by Jerry McGill
And here is where having a patient, experienced lover came in handy. I am so grateful that my first time was with someone like Irene: someone who had already had several lovers prior to me and didn’t need me to take control. Because I simply was not ready to be in that role just yet. I needed a guiding, compassionate hand and Irene was all that and more. The conversation that I needed to have with so many women before, all at once came easily now. There, in Irene’s queen-sized bed, she quizzed me on everything from just where I had sensation to what felt good to me to what positions would I prefer to explore. In those early moments in her bedroom, I was terribly awkward and the first two times we were not successful. But persistence pays off, don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.
That night was my first real lesson in what it means to be a lover; I became aware of several of the limitless sources of passion and pleasure the human body holds. I learned that a man is not measured by the width of his thighs, the number of times he can thrust his pelvis back and forth, the quantity of his ejaculate, nor the size of his cock. I realized just how sweet the flesh can be. I also realized just how powerful the spirit can be. I learned how to listen to and read a murmur in the dark. I discovered the benefits that follow a softly placed kiss, a firmly placed stroke in the most tender of spaces, the elation that can come when two people are fully aware, focused in on every shudder, every blink of an eye, every breath their lover releases. This didn’t all happen in one night, and in fact, it is still happening to this day, but I have learned that lovers can be like musicians playing in a grand orchestra: When they are in tune and they take the time to hit all the right notes, they can create a symphony most magical, most eternal, and practically incandescent.
The mind is such a potent tool, Marcus. We can achieve so much if we simply learn how to harness our thoughts and energies; how to funnel them into a broader, grander ocean. Life is so full of ups and downs that sometimes it is a great challenge just to remember this, but damn it, I want to. I want to always keep this mentality at the forefront of my thinking and if I can help others see their potential along the way, well then that would be a beautiful thing, too. The lessons you helped me learn are too precious to keep to myself.
eleven
It’s been thirty years now, Marcus—thirty long and glorious years since that night of nights when you and I came together in our ever so eventful nonmeeting. In the very beginning, the anniversary used to mean something to me. For the first five or six years after, I would get melancholy and depressed as it drew near. It would start right around Christmas and last straight through to the first day or two of the new year. I would kind of mope around in my sullen state, pretending that the holiday season didn’t matter and acting like I was above it all. In essence, I was merely masking my pain.
Then at some point I had an epiphany. It was somewhere around my freshman or sophomore year in college. Things were going quite well for me: I was living on campus at Fordham University, getting a fantastic education that I wasn’t paying a dime for (the result of numerous scholarships), I had a wonderful group of friends, I was involved in theater, acting, writing, journalism at school; I had nothing to complain about. That Christmas break I went to Los Angeles to visit a dear friend of mine and somewhere (I think it was while watching a sunset on Santa Monica beach) it hit me: Happiness is a thing I can control if I put my mind to it. It is my perspective and how I choose to see my life that is really going to make the difference at the end of the day.
Yes, something lousy had happened to me not long ago, and in a perfect world that would not have occurred. But look at me. Look in the mirror. I’m still here and I’m still thriving. I began to ask myself, What the hell right do you have to feel sorry for yourself when schoolchildren are being shot in the back in Soweto and AIDS is decimating an entire section of our population, not to mention what it’s doing abroad? I began to do the simple act of crunching the numbers, comparing the things I had to the things I didn’t have. The results were blindingly clear. I had a hell of a lot. I had no reason to go on playing Vinny the Victim. It was time for me to step up and appreciate.
I had my mind, my heart, my soul. I had a sense of humor, a strong personality. I loved people and people loved me. The positives so greatly outweighed the negatives. All at once it occurred to me: I could give this event with you, Marcus, dominion over me and my feelings about myself. I could look at January 1 as that infamous day that forever wrecked my life, or I could recognize the beauty that is still very much a part of my everyday life despite an unexpected inconvenience, and I could honor that beauty.
My God, Marcus, there is so much beauty in life. If you look closely, you can see a hundred acts of kindness and love on a daily basis. Especially in New York, the greatest city in the world. Once I summed it up in my mind in that manner, the decision to see the light in all that had occurred in my life immediately became a no-brainer. I started a new phase. I began to celebrate the outcome of my existence. From then on, on every January 1, I would take an opportunity to buy myself something special; a gift to commemorate our anniversary. One year it was a nice new shirt, another year it was a necklace, one year I took myself out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, one year I flew myself to London for some sightseeing and theater. Whatever I did, I saw to it that I didn’t allow myself to get bummed thinking about what I possibly had lost. I was going to focus on what I had and could still someday have. To this day I still celebrate that day. Our very own holiday. In my dark humor I like to refer to it as Shot In Back Day.
Last summer I did something really special, Marcus. Last summer after decades of ignoring that location (our spot?), I made a choice and returned to it. I went back to the scene of the crime if you will—I returned to Seventh Street and Avenue C, the place where it all began for us.
The block where I took my last steps.
My family had moved away from that neighborhood, you see. While I lay in the hospital, my mother was working hard to get us a new place. She was determined that I would never have to go back to that area. To her it was an ugly, filthy place that had shamed and forsaken us all, and she thought it best if none of us ever had to breathe Lower East Side air again. I can tell you, I was most grateful to her for this. Aside from the mental aspect, physically the building we lived in was a nightmare for someone in a wheelchair. Tiny elevators that were always breaking; thick, heavy lobby doors; a tiny bathroom. No, it would have never worked—a change was necessary.
The new apartment we wound up at in Chelsea was a welcome fresh start. It wasn’t that the apartment was any nicer (it wasn’t) or that the area was so much safer and cleaner (just slightly), but it was what it was: a new beginning. There were no ghosts walking the streets. To all of our neighbors I was just a kid in a wheelchair, not that poor kid who used to play ball in the neighborhood but who screwed around, got shot in the back, and was paralyzed for life. I was so relieved not to have to deal with that condescending shit on a regular basis.
Again, our new building wasn’t perfect. There were three huge steps to get into it, and for years I had to be lifted up and down them every time I came and went until the building department eventually installed a ramp. Funny thing was, no one bothered to take any measurements or consult me; the ramp was too steep and I still needed help getting in and out of the building. The elevators broke often as well. Sometimes I would hang out in the lobby for hours until they were fixed. Alterations had to be made to the bathroom so my wheelchair could fit; walls had to be knocked down and a sliding door replaced the standard door. All in all, things worked out just fine. But despite all the adjustments, I was happy to leave for college in the Bronx and get away from there as soon as I had the chance.
Graduation from Fordham University. A very proud day for me; I am the first McGill to graduate from college.
At Fordham University I pursued an English literature degree but I also spent a great deal of time working on my theater skills, both in acting and writing. I joined a company
for people with disabilities (the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped) based in Manhattan and I had to attend classes and rehearsals in the city a few nights a week. The trip into Manhattan from the Bronx was about an hour each way and though it took a toll on my studies, I did it because the experience of working with that theater company was such a positive one. There, at NTWH, I met older, more experienced people who had lived with their disabilities much longer than I had lived with mine and I found many mentors among them. For the first time I saw people with disabilities who were leading successful, “normal” lives. They worked, had children, drove cars, things I had wondered if I would ever do. They became a great source of support and advice for me.
I also joined a theater company that worked with children in the impoverished Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, called the 52nd Street Project. There I was able to write and act in plays with kids who all reminded me a lot of myself when I was their age. They were all mostly black and Hispanic kids and my years with them were precious and unforgettable. After I graduated from Fordham the 52nd Street Project hired me full-time to be their production manager, and after many happy years there I got restless and moved away from New York altogether. I had been a New Yorker my entire life and I was anxious to see what the rest of the country had to offer. I had grown weary of bitterly cold winters and snowstorms that rendered me immobile and I decided I would give the West Coast a try. I still live out west today, but I have had numerous opportunities to visit New York since I left. Last summer was the first time I made the conscious decision to eradicate the last of my demons and set foot—or wheel, in my case—back in the old neighborhood.
Me and one of the kids from the 52nd Street Project performing a play outdoors.
I wonder if you are still there. My goodness how things have changed! Back then in the early 1980s, the whole place had an eerie, burnt-out feeling to it. At night when walking down the streets you felt as if you were walking through an old abandoned Hollywood film set of a World War II ghetto in Berlin, buildings ravaged by heavy artillery, the stench of dreams deferred floating in the air. Crack cocaine was just beginning to rear its ugly head and the residents were beginning to show the wear and tear of it.
This past summer, as I rolled up the street and looked around at the old place, I didn’t see one location that resembled the old one that we knew so well—the ghetto of our youth. Sitting right there on the spot where I fell, the last spot I ever stood up in, I was surprised to be surrounded by trendy, “hip” bars and cafés, restaurants where people of all races sat outside and ate under large umbrellas while being waited on—like one might see on a quaint Parisian street. There were pretty murals on the walls and a healthy, busy energy to the hood. Clearly at some point the real estate world discovered they had a gold mine on the Lower East Side and realized that if they built it up, yuppies, baby boomers, and trust funders would come. And come they did. Gentrification had long since obliterated any signs of the land we once knew. It was fascinating to behold. An overwhelming amount of peach skin now dominated an area where only brown had dared to roam.
It wasn’t so much that I had felt a strong need to avoid that neighborhood as it was that I just honestly never saw the benefit in going back there. I didn’t see until then how retracing my steps and visiting old haunts would do me any good. But sitting there on that warm July afternoon, I felt a sense of pride swell up inside me. I wasn’t sure why I felt that way. It wasn’t like what I was doing was so monumental or exceptionally brave, was it? I looked over at a young white couple a few feet away from me holding each other close while their poodle relieved himself on a tree. I had to smile. They had no idea that not too long ago, before they were born even, a young boy fell to the ground right there, gasping for breath, afraid he was going to die in that very spot.
I looked up at the window, the one from which Eric’s mom was yelling down to us. She was telling us to hold on, that she had just called the ambulance and they were on their way. I couldn’t turn my head but I could hear her voice. I could hear all of them talking around me: strangers and Eric alike. They were saying things like “Is he alive?” and “Don’t move him.”
Now, decades later, I found myself wondering if you were there somewhere. Again, I smiled mischievously at the notion that maybe, just maybe you were sitting in your window right then looking down at that guy in the wheelchair. Perhaps you were bored and there was a commercial break in your television show, so you chose to look out the window. You probably didn’t give me a second thought. I’ve changed infinitely since that night.
For one thing, I don’t go by the name Jerome anymore. At some point, shortly after I left the hospital, I realized that deep in my heart I no longer felt like Jerome. Jerome was a young boy who had stellar dance moves. He loved Rick James and the Jackson Five. Jerome was a second baseman on his Little League baseball team. He dreamt of being another Reggie Jackson or Willie Randolph. Jerome played touch football in Tompkins Square Park. He dreamt of being a wide receiver for the New York Jets. Jerome had a mean three-point shot; he practiced it often on the glass-strewn courts of the Lillian Wald housing project. He dreamt of being another Darryl Dawkins. Jerome was an incorrigible flirt at the roller-skating rink. He taught Vicky Higgins how to skate backward, sneaking kisses as he did so. Jerome had just started taking a musical theater class. He was singing “Maria” with his teacher. He had a decent voice, but he struggled mightily at reading music.
Jerome was many things that after the accident I felt I no longer was. When I got to junior high school that September and my new teacher called out my name, I corrected her and said, “It’s actually Jerry.” She made the correction in her book and that was that. Out with the old, in with the new.
I pissed off a few of my old friends. One of my more sensitive friends was a lovely girl named Zuri, who secretly harbored a crush on me. She had been hanging out with us that New Year’s night but she had left early because she was bored at our insistence on playing video games for several hours straight. When she heard me refer to myself as Jerry she flipped out.
“Stop calling yourself that. Jerry is the name of some nerdy white guy. You’re not Jerry. You’re still Jerome.”
I ignored her, though. She didn’t understand. None of them did. After I got out of the hospital I found I didn’t have much to say to any of my “pre–St. Vincent” friends. We couldn’t really relate to one another anymore. They always seemed to be pitying me and I always seemed to be envying them. It didn’t take long for us to go our separate ways. I’ve been Jerry ever since.
I still love movies. I always have and always will, I’m afraid. I often go alone to the cinema. To me there is something so calming, so peaceful, so therapeutic about sitting in a dark movie theater and watching a splendid piece of filmmaking, especially if it is one of epic, lyrical quality with great scenic locales like, say, Out of Africa, The English Patient, or Dreams. After the credits roll and the lights come up, I sometimes experience a brief sadness knowing that I have to enter the real world again.
For years I tried diligently to get a job in the filmmaking business, even living in Los Angeles for a time while pursuing it. It’s a tough market to crack. In many ways the film world is like an old boys’ club. You have to have a combination of great connections and even greater luck to get just a peek at the menu. I seem to have neither of those things, but I keep trying because I am stubborn. I’m not a quitter and I haven’t got a whole hell of a lot else to do. It’s in my blood. I have written numerous screenplays and even shot two short films, but the powers that be in Hollywood don’t think there is a huge market for stories about people with disabilities, despite all of the Oscar-winning portrayals that have come from actors playing disabled characters.
This is one thing I hope to change: people’s perceptions about people with disabilities. It’s actually one of the reasons why I feel perhaps it was my destiny to become a person with a disability. I know I said I’m not a very religious person
, but I do believe there has got to be a reason for everything; some reason why we are where we are in life. Some purpose we are all meant to serve. There have been times when I have felt extremely fortunate to be in a wheelchair. Like it was the perfect position for me to be in at that moment.
A short film that I wrote, acted in, produced, and directed. Try as I could to market it I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously. A love story about a black guy in a wheelchair is not considered “bankable” in the film business. It still stands as one of my proudest achievements.
For example, after college I got a temporary part-time gig teaching theater arts and playwriting to a classroom full of children with disabilities at a high school in Queens. These children had all been sequestered from their able-bodied counterparts and basically pushed to the side of a small wing in the school building. When I arrived on my first day of class I asked them all what issues they wanted to write about. Many of the students voiced frustration at being alienated from their able-bodied peers and made to feel like second-class citizens at the school. I saw great dramatic potential in the topic and jumped on it. I loved their honesty and emotion and proposed that we write a series of one-act plays around the theme of alienation.
I then went to the principal and told her what we were working on. I told her that I thought it would be a great idea if the students could present these works to their peers in the hopes that it could get a dialogue going and enrich the experience of both the able-bodied and the disabled community at the school. She agreed with me. I was given a small technical crew to lead and a couple of months later we staged the shows in a very professional manner and performed them at a school-wide assembly. They were a huge success. The response was even greater than I had hoped for. Shortly after the shows, inclusion programs were instituted to bring the groups together. My students with disabilities felt a sense of elation at the idea that their voices were being heard and respected. At my going-away party several of them thanked me for “helping them feel like they belonged.” It was a priceless experience.
