“So, how does it feel, being in a wheelchair?”
“What?”
“How does it feel – you know – to be stuck in that thing, like, forever?”
The young reporter was nervous, and cleared his throat. His editor had sent him out to do a story of human interest, to find one of the handicapped students at his school and ask them stupid questions like, you know, how does it feel to be in a wheelchair?
That young reporter was me, by the way, working earnestly for my high school newspaper, Populi Verbum. I had taken Journalism I my junior year on a whim. I needed an elective to fill out my schedule, and I’d already taken Home Ec (twice) and Bachelor Living and the blow-off classes like that, and my girlfriend wanted to take Journalism, so I did, too.
It worked out pretty well, actually. Normally the J-I students stayed out of the way when the paper was being readied for a printing (usually every third week or so), while the Journalism II and III students did all the heavy lifting. We were supposed to watch, and learn. But they were short on upper level students that year, and many of the ones they had weren't real sharp. Neither was the editor, a big girl with glasses who thought a gripping opinion piece might focus on the pros and cons of students picking up after themselves in the cafeteria. They’d had a music column the year before, and a pretty good one, but the guy who wrote it had graduated. Since I was the only one in any of the classes who exhibited a broad knowledge of the current popular music and was willing to do it, I got the music column gig. Quite a big deal, I thought, though the J-II and III students looked down on it, because it wasn’t “real” reporting.
That is how I ended up out in the field asking dumb and offensive questions of my ‘physically challenged’ classmates. The editor thought that even though my music column was popular with the readers, I needed to get out and get some “real” reporting experience. Right. I ended up not completing that assignment, and figured I’d lose my column to boot, but fuck her, I wasn’t asking any more questions like that. Anyway, as it happened I got to keep the column – usually two or three short reviews of current LP releases – and no one ever asked me to do any “real” reporting again. Sweet.
The other nice thing about that class was I was the oldest student in it, and one of only two guys. The rest were 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls, a lot of them attractive 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls. Of course I couldn’t do anything about that, since my girlfriend was in there with me. She was a 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girl, too, and was friends with a lot of the other girls in that class, so they were usually hanging around her and/or my desk (it was a pretty informal atmosphere.) Truth is, I kind of ended up running that class.
One girl I really liked – as a friend now – was named Sally. She was one of my girlfriend’s friends, and sort of pretty. Yellow hair and a nice smile, in some ways just another slim teen-aged girl dressed in your standard late 1970s attire. What I really liked about Sally was she had an attitude. This 95-lb. girl would get right up in the face of anyone who was fucking with her. No fear. I liked that.
My girlfriend knew something was up right away, of course, and she got on me about it. But I swore this girl Sally was just a friend, which she was, and eventually that other died down. We had a lot of fun in that class. The teacher was only a few years older than us and pretty inexperienced, and she was happy to let us do what we wanted, as long as it didn’t get her in any trouble.
One time we were helping put together the paper for the press run. Back then, before there were computers in the classroom, we had to cut out copies of the stories run off on a mimeograph machine and stick them to these boards the actual size of the newspaper pages. The boards had wax lines on them, and we’d stick the stories to the wax, mixing and matching and moving things around the board until it all fit.
A few of us stayed late to finish, because the boards had to be at the printers by 11:00 that evening, or something like that. By the time we were done it was 8:00 p.m. Sally said she needed a ride, so she and my girlfriend and I got in my ’72 Skylark and I drove us home. I dropped my girlfriend off first because she lived on the other side of the West End, and her mom was already pissed off because we’d stayed as late as we had. I kissed her good night and then Sally slid into my front seat and I headed for her house, only a few streets over from mine.
It was the first time I’d had any kind of conversation with Sally outside of school, with no one else butting in. I asked her some things about her family – I thought I knew one of her brothers – but the whole situation was kind of awkward, and I don’t really know why. Sally was pretty talkative – and sarcastic-funny – in class, but now she was quiet and kind of timid, and I saw her in a different way than I had before. Without the up-front brashness to cover up, she was a pretty scared little girl; but rather than make me think less of her, it made me feel like protecting her and doing whatever I could to make everything all right for her.
And, of course, I couldn’t do that. I had a girlfriend who I was really happy with already, and there was no way I could pull off some kind of svengali/guardian angel thing with Sally platonically, that I knew of. I’d end up falling for her if she didn’t fall for me first, and either way that would have been nothing but trouble.
I don’t think Sally and I were ever as close again as we were that night after I dropped my girlfriend off, the night we sat in her driveway for 15 minutes and said maybe ten words between us, just sitting there in sweet silence. Nothing physical happened – like I said, we hardly even spoke – but I would not have wanted to be anywhere else on the planet that night for those fifteen minutes. I felt like time had slowed down and I had been given the gift of Vision, if only for a few minutes . . the vision to see, to know what everything about everything meant, to see every blip and planet and star on that starry night and know each one and understand the arrangement of it all, including the arrangement of me and this pretty, skinny blonde girl alone together in my car on this odd and random night. She was a friend of mine, but my feelings for her had been changed. I never even touched her, but after that night I thought of her often, though usually from afar. All through high school and after, long after. Way past the time when the girlfriend I valued so much then was long, long gone. When the night was clear and cold, especially, I would think of her. I would think I could smell the smoke from her cigarette, and see her golden hair blowing lightly in the breeze, and hear her next to me, being quiet. One thing she had told me once was that she really liked my hair, it was ‘cool’ . . . what it was, was pretty damn long, and ever since then I have worn my hair longer than I should have, all the way up to now. Because of what Sally said once, if you want to know the truth, in that wonderful, offhand way she said things.
++++++++++
I’d been sitting in the recliner in my living room staring at the ceiling for hours when my wife came in. It was a Saturday, and she’d been out shopping with her friends. We’d been married only a couple of years then, and did most things happily together, but both of us understood that sometimes it was good for her to go shopping or something with her friends, and for me to drink a few cold ones with mine or, as it happened, to sit alone for awhile in the living room, thinking about things from long ago.
That day I’d got a phone call from a guy I used to hang out with some back in the high school days. I hadn’t heard from him in years. His name was Nick, and he always talked like a ‘50s hipster/beatnik for some reason. It wasn’t an affectation as far as I could tell, it was just the way he talked. He reminded me of Sugar Bear – he sounded like him, and kind of looked like him, too – and in fact I used to call him ‘Sugar Bear’ sometimes, back in the old days. Anyway, Nick called to tell me that my old friend Sally had died the night before, they thought from an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 32 years old, twice divorced, and had two young children. And she was still pretty, Nick said. But he said all the old fiestiness had long gone out of her. She’d been through two rough marriages. One guy ended up doing a 10-year stretch in Huntsville, and the other (a guy I knew) was a fucking loser, and left her much worse for the wear. Some of this I had known, but not all of it.
Nick said for the last few years, after her second marriage broke up, Sally had just been kind of lost. She was always an experimenter when it came to controlled substances, a self-medicator. And one night she just medicated herself too much, I guess.
And upon hearing it I remember being sort of overwhelmed for a few minutes by that same feeling I’d had one night so many years before, the feeling of wanting to protect this sweet girl, and to make her smile and be happy. When that feeling passed, I was left kind of disoriented, split between the present and the time before, when things were breezy and easy and nothing mattered all that much, and I could look across a schoolroom desk at a skinny little blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl, and I could say something funny that made those eyes of hers light up, maybe made her laugh out loud. From down deep, where all the joy comes from.
And then I let her go, and I was fully back in the present. I pushed the footrest of the recliner in with my legs, and got up to go help my wife carry things in from her car. It was already fall, and when I walked outside I noticed the coolness in the air. It was going to start getting cold pretty soon, it wouldn’t be long now.
++++++++++
I still don’t know why I was put here, or who sent me, exactly. I’ve long ago forgot what my instructions were, if I ever knew. I feel just right, though; like I am becoming self-actualized or something. God loves me, and apparently Abraham Maslow does, too. As did this golden-haired girl, who was as tough as they come but really wasn’t. Who thought my hair was cool, who loved me like I loved her, with her mind, from afar. And who loves me still, I can literally feel it, from wherever she is out there.
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