There was a guy who was a member of my pit crew many years
back who lifted me out of my wheelchair one day and let out this blood-curdling
howl. It scared the crap out of me. I thought he’d ruptured a disc, popped a
hernia, ripped a major artery and who knows what else. When he set me down I
asked if he was all right. He shrugged and nodded. He said he’d been reading up
on martial arts and decided to summon maximum strength when he lifted me by
issuing a karate yell. But he didn’t do it all the time. He did it randomly and
without warning and each time I’d freak out anew for a hot second until I
remembered. One time he let out a yelp as he lifted me onto an airplane and the
fight crew looked on in horror, as if they thought he’d ruptured a disc, popped
a hernia, ripped a major artery and who knows what else.
The moral of the story is that people who work in a
cripple’s pit crew are always quirky. Even the good ones who stick around.
They’re always quirky. My sister had a pit crew person who seemed perfectly
sane and balanced. The young woman was punctual and hard-working and
even-tempered. But she claimed, with an absolute straight face, that Dan Akroyd
was her live-in lover (and distant cousin). She always talked about the cute
little thing Dan said or did today. When you called her answering machine, you
heard, “Hello, Susie and Dan aren’t home…..”
People who work in a cripple’s pit crew are always quirky.
It’s the nature of the game. It’s a nesting place for odd birds. I had a pit
crew guy who had green hair matted up in homemade dreadlocks. I had another guy
who was covered in tattoos and wore skirts and tights to work. Tending to a
cripple is a quirky job. My cripple friend Jeff got tethered to a breathing ventilator
long, long ago, back when ventilators were as big and bulky as a microwave
oven. Nowadays, ventilators are a lot more portable but back then Jeff had to
commandeer one of those old double-decker audio/visual carts on wheels. And if
he wanted to go anywhere, to a store or a bar or wherever, his pit crew guy
plunked the breathing apparatus onto the cart and pushed it alongside Jeff as
he drove through the crowded city in his motorized wheelchair.
If you’re going to work in a cripple’s pit crew, you have to
be ready to do quirky stuff like that. And you have to be dead-on reliable and
punctual, because there’s a cripple in bed waiting for you to get them up. And
you have to at least be honest enough not to seize the many opportunities you’ll
have to steal all of our shit. And you have to work for the rock-bottom crap
wages paid by the state. And there’s no upward mobility. It’s not like someday
you’ll become regional vice president in charge of washing my armpits.
And above all, you can’t be all Mother Teresa about it all.
No selfless martyrs please. There’s a home help agency around here called
Visiting Angels. What a horrifying name! I’d sooner hire an agency called
Visiting Chronically Underemployed Conspiracy Theorists Who Rant on Ad Nauseum.
Even they’d be more fun to be around. Is there anything more suffocatingly
tedious than spending all day with an angel? You can’t tell a dirty joke to an
angel. In the presence of an angel, one cannot fart.
It takes a unique sort to be a pit crew person. It’s not a
job for the completely unskewed.