I’m Special (3 page)

Ironically, my father—the one who always held back from me when I was younger—is now my best friend. We go on vacations together. We hold hands when we walk down the street. In fact, I call him more than he calls me. So the moral of the parenting story seems to be that if you create a distance with your child, they'll grow up wanting your approval and become enamored with you. However, if you do everything for them and love them more than anyone else possibly could, they're going to ignore your phone calls. WTF?

Shortly before my parents announced that they were getting divorced, they combined forces one last time to drop a bombshell on me.

“Ryan, you need to have surgery. Major surgery.”

“What do you mean?” I screamed at them. “Am I going to die?”

“No, honey,” my mom said. “You aren't going to die.”

“Well, Karen, it is an intense operation . . .”

“Dennis, stop!” My mom turned to me. “You need to have an Achilles tendon–lengthening surgery.”

“And a femoral derotational osteotomy.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you're going to have to be in a wheelchair for three months, sweetie.”

“Three months in a wheelchair? I can't!”

“Honey, you have no choice,” my mom said. “I'm sorry.”

“Oh, also kiddo, you're going to have to be in a full-body cast for two weeks,” my father said.

Oh my God. This is the secret life of the mildly disabled child. We play in the sandbox, we have friends at school, and then we tell everyone, “BRB. Gotta go be in a full-body cast for a bit. Have a great summer!” I hated it. When you're older, you actively look for ways to stand out. If I got into a body cast today for two weeks, I would just laugh, take ten thousand pictures of it on Instagram, and watch the “likes” rack up. But when you're seven years old, the differences are your undoing. We're conditioned to ignore the things that make us ourselves and want nothing more than to disappear into a sea of bland and trendy clothing labels.

My time in a full-body cast was spent in my bedroom with the blinds drawn and channeling Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
, but I still had to go back to school in a wheelchair. Luckily, my parents had spent every last dime of their money on enrolling me in a small Episcopalian school where the average class size was fifteen, just so I could have closer relationships with my peers and minimize the risk of dealing with assholes. I went to St. Paul's in Ventura, California, from preschool to eighth grade and grew up with my classmates. We became a tight dysfunctional family, and even though we were occasionally rude to one another, no one made fun of me for my disability. Well, except this one time a girl ridiculed me for drooling on her during art class, but her own sister had cerebral palsy, so her taunts must've been coming from a place of dark insecurity, right?

Still, I dreaded going back to school in a wheelchair. I had no problem with being the special retarded son at home, but at St. Paul's, I wanted to be like everybody else. I had spent so much of my time making sure that my life with cerebral palsy didn't bleed into my life at school. Miraculously it worked! If I made people laugh, I could distract them from the fact that I was wearing leg braces and ran like Forrest Gump. But after school, I was confronted with the reality of my body's limitations. Physical therapy, endless doctor appointments, painful stretches when I got home—these were things I wanted to keep hidden from my friends, because once they knew all of the weird daily routines I had to go through, I was worried they would actually pity me. Pity doesn't buy friendship. Pity gets you uninvited to every birthday party past the fifth grade.

On the first day of school, I came squeaking up the wheelchair ramp the school had installed just for me and realized pretty quickly that most seven-year-olds are obsessed with things they don't understand. They treated my wheelchair like it was a foreign spaceship and fought over who got to push me to recess. When we got to the playground, they spun me around in circles and popped wheelies. I was delighted by all the attention because it meant my friends still liked me! They really, really liked me! When I finally got out of the wheelchair, a classmate assumed the role of a physical therapist and helped me relearn how to walk on the playground. The goal was to be able to reach the wall at the end of the playground without using my walker, and I actually did it! I made it to the wall, and everyone in my class—all fifteen of them—started clapping and cheering for me. Isn't that such a touching scene? Being nice as a kid is no easy feat. Their brains haven't fully developed yet, so they say all kinds of fucked-up shit to you like, “Why are you fat? Why is your face weird? Why are you so annoying?” My classmates at St. Paul's deserve medals for not behaving like little monsters toward me.

For high school, I went to a brand-new magnet school called Foothill Tech that might as well have been called Special Snowflake High. It was a place specifically designed for nerds and people with lots of feelings. The administration banned sports, choosing instead to highlight academic achievements, which meant that instead of going to a pep rally to root for an upcoming sports game, we had events called Renaissance Rallies where we gave awards to people on the honor roll. The students were smart. Sure, most of them had severe cystic acne, were socially inept, and suffered from involuntary erections during AP Calculus, but they were popular misfits—the antibully, if you will. When I started high school, I was a closeted gay guy with a limp who wore different-colored pairs of shoes. Anywhere else, I would've had a bull's-eye attached to my forehead, but at Foothill Tech I was just another freak. In fact, I was better than a freak. I was cool. No one was going to fuck with me. In the history of my four years at Foothill Tech, there was only one recorded fight on campus, and it was over a zip disc.

Strangely enough, the teachers at my high school were often weirder than the students. My English teacher was a female bodybuilder from South Africa who wore a
Star Trek
uniform to school and insisted that we all call her Captain Peterson. No one even thought to question her bizarre request, because at Foothill Tech, it was understood that everyone got to be an individual. When I came out of the closet my senior year of high school, they practically threw me a Welcome Homo party. Not only did I have a bunch of aspiring fag hags lining up to have me as their gay best friend, I also became more popular with the teachers. A few months after I came out, my teacher, Ms. Walker, who couldn't have been older than twenty-five, stopped me as I was leaving her class to ask me some, uh, unprofessional advice.

“Hey, Ryan,” she called out. “Can you stay behind for a sec?”

“Sure,” I mouthed back, assuming that I was getting in trouble for something.

When all my classmates had cleared out of the room, Ms. Walker sat on top of her desk and said to me, “Okay, so you're gay, right?”

“Um, yes . . .”

“Great! So my ex-boyfriend left me a voice mail—I haven't spoken to him in
years
, mind you—and I was wondering if you could listen to it and tell me what you think.”

“Think about what, Ms. Walker?”

“Him getting into contact with me again!”

“Is this, like, for extra credit?”

“No, silly! I just would like your input, you know, as a gay guy.”

“Okay . . .”

She played me the voice mail, and it sounded super vague and noncommittal. After it was over, she looked at me excitedly, waiting for my answer.

“I don't know, uh . . .”

“Doesn't it sound like he wants to get back together?”

It did not sound like that. “Yes. Definitely.”

“That's what I thought!” Ms. Walker rolled her eyes and let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks, babe. You're the best. You can go to your next class now.”

Throughout the year, Ms. Walker acted like my BFF, gossiping with me after class and gifting me with mix CDs, one of which included a photo of her face on the cover. When I started falling behind in her class, I lied and told her I was going through a terrible breakup.

“FUCK HIM!” she screamed. “He's making a mistake. I swear, Ryan, if you weren't gay, I would be so in love with you.”

Ms. Walker illustrates a key difference between my generation and my parents. If you came out of the closet in the 1970s, you'd end up a social pariah, but in the 2000s you have teachers celebrating the fact that you love the D. A school like Foothill Tech signaled an important shift in teaching styles and the accepted social order for the Millennial generation. Gone were the days of being popular just because you played sports and had a six-pack or put out. Now your popularity is measured by how special and weird you are.

Before Foothill Tech, my disability would try to get me to acknowledge it and I'd be like, “What? Um, I don't know you. Bye!” By the time I was a sophomore, however, I was making small steps to embrace my differences. As part of a graduation requirement, Foothill Tech made each of its students complete seventy-five hours of community service. Most kids volunteered to spread the word of Jesus Christ to vulnerable In-N-Out Burger customers everywhere, but I decided to be bold and work with United Cerebral Palsy of Los Angeles. My responsibilities there would include hanging out at disabled kids' houses and chaperoning the occasional field trip. It sounded so chill and relaxed. While all my friends were busy cleaning up dead whale parts on the beach for community service, I would be getting credit just to hang out with my mongoloid people! (I can say mongoloid because I am one, right? That's usually how it works, isn't it—people reclaiming the power of the offensive word and making it theirs? Babe?)

But I quickly realized that I might have made a mistake in my quest to become the gay Mother Teresa. My first task involved taking twenty kids with cerebral palsy to the harbor, and it turned out to be a complete fucking disaster. Even though I was with licensed physical therapists who were helping me manage the kids, I still had to watch them like a hawk, because the second I turned my back, they'd be ready to jump off the goddamn pier to go for a swim. The whole day consisted of me frantically running around and catching them moments before they did something that could've killed them. It felt like the blind leading the blind or, in this case, the less retarded leading the more retarded.

A week later, I was driven to a boy's house in Thousand Oaks, where I was told to simply spend time with him and play video games. “Perfect,” I thought. “I'm great at hanging out!” When I got to the house, his mother, who seemed like a very nice Valley girl-woman, led me to his bedroom.

“Dustin,” she squealed, “your friend is here to play with you.”

Dustin didn't even bother to turn around and say hello to me, although who could blame him? There's something especially humiliating about having to get a volunteer to hang out with you. Undeterred, I sat down next to him on the floor and asked what he was playing.

“
Twisted Metal 2,
” he responded blankly. His speech was a little slow and slurred in a way that I later found to be similar to someone who was high on heroin.

I watched Dustin destroy cars in a field for half an hour until he finally paused the game and acknowledged my existence.

“Why is your hair blue?” he asked.

It was actually a really good question. Why
was
my hair blue? Oh, right—because when I met Dustin I was still in the closet and the only way I could express my sexuality was by dyeing my hair unfortunate colors. I didn't know that at the time, though, so I just explained to him that I did it because it seemed fun.

“Oh,” he said. “Are you going through puberty?”

“Um, I guess.” My neck stiffened up. “I, uh, kind of already went through that.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“What do you guys do for fun?”

“Just, you know, normal stuff. Go to the movies and hang out at each other's houses. Nothing too crazy.”

“Oh.”

A look of embarrassment spread across Dustin's face that let me know just how different my definition of “normal” was from his.

“What do you do for fun?” I asked him, already knowing the answer.

“Play video games.”

“What else?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “Nothing.”

Dustin then resumed play on his video game and ignored me for the rest of our playdate. After I left his house, I never worked with UCPLA again. Spending time with other kids who had CP was supposed to give me a sense of belonging, but in the end it just made me feel even more alienated. The people I met had trouble talking, which prevented us from having any kind of meaningful dialogue, so most of the time I would just sit there and occasionally help them accomplish menial everyday tasks or make sure they didn't electrocute themselves. On one hand, I wanted to help these disabled kids and offer them my friendship, but on the other, I selfishly wanted them to be
my
friend and offer
me
support. When they had trouble doing that, I felt let down and annoyed, which, in turn, made me feel like a self-serving dick. Who was I to get mad at some kid for not being able to hold a conversation with me because he had severe brain damage?