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

by John Callahan

  Inside the Galleria, over my first cup of coffee, I enjoy the view. In the background are yuppie shops. In the foreground, using up all the tables at La Pâtisserie, sit a throng of thirteen-year-olds in black leather with half their heads shaved and the other half dyed bright orange, green, or electric blue. I sometimes wonder if they have problems with sex-starved parrots trying to mate with them. To think of all the energy I wasted, those many years ago, trying to get my father to let me grow my hair as long as John Lennon’s. Dad was right all along, just three decades too soon. I can hear today’s parents snarling, “When are you going to grow your hair out and get a job?”

  Today I’m meeting Celeste, a friend who’s an airline stewardess with PSA and in town for about sixteen minutes. I’m definitely falling for her: she’s in her late twenties, a brunette with high cheekbones, full lips and big blue eyes. She has a short New Wave haircut and wears a beautifully tailored mauve authority-figure uniform that makes me want to fall down and grovel at her feet. “Hi, Numb Nuts!” she greets me. Celeste loves to give me a hard time.

  When I had to get through three days of interviews for Maria Shriver’s Sunday Today show on NBC, Celeste canceled her flights to nursemaid me through the whole exhausting thing. She just stayed in town and crashed on my couch. Today I pay her back with lunch at the Hilton, a block away, where PSA reserves rooms for its stewardesses. She holds my arm as I roll along and we laugh continuously. Celeste has a true gag sense, it’s her best feature. But she looks fantastic, and I can’t help telling her about it.

  “Compliments, compliments, compliments! Do you want to have lunch or do a pork job on me?”

  “I’ll take the pork job. But if you want, we can eat lunch first.”

  Celeste is always bringing me things; today it’s a sweater from Pittsburgh, a town she hates. She’s from San Francisco, but really lives all over the continent. For me to get to a party in the suburbs takes a major effort; but Celeste hops on planes as if they were skateboards and routinely hits three major cities in a sixteen-hour day.

  After lunch we zoom around town, Celeste hanging onto my arm. I buy her some knickknack she wants. I don’t know what it is, but it falls under her label of “cute.” Finally we stop in Waterfront Park under a gray, windy, forbidding sky. Celeste sits on the bench, I park beside her, and we’re quiet for a while. Soon she’ll go.

  “What are you thinking about, Callahan? A gag?”

  “Yeah. I’m working on an evolution gag.”

  “I’m gonna have to leave you to it.” I take her back up the hill to the Hilton and the airport limo. We kiss. “So long for now, Numb Nuts.”

  On the way back to the Galleria, where I have an appointment with David Milholland, one of my editors, I stop repeatedly to say hi to the shopkeepers I know. I’m highly visible in Portland. I’m constantly being greeted, which I enjoy. As I roll along the sidewalk, a bus driver will roll down his window and yell, “Hey, Callahan! I loved the lawyer joke.” Or Mayor Bud Clark will pedal up on his mountain bike. “You’re John Callahan, aren’t you? I loved the rectum joke!” But I enjoy it just as much when someone says, “Your work is sickening. You should be dropped from the paper!”

  While I’m at the Galleria, I pick up some groceries at the health food store. I’m interested in avoiding too much sugar and preservatives, but nonetheless I’m amused by the health addicts in orthopedic sandals, muslin clothing, berets or fezzes, people who don’t believe something’s worth eating unless it comes from a bin. They are being suckered just like supermarket shoppers. And they don’t seem to appreciate a sign that always cracks me up: “These eggs were laid by chickens that were hand-fed.” Why not “These eggs were laid by chickens whose owners wore Birkenstocks”?

  “My client objects to the endless delays in this trial. Attorney fees alone, he says, he says, are becoming increasingly painful to bear.”

  The conversations in the checkout line are dynamite. “Yes, groatbutter is so good for the intestines, and I always add some fish oil and purge my colon every three days. . . .”

  “Well, I always have a certain amount of lecithin and muckathin in my diet to cleanse my kidneys. . . .”

  A special attraction of the health food store is a bulletin board on which the nutritionally advanced seek each other out. I always read it closely as it’s a treasure house of ideas and information about our era: “Harmonious male, backpacker, into making sixteenth-century stringed instruments, seeks radical lesbian feminist household which will not tease me about my testicles.”

  David Milholland is the editor of The Clinton Street Quarterly, a showcase for new talent, distributed in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. It’s in his paper that I’ve been able to develop the longer pieces that have become increasingly important to me, pieces such as “The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life” and “How to Relate to Handicapped People.”

  Besides being a tremendous editor, David is very funny himself and a great fan of comedy. He arranged a lunch for me to meet Graham Chapman of Monty Python, brought my work to the attention of Tom Robbins, and serves as my best critic, sounding board and ex officio psychologist. Today we’ve got the rough of a new piece about my dad spread out among the coffee cups on the Galleria table and, as usual, David is trying to reassure me that it will work.

  “Yes, John, it will be a classic.”

  “But will it be a major classic?”

  “Yes, John, it will be a major classic.”

  “But, David, I don’t want to do it unless it’s an absolute classic.”

  “It will be an absolute classic.”

  “But, will people think it’s funny?”

  David is also available for agonizing between six and nine each evening. I like that about him.

  After my meeting with Milholland, I perform my most important daily task: I bring hot coffee down to the parking garage where my friend Kevin, a lost Irish poet, is to be found parking cars and nursing his hangover. I listen sympathetically to a fifteen- or twenty-minute account of how much it hurts, where it hurts, the pulsating nature of the pain, what the other symptoms are, how the hangover came to be, how much sleep he did not get, where he drank the night before, how much he drank, how much he plans to drink this very night, and would I mind getting him a couple of beers to help him over the rough part?

  To obtain Kevin’s couple of beers, I have to cross the street to the Yamhill Marketplace, more urban yuppification. Just enough of a fresh produce market has been left to anchor fifteen espresso stands, a fish market, a shoeshine, an exotic butcher (camel steaks, anyone?), a cheese shop, and a “Chicago-style” deli, all horribly overpriced. Shelly, of the deli, complains to me about my latest cartoon atrocity.

  Before delivering Kevin’s relief, I must empty my urine bag. I have to do this often because the bags are small. I’m grateful to discover, when I get to the men’s room, that the wheelchair access stall is not occupied. Quite often there will be someone in there fighting heavy constipation in the only stall at the Marketplace that I can fit into. So I sit there, listening to the painful gasping, and pray my bag doesn’t spring a leak as I wait.

  I’m an expert on downtown toilets. There are only twelve or fifteen accessible men’s rooms in the city center. My plan is to team up with a woman quadriplegic and publish an illustrated guidebook, complete with maps, for the use of people in wheelchairs. We’ll call it Pissing Around Portland.

  Often I get trapped in the bathroom. Quite a few of the doors are easy to push open from the outside, but then I can’t maneuver the chair to pull them open again from the inside. I try to empty my bag during high-traffic, full-bladder time periods, but that doesn’t always work out. I’ve spent hours in one can in particular, up at Good Samaritan Hospital.

  People ask, “What do you do? How do you fight down panic when you are stuck in the bathroom?” Anyone who walked in on me suddenly at such times might be startled to see me doing vigorous arm exercises, which I do when I’m bored. Or perhaps I’ll
be meditating or singing out loud. I jot down cartoon ideas, rewind my Walkman, do anything I can to keep at bay the dark prospect of being isolated and totally forgotten for a day, a night, a lifetime.

  By the time someone opens the door, I’m so grateful, I almost fall out of my chair around his feet crying, “I’ve been so lonely!”

  After bringing beer to the Lot Sot, as I call Kevin, it’s time to visit my other local editors, drop off cartoons, pick up my mail. I’m still published at Portland State, so usually that’s where I’ll go first. It’s on a tree-lined park, the girls are gorgeous, and there’s always something going on. But I always feel self-conscious, too old around there. I half-expect a security guard to come and prod me with his nightstick. “Look, buddy, Do you think you could move out of the way? We got a lot of young people trying to get an education.”

  The land slopes downward from Portland State to the city center, and I really blast along. I usually have a wreck each day. I’ll be flying down Broadway at the speed of light just as the offices empty out and thousands of young secretaries hit the street with their high heels clicking, everyone heading for a bus; suddenly I’ll hear that old telltale clunk. The drive belt! Either I smash through a jewelry-shop window or into a small Chinese grandmother, fresh off the boat, whose first experience of America is to be pinned to the sidewalk by a one-hundred-eighty pound quad in a three-hundred-fifty-pound wheelchair.

  In the middle of Portland is Pioneer Square, a brick-paved piazza surrounded by oddball architectural elements: headless columns, partial walls, a surrealist’s idea of a civic space. When it was built a few years ago, it was briefly the in place for secretaries and young executives to bring a bag lunch. But it was quickly taken over by jive experts, dope pushers, and various other fringe elements, each of whom claimed their own territory. The whores and pimps have one corner; they don’t mix with the bloods, whose ghetto blasters are tuned to Run DMC; in turn the bloods keep away from the white trash with their boom boxes set to Satan; everybody keeps his distance from the Mall Prophet. The Mall Prophet is a fifty-year-old toothless hippie with his hair in braids, wearing a woman’s dressing gown, who reads palms and sells earrings he makes himself from IUDs. He’s what remained of the Age of Aquarius when the acid wore off.

  I stop at Willamette Week to drop off a new gag and pick up my letters for the day. “Dear Mr. Callahan,” they usually begin, “How dare you be so offensive to (fill in oppressed minority).” The noble defenders.

  Right across the street from Willamette Week is temptation: a topless bar. I decide not to go in. Due to my Catholic upbringing I can never bring myself to look upward in those joints. A girl would have to have her tits mounted on her knees for me to experience stimulation. Try as I may, I can never work up the nerve to look up and make eye contact. I’m positive the topless dancer would catch me looking and say, “Okay, Callahan, get your eyes down!”

  Instead, errands finished, I retrieve Kevin and head for the Metro. The Metro is trendoid, a giant café in the European style, with sidewalk tables and featuring different cuisines of the world—French, Italian, Spanish, Greek—served from buffets around the interior. I always get lots of ideas from waiters. I have one gag showing a guy in a restaurant sitting on the floor, the waiter hovering over him with his pad and pencil. The customer is saying, “Well, today I think I’d like to start out with a chair, a table, a menu. . . .” Now, watching the clients bent over Hindustani eye of lamb or Nigerian cow belly en croute, I think of a variation.

  Kevin returns to the table with a pitcher of beer and a glass. “Shit! I brought a glass.” He launches into stories of how the Christian Brothers would smack him on the head when he was a kid. We trade school stories. It’s like talking to a brother, and Kevin is the one friend who can really keep me in stitches. If I say, “Get me another drink, will you, Kevin?” He’ll come right back with “Get it yourself, you crippled son of a bitch.” But I get back at him. He is a total homophobe. Once I ran out of cash and had to write a check. I need both hands for that, and I asked him to steady the checkbook on my lap. There were at least fifteen beautiful girls standing in line, within earshot, at the buffets as I said, “And this time keep your hands off my genitals.”

  There’s something in both of us that makes us revert to Catholic schoolboys when we’re together. Kevin has a marvelous turn of wit that relates everything to a central leitmotif: his dick. If I ask him how he feels about the upcoming Mike Tyson fight, he’ll say, “That man makes my dick vibrate with annoyance.” If I ask, “Kevin, isn’t that a beautiful blonde there in the corner?” he’ll answer, “John, when I see a woman like that, I have to take out my dick, stick it in a drawer, and then slam the drawer as hard as I can thirty-six times.” Kevin disapproves of the upscale, West Hills girls I often date, preferring earthier, working-class types himself. “John likes women whose asses you could crack an egg on but with the brains of a skink fox.”

  I can roll home quickly in my chair, but Kevin can’t keep up with his bladder full of beer. So he rides the bus, but hates it, because as soon as he’s aboard, he’s dead meat. I’m so childish. I’ll wait till the doors are about to close and then yell something like, “Now, don’t be afraid to buy some Preparation H!” And Kevin will get this helpless look on his face. He’ll be thinking, God, be merciful. Don’t let the crippled bastard say anything else. Just let the bus go. Just let me get home and pee without further humiliation.

  I head home alone, full of thoughts of the images I’ve collected and what I’m going to do with them. There are maybe twenty blocks to travel on the way back to my northwest Portland neighborhood. I take the back streets, the factory areas, which are almost deserted by eight o’clock at night. There are no whores, no beggars with tin cups, no hustlers or dopers along these empty streets, where a few men are still at work in the silent warehouses and breweries. It’s a place I find comforting and peaceful. This is a very old part of town, with buildings nearly as old as the city itself.

  But between Fourteenth and Sixteenth streets, eight lanes of freeway, roaring with high-speed traffic, gouge through the city in a huge trench. I cross the freeway by way of a bridge, halfway across which I always get a horrible chill, one I can feel in my bones. This is the same freeway on which I cracked up and became a quad, one thousand miles to the south.

  I get this feeling of terrible, impending doom, and I can’t get across the bridge fast enough. I always feel as though something is going to push me over the edge and kill me, or that the bridge is going to collapse under me. I have to remind myself that when I’m across, I will be at the cathedral, a block from home.

  Feeling like a hunted animal, I reach safety under the tall, Romanesque facade of Saint Mary’s. It looms high above me in the night sky with its sculpted saints and the peaceful face of the Blessed Virgin above the ten broad doors. It is huge and self-contained, joined to the right of the facade by a walled courtyard to the convent of the teaching nuns and, beyond, the rectory, where the priests are just sitting down to their suppers after vespers. I stop here, even though it’s windy and beginning to rain. The wind is moving the bell. I can hear the bell sounds, broken by the wind, and the rain is stinging my face.

  The winos are crouching in the little shelters that the doors and buttresses of the church provide. I can just make them out. They are in their own niches, below the saints and martyrs.

  An ancient beauty holds me here, and an old resentment keeps me at a distance. I try to live a spiritual life. Yet I feel damaged by the church.

  Some of the winos call out for money. A few priests and nuns hurry in their hoods across the courtyard to some evening task.

  People sometimes say, “You have such strength and you’ve been through such tragedy.” And I always remember the cartoon I drew years ago of an obese man who has fallen flat on his face and spilled all of his candy. He’s thinking, “What kind of a God would allow a thing like this to happen?” When I think of this cartoon, I realize I don’t feel sorry
for myself anymore.

  I found something when I dropped the wine bottle ten years ago, some kind of strength. Something I can depend on when my props have all been jerked from under me.

  And I’m more surprised than anyone that I have adapted to this way of life. Sometimes I still wake in panic in the night when I discover I cannot move my legs, just as I did sixteen years ago on that night in L.A. And I panic again at the thought of having to spend the rest of my life in this condition. I wonder if I will survive it. It’s true I’ve had to be a scrapper. I’ve had to work exceedingly hard to survive; before all else, it takes me three hours just to get ready in the morning.

  But deep inside I know I’m always right where I’m supposed to be at the time. I don’t want self-pity. I don’t allow it. I want to grow. My life certainly has a black side but in other ways it’s almost charmed. I always knew it would be. It’s really satisfying in quite a wonderful way.

  I feel I have a special calling. And when I do the work I was born to do, I get a sense of fulfillment that keeps me going. I see reasons for the things I’ve lived through. I don’t have any remorse. And I can see the suffering of people around me now.

  I’m getting soaked, it’s time for me to go home. I enjoy getting home and seeing Marlos, my night attendant, with whom I speak French, my minor in college. Marlos speaks more languages than a possessed girl. He’s Brazilian, a very quiet, generous-hearted person.

  Marlos helps me get out of my wet clothes and into bed. I do my exercises, and he brings me a cup of tea. My cat jumps up into my lap, my nineteen-pound cat eager to make his nightly deposit of hair. Marlos and I chat.

  Often a neighbor, Aloysius comes over. He’s seventy-two, a saintly figure, the sexton of the cathedral. Or friends wander in, maybe Kevin, maybe my friend Michael Krupp, a comedian and the son of a comedian, Stanley Myron Handelman. Like me, Michael loves to twist the old, old gags: “I just rolled in from Vegas . . . my ribs are killing me!”