The Fabulous Flying Commode

Sometimes slogging through life as a cripple can be so disheartening that I just want to give up.

I felt one such dark moment of resignation recently in an airport bathroom. I had to piss. There was only one cripple stall and of course, as is always the fucking case, the door was locked and there were two feet inside the stall. And the feet were pointed away from the bowl, which meant that the person attached to those feet was settled in. He wasn’t just taking a quick piss. He wouldn’t be in there pissing with his back to the bowl. And if he was in there pissing with his back to the bowl, that would be even more disheartening.

When I see two perfectly good feet in a cripple stall, especially when they’re pointed away from the bowl, I feel a great sense of futility. I wouldn’t even mind if all I saw was a single foot in the stall or one shoe and one cast or two feet wearing goofy-looking, corrective cripple shoes. But when I see two perfectly good feet in perfectly fine shoes, I say to myself “What’s the point in going on?” I mean, even after all these years, some people don’t know or care enough to save the cripple stalls for the cripples.

Ours is a cold, cruel, insensitive world sometimes. Thus, cripples need to make contingency plans for everything, even a simple thing like taking a piss. Like one time I was on the mall in Washington D.C. I had to piss. No worries. There was a line of port-a-pots yonder. But when I got there, all the double-wides with the cripple symbol on the door were locked! I’ve heard other cripples complain about this situation before. The city fathers think homeless people will sleep in the spacious cripple stalls. So they lock the doors. And if a cripple has to take a shit, tough shit!

And don’t even get me started about the airlines! You know how cramped airliner bathrooms are. It’s like trying to take a shit inside a chimney! So if you’re a cripple, forget it! No potty breaks for you! Your contingency plan is to dehydrate the hell out of yourself until your innards turn to dust.

It’s no wonder I had this wonderful dream where I was riding around in a motorized commode. Yep, it was a fancy motorized wheelchair, just like the one I ride in now, but it was also a commode! And this commode could fly, too! It was beautiful!

I’m sure the fabulous flying commode was a symbol of my fantasy of living in a paradise where cripples can take a piss whenever they so desire! I felt so powerful in my fabulous flying commode, so in control of my destiny. It was so liberating!

But alas, I woke up and realized it was only a dream.

Where's the Keeper?

I know that facial expression quite well. I’ve seen it a million times. I see it every time a covey of cripples suddenly arrives.

(Cripple etiquette lesson #27: Covey is one of the proper terms to use when referring to a group of cripples. It’s correct because it’s alliterative. However, when referring to specific types of cripples, different alliterative terms apply e.g. a pack of paraplegics, a herd of hemiplegics, a pride of polios or a bevy of brain injured. But any group of between two and eight cripples of mixed or unknown categorization is known as a covey. Any group of more than eight cripples is known as a nursing home field trip.)

But anyway, when cripples converge, I see that all-too-familiar look on the faces of those being converged upon. It’s a look of alarm, except with eyebrows downcast. It’s a searching look. It’s a look that says: Where’s the keeper?

I see that look when cripples protest. Cripples burst in screaming “fuck the fascist pigs” and the cops look around desperately. Where’s the keeper? And then they approach the nearest vert (as in vertical, which is the proper term for a person who can walk). It's as if the cops think cripples are incapable of bursting in and screaming “fuck the fascist pigs” unless some vert puts them up to it.

But I see that look even when a covey of cripples comes in peace, say like to a movie theater or restaurant. The manager has a look of panic. Where’s the keeper?

It happens all the time. I’m guilty too. I went to see a play. It was some Shakespeare deal starring Down Syndrome people. The play began and the only people on stage in Shakespeare outfits were Down Syndrome people. That wasn't what I expected. I said to myself, “Where’s the keeper?” I’m well aware that this means I am an ass hole. But acknowledgement is the first step to recovery.


And sometimes I see that look even when I’m the only cripple in sight. I see it a lot at airports. I see it and then I hear “Are you with him?” That’s the security person addressing whichever member of my pit crew is traveling with me. “Tell him to go over there,” the security person says, as if my pit crew and I communicate in Swahili. And I am left to conclude that apparently I, singlehandedly, look as pathetically intimidating as an entire covey of cripples or drove of dytrophics.

I’ve seen that look everywhere. Where’s the keeper? I’ve seen it at the store around the corner, in the church down the street and everywhere cripples are kept.

Another Reason Why Walmart Blows

I was deep asleep. I woke up with a jolt. I heard a commotion.

“Ma'am! MA'AM!”

I figured out that I was in my van in Walmart parking lot. The commotion was Rahnee, having it out with the store greeter.

“Ma’am! You can’t bring that scooter out of the store, MA'AM!” the greeter spat.

Rahnee tried to ignore her but the perturbed greeter followed her out to the van. “Bring that scooter back!” Rahnee spat back that she wasn’t trying to steal the store’s cripple scooter. She was merely bringing her stuff out to the van. But the greeter was having none of it. She went back in to summon security. Rahnee put her stuff in the van and we were gone.

So this made me wonder if there’s ever been an actual case of someone trying to steal one of those ragged-ass Walmart cripple scooters. I found two cases. (Warning: These stories are true.) In Houma, Louisiana, police pulled over a guy driving a motorized scooter down a busy street, towing behind him a guy in a wheelchair. Turns out the scooter was shoplifted from Walmart. The driver just said he took it to go for a “joy ride.” He was charged with theft (grand theft store cripple scooter?) and operating a vehicle while intoxicated.

In Florence, South Carolina, two guys jumped into a pair of scooters as they were leaving Walmart and took off. Police caught up with them pretty quickly. One guy jumped out of the scooter and tried to run away. The other first claimed he purchase the scooter and then said he took it because he got “tired of walking.”

Note how neither of the scooter thieves were crippled. That because no real live cripple would steal a store scooter. I can see where a lot of cripples might be tempted. I mean, a cripple without adequate wheels is like a turtle flipped over on its back. But wheels, especially motorized wheels, are FUCKING EXPENSIVE, particularly if you’re on Social Security or if you work at a place that pays crap wages, like Walmart. You become intensely jealous of any cripple who has the wheels you lack. You entertain fantasies of wheelchair jacking. So in a moment of inertia-induced temporary insanity, absconding with a Walmart cripple scooter may seem like a brilliant solution.

But cripples know that driving a store cripple scooter is like driving a barge. That’s how sleek and maneuverable they are. And they’ve got that God-awful, eardrum-piercing, irritating warning beep whenever you back up! So no genuine cripple would steal a store cripple scooter. It ain’t worth it.

Smart Ass Cripple reader Nancy is a genuine cripple who went to Walmart. “I went to get some groceries after a long day dealing with ailing parents,” says she. “I needed a lot of stuff so I used the Walmart scooter.” She paid and tried to exit but the store cop blocked her and said she was not allowed to drive the scooter out to her car. “Now I was tired and it was late I wanted to get home so I protested about having to transfer all the items to a regular cart and then again to my car.” The store cop said he’d get someone to help. “But I waited 10 minutes. Nothing happened. So I said ‘f this’ and tore out to my car.”

But that little stunt apparently landed her on the Walmart cripple scooter watch list. Maybe the FBI dusted the scooter for fingerprints or took a DNA swab and then slapped Nancy’s mug shot up in the break room. Because the next time she exited that Walmart, the cop chased her out of the store and grabbed onto the back of the scooter yelling “You can’t take that scooter out of the store!”

But it wasn’t even Walmart’s scooter. Because of the scooter hassle she got before, this time Nancy decided to byo.

Eventually the store cop figured that out. A crippled store cop would never have made that mistake. We know a barge when we see one.

The Elbow Macaroni Queen

Pierogi Fest. That’s what the celebratory sign said.

That’s how you assert your culture within the dominant white culture. That’s how you celebrate who you are and where you come from.

You do it with food. You pick a food that symbolizes who you are and where you come from. And you build a festival around it.

Pierogi is an indigenous food of my maternal culture. Babushka cuisine. It’s a cuisine born of frugality. My family ate the tongues and butts of animals. My grandma used the blood of a duck to make soup. And once grandma plucked and cooked a chicken from her farm and we all ate every last damn edible bit of that bird, everything but the beak and eyeballs. Grandma boiled the chicken’s feet and I ate one.

But you have to be careful because you know how the dominant white culture can be. When the dominant white culture comes to fully recognize something of value in a different culture, you know how they show their appreciation. They steal it. And then they ruin everything. They do it with food all the time. It’s culinary colonization. I saw this new place called Autentico Mexican Restaurant. It was in a foo foo suburb so I looked at the menu in the window, just for laughs. There wasn’t a damn thing autentico about it. Tacos for $13.50! Tacos are supposed to be cheap. That’s a major reason why tacos are such a celebrated food. But the dominant white culture fills a tortilla with lobster thermidore and charges $30. That’s as ridiculous as chitlins a l’orange!

Cripples have yet to identify a symbolic cultural food staple that we can put forth to illustrate who we are and where we come from. Until we do that we’ll never be affirmed by the dominant white culture.

So I’d like to offer up elbow macaroni as the cheap food that is the essential ingredient of cripple cuisine. The official cripple cookbook: 1,243 Recipes for Elbow Macaroni.

Because it's so cheap, just about every cripple is full of elbow macaroni up to their eyeballs. Institutionalized cripples are served elbow macaroni for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Buttered elbow macaroni. Elbow macaroni with salt. Crunchy elbow macaroni.

But even free-roaming cripples consume tons and tons of elbow macaroni. Broke ass cripples use elbow macaroni as thoroughly as Eskimos used the whales they harpooned. They don’t just eat the elbow macaroni. They make clothing and furniture out of it. They construct huts out of elbow macaroni and heat them by burning elbow macaroni in furnaces made of elbow macaroni.

We’ll know the dominant white culture has officially taken notice of cripple culture when we see Chef Pierre’s Elbow Macaronium.

And of course the highlight of every food-oriented culture festival is the presentation of the queen. So the star of cripple fest will be the Elbow Macaroni Queen. She’ll wear a regal crown and flowing gown, made of elbow macaroni.

Impressionable Young Minds

Children are naturally inquisitive. So it’s perfectly logical that when they encounter a real live cripple, their curiosity will be piqued. Therefore, it’s important for mature, adult cripples like me to always be patient and cheerful when dealing with the stares and comments of children. After all, the children are the future leaders of America. We have to remember that every personal interaction with them presents a golden opportunity to teach them valuable lessons about people who are crippled and to have a profound and lasting impact on their impressionable young minds.

But sometimes that’s so fucking hard to do. Sometimes, you just want to flatten the little rude bastards.

Like one time my sister, Teena, was at the Brookfield Zoo. She visited one of those natural habitat houses, where the animals run free and humans observe them from walkways above. Birds flew around in this habitat. Big birds. Sometimes they flew up onto the walkways and walked amongst the humans.

So there’s my sister, sitting in her wheelchair by the railing, looking down on the jungle below. Suddenly she feels a jolt from behind. Somebody walked right smack into the back of her wheelchair. And then she feels these grubby hands pawing all over the top of her head. And then she heard a young boy’s voice say “What the hell is this?” Apparently this brilliant little future Rhodes Scholar thought Teena was some kind of weird, prehistoric bird, like a pterodactyl or something.

Who would blame Teena if she would have whirled her chair around, snarled like a man-eating pterodactyl and chased the kid full-throttle right out of the zoo?

And then there was the time I was rolling down a sidewalk in Washington D.C., just minding my own damn business. This kid, about age 9, walks past me. He was so busy staring back over his shoulder at me that he walked right into a stoplight pole and landed flat on his butt!

Ha! There was no need for me to flatten that kid. God did it for me.

I laughed hard. Don’t worry. The kid was fine. He sat on his butt, rubbing his nose and looking stunned. He learned a valuable lesson about cripples that day. I hope it had a profound and lasting impact on his impressionable young mind.

Cruz Roja

Cripples should always wear clean underwear. Because sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in a Cruz Roja situation.

A Cruz Roja situation is when you arrive somewhere in your wheelchair and find that the only means of access and/or egress involves going up or down stairs. But don’t worry. The proprietor has a solution. Goon power! If it’s a restaurant, for example, all employees are rounded up—the servers, the bartenders, the cooks in their aprons and mushroom-cloud hats—to carry you. But they soon learn that carrying a deadweight cripple up and down stairs is a lot like betting $50,000 that you can eat 30 hot dogs in 30 minutes. At first it seems like a snap. Easy money. But halfway through, your gut splitting from the strain, you realize you’ve made a horrible mistake. But there’s no turning back. You pray just to get through it alive.

And if you’re the deadweight cripple, you’re reciting the same fervent prayer. And even if you do survive, by the time they all finish grappling and pawing you, your shirt is wrapped around your head and your pants have fallen down to your ankles.

So always wear clean underwear.

Here’s why I call this a Cruz Roja situation:

The time was 1988. The place was the airport in Havana, Cuba. We were a delegation of American cripples invited to visit the island by an organization of Cuban cripples.

Our plane taxied up to the terminal. No jetway. A steep, narrow stairway was rolled up to the door. Two men boarded the plane. They wore white t-shirts with red crosses on them. The shirts said Cruz Roja. The men were in their fifties, beer-bellied.

“Are you here to carry us off the plane?” someone asked in Spanish. “Si!” said one of the Cruz Roja guys. “Soy muy fuerte. (I am very strong.)” He made a muscle. “Yo como mucho jamon! (I eat a lot of ham!)

There were five of us U.S. cripples for the Cruz Roja guys to carry. They looked us over, searching for their first victim. We all cowered back, each hoping they’d pick the other. They grabbed poor Drew. Now being a cripple swept up in a Cruz Roja situation is exponentially more terrifying when the complete strangers carrying you don’t even speak your language. Drew knew so little Spanish that the only phrase in his vocabulary he learned from me, the hopeless gringo. I told him when in doubt just say “Un momento, por favor.” At least that might buy him some time.

The Cruz Roja guys hoisted Drew up in a fireman’s carry. But Drew’s ass drooped, nearly scraping the ground. “Un momento, por favor,” chirped Drew. The Cruz Roja guys grunted and groaned. At the top of the narrow stairs, they stopped. Realizing they would never fit through three abreast, they discussed a change in strategy in Spanish.

“Un momento!” Drew said.

The Cruz Roja guys flung Drew up like a sandbag and sat him on the handrail of the steps. Here’s Drew, a guy with no trunk balance, one butt cheek perched on a three-inch wide cylinder, teetering and staring down at a sheer 15-foot drop.

“UN MOMENTO!!! UN FUCKING MOMENTO!!!!!!”

A Cruz Roja guy clinched Drew from behind with a great Heimlich hug. The other scooped up his legs. They carried Drew down single file.

Down on the tarmac, his pants half off, Drew wanted to kiss the sweet earth like the Pope. The Cruz Roja guys panted, in need of a good refreshing jolt from a defibrillator.

So please, crippled brethren, always wear clean underwear. I concede that the odds are not great that your underwear will remain clean. At some point during your harrowing Cruz Roja carry, you’re bound to soil them.

Cripple Sports I'd Pay to Watch

Now that the regular Olympics are over, the cripple Olympics will soon be officially underway in London.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Sorry. I know I should be shot by a cripple firing squad for saying that. Even though I spend way too much time watching regular sports, I have no interest in cripple sports. Maybe I’m just bitter because I can’t heave a steel ball five feet. But I think it’s that I don’t find cripple sports as entertaining as regular sports.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no sports bigot. There are some Olympic sports that would be way more entertaining to watch in the cripple Olympics than in the regular Olympics, but they’re not part of the cripple Olympics. Take for instance, wheelchair pole vaulting. All the wheelchair athletes I know are too wussy to try that one. But then they complain about how no one pays attention to the cripple Olympics. Well you can’t have it both ways! Those millions of people who love extreme sports like rocket-powered snowboarding would really get their rocks off watching wheelchair pole vaulting.

And how about wheelchair beach volleyball? Two things that don’t go together are wheelchairs and thick sand. Your wheels sink in and you’re stuck. You practically need a tow truck to get out. Wheelchair beach volleyballers would have almost zero mobility and range. So in order to keep the ball in the air, there would have to be 52 cripples on each side. That would be entertaining to watch, for a few minutes anyway.

As for the blind, there are a lot of Olympic sports I’d enjoy more watching them compete in rather than the sighted, like boxing or anything involving shooting a gun. But top on my list is fencing. Fencing is the prissiest goddam sport since croquette. It’s sword fighting without all the fun stuff. When I was a kid I loved sword fighting movies because people got stabbed in the heart and died. It was so cool. But no one dies in fencing so what’s the point? How do you win in fencing anyway? Do you win when you slice a hole in the other guy’s satin knickers? I’d much rather watch blind fencers have at it with real swords! Winner takes all!

There are some things at which certain cripples excel that ought to be cripple Olympic sports. The first that comes to mind is quadruple amputee scoot racing. Have you ever seen quadruple amputees scoot across the ground? My God it’s so impressive! Those people scoot harder and faster than a dog that just sat on a beehive! It’s one of those cripple compensation things, like how blind people have super sharp hearing. Quadruple amputees have highly-developed ass muscles. So let’s line up quadruple amputees from around the world on a track and let them scoot their tushies off. There should be a wide variety of scoot races, from sprint scoots to marathons.

And there’s the fallen quadriplegic commando crawl race. Every quad has to become proficient at this basic survival skill. You fall out of your wheelchair. You need to call 911 but the phone is at the other side of the house. So you flip over on your belly and commando crawl to the phone, propelling with your elbows. So again, quads line up on a track. When the starter’s pistol shoots, they’re dumped out of their wheelchairs. The first quad to commando crawl to the phone and call 911 wins the gold!

I’d pay good money to watch those cripple sports! Who wouldn’t?