The Orange Man

 I call him The Orange Man because he wore an orange shirt and an orange baseball cap. He peddled an orange bike and there was a rope attached to the back of it from which he pulled an orange wagon. The wagon was full of what appeared to be random scraps of cardboard.

It was the 4th of July. As I exited my cripple van via the ramp deployed from the side door he stopped peddling and stared at me. He said something about how he used to own a cripple van like mine, even though he wasn’t in a wheelchair. He said he put 50 thousand miles on it and it served him well.

And then he said that his nephew (or maybe was his cousin or son) was interested in designing wheelchairs when he was a kid but now he’s working for Tesla.

And I almost said, “So he works for Elon Musk, huh? But then again, don’t we all?”

But The Orange Man struck me as a Fox News type of guy. So instead, I just said “Oh.”

Then The Orange Man said, “Well I’m sorry to tell you but your wheelchair is forever out of balance. Because no two tubes can be shaped exactly the same.”

“Why not?” I said. 

“Because tubes have memories,” he said. “Just like you have a memory. I bet you remember when you were straight and strong and you could walk.”

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve always been this way.”

“Well I feel for you,” he said.

“No need,” I said. And that’s when I thought the best thing to do was to just get the hell out of there, So I spun around and left.

But then I heard his voice coming from behind me, shouting, “Well at least you’re free!”

I was right. He really was a Fox News type of guy.

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The Battle of the Street Beggars

There are a lot of those Latin American immigrants who are seeking asylum in the U.S. hanging around the city here. When they first started showing up here about a year ago, I was pissed. I wasn’t pissed at them.  I was pissed at the guy who put them on a bus and  dumped them all here, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas. I figured he was trying to pull some racist bull shit, like guys like him love to do. I figured he was trying to make everyone up here believe that these dirty Spanish speakers were invading our country and taking away our jobs.

At first, the more I saw of those immigrants, the more I felt sorry for them.  They looked like regular folks who were just seeking decent work so they can take care of their families and enjoy their lives.

But now I ‘m thinking maybe Abbott was right. Maybe they really are invading our country and taking away our jobs. They’re taking away cripple jobs. Because what’s the job most closely associated with cripples? Street beggars, right? I’m not basing that on data from sociological research or anything like that. I’m just going by how I think cripples are viewed by verts (which is what I call people who can walk because it’s short for vertical).

Anyway, it seems like a lot of the Latin American immigrants are going for those jobs, probably because those are the only jobs they can get. You don’t need a permit or a license or anything. All you need to do is go sit on a corner with a cup. And you don’t really need a cup.

When I have personally encountered these Latin American immigrants., it has usually been when I passed them as they were being street beggars. I know it’s them because they usually hold a sign scrolled with black marker on a sturdy hunk of cardboard that identifies them as such. They are wise to do this because it gives them a marketing advantage. Let’s face it, if you’re walking down the streets of Chicago and you’re feeling generous enough to toss a few coins at a street beggar, you can’t do that with every street beggar you see, or you’ll go broke. You must be discerning. You have to give your money to the beggar that you feel will give you the best bang for your coins, so to speak.

 That used to mean that crippled beggars had the marketing advantage because, all things considered, most people found it doubly satisfying to toss their coins at a crippled beggar rather than some begging vert.  I’m not basing that on data from sociological research or anything like that. I’m just going by how I think cripples are viewed by verts.

But now it seems like the Latin American beggars are undercutting the crippled beggars. My suspicions were confirmed recently when I was walking around downtown and I came across a family of begging Latin Americans. It looked like their cup was pretty full. But around the corner was a forlorn-looking crippled beggar. He shook his cup and it sounded pathetically empty.

I can’t blame people for wanting to give their money to Latin American immigrant beggars. It’s like giving a big middle finger to Abbott, which makes it feel extra good.

But if cripples can’t beg anymore, we’re screwed!

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The Best Medicine is Medicine

 

 

I took some medical diagnostic tests and went to see my doctor to get the results. My doctor entertered the room with a glum look on his face. He wrote something on a  piece of paper and handed it to me.

On the piece of paper it said: RX one comedian. “What's that supposed to mean?” I said to my doctor.

And my doctor replied, “That’s the only treatment that  your insurance company will pay for. You see, your insurance company believes that laughter is the best medicine, probably because it’s a whole lot cheaper than giving you real medicine. The idea is to make you laugh.”

So I called the 800 number of my insurance company and I told the person who answered the phone that I had a prescription for one comedian. And the person who answered the phone said that my insurance company would dispatch a comedian to make me laugh. But, she said I couldn’t just pick any comedian. She said that they would send me one of the “in-network comedians“ that has been approved by my insurance company.

I should’ve known that any comedian thar would work for the little bit of money my insurance company must’ve been paying them couldn’t have been very good. The sent  me Las Vegas rejects who probably emceed in sleazy lounges in the Catskills. It was the comedy team of Tommy and Seymour. Seymour was a ventriloquist dummy. He sat on Tommy’s lap. Tommy said. “We just flew in from L.A.” And then Seymour quipped, “And boy are our arms tired.” They proceeded to tell a bunch of jokes about Seymour’s mother-in-law and what an old battleax she is.

I never even cracked a smile. I was just mad the whole time they were doing their schtick. I kept thinking about how much I pay my insurance company in premiums every month. 

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Linguistic Milestones

 

 I am not a multilingual person. I am one of the many tragic victims of that stupid mentality in this country that proudly proclaims, “We don’t speak no foreign languages in America! We speak English!”

  But I am  a multilingual person when it comes to cussing people out.

I believe that I can say kiss my ass in Spanish. But I don’t know for sure. My translation might be too literal. When I was a high school freshman and I was taking a Spanish class, the first thing I did when I got my hands on a Spanish/English dictionary was look up how to say kiss my ass. (You know how adolescent boys are,) I looked up those three words separately and then put them together and came up with beso mi asno.

My dad spent a good deal of time in Germany and spoke some German so one day I asked him how to say kiss my ass in German. He said it was lick mish mosh. I don’t think that’s true but it’s funny so I go with it.

This was before computers were a thing. An adolescent boy these days can learn how to say kiss my ass in a bunch of different languages much easier than I could. He can use Google Translate or something like that.

 It’s been a long time since I was an adolescent boy but in some ways I still think like one. And so the next linguistic milestone I have set for myself is to learn how to say kiss my ass in American Sign Language. Whenever there’s someone on stage and they say a swear word and there’s an ASL interpreter on the stage with them, I quickly look at the interpreter to see if I can catch the sign they use to translate the swear word so the deaf may enjoy it. I’m confident that if I am diligent enough, by applying this method, the triumphant  day will come when I Iearn how to say kiss my ass in ASL.

I bet that’s something you can’t learn on Google Translate.

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Do-it-Yourself Excommunication

 

I remember it as a very liberating moment of my childhood. All of us Catholic kids were told that if we didn’t do the things a good Catholic was supposed to do, like go to church every week and put money in the basket, we could be excommunicated.

Excommunicated! That word sounded so scary and painful. I pictured a ritual where I am marched out blindfolded into a yard with my head hanging in shame and my hands tied behind my back, like a prisoner headed for the gallows. A priest rips open my shirt a uses a hot branding iron to tattoo the letter X on my chest. I am then drawn and quartered by four horses.

But then I found out that when you’re excommunicated, all that means is that you’re kicked out of the church and thus you can’t take communion anymore and stuff like that. And I remember thinking, “Is that all that big scary word means? If I don’t do the things a good Catholic is supposed to do, is that all they can do about it? Big deal!”

 You mean, I won’t have to go to church every week? I won’t have to  put money in the basket every week? That sounded more like a reward than a punishment.

 I always resented giving money. I understood that the church needed money to pay for stained glass windows and shit like that. But why did it have to be my money? I mean, if Jesus could turn water into wine, couldn’t he also turn anything he wanted into a pile of cash? So it seemed to me that any priest who could pray worth a damn could persuade Jesus to make it rain dollar bills.

And I never cared much about taking communion either. I thought the wafer tasted like notebook paper.

If I was excommunicated, I wouldn’t have to think about stuff like that anymore. That’s another reason why it suddenly seemed like a pretty sweet deal. So I just stopped going to church, which is how I quietly excommunicated myself.

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My Adolescent Expertise

 

As I recall, they pulled me out of class one day at the state-operated boarding school for cripples, which I refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT).

I was worried that I did something wrong. But what?

“Miss Joyce wants to see you in her office,” I was told. But what could I have possibly done wrong that would make them send me to  Miss Joyce’s office? Miss Joyce was the head of recreation. Her office was right next to the gym.

I was escorted to Miss Joyce’s office. She greeted me with a big smile. “Its so great to see you!” she said to me. And then she said, “I sent for you because I’m going to a costume party. My costume is going to be Poland.” She said she wanted to cover her costume, which would be a hunk of papier mache shaped like the country of Poland, with Polack jokes. “I understand that you know a lot of Polack jokes,” Miss Joyce said. “Can you tell  me some?”

 For those of you who weren’t around back then, there was a genre of jokes known as Polack jokes. And the point of each of these jokes was to illustrate how incredibly stupid all Polish people were supposed to be.

And it’s true that I had a million Polack jokes in my repertoire and I told them every chance I got. This was my adolescent expertise. I remember some of my Polack jokes  but I won’t tell them  anyway because they’re all pretty dumb. But on that day I regaled Miss Joyce with Polack jokes and she took copious notes. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t come through for her that day. Would I have been punished? Maybe I would’ve been restricted to my room until I came up with some good Polack jokes.

As far as I know, my encounter with Mis Joyce was not video taped or recorded for posterity in any way. I’m grateful for that. That was a simpler time when a guy could make jokes about how incredibly stupid all Polish people are and get a big laugh. But now I would be ostracized, as if I was helping Miss Joyce put on black face.

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The Unintended Consequences of Cripple Awareness Campaigns

 I still assume that maybe it’s safe for me to wear  a red shirt when I shop at Target, because I ‘m crippled. But I’m not so sure anymore.

If there’s anybody out there who has never shopped at Target, you need to know that all of their employees wear red shirts. Thus, if you wear a red shirt to Target, it’s quite likely that another shopper will flag you down and ask you where they can find motor oil or yogurt or whatever. The most foolproof strategy for avoiding this annoyance is to never wear a red shirt when you go to Target.

But I always thought that wearing a red shirt would be no problem for me because even more conspicuous than my red shirt would be the motorized wheelchair I’m always sitting in. I figured that that would cancel out my red shirt because most people would see it and think that cripples aren’t capable of doing anything as lofty as working at Target. So I must just be some random crippled  old man whose nurse put a red shirt on him this morning.

But the last time I went to Target I went to the men’s department and there were various pictures posted around that featured young men smiling big and really enjoying their lives while wearing the items of menswear that were for sale. And one of those young men was in a wheelchair.

That means that Target is trying to convey the message that cripples are people, too. And if enough people who shop at Target come to believe, as a result of this cripple awareness campaign, that cripples are people, too, then they might also come to believe that therefore, cripples must also be capable of working at Target.

And if that happens, I’ll probably have to  think about whether or not I might end up at Target, before I put on a red shirt.

Sometimes cripple awareness campaigns have unintended consequences.

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