If at Birth You Don't Succeed (14 page)

Just before this kamikaze confrontation came to a head, the phone rang. It was Tammy, my mom's friend from Pittsburgh. “Sorry, I'm running a little late,” my mom said, stepping out of the room. “There's kind of a situation here.”

This was our one shot.

As I edged toward the door, I noticed that my mother had laid all the money for her trip on the kitchen counter, unguarded: a king's ransom of $180 cash. I was past the point of no return. I
had
to make it to New York City now because after what I was about to do, I would never be allowed back in my own house.

I took three twenties and put them in my pocket. “Let's go,” I said to Dave. I guess my thought process was that if you dig a hole deep enough, eventually you'll get to China or, preferably, Cindy Crawford.

Under the cover of broad daylight, we headed down my street.

“Whatchya doin'?” asked my neighbor, watering his lawn.

Dave grinned. “Going to New York City to meet—”

“Nothing!” I interjected. As the old saying goes: when in denial, deny everything.

The confused looks from my neighbors might have fazed other explorers, but we happily headed down the block, thinking we were home free.

“I can't believe we actually did it!” I exclaimed. “We're on an adventure that we'll remember for the rest of our lives!”

“We'll probably need to hide in the bushes at some point!” Dave eagerly anticipated.

And for four blocks, Dave and I talked about anything and everything Cindy Crawford. It felt like an eternity of contentment. We'd spent a lifetime looking for meaning and finally, at the ripe age of ten, we were done searching. It didn't matter how far we had to walk because we could see the finish line. Sure, there were miles to travel by foot in some undisclosed direction, and probably a urine-soaked bus ride and an aimless search through a city of millions of people ahead of us, but after that there would be a beautiful encounter with a beautiful woman (who may or may not actually reside in that city). Nothing could stop us.

And then I saw it: the maroon minivan of motherly justice roaring around the corner to collect us and sweep up the fragments of our broken dreams. I looked at Dave, both of us knowing in our hearts that we didn't have much of a chance. Then I suggested that Dave do something we were both unaccustomed to.

“RUN!” I shouted.

I pushed my wheelchair into full throttle, miming a running motion with my one free arm, hoping it would make a difference. It didn't. I knew that the 1988 Dodge Caravan was a far superior vehicle to my electric wheelchair, but I turned my speedometer all the way up to the little cartoon rabbit anyway. Dave frantically chased after me, recklessly pushing my manual chair in front of him. With my mother fast approaching, he shouted, “You gotta turn your chair to Rabbit!”

“It is to Rabbit!”

“Shit!” Dave screamed.

Then, our fatal mistake: the pillow atop Dave's chair flew off and crashed to the ground, a casualty of the chaos.

“Leave it!” I called.

“BUT I WANNA BE COMFORTABLE,” Dave pleaded, returning to pick it up and then running as fast as he could. But the damage had already been done.

My mom sputtered up beside us, rolling down her window. “Get. In. The. Car,” she demanded, pulling over.

“Never,” Dave taunted, but his audacity faded quickly in the face of my mother's fury. Though Dave's heritage had allowed him to see the humor in everything, we knew that resisting arrest at this point would only make things worse. Ignoring a few defiant kicks and cries to let me go, she stuffed me into the backseat.

The three-minute car ride home felt like the start of a life sentence with the weight of my mother's fuming silence bearing down on our already heavy hearts. Dave and I barely said a word to each other except when I whispered to him, “Do you think we'd get really hurt if we rolled out of the van?”

As we both contemplated our punishments, we realized that our future for the next several decades looked pretty bleak. We knew with every ounce of our ten-year-old bodies that love was not a crime. Stealing sixty dollars from your mother was, however, and unfortunately, I had done that as well. I was grounded for two weeks and was not allowed to socialize with Dave for a month. Lucky for me, we were poor and my mother had nothing, apart from hope, that she could take away from me. Dave's punishment was far worse: three weeks with absolutely no Super Nintendo.
2

At school, I tried to approach Dave about a second attempt at busting out of fourth grade, but the lack of Donkey Kong had shaken him to the core. This was a broken man who realized that, when it came down to it, video games were more important than women.

To me though, Cindy Crawford was more than a woman. The flame I held for her had less to do with the countless erections she inspired, and more to do with the promise of freedom. Once I realized that Dave had fully abandoned the cause, I started looking for other ten-year-olds who'd be willing to join me on a pilgrimage for true love. In my most desperate hour, I showed up to my classmate Charlie Bennett's house with a plastic bag full of Kix cereal from the bulk food aisle of the grocery store. I didn't have much incentive for him, so I just cut to the chase.

“Wanna go to New York City?” I asked.

“When?” he said.

“Now.”

He stayed on his front step, pretending to think about it. “I don't, uh, think I'm gonna be able to do that. I have cello practice at five.”

I hung my head and clung to my sack of cereal as I rolled back down the sidewalk to my house. Of course Charlie Bennett couldn't go. He was already a child prodigy and had a bright future that he couldn't just throw away chasing after supermodels. And Dave had had a lot to lose too. He had more friends than I did and a lively Little League career. I just had Cindy.

At ten years old, the only thing I could do independently was dream. I couldn't get dressed or go to the bathroom without the assistance of an adult. I had aides at school and parents at home to help me cope with, but also to remind me of, my limitations. Running away to meet Cindy Crawford was my chance to do something extraordinary at a time in my life when most of the things that set me apart from my peers were subordinary; I was only special for the things I lacked in comparison to other kids.

They say that if you shoot for the moon and fail, you'll still land among the stars. But at the time, it sure seemed to me that if you asked any of the adults around me, their outlook on my future was too hazy to see any stars at all. I had told my physical therapist that I wanted to walk someday and she said that that
probably
wouldn't be possible, why don't we focus on buttons for now? I said that I wanted to live on my own, and they said, “Maybe, someday … but there's also this thing called a group home that might work better for you.” Running away to New York City was my chance to prove to myself that I was going somewhere.

For many years after Dave and I had run away, I imagined what life would have been like if we'd actually made it to Cindy Crawford's doorstep. I pictured us rolling up to a thick iron gate adorned with the gold-plated initials “C.C.” We'd ring the buzzer and after explaining the situation to a butler over an intercom, the gates would fling open. Our hearts pounding, we'd head up the long driveway and make our way past the trees, barely stopping to notice the moat or the pink flamingos, and finally, we'd see it—Cindy Crawford's mansion, nestled deep in the forests of Manhattan.

Then, from around the side of the house, a beautiful woman in a familiar red one-piece bathing suit would emerge. She'd just gone for a dip in the pool and before she could notify the authorities, or worse, our mothers, she'd say, “You two must be exhausted. You wanna come in and have some lunch?”

Dave, having held it in since we left Buffalo, would ask where the bathroom was and leave Cindy and me alone at the dining-room table. We'd sit there, locking gazes, and she'd put her hand on mine knowingly and whisper, “I know what this is about. You can touch my boobs for ten seconds. Just don't tell Dave.” And as I blew bubbles in my chocolate milk to charm the woman I loved, I'd feel the type of satisfaction you only get from realizing a dream that everyone else told you was too big.

 

CHAPTER 8

I'll Have a Virgin Zachary

“I think that's something you should put in your bio: ‘My penis works! I'm not a vegetable and my penis is great!'” Brad called out from the backseat of our ride, a white Chevy Suburban we'd affectionately dubbed “Betty” after our favorite Golden Girl.

“That should be your two-minute speed-dating pitch,” Josh added from behind the wheel. We were a few weeks into our road trip of a lifetime, but to my friends Josh and Aaron and my brother Brad,
Riding Shotgun
was more than just an Internet-fueled travel show—it was an opportunity to finally get me laid. All attempts to find me a lady on the trip so far had failed, and Josh and Aaron, never having had trouble with women themselves, struggled to understand why. Getting dating advice from them was like living in a village without running water and receiving a cheerfully delivered chocolate fountain. They wanted to help but didn't know how. Josh and Aaron grappled with the idea that for some people, the casual hookup was as elusive as an open bar at a Mormon wedding.

“I imagine that if there was someone in a wheelchair, there would be a sort of desexualization of that person,” Josh theorized.

Aaron jumped in, recounting an unsettling experience. “When we were filming in New Orleans and I was riding around in your chair at that parade, I came up to these two or three girls, and they looked at me and were like, ‘Hey, how's it goin'?' and I was like, ‘Heeey, how's it goin'?' and they were like, ‘Awwwww!' and then they walked off and I was like, ‘Wait, what the…?'”

The “Hey, how's it going?” method had been foolproof for Aaron in the past, so it troubled him that the same words that had led to so many romantic encounters before could be rendered powerless simply because he was on wheels. He was the same person, with the same chiseled features, the same confidence, and the same pectoral muscles bursting out of his shirt. The only real difference was that he had stolen his friend's wheelchair for a few minutes and now girls saw him not as a Lothario but as a cripple.

“It really did put things into perspective, though, to sit in that chair. I was surprised how tough it is to be taken … not seriously, but to be taken … equally,” he reflected. I thought that this kind of infantilizing dismissal, more than anything, was the reason that I was still a virgin at the age of twenty-seven.

No matter how old I get, there never seems to be a shortage of strangers who invite themselves to pat me on the head and have no qualms telling me to sit up straight in my wheelchair and buckle the seat belt. It's like they think I'm just a tall, foulmouthed eight-year-old with a beard. The idea of me being an adult, let alone a sexual being, never occurs to them. In nearly every interaction with someone new, my first job is to undo all the misconceptions they have about people with disabilities. Making people see not just a person but an individual—instead of a wheelchair with a boy in it—is a tall order. I'd not been able to make the leap from pity to passion with women in the real world thus far, despite having received several marriage proposals online.

While my lack of sexual experience weighed on me heavily, it wasn't the great white whale my friends had made it out to be. I knew that casual sex was not something that would be easy for me because my body barely fit into my own life and it was going to take a supreme amount of understanding and patience for another person to navigate through my endless list of physical quirks. The random spasms, flailing limbs, and limited mobility were not things that could be easily incorporated into the heat of passion during a one-night stand. I was a guy who, while disrobing, would have to launch into a litany of caveats longer than the list of side effects for an erectile dysfunction drug. Even making out would have to start with a debriefing.

“Is there a way that I could get closer to you? Or if you could, just scootch up beside my wheelchair—and try not to hit the joystick because I'm planning on making a spontaneous move to kiss you,” I imagined myself saying.

This is not an easy conversation to have drunkenly while “Gangnam Style” is blaring in the background. Who would possibly pick me when there were other hookup options that wouldn't potentially lead to driving a wheelchair into a wall with your ass? The way I saw it, my sexual awakening was only gonna happen if love was part of the package.

The problem I'd found with being a hopeless romantic is that in holding out for romance, I'd only been left with hopelessness. So as we continued across the highways of North America and no suitable soul mates emerged, my friends shifted their focus from the search for true love to the search for any womanish person who would have sex with me.

Josh and Aaron were optimistic that I possessed
something
that could overcome a culture of sexual dismissal toward the disabled.

“… If women
knew
of you, you could sort of parlay your fame…”

Josh's suggestion might have seemed shallow on the surface, but it
was
more likely that I would be able to become romantically involved with somebody who knew my work, and through that had gotten to know me as a person and not just a stereotype. I'd gone through most of my life armed with only a sense of humor, a thoughtful personality, and a parking placard. Now I also had an adoring fan base of people who, when shown carefully edited clips of me, might be able to see me as datable. After years of fumbling through an empty romantic Rolodex, I finally had options. I just didn't know it.