the mother superior’s office and told to shape up or ship out. It seemed advisable to move the scene of our debauches off campus.

  In keeping with the general medieval theme of hierarchies, the town and its fleshpots lay below the abbey. Actually there was only one fleshpot, Tiny’s Tavern, a huge barn of a place with real sawdust on the floor and no heat; in Tiny’s either you were already drunk or you wore a coat. The place attracted farmhands, nursing-home patients and itinerant hippies. A good cross section of medieval-looking peasants.

  Nearly every day we’d withdraw $40 from serious-faced Sister Rose in the business office, wheel down the hill, go to Tiny’s, and get shit-faced. As the months went by, I was actually gaining motor skills: using a fixture on my splint, I could now raise a glass of the hard stuff to my lips.

  Toby and I were quite a bizarre fixture in Tiny’s. One type anybody in a wheelchair meets fairly frequently is the citizen who flatly disbelieves you’re really crippled. To these guys it’s all in the mind. One afternoon we were accosted by a Mount Angel college sophomore who had had a few and who was clearly affronted by the very sight of us. He came over and told us off.

  “You guys are just fakers! If you really wanted to, you could use the power of your minds to get up out of those chairs and walk!”

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” agreed Toby. He put his hands down on his wheels and slowly lifted all that was left of his torso straight up out of his pants. With his elbows locked there were four inches of clear air above his belt buckle. The college kid’s eyes bulged and he picked up his beer and just moved out, while the room full of regulars exploded with laughter.

  Another regular at Tiny’s was Brother Mark. Brother Mark was a young monk, about my age, highly cultured, articulate, and hopelessly alcoholic.

  Brother Mark had Thursday afternoons off from three o’clock on, and we nearly always went out for a drink. Or for quite a few drinks. I was lucky to be in a wheelchair. Brother Mark had to be carried out to a cab on more than one occasion. He was always in trouble with the abbot. Besides being homosexual, he was on the plump side and wore heavy-rimmed glasses like Poindexter’s, which made him look like the scholar he was and added comic effect when his face turned bright red and he screamed at somebody to step outside and duke it out. The evenings usually
ended with him up on the table at Tiny’s, holding up the skirts of his habit daintily to dance a jig while everybody in the place pounded out the time on the table with their beer mugs.

  Sadly, Brother Mark lost his struggle to live by the Rule of Saint Benedict and left the order. Today he’s a wino in Portland.

  Among its enterprises, the abbey ran a seminary for the education of its priests and teaching brothers, with academic standards that would reduce the average American college student to a nervous wreck inside a week. Of course I was attracted to it. The mother superior spoke to the abbot. After a year of dealing with Callahan the Drunk, she was grasping at straws. I was allowed to take the entrance exam and somehow passed. I studied the English Romantic poets, Joyce, and Eliot. Years later I figured out that each class at the abbey cost me as much time and effort as five at Portland State University.

  The interior of the abbey was like something out of James Joyce: severe-looking tonsured men in crisply ironed black robes, who had risen before dawn to sing matins, swept along freshly scoured marble corridors from this task to that. The place echoed with Gregorian chants, and the air carried the sharp scent of Lysol.

  I always tried to be as inconspicuous as I could, parking my chair at the very back of each class of thirty monks, many of whom incongruously smoked cigarettes at their desks. But one morning suddenly I heard a dripping. My Texas catheter had sprung a leak! It sounded like a cow pissing on a flat rock. A brother had to be summoned with a bucket and mop to clean up the mess.

  Even that embarrassment paled when, at the nursing home a few weeks later, student nurses giggled as they watched an RN nun trying to put the catheter on my dick. She had to give me a hard-on first. My mother never prepared me for things like this.