I Am, Therefore I Loiter

All cripples have a superpower. It’s our ability to loiter.

The one thing cripples do better than anybody is loiter. There are two reasons for this. First, loitering is just hanging around. You just sit there. You don’t have to do anything else. Cripples are good at that.

But hanging around only becomes loitering when you start hanging around places where you’re not welcome. So that’s another reason cripples are natural born loiterers. It’s always been easy for us to find plenty of places where we’re not welcome. And the most crippled up cripples make the best loiterers of all because the more crippled up you are the more places you’re not welcome. Take, for example, the comatose. They’re the most crippled up of all and so everybody feels awkward around them. Even me. I admit it. Some people say if you talk to the comatose they can hear you but I don’t want to talk to them because I have no idea what to say to them. I don’t want to offend. I’m afraid to ask an innocuous question like, “How has your day been?” It might come off as stupid and insensitive.

Thus, since the comatose make conscious people feel so uncomfortable, they’re unwelcome pretty much everywhere beyond their sickrooms. So it’s easy as hell for them to loiter. If you don’t believe it, try an experiment. Take a comatose person out to lunch. Or take them to a movie or a ballgame or to church or wherever. Everyone around you will soon be on edge. It won’t be long before security comes around.

The cripples of yore were big time loiterers because there were a whole lot of places they weren’t welcome. But some of them decided to use their superpower as a force for good. They started hanging around wherever they damn well pleased, whether cripples were welcome or not. And they endured all the crap you’re put through when you do that. They loitered so future cripples wouldn’t have to.

So now there are a lot less places where cripples are unwelcome. But their work is not finished. There’s still plenty of loitering that needs to be done. So it’s good to know that the more crippled up I become the more subversive and powerful I’ll become. It makes me feel as though I’ll always be of use. I’ll be able to loiter even if I’m in a coma, though I’ll need the help of accomplices to pull it off. I’ll need my conscious allies to take me to places where I’m not welcome.

And if I’m in a coma on the day the peaceful revolution begins, somebody please come get me and put me at the front of the march. It will render all the evil bastards in charge powerless. What are they going to do, turn their water cannons on a guy in a coma?

I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I helped revolutionize human society and usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, just by loitering.

The Simple Joy of a Sturdy Toilet Seat

I think the most brilliant actors are those who perform in television commercials. Their incredible talents leave me in a state of awe. A woman, an on-the-go working mom, removes a glass from her dishwasher. She inspects the glass closely, her face awash with worry, as if she’s about to receive her biopsy results. But when she sees the glass no longer has water spots, she leaps with joy. She becomes an evangelist for this brand of dishwasher powder, telling all her neighbors the wonderful news.

It’s amazing. How does that actor do it? How does she go about inhabiting a character that ascends to a state of unbridled ecstasy when she no longer has water spots? What elusive muse does this actor beseech? It seems to me that would be harder for an actor to do than Shakespeare. Do they have a gala awards show for these actors? They sure as hell ought to. Fuck the Oscars. Fuck Olivier. 

Last month I broke down and bought a high end toilet seat. I’ve always bought cheap ass toilet seats because why not? But before long the plastic bolts crack and the damn seat shifts around under me while I sit reading on the crapper and it’s irritating as hell.  It takes the sacredness out of my nightly dump. So I got a toilet seat with metal bolts and to this day it’s still sturdy.

But I resist the urges to get all worked up with happiness about my new toilet seat because I wouldn’t want to risk becoming like one of those people the actors portray in commercials. I wouldn’t want to become the kind of person who sees a bottle of dish liquid named Joy and takes it literally. Because if I buy into that whole idea, then the next thing I know somebody’ll try to sell me a bottle of dish liquid named Orgasm. And won’t I feel like a chump when I find that about the only way using this product is reminiscent of the actual event is when it squirts out a sticky white substance.

But maybe I should go ahead and surrender to consumerism. Seeking spiritual fulfillment in household products might harmonize well with the sedentary cripple lifestyle. But it’s hard for me to give in because one of the things I inherited genetically from my mother is her hypersensitive bullshit-ometer. My mother did not suffer bullshitters well. I often thank her for passing that trait on to me. It’s kept me from falling prey to most of life’s sinister sales pitches. But often, and especially lately, the needle on my bullshit-ometer stays pinned at the far end. My bullshit-ometer crackles incessantly with static, like a crazed Geiger counter. The alarms sound and the lights flash. It’s an excruciating din. And I don’t know how to shut the damn thing off.

I fear the only way to find relief may be to have a complete bullshit-ometerectomy. But wouldn’t that leave me completely defenseless, like a declawed cat? Maybe I’d be better off.  Maybe life would be a lot more free and easy if I just tossed away all skepticism and let myself experience that kind of unconditional love known as brand loyalty.

Pit Crew

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. 

Crippled Messiah

When I was an adolescent, my mother told me something that paralyzed me with fear.  “Someday,” she said, “you will get a job. And when you do, you’ll have to prove yourself by working twice as hard as everyone else.”

Holy shit! Really? And she wasn’t the only one who said that. I heard it all the time.

So if I fail, I fuck it up for all future cripples who enter this realm? I felt like the crippled messiah. Everything was riding on me. It was a punch in the gut.

I already was fighting off a big time messiah complex as it was. I was named after St. Michael the Archangel. That’s a lot of pressure. That dude was God’s chief of staff and commander of his army. He slewed dragons and shit. He kicked Satan’s ass and threw him out of heaven. St. Michael was God’s enforcer. If God was a loan shark, he’d send St. Michael to break the legs of deadbeats. That’s a lot to live up to, being named after him.

And being a white guy wasn’t even going to earn me any breaks from being the crippled messiah, which sucked most of all. Because other than being crippled, I was white and male and heterosexual and all that stuff that usually counts for something. Nobody would tell me if I fucked up on the job I would ruin it for all other white guys or heteros.  So if I fucked up, instead of blaming it on the crippled part of me, why couldn’t it be blamed on the white guy part of me? Then everybody could just shrug and move on. Apparently the cripple part of me trumps everything else, at least when it comes to fucking up on the job. I don’t know how the rules of that game work. It’s all very confusing, like rock-paper-scissors.

So then I thought maybe I just had to accept my unfortunate lot in life and work real hard and succeed for the benefit of future cripples. But then I realized that if I succeeded I’d fuck it up for future cripples, too. Because if I was a brown-nose goody-two-shoes, then the same would be expected of them. I’d be pissed at any cripple who did that to me.

So then I thought maybe the best thing I could do for my fellow cripples would be to fuck up in some grand fashion. I would proudly and defiantly assert my right and the right of all cripples to fuck up as much as everybody else. But that might have just the opposite effect. The cripples in line behind me would probably be denied their right to fuck up out of fear that they might fuck up.

After all these years, I still don’t know what to do. Maybe I should get a job at a place where a bunch of white guys work half as hard as they should. Then I can work at a normal pace and seem like I’m working twice as hard as them. That might be the only safe way to get out of this whole crippled messiah thing without anybody getting hurt.

Middle Finger on a Stick

Everybody has their limits. Some people say that if they become crippled to the point where they can’t wipe their own ass, they no longer want to live. Hell, some people say if they can’t play tennis they don’t want to live.

I don’t know about all that.  I haven’t wiped my own ass since about 1972, but I always figured out a way to get it done. You just have to plan ahead. It takes a little of the spontaneity out of life, but it ain’t worth dying over.

But I’ve come to realize I also have my limits. You can pull the plug on me if it gets to the point where I can no longer give the finger. I like to express my emotions and if I couldn’t express that particular emotion I don’t think I could bear it. On those occasions in life when the only appropriate response is to flip someone or something off, if I had to bottle all that up inside I would probably explode.

Thank God I’m not a literal person, or that dark moment would almost be upon me. I’ve just about lost the ability to physically flip the bird, especially in winter, when my hands are cold and it’s harder to move my fingers. But I know cripples are resilient. Where there’s a will there’s a way. I derive hope from crippled role models who can’t move their arms but still flip people off with facial expressions. They’ve mastered a variety of dirty looks that make it unmistakably clear to the intended target that they have just been flipped off, cripple style. It’s inspiring to behold.

The more crippled up your body is, the more you rely on your face. So I know that even if my body becomes nothing more than a pedestal for my animated head, I’ll still be able to give the finger in my own unorthodox but equally effective and satisfying way. I’ve already started practicing dirty looks in the mirror.

 But what if I have a stroke or something and I can’t move my arms or my face? How does a guy like Stephen Hawking flip people off? He can’t even shoot somebody a raspberry. It must be hell.

So I’m working on a piece of cripple assistive technology I call middle finger on a stick. It looks like those foam hands goofy sports fans wave except it’s a different finger sticking up and it’s made of plastic so as to be more durable an easier to clean (dishwasher safe). And it’s on a stick. Middle finger on a stick comes in an array of colors and sizes so a cripple can carry around a quiver of them and display whichever is most appropriate for the occasion.

The vexing question that remains, however, is how does one who cannot move their arms deploy their middle finger on a stick? If you’re accompanied by an assistant with whom you are simpatico, that person can be your middle finger on a stick caddy, so to speak, and help you select and wave around the proper middle finger on a stick. But I fully understand the deep desire of some cripples to be able to fully utilize their middle finger on a stick independently. So I’m trying to design a deployment system where middle fingers on a stick dwell inside cylinders mounted on a wheelchair. And when the need arises to flip someone off, the occupant activates the system by pushing a button with their nose or tongue (or maybe by using brain waves) and the middle finger on a stick pops up. That part is still on the drawing board.

But once I figure it all out, middle finger on a stick will give cripples new hope that no matter how bad things may get, they’ll never completely lose their autonomy. They’ll always be able to give the finger.

SMART ASS CRIPPLE STORE NOW OPEN AT lulu.com

I hope you'll do some shopping at the Smart Ass Cripple store at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/smartasscripple

Please spread the word to everyone you know who can read.

 

Smart Ass Cripple's Little Yellow Book By Mike Ervin

The Clown Prince of Crippledom strikes again! More humorous (and short) essays about being crippled and other stuff.

And don't forget (as much as you may want to) 

Smart Ass Cripple's Little Red Book By Mike Ervin

Everybody loves a cripple but everybody hates a smart ass. 

I Was Forcibly Sterilized by the State of North Carolina and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

If a cripple who was sterilized by the state without their informed consent collects financial restitution from the state, it will put everyone else in an awkward social position. We won’t know how to react to them.

My first instinct would be to congratulate that cripple, maybe throw them a party. Maybe even a surprise party. They come home after picking up their restitution check and we all jump out from behind the furniture.

But maybe that’s inappropriate. I don’t know. How would one decorate for such a party? Balloons and streamers? It just doesn’t seem right. Should there be cake? What would one write on that cake? The party store consultant would be stumped.

This isn’t clear cut. It’s not like winning the World Series. I don’t think when you finally receive your sterilization restitution check the first thing you do is pour champagne all over your head. It’s not like winning the lottery. The lottery is free money. There’s no ambiguity to spoil it all.

Maybe the party should be a somber affair, something with black armbands. It’s like those stories we hear where a guy goes in to get his wisdom teeth pulled and somehow ends up castrated. Even if a jury awards the guy $10 million, it’s hard to feel envious.

Well, the state of North Carolina went berserk sterilizing cripples from 1929 all the way up to 1974. About 7,600 people were sterilized by “choice,” force or coercion under the authority of the N.C. Eugenics Board. The program was originally intended to keep cripples like those with epilepsy and “feeblemindedness” from reproducing more of their degenerate kind. A lot of the victims lived in state institutions. But eventually the program was expanded to include other undesirables, a lot of whom were poor women of color.   This tells us that the N.C. Eugenics Board surely was composed of white, uncrippled males with money.

There was a time when these cripple sterilization campaigns we going on in a lot of states. About 10 years ago, surviving victims started speaking up in North Carolina. In 2002, the governor apologized on behalf of the state. Earlier this year, a task force created by the current governor decided each living victim should receive $50,000. So the governor included $20 million to pay for restitution in her budget and the republican-controlled House concurred.  Ah but then the dear republican-controlled Senate shot it all down. The victims get squat.

Republican Senator Don East said, “It doesn’t change anything — if they’re sterile, they’re still sterile.” He said, "I'm so sorry it happened, but throwing money don't change it.”

Money doesn’t make any difference? Let’s take a quick poll: Which would you prefer?

a) Be forcibly sterilized and have $50,000

b) Be forcibly sterilized and not have $50,000

Who chooses option a? Need I count hands? Can we just call it unanimous?

So anyway, the rest of us dodged a bullet there. We won’t have to figure out the proper way to react to restituted victims. We don’t have to add a new chapter to our social etiquette books just yet.

I don’t know what’s next. Maybe the state Senate will at least appropriate enough to buy each survivor a t-shirt. We all know what the shirt will say.