Being Crippled for Fun and Profit

I was riding through Akron with a fellow from Goodwill Industries when curiosity overtook him and mashed my Sarcasm Button like a sugar-fueled twelve-year-old assaulting an arcade machine he didn’t have to buy. I kept my face solemn, saintly almost, and said, “I tape my razor to the floor and drag my face across it.”

“Really?!” he asked, eyes widening as his imagination tried to assemble that little domestic horror scene.

“Really,” I told him, with all the gravity of a man testifying before Congress.

And there I left him, stranded on the side of absurdity, blinking into the headlights.

I confess, exchanges like that have always given me a nearly indecent amount of joy. They make my inner alarms light up and sing. Few things delight me more than hearing somebody moan, “Well, I’ve only got two hands,” because my soul immediately rises like a hound that has caught a scent. I live for those moments. Even now, the memory of their awkward wriggle can put a smile on my face wide enough to alarm the neighbors.

Years ago, whenever people made a production out of my prosthesis or stared too hard at the way I managed some ordinary little task, I’d tell them my next trick was going to be juggling knives while drinking a glass of water. But once the foolery got ahold of me, I could never leave it alone. No, I had to climb the next rung of nonsense and announce that I was considering writing a book called How to Be Crippled for Fun and Profit.

A bestseller, obviously.

I told them it would include every disability joke I’d ever heard, a full anthology of questionable humor and bad timing. I’d even gathered contributions from the field. One of my favorites came from a one-legged plasterer who was standing on a chair in our living room, patching the ceiling like some lopsided Michelangelo. “How do you hang a man with a wooden leg?” he asked. “You don’t. You hang him with a rope.”

Rimshot.

Now, civilized people may well conclude that this sort of thing drifted a little south of graciousness, perhaps below the jugular in pursuit of a laugh. And they may not be wrong. But in those days it was also a way of deflecting the discomfort that floated into the room whenever other people didn’t know where to put their eyes, their questions, or themselves. Humor was quicker than explanation, and far more entertaining.

Besides, I was having entirely too much fun.

Every now and then, some bold little boy—usually powered by equal parts sugar, ignorance, and poor supervision—would march right up, grab my hook, and jerk it around like he was testing merchandise at the hardware store. “What happened to you?” he’d ask, with the bluntness only children and tax auditors can manage.

I would kneel down to eye level and tell him, “I don’t know. I went to bed one night just fine, but when I woke up the next morning my arm was gone and there was a quarter under my pillow. I think the Arm Fairy took it.”

Then I’d walk away and leave the parents standing there with their mouths open and their child suddenly unsure of the laws governing the universe.

It seemed fair.

Now let me say plainly: being disabled is not all balloons and brass bands. There’s a reason they don’t seat people like me next to the emergency exit on an airplane. Society, in its wisdom, prefers that the fellow responsible for opening the door in a flaming crisis possess the recommended number of parts.

And then there are the parking spaces.

Ah yes, the sacred blue-marked real estate of the republic.

It has long been my private suspicion—perhaps unjust, perhaps merely crotchety—that among the truly needy there occasionally roam a few counterfeit sufferers, people who have baptized ordinary laziness and called it disability. “I have a breathing problem,” they say.

Of course you do. You haven’t walked farther than the refrigerator since the Carter administration.

That may be harsh. It may even be Pharisaical. But a pet peeve is not required to pass a theological exam before climbing into the pulpit.

I’ve only used one of those parking spots myself exactly once.

While pastoring in Ohio, I got word that one of the dear women in our church was near death after a long and merciless struggle with cancer. I hurried to the hospital, circled the parking lot several times, and found nothing. Not a space. Not a sliver. Not even one of those suspiciously small places where only a bicycle or a morally flexible clown car could fit.

So I weighed the matter: the foolishness of appearances against the sacred urgency of a last goodbye.

I parked in a handicapped space near the emergency room entrance.

It was the first time I had ever done it.

It was also the last.

No sooner had I stepped out of the car than a security guard appeared from nowhere, as if summoned by a trumpet blast only he could hear. He approached with the righteous intensity of Barney Fife reaching for his one bullet.

“You can’t park there,” he snapped. “You gotta be handicapped.”

Now, seeing as the State of Ohio had already rendered its opinion on that matter in permanent and official terms, I asked him, “How handicapped do I have to be?”

Surely, I thought, this was one of those rare moments when mercy might overrule policy. Surely the evidence before him was not subtle. Stevie Wonder could’ve made the call from across the lot.

But no.

The man was unmoved. Granite would have shown more tenderness. He had been trained so well he’d circled right past judgment and arrived at doctrine.

So I moved the car.

And perhaps my irritation with the whole business—those who park where I can’t, those who seem suspiciously spry when entering the pharmacy, those who treat privilege like inheritance—perhaps all of it really is just bitterness in orthopedic shoes. Maybe my grumbling proves only that I remain a recovering Pharisee, ever eagle-eyed for the blemishes of others while maintaining a tasteful fog around my own.

Or, maybe, some people really are lazy, sneaky, system-gaming opportunists with a laminated tag and no shame at all.

There now. I’ve said it.

Why does it bother me so much? That is the question, isn’t it? Perhaps I simply need to step back from the ledge, breathe deeply, and let humanity continue its limping parade without appointing myself Marshal of the Parking Lot.

But ahhhhh, what’s the use, Hortense?

The true misery of airing a pet peeve—especially a petty pet peeve—is knowing full well that not one of the guilty parties is likely to read a single word of it. Not one. Their cheese-puff-dusted fingers are not expected to waddle in this direction. So I am left, as many prophets before me, preaching to the choir and hoping the saints at least will take notes.

So hear me, America.

Do not be that person.