Mid-1980s, Los Angeles, California

By Anne Gray

When I was 22 years old, I killed an 8-year-old kid in a car accident.

After that, many things changed. One of them was that I started dating men with disabilities. There was a guy who had only one leg, another with only one arm, and one who was losing his sight. I eventually married a man with a severe limp. Somewhere in the middle, there was Scott, a quadriplegic.

I didn’t seek out disabled men as some kind of penance. We just seemed to fit together. I was broken inside but looked pretty good on the outside; these guys looked broken but were psychologically a lot stronger than I was.

I met Scott two years after my accident, just after I moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles for graduate school. California has a way of lightening even the darkest mood. I suddenly started smiling again. Under the bright sunshine, entire hours passed before images of a child’s small body lying crumpled on blacktop interrupted me.

When I finally left the beach long enough to check in at the university, a few graduate students who had been around for a while invited me to join them for dinner. Scott picked us up in an old Volvo.

I thought he was cute, in a scruffy sort of way. It took me a few minutes to realize that the car was outfitted with hand controls. When we got to the restaurant, one of his friends lifted his wheelchair off the back of the car and brought it around next to the driver’s seat. Scott swung himself into the chair and maneuvered his way into the crowded restaurant. The hostess gave him a big hug and let us jump the line.

Like every other rube arriving in Los Angeles from the Midwest, I’d never had Mexican food before (Taco Bell doesn’t count), and the hot peppers burned my mouth. I gulped water while the rest of the group laughed. “You’re initiated now,” Scott said, and after that, I didn’t feel so embarrassed.

Scott was the center of our group, exchanging jokes I didn’t understand about professors I didn’t know. I was ignorant but eager to learn. Scott and his friends were my guides to the new world of graduate school. I wanted – needed – to win some approval, but the past two years had drained my confidence.

When Scott dropped me off at the end of the evening, he offered to meet me the next day and tell me more about the graduate program. Pretty soon, we were having dinner together almost every night.

I asked Scott what happened to him. He told me that he was caught in the crossfire of a gang war in South Central LA. The next night, he confessed that was a lie. He preferred it to the truth, which was that he rolled his car when he fell asleep at the wheel on the way to Las Vegas. He, too, knew how little control we have over ourselves and our world.

After I told Scott that I’d grown up in Scarsdale, New York, he started calling me “princess.” It was more of an accusation than a term of affection. He sensed the guilt rolling off me like BO, but he attributed it to the guilt of a rich girl who lived a life of privilege that she didn’t earn. He didn’t know about my accident. In those days, I couldn’t talk about it at all.

After a couple of weeks of restaurant dinners, Scott invited me to his apartment. It was set up for independent living, with special appliances on wheelchair-height counters. He cooked us dinner in the microwave. I drank too much wine, and when he patted his lap and said, “Come sit over here,” I did. We sat like that and watched television for a while, and then he kissed me.

I wanted to be like Jane Fonda in Coming Home, but Scott was no Jon Voight. Jane and Jon could roll down the boardwalk together, she on roller skates and he in his chair, but Scott had to stay out of the sun because his body’s thermostat didn’t work right. On hot days, he had to pour cups of water over his head to cool down. Instead of spending time on the beach, I hung out in Scott’s air-conditioned apartment. I could have been back in Pittsburgh.

And unlike Jon Voight, Scott didn’t have much strength. His arms were thin sticks, his belly soft. He needed to sit on a special cushion to avoid sores on his butt. He had a catheter too, but I didn’t know it until the first time we made love. I’d been sitting on his lap while we were making out, which had become a nightly ritual.

“Enough of this,” Scott said, and rolled us both right into the bedroom. The long plastic tube coming out of his penis startled me. There were little drops of pee in it, which drained into a bag that he had tucked discretely out of sight.

“Can you take it off?” I asked.

“No. Does it bother you?”

“No, no, not at all. But I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t do anything. Just lie here next to me.” His fingers didn’t work very well, so he used the side of his hand to stroke me. I closed my eyes and pretended that I was someplace else until I came. I hadn’t had an orgasm for a long time. It surprised us both.

“I can’t get hard, but I like to be touched,” Scott said. He watched while I ran my hand over his limp penis, careful not to dislodge the tube. I had no idea how tightly to hold him, whether to squeeze or stroke, how long to work at it, or what, if anything, he was feeling. After a few minutes, I stopped.

I stuck it out with Scott for another few weeks. He treated me kindly at a time when kindness was in short supply in my life, but he also used me. He knew a lost soul when he saw one. At any rate, the pull of the sun was too strong to resist. I had to get out of his bed and out of his apartment.

Just before classes began, I told Scott that I wanted to devote myself to my schoolwork. He gave me a cynical grin and wheeled away. Before the end of the day, he had offered to help an exchange student from Japan improve her English. Not long after that, I saw her sitting on his lap.

In addition to her freelance writing, Anne Gray is a social psychologist currently serving as a university administrator. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 | Email This Post

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