The Battle of Cripple Creek

 It took some doing. The people of Cripple Creek did not want to change. But in the face of relentless protests, they finally capitulated.

The protesters were a pack of wheelchair people, blind people and people who walked using crutches, with some Down Syndrome people and epileptics mixed in. They called themselves  The Campaign to Abolish the “C” Word. And they descended upon Cripple Creek with but one goal in mind: to get them to change their offensive name.

Their opening salvo was a press conference which was held outside City Hall in Cripple Creek. Several protesters spoke of how they were teased as children by other children who called them the “c” word. They demanded that the name Cripple Creek be changed to something more dignified.

But the mayor of Cripple Creek balked. He said the name Cripple Creek was bestowed upon the beloved and nurturing creek by the first settlers who came to the area generations ago and that it endures as a symbol of the proud heritage of the citizens who have built the namesake town that sprang up around the creek. He accused the protesters of all being “outside agitators.” The Cripple  Creek Chamber of Commerce also balked. The chairman said it would “wreak havoc” upon the local economy to have to change the name of Cripple Creek Boulevard, Cripple  Creek  High School, Cripple Creek Savings and Loan, the Cripple Creek Diner and the Cripple Creek Nursing Home, just to name a few examples..

Public opinion was decidedly against the protesters. Townspeople spat upon them and called them terrorists.

So the protesters adopted more aggressive tactics. They put into play their "kamikaze” strategy, in which they jumped one by one off of the Cripple  Creek bridge into Cripple  Creek itself. Those that couldn’t swim drown.

This drew media attention around the world and forced the town council to hold an  emergency meeting. A resolution was put forth to “modernize” the name of the town and the creek itself to something “not offensive and dignified “ The resolution passed, even though the townspeople who packed the gallery jeered and someone held up a sign that said Over My Dead Body.

And that’s why Cripple Creek is now called Person Who is Differently Abled Creek.

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Big Cripple on Campus

 John the paraplegic was the big cripple on campus at the state operated boarding school for cripples that I attended in the 1970s (which I refer to as the  Sam Houston Institute of  Technology or SHIT).

Actually, John was more like the vice big cripple on campus. The actual big cripple on campus was Ron the paraplegic. Paras usually have muscular upper bodies because they push a wheelchair all day. You had to be that kind of cripple in order to be the big cripple on campus at SHIT. There was no election to obtain this most prestigious status. An unspoken consensus developed among the SHIT inmates as to who was the big cripple on campus, based on which cripple we all felt could beat the other cripples asses. (It was pretty much the same way a wolf pack determines its hierarchy.) And since Ron was even more muscular than John, everyone figured that he could beat John’s crippled ass, too.

But this cataclysmic clash of the titans was never likely to occur because Ron was a much more peaceful guy who didn’t seem too interested in fighting. If John was to challenge him to a duel, Ron would probably just chuckle, yield the title and roll away.

John, on the other hand, was much more of a boisterous bully. He acted like he was looking for a good excuse to beat everybody’s ass. One day I saw him with a silver ring on his finger and I feared that meant that he was setting me up for an ass beating. Because it looked exactly like my ring that had recently come up missing.

So I went up to John's table in the mess hall, very sheepishly, and told him that appeared to be my missing ring.

John said, “Man, I didn’t steal no ring! This is my ring!” He continued eating, acting like I wasn’t even there. I interpreted that as his way of telling me to either go away or get my ass beat. So I went away.

When I told my mother about all of this, she was livid. She told me to point out to her which cripple was John the next time she went to SHIT and she would rip the ring off of his finger.

But I never did that because the only fate worse than an ass beating was being shunned by the other SHIT  inmates for being a snitch,

I haven’t seen John since I graduated from SHIT nearly 50 years ago. But he didn’t end up with much in terms of spoils. It was a cheap ring. It probably turned his finger green. The red jewel atop the ring was probably a hunk of  plastic.

If I ever run into a crippled old man with  one arm, I’ll figure that must be John. I’ll figure my ring must’ve turned his whole arm green and he had to have it amputated.

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Reasonable Cripple Accommodation

 I ought to be legally allowed to run around naked in public, And it ought to be socially acceptable for me to smell like a horse.

These rights and privileges ought to be bestowed upon me because I’m crippled. And being crippled makes it difficult for me to do a lot of the routine, daily tasks that are taken for granted by verts (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). Take, for example, getting dressed. For your average vert, getting dressed is a simple matter of pulling on your pants.  But not for me. Nope,  I have to have someone come in every morning and pull my pants on me, get me out of bed, etc. I call the people that I've hired to do these things for me my pit crew. Their wages are paid by state funds.

So some days I feel like things would go a lot easier if I didn’t have to wear pants at all. After all, when you think about it, what’s the point of wearing clothes? I'm not a  nudist at heart. And I can certainly understand putting on clothes in order to be warm. But besides that, the reason we wear clothes is to hide our genitalia. And why is that such a big deal?

But I capitulate and  wear pants every day anyway because I don’t want to get arrested. But I sure would love it if I could reserve the right to go about my business pantsless on a given day if I saw fit. I could carry around a note from my doctor certifying me as crippled in case a cop sees me running around naked and pulls me over,  demanding to see my papers.

The same goes for taking a shower. That’s a big undertaking for me, too, because I  also have to have one of my pit crew guys help me do that. It sure would be nice if I could shower twice a month or so. But I don’t because if I do I’ll smell like a horse and that’s not a good way to make friends. 

Going pantsless and smelling like a horse could be considered to be a reasonable cripple accommodation for me. But I’ll never advocate for these changes in public policy because it  might  blow up in my face. You know how lawmakers are. They’re always looking for a way to save a buck. They might really like that idea and they’ll just change the law to allow certain cripples to run around not wearing pants and smelling like horses so they can cut off the money they use to pay people to be on our pit crews.

So if you know any lawmakers, don’t say a word about this.

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Why I Will Never Wear a Toupee or The Cyrano de Bergerac Game

 A long time ago I  made a solemn vow to myself that I would never wear a toupee. I also swore that if I ever was going bald or if my hair was turning gray I would do nothing to conceal it. I would never spend a dime on baldness cures, hair-restoration treatments or dyes. The people who sell that stuff are just trying to shame you into buying their stuff.

I believe my strong conviction to these principles arises from the fact that I have been crippled for so long and cripples often have to play the Cyrano de Bergerac game. It's so tiresome. Cripples who have been involved in the dating scene probably know damn well what I mean by all this. It has to be tempting to put up a picture of somebody that’s hot and hide behind it until such time as you feel confident that the object of your desire is so smitten with you that no matter what surprises you reveal later they won’t be deterred.

The same thing often happens to cripples who are looking for a job or whatever. You wonder at what point you should spring it on them that you are crippled. But playing that game is much too stressful for me. I’d rather let people know right up front that I am crippled because if knowing that I am crippled is a deal-breaker for them, that’s good for me to know right up front.  Because knowing that they are that kind of person is a deal-breaker for me.

The same thing goes for being bald. You can’t keep wearing a toupee everywhere and forever. Sooner or later you’ll have to take it off and it won’t be a secret anymore that you are bald. And you shouldn’t be ashamed about being bald anymore than I should be ashamed about being crippled.

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Cripple Parking Encounters

 A yellow taxi cab was parked in the parking space that is reserved for cripples. I figured he didn’t belong there since I’ve never known there to be a cab driver who was crippled enough to need a reserved  parking space.

A man sat in the driver seat. So the person who was with me got out of my vehicle and tapped on the cab’s window. The cab driver eventually turned his head to look at him, reluctantly and resentfully. My guy asked him to move, through the closed window, and explained to him that I had a genuine cripple van with genuine cripple  license plates and all and I really needed to park there.

The cab driver reached down and pulled out a cripple parking placard and hung it on the cab’s rearview mirror. He then went back to trying to ignore my guy. Right then the car that occupied the other cripple parking space left so we just pulled into that one. But after I exited my vehicle I gave the cab driver the searing, icy, guilt-inducing stare I save for special occasions like this.

This guy clearly seemed to be one of those guys who commandeers his grandma’s parking placard whenever he goes out and stashes it in his glove box, just in case. I usually give people a big benefit of the doubt about that because I  know there are a lot of people who are really and truly crippled who don’t look crippled at all. But this guy sure looked like the shoe fit him just right.

Believe it or not, this was not the most memorable encounter I’ve ever had with a douchebag hogging up a cripple parking space. It still doesn’t beat the time there was a pick up truck parked in a cripple space. The truck didn’t have a cripple license plate or parking placard or anything. Then a guy walked up to the truck. He sure didn’t look crippled but, like I said, you never know. As I shot him my stare, the guy got into the truck, opened the glove box, took out a placard, rolled down the window and said to me, “I’m a black man in America. I was born with one of these.”

The yellow cab was gone and the parking space was empty when we returned to my vehicle. Maybe my guilt-inducing stare worked.

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Misery Loves Company

I don’t understand how some people who have suffered feel better when someone else suffers the same way they did.

I hear a lot of that kind of nonsense when people talk about student debt loan forgiveness. Some people say stuff like, “Hey, no one forgave my college loan debt. I had to work three jobs to pay it off so they should, too!”

Let me say here that I never had a college loan debt to pay off. The cost of my college education was paid in full by the state of Illinois as part of the vocational rehabilitation program.

Maybe if I had to pay off a college loan debt I’d feel differently. But I sure as hell hope I wouldn’t. It reminds me of the time a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples. We eventually won, but suppose some old timer cripple had come around back then and said, “We shouldn’t make the buses accessible because I couldn’t ride them back in my day so they should never be able to either." Thank God nothing like that ever happened because no one was that much of a dumbass. If the cripples of today were still just as stranded as we were, I don’t see how that would make me feel any better.

Hell, I never even get involved in diagnosis-specific cripple causes because I’m too susceptible to survivor guilt.  I’m interested in doing stuff that makes life better for all cripples, not just those  who are crippled for a certain reason, like they have muscular dystrophy or a spinal cord injury or whatever. Imagine if a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples we were fighting to only make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples with a certain diagnosis. If I was riding a bus that was blowing past other cripples, I’d feel like shit about it. It would take all the fun out of winning.

We  might’ve all had to carry around a notarized doctor’s note verifying that we were indeed the type of cripple that was officially authorized to ride public transportation That would’ve really sucked.

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Name that Cripple

 

I always thought that there ought to be a game show called Name that Cripple. It would surely become a craze that would sweep the nation.

All we’d have to do is line up three wheelchair cripples right next to each other on a street corner somewhere. The three cripples would be of the same age and race and gender and all so they’d all look pretty much alike. But one of the cripples would have something like muscular dystrophy and  the second would have something completely different like cerebral palsy and the third one would be your standard quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury.

The emcee would stop random passersby who are verts (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). And if a vert agrees to play Name that Cripple, the emcee gives them three blank cardboard placards and a marking pen. And each placard would be attached to a string and the vert contestant would write something like muscular dystrophy on the placard and hang it around the neck of whichever one they thought to be the corresponding cripple.

And if a vert contestant gets all three right, they win a valuable  prize, such as a lovely new dining room set from Broyhill. But nobody will ever get all three right because it never fails that the average vert on the street can’t tell the difference between a c.p. cripple and an m.d. cripple and a quad. They can’t tell the cripples apart without a scorecard.

This always baffles me because if I played Name that Cripple I’d be the grand champion. I can identify a cripple’s genre from a mile away. If I was looking down from a helicopter on a field of cripples, I could rattle off in no time which one was which.  I think the differences between us are bloody obvious.

But that’s probably because I’ve spent so many years hanging around with such a wide variety of cripples that I’ve developed a keen eye. I don’t think I can say the same about anything else. If I was looking down from a helicopter on a field of cows, for example, they would all just look like a bunch of cows to me.

But when it comes to cripples, I can look at a parking lot full of empty cars and tell you which car belongs to a cripple and which one doesn’t. Like for instance, if it’s a fancy sports car, it’s probably not a cripple car. I never see cripples driving or even riding around in fancy sports cars, probably because doing so is too much of a pain in the ass, what with the bucket seats and all. Or maybe it’s because fancy sports cars are too expensive for most cripples.

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