Disability: is there a Rhyme & Reason?
Posted : 6/12/2005
By Geoffrey E. Matesky
You would be surprised at the explanations I’ve heard about how I ended up with my disability. I’ve actually encountered some people who insist I surely had done something irreprehensible in a past life, something so terrible that being disabled in this life was my due punishment. Now there’s a winner. What comfort that explanation provides me, not to mention the palpable divide it sets up between you, the able-bodied, pure-hearted, non-sinner of your past lives and me - the punishable, lowly sycophant of ages past serving my sentence. You are not safe, either. Your past life may be catching up with you as well in another few minutes.
Of course, sometimes there actually is a rhyme and reason for disability. The fact is, the majority of the time we were doing something pretty stupid. In most cases we could have done something to have prevented it.
In my case, I got into a vehicle driven by a buddy who was drunk. I did not put on a seat belt. That’s it, soup to nuts; I wasn’t once Attila the Hun or Emperor Nero, I just wasn’t thinking about the worst thing that could happen. I can and often catch myself making excuses – I was only a few miles from home, it was 1984 when there was no seat belt law, the bouncer should have never let a 19 year old in the bar, Chris, the driver was much older than I and didn’t even seem tipsy, and so on – but nothing rewinds time.
No, I didn’t try to jump over 20 trucks on a motocross bike, or dive off a fifty foot cliff and hit a rock, or even vault from a three story balcony to try and grab onto a rotunda chandelier and miss, like the guy in the bed across from me in the rehab hospital did. It was just another night of partying in the suburbs, nothing out of the ordinary. The dangers were artfully disguised among the Rolling Rocks on draft, the girls at the bar in leather skirts and big hair, the cheesy disco lights and the endless thumping beat of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” and “She’s a Maniac” from Flashdance.
Forget Attila.
I suppose I’ve done enough in this very life to deserve exactly what I got.
(This is an excerpt from "They Call Me Wheels", a memoir by Geoffrey E. Matesky, NOW AVAILABLE from iUniverse, Amazon.com, & Barnes & Noble (bn.com). If you are a bookseller and wish to obtain copies, please contact the sales department of my publisher, iUniverse.com for more details.)
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