friend. So you don’t notice one go away. Or five who split. But, when it started to get to be ten and twenty, I paid a little attention. / /T „ I t happens every time, every X time” says Sandy Ford, a nurse who does research at Hennepin County Medical Center. “ Like we’ve got a guy was injured this week. And he’s 32 and he has this cute little fiancee that’s there holding his hand, that’s there crying. Weeping, weeping. All this stuff. And unless he has an extremely good recovery she isnot gonna hang in there. “And when I see high school kids come in. The first three weeks there are kids everywhere. I mean, they’re flockin’ in here and everyone is suddenly John’s best buddy. I mean, everyone has known him since he was a baby. Everyone is a good friend. And all you gotta do is sit back and watch. If, outside of his family, if he winds up with two people that will stick with him for six months—and some people will stay six months. But at a year, if you have one person who stayed with you, you’re pretty lucky.” But, Sandy offered this odd paradox that, for some people, if their friends didn’t leave, they wouldn’t have done as well. Weird, huh? The explanation for people leaving is always the same: “They probably don’t know how to handle it.” It’s a cliche that everybody uses. I’ve literally heard that line dozens of times. My friend Stevie, the writer, said having your friends leave you happens to everybody. I want to say, pure and simple—not all at once or the same way as it happens to people who have been hurt or handicapped, it don’t. The injury caused me to really depend on my friends. And everybody’s all the time telling me what’s happening with me. Like, Stevie’s got this thing that it ’s very hip to turn the obvious on its ear. “They didn’t leave,” he said. “You left.” He really said that. Later, when I went back to the University of Minnesota and Dr. Professor George Shapiro kept pushing this book called The Pragmatics of Human Communication, that I started to groove with. It quotes William James, who everybody calls the father of psychology. James talks about this thing called “ disconfirmation.” He wrote No more fiendish punishment could be devised, even were such a thing physically possible, then that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. Having all those people go away and ignore you is fiendish punishment. Some people have walked by me on the street and pretended they don’t recognize me. Like, you need interaction with other people. Probably the worst of them were the “old friends” who acted like everything was OK and we’d “work it out.” And still split. It all caused me to look at love and trust real different. Let’s not turn this into some kind of junk about the handicapped. People left for all kinds of different reasons. Because they “ c o u ld n ’ t handle” pain or even unpleasantness, because I wasn’t the harddrinking know-where-the-party-is-at kind of “ fun” guy any more, because I didn’t have the radio show....You pick it. But, they did leave. All this time Kim and I are still seeing Jeremy Delphi at the dogooder agency. Dummy that I am, I kept thinking that part of The Problem with us had to do with communication. I think, even now, that communication in its various forms is what makes people human. There’s all this book learning that says that it actually makes up reality. Far out, huh? The Pragmatics says communication’s got to do with basic survival. That’s what I told Jeremy. But he, like most people, still thinks that there’s this thing called “ reality” that’s what’s going on and communication is just how we talk about it. Most people think that communication is only a step above how to write a business letter or run your modem or some damn thing. Jeremy didn’t see communication as much of a relationship problem, either. That wasn’t the real problem, he explained to me, in that therapist’s way, without ever exactly using the words. The real problem was that I was getting old. (“Thank you for sharing that.” ) I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. —Little [T|ommy [S]teams Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Everybody’s got their junk to say about what’s going on with me. Nobody wants to ask me...or even seems to be able to see me. Everybody’s all the time “ dealing with” some idea of reality: “ It’s not that bad.” People want stuff nice, and getting better. Nothing painful, or unpleasant, or negative! There are forty times more head injured individuals than persons with muscular dystrophy. Much later I came across a book ca lled Transitions, by th is guy William Bridges, who points out the American fast food way of “ dealing with” experiences. You know, get it over, especially painful stuff. Billy Bridges writes, To deny it [pain, loss, confusion, etc.] is to lose the opportunity it provides for an expanded sense of reality and a deepened sense of purpose. And to be overwhelmed by i t is just as unfortunate, for one then has no way to integrate the experience with the rest of one’s life. I just thought I was losing everything and was in a lot of pain. I didn’t understand it was an “opportunity.” I suppose, like Mrs. Nietzsche’s little boy Freddie says, anything that don’t kill you makes you stronger. eremy kept identifying different things as “The Problem.” It was because I was out of work. “ People get a lot of their good feelings about themselves from their jobs,” he told me. So jobs didn’t have jackshit to do with paying the rent and buying food, they were about “good feelings.” Later, he sent me to Vocational Services, an arm of his own agency. Talk about the three stooges. They give you all these tests to finger out what you should be. Or at least what you want to be. Why the hell didn’t they just ask me, it would have saved a lot of time. They subtly asked, “True or false, ‘ I would like the work of a prissy doily embroiderer.’ ” Honest to God, they seem to see those tests as closer to Moses’ Stone tablets than they are to tea leaves. But, If they run the tests then they’re covered. “See? It says right here....” They gotta have something to demonstrate that they’re doing something. They assigned me to this woman who only got me one interview in the months and months that I worked with them —and that was for an internship at a TV station I’d already worked at, for God’s sake. Like I said, she was less than responsive. MoJo says i t ’s catch twenty-two if you question your therapist, do-gooder types. You know, it you ever question them then what’s wrong with you. They are like a protected priesthood. They’re beyond being always right— they can’t be questioned. They’re “ trained professionals” and they’re “only trying to help you.” I’d love to tell you that somehow the do-gooder agencies were the exceptions to the rule—but they ain’t. The Social Security people and the State services—with a couple of real notable exceptions—and all the official. and unofficial do-gooders that I ran into are unbelievable. Handicapped people know this. There’s what I used to call wheelchair to wheelchair communication. You can say it to them with a look. Or a part of a sentence. But things are set up so nobody else ever hears about it. Anyway, something told me to go back to the U. I figured it would be like a gym for my brain. There, I came from not being able to count change to getting my M.A. I suppose it was that and the computer labs at the U. Remember Marshall McLuhan saying that computers were extensions of the brain and central nervous system? If you're one of those people who want an explanation for how I got better, that’s my guess. Computers and the university. The university is as cold, hostile, and unfriendly as everyone ever said it is. It was a fight, let me tell you. Crawling up a cliff with my fingernails. But, two professors saved my ass. Dr. Professor Shapiro and Professor Christopher Robin took me under their wings and ran interference for me. So I went from not being able to count change to finishing a master’s degree. Coming from where I was that’s a big deal. And the Office for Students with Disabilities got me the phone number of this guy, Earl, who was willing to work on computers with beginners. I started calling him the Dukkha Earl. (Buddha said, “ Life is dukkha.”) The Dukkha Earl also jumped in way above the call. Took my phone calls all the time. At work. Late at night. The guy’s pure gold. When he met me I couldn’t even figure out how to turn it on. I’d call him up and he’d tell me how to get it rocking. I believe that the computer and the Dukkha Earl are a couple of the main reasons why I’m not in a nursing home. That and Dr. Professor Shapiro and Professor Christopher Robin. If I would have done what those who “ know best” said, I would have had a bed in a nursing home. Let’s face it, if you’re handicapped in America you’re in the toilet without a paddle. It don’t have to be that way, but that’s the way it is. That’s the way we set it up. But, I could be mistaken. I’m brain-damaged, ya know. This is an excerpt from a larger article. Some of the names have been changed, “to protect the guilty,” says the writer. Billy Golfus has spent the last five years recovering from a serious motor scooter accident. He is brain-damaged and has some physical disability. In the spring of 1989 he earned his master’s degree in Speech—Communication and now can talk to anybody. Billy has produced a number of award-winning radio documentaries. His master thesis, DAP CRAP, is an example of the nude journalism. He is currently working on an article about organizations and community with Dr. Professor George Shapiro and Professor Christopher Robin. Whenever the mood moods him he publishes Computer Nerd News. Stuart Mead is a frequent contributor to the CSQ. He will be showing paintings with Dean Luckers’ sculpture at the Rifle Sport Gallery starting Nov. 19th. Jezac is a typesetting/design firm in Minneapolis that has been with the Minneapolis edition of CSQsince its introduction in the spring of 1988. Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 29
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