by Jerry McGill
To add to my frustration, I had been right-handed for all of my young life, but now I noticed that my left side was stronger than my right, and I had to retrain myself as a southpaw. Dr. Dempsey said this most likely had something to do with the fact that the bullet entered on my left side and that the vibration may have been felt more harshly on the right; some crazy shit like that. Either way, the entry point did have a great deal to do with my mobility. Had you shot me somewhat lower—say around the waist—I probably would have had much greater use of my upper body and a stronger sense of balance. The flip side, of course, is that had you shot me somewhat higher than the neck I could have been a vegetable or in a comatose state. Does one see the cup as half full or half empty? That, my dear Marcus, is the question.
Little did I know that for every hour of occupational therapy you get you also need an hour of physical therapy (PT, which everyone joked stood for “Pain and Torture”). Irit’s cohort, my physical therapist, was a freckle-faced young Irishwoman named Cheryl. My time with her was far less pleasant but equally important, as it involved keeping my body in shape. My first few weeks with Cheryl consisted of her stretching my arms and legs in ways that looked uncomfortable (think yoga, but with a second party contorting you) but kept them limber, free of kinks and tightness in the joints. She would also have me work out with a set of light weights that she strapped around my wrists. Similar to Irit, Cheryl had a loving, caring demeanor and though at first I resisted, I couldn’t help but come to have affection for her.
There were so many other people that you put me into contact with, Marcus. Besides about a hundred doctors and nurses, there were my roommates. People like Tony, the young Puerto Rican kid with the broken leg who became my partner in crime during the two months that we shared a room. We would watch Saturday kung-fu movies together, play cards, have wheelchair races up and down the hospital halls. Tony’s family grew to like me and whenever they came to visit, if they brought something for Tony, they brought something for me as well. His mother came with a big old bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I got a few pieces, too. And I always shared my gifts with him. Home-baked cookies from my favorite teacher were split with Tony. When Tony finally left to go home I nearly cried; it felt so much like losing a family member.
There was Matt Conroy, the sweet-faced social worker who saw to it that I had all the supplies and adaptations that I needed, both in the hospital and once I left. Matt was interesting because he did so much work behind the scenes for me in terms of making sure my apartment was accessible once I left the hospital, making sure I had school supplies, even hooking me up with social opportunities like summer camps for kids with disabilities. But I rarely ever saw him. He was like the Wizard, pulling all of these strings from behind the curtain. There was Dorothy, the silver-haired teacher in the children’s ward whom I had to go see three times a week and who actually gave homework! She really did care so much, that old lady, and I gave her such a hard time. But really, what kid wants to go to school when they are in the hospital? Isn’t that really the greatest benefit of being in the hospital when you’re a kid—missing school?
There was Judy Silver, my psychologist. My relationship with Judy was a most complex one. I truly resented having to see her because even at that young age I felt similarly to how I feel today: Psychology is a vast and expensive waste of time. Why would anybody want to sit and talk to a stranger for an hour about their feelings when they have friends with whom they could do that? Yes, I know, in the mental health profession one is trained to analyze those feelings and channel them, a thing your average friend ordinarily cannot do, but I have known way too many people who have been in therapy for years upon years. People who have seen very little in terms of actual growth and who, in my opinion, have merely developed a dependence on that analyst. I call it Woody Allen Syndrome. But I digress.
As a thirteen-year-old boy I found it all even sillier. I was unable to take note of the severity of what had happened to me. I was too myopic to consider the effects that such a trauma could potentially have on me down the road and, quite frankly, I didn’t really see what talking to this woman was going to do to help my situation. But if there is a God, he or she has a really strong taste for irony and humor. I “tolerated” seeing Judy because she was terribly attractive: a long-legged, brunette looker with light brown eyes that gleamed as she focused on you, and a huge Colgate smile. She had a penchant for wearing high heels and snug-fitting skirts. I don’t know about you, Marcus, but growing up in the wonderful multiethnic stew that New York was, I never cared much for race or nationality when it came to women. Give me a great pair of legs, some decent breasts, full lips, a nice smile, and I was there. Count me in.
In the first few weeks I resisted Judy greatly. We had a weekly Wednesday meeting that interfered with my viewing of All My Children and that really ticked me off. Sometimes I would even hide from her by going to a different section of the floor and pretending I forgot it was Wednesday. However, Judy always managed to find me and bring me back to our meeting spot, the children’s recreation room.
Periodically she administered psychological tests and in my responses I would give her short bursts of answers. Every now and then I would pepper them with a bit of sass. With that great arrogance that you sometimes find in young people, I truly believed I could outsmart her if I kept on the way I was. But she was good, Judy. I imagine she had dealt with kids a lot brighter and a lot tougher than me in her day. Eventually she wore me down and I came to trust and actually like her.
It’s funny, the things that stay with us. Looking back, I can remember with amazing clarity a major talking point that Judy hit upon in one of our sessions. I’m sure I remember it so well because it is an issue that I still deal with to this day. It all started with my favorite game, Scrabble. Judy and I often played board games since it was a painless way to engage me in dialogue. I had spelled the word legs and topped it off by stating: “And you’ve got great ones.”
“Really?” Judy said, a tone of surprise in her voice. “I never knew you noticed.”
“It’s hard not to,” I shot back. Even at thirteen, I was a shameless flirt, Marcus.
“Do you think your girlfriends will all have great legs?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna have a girlfriend.”
“Really? Why wouldn’t you have a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think a lot of girls are looking for a guy like me.”
“May I ask, what do you mean when you say, ‘a guy like me’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“I just mean, I don’t know if girls are gonna like a guy in a wheelchair. Look at me, I can’t even feed myself.”
Oh, Marcus. Just thinking about this moment now causes a small lump to form in my throat. Even back then I was articulating a terrible insecurity that still plagues not only me, but a great number of persons with disabilities whom I have known throughout my life. It’s peculiar, because my disabled friends and I, so many of us are strong, educated, driven, passionate, likable people, but at times we all struggle to get past this one stumbling block: this notion that “I am not good enough. I am not as good as the others. I clearly have less than them as a result of this slight deficiency.” It is difficult to explain this shortcoming to a non-disabled person, but I can assure you it exists in so many of my peers.
Every relationship I’ve ever had since I left the hospital has started out with me feeling this way. This overwhelming concern has caused me to act recklessly more often than I care to admit. At times I find myself needing to sabotage relationships before they ever really get off the ground because I would rather do the hurting than be the one eventually being hurt. I have ruined a good number of potentially meaningful relationships as a result of this defense mechanism. Despite any strong attributes I may have brought to the relationship, deep down inside I just knew that I was not good enough and t
hat eventually my partner would come around to realizing that, too. I would literally sit around waiting for the “magic” to wear off and to be told, “Listen, Jerry, I really like you, but …”
Learning and accepting that I was indeed worthy, that took time. But it inevitably came. And what a marvelously rich lesson that was to learn. I soon learned, somewhat to my surprise, that this feeling of insecurity was not solely the domain of persons with disabilities. I was amazed to find that a lot of “normal” people felt this way as well. From models and sports icons to famous artists and world leaders, insecurity is a condition that grips so many of us. I wonder, Marcus, if perhaps you have ever felt like you weren’t good enough for those in your life. Maybe this sense of low self-esteem caused you to fear or to hate, or to mistrust. Maybe it caused you one night to unintentionally commit a dreadful act against another human being.
Well, if that should be the case I just want you to know that I understand. I empathize with you. Self-loathing is one of the worst things that can ever happen to a person, if not indeed the worst. I love myself now. I respect myself now. But shit, bro, it was a lot of work. And so much of my success was tied to the people at that hospital. That staff at St. Vinny’s in so many ways gave me the tools, the courage, and the strength to—for lack of a better phrase—get back on my feet again. There is only one true way you can ever thank a person for this type of act: You can go on to lead a full and meaningful life; share what they have taught you with others. When kindness begets kindness, everybody wins.
EXT. A LAKE IN THE COUNTRY—DAY
JEROME and MIRIAM, a white woman with silver hair, fifties, sit in a canoe, paddling down the lake. After a beat, they stop and just sit there, floating. SUBTITLE: FAMILY—THE OTHER “F” WORD
MIRIAM
See that, if we just kinda sit here like this the wind will just carry us back to the shore.
JEROME
It won’t get us home, though.
MIRIAM
Well, no, but pretty darn close. Have you decided what you want for dinner tonight?
JEROME
Can you please make some more of that lasagna, Miss B?
MIRIAM
Of course I can. Dad loves that, too.
JEROME
It’s so good.
MIRIAM
We were talking last night, how would you like to come out for Christmas break this year?
JEROME
That would be great. I would love it.
MIRIAM
Good. Good. We love having you here, kiddo.
JEROME
Miss B?
MIRIAM
Yeah, kiddo?
JEROME
Do you think it would be okay for me to stay with you all and live here?
six
The hospital staff and how close I got to them kind of made me think about family in a whole new light. In a way, those people in the hospital—well, many of them anyway—became family to me because they did what one always assumes a family is supposed to do: They provided unwavering love and support. It doesn’t matter that one was Jewish, one was Irish, one was Italian. They were there for me. Wouldn’t you agree that is what family is for? What does family mean to you, Marcus? Are you from a large one? A small one? A tight-knit one? Are you able to go back generations and look at your family tree? Perhaps you can trace members of your family to way back when and deduce patterns and notice attributes that help you understand who you are today. I hear about people doing this all the time and it sounds like a great resource to be able to take advantage of such knowledge.
Unfortunately, we McGills have no such opportunity. Or if we do, we sure don’t know it or don’t care to explore it any further. Mine has never really been a conventional loving family. It seemed we never had that luxury. We have never been a big family, either. Growing up I can scarcely recall a McGill that wasn’t in some way screwed up to the point of dysfunction. All of those sitcoms we grew up idolizing—you know, with the Bradys, the Partridges, the Cunning-hams, and the Huxtables—to me those were characters from some fantastic and mystical world. I mean, in real life families didn’t ever actually sit around a dinner table and eat together, did they?
My time in the hospital and my time recovering at home showed me just how loving and supportive my family could truly be. Aside from my mother, whom I saw practically every day, and my sister, whom I saw on average maybe once a week, the rest of the members of my family I saw maybe once in that six-month time span. And truth be told, that was enough as far as I was concerned. I am convinced that my family was somehow cursed. The analogy I like to use is that us McGills, in our own way, we are like the Republic of South Africa: Each of us is our own little country, wasting away, prideful, but utterly without any real hope. Our suffering is partly of our own doing, but ultimately can be traced to numerous inherited hardships inflicted by fate and humanity.
Tolstoy put it best, I believe, in his opening line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” My mother became pregnant with me when she was sixteen. Her mother was none too happy about this and proceeded to throw her out of the house. My grandmother, Evelyn, was a harsh and bitter woman, masterful at the art of alienating everyone within her vicinity. She gave birth to three children and I don’t believe any of them could ever honestly say they loved her, nor she them. This is impossible to confirm now because out of the three children my mother is the only living sibling. Both her brothers died before my grandmother passed. But memory serves me well, and my recollection is that no one was ever truly happy in that woman’s presence.
When I was very young, my mother would take my sister and me on what seemed to be an endless train ride out to my grandma’s apartment in Brooklyn, where she would babysit us with much obvious resentment. She lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment in a ghettofied complex that resembled a prison in lockdown. Her apartment was distinct for a couple of reasons. One, it always seemed dark inside. My grandmother disliked the outdoors greatly and often had the shades pulled closed, even on bright summer days.
Another memorable feature of the apartment was that it always reeked of cigarette smoke and really cheap alcohol, two of my grandmother’s favorite pastimes being smoking and drinking. I can barely recall a time when she wasn’t already drunk by the time my sister and I arrived, and she usually stayed that way throughout the weekend, with minor instances of early-morning sobriety. I don’t know if you have known many alcoholics in your day, Marcus, but there is a certain look and smell that the hard-core ones wear and those close to them don’t soon forget. My mother always made me hug my grandmother as soon as we entered her place, and when I got up close to her I could see her eyes were bloodshot and slightly hazy; her scent was a mix of Pall Malls and Thunderbird. And here’s a funny fact: When she ran out of either, which occurred at least once a weekend, she would send me to the store to get more. It didn’t matter if it was a ten-degree day or a 110-degree night, my ass was going out there to get her some more. And the man at the cash register never blinked an eye when handing me, an eight- or nine-year-old kid, a tiny brown bag loaded with alcohol and cigarettes. That’s how things roll in the ghetto.
Interestingly enough, I never really knew my grandfather. Just like my father, I had met him once or twice and only briefly then. I assume he suffered from what I would come to refer to as BMS—Black Male Syndrome. I don’t think he was around much in my mother’s life, either.
I’m sure that it wasn’t so much that my grandmother didn’t love us, or her own children for that matter. Some people just have a hard time expressing anything even close to affection. For reasons I will never know, my grandmother’s heart just didn’t move in that direction. I would like to give her the benefit of the doubt. I can imagine that growing up in the pre–civil rights era she must have seen some things and experienced certain indignities that no human should ever have to endure. This is the excuse I make for her—the excuse I need to ha
ve for her because the truth is, her behavior was deplorable.
I remember very vividly one of my last interactions with my grandmother. She was by my bedside in my hospital room, an extreme rarity, as she almost never left her apartment, much less traveled outside of Brooklyn. And she was sober, a thing I’ve already noted was rare. She was smiling at me and telling me those same hollow words everyone else would tell me: Everything’s gonna be all right, Jerome. Don’t you worry about nothin’. She was so out of her element that the overall effect was jarring; she seemed like a stranger.
As I mentioned, my mother had two brothers: Uncle Michael and Uncle Butch. These two men were as different as you could possibly get, and the whole time I knew them I never once saw them together in the same setting. Fate had dictated that these two men’s lives would take extremely varied paths, but in the end—in one of those great bits of irony that make you almost want to laugh at the cruelty of it—they both died of the same unnatural cause: Both men died suffering and destitute, stricken with AIDS.
Uncle Butch, like his mother, was an addict. His drugs were harder, more destructive. He was strung out on heroin and I’m pretty sure that when all was said and done he was pretty heavily into crack as well. I remember him as a man who had a difficult time stringing two complete sentences together. A man who appeared thinner than he should; who you could clearly see had missing teeth because he smiled a lot; who often looked like he could use a good bath. He had a full and hearty laugh and at the same time he was the kind of guy who gave you the sense that if you left your wallet on the table and walked away for a minute, odds were good it wouldn’t be there when you returned.
I don’t remember anything about his visits to the hospital, only that they didn’t happen often. Maybe twice. Just like his mother he was a creature of Brooklyn. Stepping outside the borough made him feel vulnerable and on edge. When his time came, there was no reason for me to attend his funeral. I didn’t know him.
