The Best of Me(11)
I was cooking spaghetti and ketchup in my electric skillet one night when I heard the pay phone ring outside my room. It was Peg, calling to say she had rolled away from home.
“Good for you,” I said. “This is going to be the best thing you’ve ever done.” When I learned she was calling from the San Francisco airport, I modified my statement, saying, “I don’t know about this, Peg. Won’t your parents be worried about you? What about your education?”
What followed was a lesson that college bears no resemblance to civilian life. Leaving the building involved carrying Peg up and down five flights of stairs before returning for her wheelchair. The landlord charged me a double rate for having a guest in my room, and I lost my job when Peg fell against the bathtub, taking five stitches in her head. This was a big city where people held on to their fried chicken. Nobody cared that we were a young married couple searching for a better life and not even the buses would stop to pick us up. Fed up, Veronica and I decided to head north to pick apples. I told Peg, hoping she might accept the news and return home, but she held fast. Armed with a telephone directory, she placed collect calls to government agencies whose workers held the line when she dropped the phone or took twenty minutes to locate a pen. Volunteers wheeled her to meetings in cluttered ground-floor offices where paraplegics raised their fists in salute to her determination and tenacity. She wound up living alone in a brick apartment building somewhere in Berkeley. An attendant visited every twelve hours to prepare her meals and help her onto the toilet. If a spasm sent her onto the floor, she lay there patiently until help arrived to dress her wounds. When her parents called, she either hung up or cursed them, depending upon her mood. Peg’s greatest dream was to live far from her parents and enjoy a satisfying sexual encounter. She sent a postcard detailing the event. There had been three wheelchairs parked around her waterbed, the third belonging to a bisexual paraplegic whose job it was to shift the lovers into position. Within a year her health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer be left alone for twelve-hour stretches. We both wound up crawling back to our parents but continued to keep in touch, her letters progressively harder to read. The last I heard from her was in 1979, shortly before she died. Peg had undergone a religious transformation and was in the process of writing her memoirs, hoping to have them published by the same Christian press that had scored a recent hit with Joni!, a book detailing the life of a young quadriplegic who painted woodland creatures by holding the brush between her teeth. She sent me a three-page chapter regarding our hitchhiking trip to North Carolina. “God bless all those wonderful people who helped us along the way!” she wrote. “Each and every day I thank the Lord for their love and kindness.”
I wrote back saying that if she remembered correctly, we’d made fun of those people. “We lied to them and mocked them behind their backs, and now you want them blessed? What’s happened to you?”
Looking back, I think I can guess what might have happened to her. Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.
Girl Crazy
Producers of the ABC sitcom Ellen are discussing plans to have the main character disclose that she is a lesbian.
—New York Times, September 16, 1996
Dear ABC:
Why is it that Ellen can be a lesbian but a six-year-old boy from North Carolina can’t kiss a little girl without being suspended for sexual harassment? According to you and Ellen, things would have been just fine had he kissed a boy! Just when I think I know what’s going on in the world, you switch a show from one time slot to another and then change the characters into homosexuals, so nobody can recognize them anymore. You’re playing games with our minds, and I, for one, don’t like it. Mess with Regis and Kathie Lee, and you’ll be picking your front teeth out from between my bloody knuckles!
Barb Diesel
High Point, N.C.
Dear ABC:
Kudos for allowing Ellen to reflect the rich cultural diversity of the real America, a place where differences are celebrated and frank discussions of sexuality are as common as evening prayer. Don’t be fooled or intimidated by the right wing’s proposed boycotts. For every rabid fundamentalist, there are ten free-thinking progressives whose viewing habits cannot be altered by fear and hatred. I congratulate you for breaking new ground and feel certain your courageous decision will reward us all. One question, though: How soon after she comes out will Ellen start getting it on with other women? There must be all kinds of college-age girls ready to shed their sweaters and hop into the sack with the stacked and lovely Miss DeGeneres. Stick with the hot stuff, and you’ve got yourself a loyal viewer.
Dimitrius Sappho New York City Dear ABC:
Stop the cameras, because I’ve got a little news flash for you: Not all lesbians own bookstores and drink coffee. As a practicing homosexual for the past eighteen years, I am sick to death of your stereotyping. There are hundreds of thousands of us out here who have never read a book, touched a cash register, or had a sip of coffee, either hot or iced. Caffeine makes me jumpy, and I prefer drinking Hawaiian Punch with just a whisper of vodka. Does that make me a freak? In your attempt to “package” Ellen, you hurt those of us who live outside the little cardboard boxes in which you confine your minority characters. Undoubtedly your network is run by Japanese who think they can squeeze out a few extra yen by stirring up a little controversy. Well, squeeze away, Emperor Mitsubishi. You ain’t getting a dime out of me.