Inaccessible Pizza

 

Since I am about to blow the whistle on a dangerous food product, I will give the protagonist of this true story a Smart Ass Cripple alias. I’ll call him Joe DiMaggio.

Joe DiMaggio is blind and the father of two boys, ages 6 and 8. One day recently, Joe DiMaggio was preparing to make dinner for them. So he set the oven on 450 degrees and took a frozen pizza from Home Run Inn out of the freezer. He placed the pizza on the rack inside the hot oven. But about 15 minutes later, the smoke detector was blaring and black smoke billowed from the oven.

Joe DiMaggio says, "There was literally a grease fire in the bottom of the oven."

That happened because Joe DiMaggio put the pizza on the rack upside down and the cheese dripped down onto the coils on the bottom of the oven and ignited.

Joe DiMaggio thinks Home Run Inn is "the best” frozen pizza. But this was the third time he'd placed one in the oven upside down and a fire ensued. And every time it was a plain cheese pizza.

It’s hard for a blind person to tell which side is which on a Home Run Inn plain cheese pizza because the cheese is smooth. On other frozen pizzas, Joe DiMaggio says, the cheese is in shreds so that provides a reliable, Braille-like clue as to which side the toppings are on.

The same is true, Joe DiMaggio says, of Home Run Inn pizzas with additional bumpy toppings like pepperoni or veggies.  "I've never put a sausage one in upside down,” he says.

The other problem is that Home Run Inn frozen pizzas don’t come with the customary cardboard disc that provides an additional indicator of which side is the bottom.

And Joe DiMaggio isn’t the only blind person having this problem. He also has a brother who is blind, whom I will call Dom DiMaggio. And Dom has also put Home Run Inn cheese pizzas in the oven upside down.

So I called the Home Run Inn headquarters and I ended up with a pleasant customer service agent named Michelle. I told her about the plight of Joe and Dom. She acknowledged that the cheese on Home Run Inn pizzas is smooth because the pizzas are baked before they are frozen. She also said that no cardboard discs are included because the cardboard absorbs moisture from the pizza and makes the crust brittle.

Thus, Michelle said, even sighted people have reported putting cheese pizzas in the oven upside down because it’s also hard to tell top from bottom visually. Michelle said she tells people there are tiny ventilation holes on the bottom of the pizza that look like the crust was stabbed several times with a fork.  If you see them, you know that’s the bottom. Michelle said she hopes Joe Dom and other blind people can find the holes by feeling for them. “I'm sure their sense of touch is much more acute than yours and mine," she said.

 So I passed that tip along to Joe DiMaggio. If it doesn’t work, he may have to resort to desperate measures in his quest to successfully find his way around a frozen Home Run Inn cheese pizza when feeding  his hungry boys.

"I've thought about giving it a quick lick," he says.

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Ralph the Cockroach: Another Tale from the Pit Crew

 

 Here’s a story told to me by a current member of my pit crew, which is what I call the people I hire to get me out of bed, wipe my butt, etc.

When Nick was in high school, his girlfriend broke up with him and that made him sad. So another friend, who was a girl but not his girlfriend, gave him a new pet to help cheer him up. She brought a terrarium over to Nick’s house and in it was a cockroach about as big as the palm of Nick’s hand.

It was a Madagascar hissing cockroach.

Nick’s mom was cool with having a pet cockroach in the house but his dad was quite stressed about it. Nick’s dad had a cockroach phobia due to an incident that occurred way back when he worked at a food store. Nick’s dad was carrying a bag of grain that was full of cockroaches, which was unbeknownst to him until the bag accidentally burst open and the escaping cockroaches crawled all over him.

So Nick kept the cockroach but he named it Ralph because his dad often said if he ever had a pet dog he would name it Ralph. Nick figured if he named his cockroach Ralph, it might cause his dad to view it in a more positive light.

Nick dutifully fed Ralph dog food, as the girl who was his friend but not his girlfriend had instructed him to do. Ralph didn’t hiss much at first, which disappointed Nick. But after becoming more comfortable with his surroundings, Ralph hissed at night and this created a soothing bond with him for Nick and helped take Nick’s mind off of the break up.

Nevertheless, Nick’s dad lived in fear that Ralph would one day escape from the terrarium and, sure enough, it happened. But Nick sprang into action and eventually found Ralph lounging atop a David Bowie album. Nick returned Ralph to his terrarium and issued the all clear.

For the next year and a half or so, Nick and Ralph lived happily ever after. Nick even got a new girlfriend, who also bonded with Ralph. But then Nick was accepted into college in Chicago and the dorm had a strict no-cockroach policy. That’s good. The world would be a better place if more dorms had strict no-cockroach policies.

So Nick turned over custody of Ralph to the new girlfriend. But Nick was worried because the new girlfriend was moving to Toronto. She vowed to take Ralph with her and continue to care for him. But what if the Canadian authorities denied entry of a foreign cockroach into their country? Would the new girlfriend have no choice but to free Ralph into the wild to fend for himself, where he wouldn’t stand a chance?

But soon Nick received pictures from the new girlfriend confirming that she and Ralph arrived safely in Toronto. Nick had no idea how the new girlfriend got Ralph past Canadian border security. Perhaps she smuggled him in. But Nick didn’t ask. He was just relieved that they made it.

As Nick and the new girlfriend faded away, so did her updates on Ralph. Nick assumes that Ralph is now dead, since average lifespan of a Madagascar hissing cockroach (in the wild) is three to five years, according to cockroachfacts.com. But Nick will always have a fondness in his heart for Ralph the cockroach for helping him through a trying time.

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Cripples Talking Cripple Talk

  

 

I can certainly understand how being around packs of cripples can be intimidating, what with all the acronyms and initialisms and other inside references flying around. It’s enough to make your brain explode if you’re a vert (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical).

Like for instance, I am crippled because of MD and so is one of my friends. But his MD isn’t anything like my MD. My MD is muscular dystrophy but his MD is macular degeneration, which means he’s legally blind. People always refer to my type of MD as MD but I never heard anyone call macular degeneration MD. I don’t know who decides these things.

And then there’s multiple sclerosis, which is called MS, which is why people always get it mixed up with MD.

And what about TBI, which stands for traumatic brain injury? Don’t confuse that with UTI, which stands for urinary tract infection. But there’s no such thing as a UBI or untraumatic brain injury. Maybe it’s because every brain injury is traumatic. But again, I don’t know who decides these things.

Perhaps the most popular initialism in cripple circles is SSI because it stands for Supplemental Security Income and that’s the Social Security fund through which a lot of cripples get the money they live off of.  SSI isn’t the same as SCI, which stands for spinal cord injury, although a lot of people who are crippled because of an SCI live off of SSI.

Just about every cripple uses some sort of DME, which stands for durable medical equipment, which is stuff like wheelchairs. And there’s a lot of talk about ADLs, which stands for activities of daily living, which is the stuff everybody (crippled or not ) does every day, like the putting on pants and brushing teeth. Cripples are often evaluated to see how much we suck at performing our ADLs so we can prove that we are crippled enough to receive stuff like DME and SSI.

So if you hang around cripple circles long enough, you’ll hear such dizzying banter as, “That guy with the TBI has a UTI.” Or, “That guy with the SCI really needs DME but he can’t afford it because he’s on SSI.”

And that’s just the beginning of it all. There are tons and tons more acronyms and initialisms in cripple circles. But rather than drive the poor verts nuts trying to keep it all straight, if we just lock all the cripples up in institutions then no one else has to worry about it. 

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Cripples, Worms and Insects

  

There’s a professional hockey team called the Nashville Predators. Thinking about that name has helped me figure out a lot about the status of cripples in society.

Because like I’ve said before, at least one thing cripples don’t have to complain about is sports teams named after stereotypes of us. We're not like the poor tribes, being hounded by stuff like the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians. There hasn’t been a team that I know of with a name like the Indiana Invalids. Hell, there hasn’t even been a team with one of those cutesy cripple names, like the Houston Handicapables or the Philadelphia Physically Challenged.

But is this completely a good thing? Why would a team owner want to associate their team with predators but not cripples?

I then I thought I figured out the answer. Maybe it’s because cripples are perceived to be the opposite of predators. We’re prey. And the world of sports is all about predators and prey. There’s a clash and one side wins and one side loses. Period. So if you have to choose sides, you might as well choose the winning side, which is the predators.

But then I reminded myself that not all teams are named after beasts. Some are named after birds. They’re often predatory birds, like hawks and eagles. But there are also cute little tweety birds, like cardinals and blue jays.

These birds are hardly predators. But then again, aren’t concepts of predator and prey relative, depending on the point of view of a given species? Aren’t cardinals and blue jays vicious predators, if you’re a worm or an insect? To them, tweety birds must look like pterodactyls.

But when viewed through a human centric lens, which is what we do when naming sports teams, tweety birds are strictly prey. So that must mean that it’s acceptable to name your sports team afar some creatures that aren’t predators first and foremost, but not many others.

Then this, it seems to me, must be why you don’t see sports teams named after worms, insects or cripples. We’re all too far down the food chain. Well I suppose there might be some sports teams named after spiders. At least spiders are scary to humans. Cripples are scary to humans, too, but not in a way that has any marketing appeal.

So maybe nobody names sports teams after cripples because we are viewed as among the lowest, most vulnerable prey. The only thing we are a threat to feast upon wantonly and voraciously is the public treasury. And that’s not the dignified kind of predator. 

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Things I Wouldn't Know if I Lived in a Stinkin' Nursing Home

  

Bohol is an island province of the Philippines. It consists of the island itself plus 75 surrounding islands. Its capital is Tagbilaran. Its most popular tourist attraction is the Chocolate Hills, which are called that because they sort of look like a range of giant chocolate chips. If they really were made of chocolate, you know some corporation like Hershey’s would have seized the land and strip mined the hills a long time ago.

I wouldn’t know anything about Bohol if I lived in a stinkin’ nursing home. The only reason I know Bohol even exists is thanks to one of the members of my pit crew. That’s what I call the crew of people I’ve hired to come into my home and do miscellaneous stuff for me like get me dressed and out of bed. One of them came in recently wearing a yellow t-shirt that said Spirit of Bohol. I asked him what Bohol was and he said he thought it was part of the Philippines. He said he got the t-shirt from a resale store. So that prompted me to look up stuff about Bohol, which I never would’ve done otherwise because I don’t spend a lot of time wondering about things like Philippine provinces. I’m not especially proud of that trait. I wish I was more the naturally curious type of person who embarks upon research adventures without prompting. But, sadly, I am not.

But if I lived in a stinkin’ nursing home, the people helping me get dressed and out of bed would all be required to wear boring-ass scrubs, which are all a stern solid color like grey or dark blue. Sometimes they’re adorned with stuff like Smurfs or rainbows or unicorns, but nothing interesting.

Another thing I also learned about from a resale t-shirt of one of my pit crew guys is the spread of communism in the 20^th Century. On the front of his shirt was Lenin, Stalin and Mao and it said The Three Terrors. It was a parody of a concert tour t-shirt of The Three Tenors and on the back, instead of listing all the cities and dates of the stops along the tour, it listed, chronologically, countries that turned communist. The first date was Russia in 1917, followed by dozens of countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and China.

Whenever this pit crew guy worked with his back to me, like washing dishes, I learned more about the spread of communism in the 20^th Century. But if I lived in a stikin’ nursing home, all I’d see when someone had their back to me would be a solid wall of a stern color.

I have another pit crew guy who has a wide array of soccer jerseys he bought at resale shops. They’re not educational, but they’re entertaining. 

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No Longer Living a Lie

  

 

This is the time of year when everybody reflects on how far cripples have progressed over the last few decades or so because July 26 is the anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Well one thing I can say about how the ADA has changed  my life is I don’t have to fake like I have a doctor’s appointment anymore. I used to have to do that a lot back in the 1970s and early 1980s, before the ADA was a glimmer. There was all kinds of public transportation in Chicago but none of it was wheelchair accessible so if a cripple like me needed to go somewhere and if they didn’t have a car they could drive, they had to call MOSCH, the Mayor’s Office for Senior Citizens and the Handicapped. (Well okay, that’s another thing that’s changed for the better since those days. We don’t get referred to as handicapped anymore. They used to call us that in the press all the time, but not now. And the government agencies that are supposed to serve us sure as hell don’t call us that.  The ADA isn’t called the Americans with Handicaps Act.)

MOSCH would dispatch a van equipped with a wheelchair lift to pick you up if you were lucky enough to get through before they were all booked up. And their limited hours we something like 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday thru Friday. And they would only take you to doctor’s appointments.

So what I did if I wanted to go somewhere was figure out what hospital, clinic, dentist’s office, etc. was nearby and I’d have the MOSCH van driver drop me off there and I’d go inside and wait for the driver to be far enough away and then I’d go to where I really wanted to go. And then I’d hustle back to the medical place in time for my pick up. And all the time in between when I roamed the streets I lived in fear that a van driver would see me and report me to their superiors and my lone source of independent transportation would be cut off, even though I’d never heard a confirmed case of that actually happening to anybody .

The people at MOSCH probably thought I was the sickliest cripple on earth since I was always seeing doctors all over the city. Sometimes when riding in the van I wondered if I should fake a hacking coughing fit just to maintain my cover.

But I don’t have to live that stressful lie anymore. All the buses and most of the train stations are wheelchair accessible now and none of the drivers or train operators give a shit where I’m going or why. They just shut up and take me there.

So at least there’s that. But it’s a lot. 

P.S. But of course not all cripples are this lucky. A lot of cripples who are stuck in nursing homes or places like that where someone else runs your fucking life for you still have to fake being sick. Sometimes the only way to get the hell out of one of those places is to pretend you're having a heart attack so they have to call an ambulance for you. They only take you to the hospital and back, but at least you see a little damn daylight.

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Good Signs, Bad Signs

  

I guess the proliferation of those big blue signs with the white wheelchair stick figure on them is supposed to be a sign of progress. It means cripples are welcome more and more. But I’ll really feel like we’re making progress when I see that same sign except with a slash through the white wheelchair stick figure, meaning cripples are not welcome.

Because it’s too bad those blue access signs are even necessary. But they are necessary because cripples eventually come to assume through life experience that we are unwelcome unless informed to the contrary. Exclusion is our default position. We often err on the side of avoidance. Before I go someplace I’ve never been before, like a restaurant or whatever, I feel the need to call ahead and ask a bunch of questions to make sure I can actually get in and around and all that.

But it’s funny that, as a white man, I’ve never felt that I need additional confirmation to reassure me that I’m welcome. I’ve never felt that I needed to see a sign that says WHITE MEN WELCOME, which is good because no such signs exist. They aren’t necessary because that would be to belabor the obvious. As a white man, my default is the opposite of what it is as a cripple. Before I go someplace I’ve never been before, like a restaurant or whatever, I never call ahead and ask if white men are welcome.

You never see NO SMOKING signs anymore for the same reason. They’re unnecessary. Everybody assumes everywhere is no smoking unless otherwise designated. But it used to be the opposite. Everybody assumed everywhere was okay for smoking unless otherwise designated so you saw NO SMOKING signs every day.

But things have changed so much that NO SMOKING signs are now obsolete. So wouldn’t it be cool if things changed so much that the blue sign with the white wheelchair stick figure was unnecessary and obsolete because everybody just assumed cripples were welcome everywhere? And wouldn’t it be cooler still if signs with a slash through the white wheelchair stick figure were necessary to serve as a warning because cripples being unwelcome was so out of the ordinary?

Maybe someday.  

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