Crip Street

 

I try to be the best person I can be. I don't mean this as some kind of ersatz kindergarten scenario―rather it's a kind of nominal hoping. I hope to be someone of discernment. When I'm honest with myself I recognize that I'm batting .500 on most days, a pretty good average for baseball but still problematic for street life. I yearn to possess more emotional intelligence but I'm a person who has a disability―that is, I hail from a historically marginalized group. My very existence is a shambling matter of misunderstandings. It's useful to think of disability as a kind of magnification: whatever occurs to a non-disabled person will be exaggerated in a disability centered setting. Sometimes I try to convince myself that matters are otherwise but this is usually a mistake. 

 

A friend once went with me to the airport. I'd told him how my presence at the security checkpoint always causes hand wringing, flustered speech, and various other inappropriate gestures. My friend who is a literary writer and a cultured man was stunned by the nutty chaos that a man with a guide dog could produce in a small town Pennsylvania airport. Some people grabbed me, some barked senseless orders. The idea that someone with a dog and who as a matter of physical difference could not see, so entirely shattered the TSA agents' sense of decorum that my personhood was rendered into a public spectacle. My friend saw first hand how my brand of physical difference tormented the nerve of routinized life. I have hundreds of friends with disabilities and they will all tell you how hard it is to be in this  hyperbolic and problematic space. 

 

If you have a disability of any kind –whether it's invisible or visible, you can't ever tell when the moment will occur―that signature instance when the trap door of circumstance opens beneath you and drops you into social chaos. All too often that chaos is painful. Untrained airport service personnel talk about you in the third person, then offer you grudging help, some of them making a moue of disgust. I can tell you that as a frequent flyer I've been treated to a hundred indignities and I suspect this is a conservative estimate. But conservative or not you can see the pickle that people with disabilities are in: the public sphere is a place of capricious turns, a location of severely shifting acceptances and agreements, and accordingly it's a challenge to remain altogether composed while traveling or just walking the ordinary street. When you have a disability there is no ordinary street. 

 

As a teenager I began to read voraciously. I'm in no way remarkable for that. My point is that reading will acquaint you with the broader community in ways that the customary street may not. James Baldwin puts it this way: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." 

Baldwin was not seeking the solace of comparative pain―that old bromide that suggests all suffering is essentially democratic with a small d. Instead he was suggesting that there's a communitarian value to injustice which is the only space for hope.  

 

That's a dark lesson to be sure. I will also offer the opinion that it's a lesson most Americans don't like to hear. 

 

We like stories with unambiguous and happy endings. We don't like any symbolism that speaks to unhappiness in our public square. People with disabilities are encouraged to appear always sunny. If there are dark and complicated dynamics to our respective experiences we are bucked up and told to keep these to ourselves.

 

This is an impossible way to live and that's that.      

 

Charles Dickens puts it this way: 

 

“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away."

 

**

 

I think of Crip Street as a place of opposition. But the resistance concerns what Dickens calls “the blight”–at least this is the case with me―I don't want to live the bitterness of abjection any more than I want to breathe second hand smoke. 

 

Still, every time I book an airline ticket, each time I set out on a journey I face the real prospect of being treated like a stigmatized, taboo mannequin, talked about in the third person, grabbed and steered or sneered at. Taxi cabs refuse to give me rides, civic authorities fail to redress the problems. It's more than a jungle out there, the public arena is often a toxic place, save for what you can make of it in your head. And the place inside my head is what I call Crip Street.

 

**

Crip is of course an abbreviation of cripple and those of us in the disability rights community who have long felt the rococo complexities of our identities have come to embrace the term for its straightforwardness. As Nancy Mairs says famously: “As a cripple I swagger.” I'll add to that: as a crip one has immediacy.

 

I think the immediacy of a crippled identity has everything to do with knowing that you are a body―that is, you are not a cognition machine living a separate life from your embodiment, you are the body. Not long ago I tried to address this in a lyric poem about my early childhood:

 

 

Solo Dancing

 

Do you remember hiding in the cellar as a child?

Of course you don't–you were likely one of the strong ones.

The strong are made of air–so they don't see the need for a skin,

They are the light of god, the electrolysis of bone. 

But the boy down stairs is all spine. 

He's upright, clouded, flexing, shoeless,

Standing like a rake, lifting his arms,

Yellow flowers in his mind's eye.

Crippled kid, all body.

All body.

Think of that. 

 

I think it's fair to say the mind and body are not separate as we are customarily taught and I think this is particularly evident to anyone who must puzzle out the ways and means of living what is still often imagined as a spoiled or ruined identity. (See Erving Goffman.)

 

 

Crip Street is where this knowledge is enacted and vitalized. As Crips we take our solo dancing outside. 

 

 **

Still the way forward is often difficult.  The public sphere is not a child's basement. A Crip's reception is often a conditional matter. Just this week, while flying from Portland, Oregon to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I was treated poorly by a sub-contracted airport employee whose job was to escort me from one gate to another. 

 

She stared at me as I got off the plane with my guide dog. Just stared. Said nothing. Finally I said: “Are you here to help me?” She wasn't going to acknowledge my presence so I had to do the talking. Crips know all about this. This is how things go in the public sphere. 

 

The escort lady didn't like my dog. Either that or she thought my condition might be catching. But no matter, she was giving me the silent treatment. I said: “Look, I'll just find my way on my own, you obviously don't have any interest in acting like a professional.” I took off. 

 

I get so tired of this. Get tired of the dual pressure to be sensitive to other people's discomfort about disability, forgive them, imagine that they grew up in what we nowadays call developing nations, places where people with physical differences are thought of as a burden―Jesus, I'm tired of being treated like shit. And rather than lose my cool with the woman in question I just walked away. The pressure was on me to be cool. If you're a crip and you lose your temper you're automatically a person who has both a questionable identity and a bad attitude. “Which came first,” says the public mind. “He must be cranky because he's a blind person.” Only the crip knows what's going on. You've been reduced. You are beneath acknowledgement. 

 

 

So I walked away. 

 

The only reason I'm relating this incident is that the woman decided to follow me. She lent no meaningful help but she trailed my dog and I through the airport. She was essentially covering the bases―she could report to her superiors that she did her job. And of course by trailing me she simply compounded the insult. 

 

It is tiring, this business of being a crip.

 

I decided to make no complaint. Crips know the path of least resistance. 

 

But each of these incidents is a little porcupine quill in the life of the mind.

 

**

 

Crip Street is a dance floor. It’s liminal space. It’s both inside and outside our customary public square. That’s not an easy concept–in fact, it sounds petulant, as if I said, “I’m your neighbor sometimes, and sometimes I am not.”

 

But you see, Crip Street is a place in the mind. Living there I understand that not all the gates are open to my able bodied friends. When I understand this I begin to experience the power of my alterity.  We Crip people are beginning to live the Eleusinian mysteries of our differences. And we will let you in from time to time. But not always. 

 

S.K.