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It has always been my chief fear I’ll be struck by an automobile. Each of us has a signature fear. Franklin D. Roosevelt was afraid he’d be consumed in a house fire, his terror all the more ghastly because of paralysis. Disability dread isn’t casual like the proverbial spider in the bathtub. It’s substantial and inherently realistic and one learns to carry it as some carry memories of bad divorces or the traumas of violence. 

This morning I read of the sudden death of Ben Woolf a young television actor who recently became well known for his role on the hit series “American Horror Story”   Ben Woolf was born with pituitary dwarfism and accordingly was a man of short stature. On American Horror Story he played goulish figures—“freaks” in the manner of Todd Browning, and I’ll withold my opinion about whether he was exploited or not but merely quote from today’s New York Times:

Mr. Woolf, diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism when he was a child, became known for his work on the FX series “American Horror Story,” an Emmy-nominated show that features an ensemble cast. It has new characters each season and a new story line and settings that have included a haunted house, a 1960s mental hospital plagued by demons and extraterrestrials, a coven of witches, and a 1950s carnival “freak show.”

In the first season Mr. Woolf played the Infantata, the murderous ghost of a baby-turned-Frankenstein monster by his grieving parents, and in the recently concluded fourth season he played Meep, a sideshow performer with a one word vocabulary and a gift for biting the heads off live animals.

Standing just over four feet Ben Woolf would be hard to see in a busy traffic situation and that’s the trafic story as he was clipped by a vehical’s side mirror while crossing the street and knocked unconscious. He died of a stroke. 

As a guide dog user I’m always, and I mean entirely thinking about the street ahead, the one I must cross. I think about a hundred things. The drivers who are naturally incompetent; those who are medicated with over the counter drugs—drugs that were formerly available only by prescription, and which, when taken without supervision, can make a person foggy. Don’t forget the drivers who are texting; who fumble for dropped lipstick; talk on their phones; spill coffee in their laps. Then there are the habitual scofflaws—the traffic light runners, the acceloristas. Blind walking requires (in the words of Lou Reed) a busload of faith to get by. In other words, to overcome my fear and navigate the day, I must imagine people are competent. It’s like the adumbrations of faith one must martial when flying on an airplane. You tell yourself the pilot is competent, the mechanics are heroic, perhaps and likely against contrary evidence. You need to get someplace. You certainly can’t stay home.

Ben Woolf died in traffic. The driver who struck him stopped. It was a genuine accident. And I’m haunted by “Infantata” the ghost of the dread streets.    

Readers searching for a brainy gallimaufry (there ought to be a word for this, but trust me, there isn’t) need look no further than the daily blog of Lance Mannion. A passel of brainiacs (there ought to be a word for this, but trust me there isn’t) already knows about LM—his following is considerable. His cerebral readers include Tom Watson, Farran Nehme, James Wolcott, Maud Newton, Melissa McEwan (Shakesville) and many more.

Why should I wish to be Lance Mannion? Well, for one thing, I knew him when he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa’s “Writer’s Workshop” and from the get go I saw I was in the company of a generous and amused mind—a sensibility—for he appeared at my door one day (having answered a bulletin board ad for a reader for a blind guy) with a book under his arm, “The Heart of Midlothian” which he read to me entire, and in the manner of Dickens, which is to say he “did” the voices. Please take the time to think about that. A young man (for Lance was young in those days) who could “do” a dozen Scottish voices without destroying the book is rare. I’ll venture he was the only man in Iowa City who could have done it. 

Of course a gift of that kind would ordinarily mark a man as eccentric and that would be that. (I know “from” eccentric: my maternal grandfather built early automobiles and motorcycles before World War I, then converted his factories to munitions plants and gleefully spent the rest of his life dynamiting rural homesteads in New England.) 
If Lance was eccentric he was neither formidable or vast. It’s not my aim to launch a taxonomy of anomalous personalities (that is “so” last century) only to say Lance was both odd and kind. And “is”. Which is why I believe Mr. Mannion is our contemporary Samuel Pickwick, who as Simon Callow noted, is benevolence personified, decent and determined. Mannion is our American Pickwick: observing our contemporary foibles while rooting for his friends to endure and succeed.

Mannion’s Winkle, Snodgrass, Tupman, and Weller are harder to spot than Dickens’ originals because America is santized for your protection and mediated beyond easy measure. Whch is why he offers us “Mannionville”—a place more muscular and analytical than Lake Wobegone, for the Mannionville women are learned, its men don’t care much how they appear (not precisely) and one imagines more than a few of the residents have read Mutual Aid. Certainly the people of Mannionville have read Babbitt (which they liked though not without a moue of disgust) and An American Tragedy (which they didn’t like but agreed was largely accurate). The Mannionville folks don’t like Ford Madox Ford  who was never much interested in being accurate about people. They do like Mencken (only provisionally)  They love Huck Finn. They care a good deal about Roger Ebert.         
     
The Mannionville-istas can tell you why Rudy Giuliani  is a cynic. They can also convince you a second rate Disney animated flick is worth watching (Pickwick would have liked it) and why America desperately needs to read fiction (hint: a GOP legislator in Montana wishes to ban Yoga pants.) 

There’s a hint of George Orwell in Mannion’s wanderings. Orwell didn’t merely fear our fears will ruin us—he feared the falsified nature of fear, its easy plasticity, the way fear itself can be the distraction. All advertising is built from fear—or “agitation” if you like—your skin is loose; you’re bladder is insurrectionary; you drink the wrong brand of soft drink; or worse—you’re driving a proletarian automobile. Orwell understood the entertainment industry of fear all too well. Lately there’s been a ubiquitous commercial for a British luxury car which suggests that you also can be a James Bond-esque villain if you fork over $75,000 for the accoutrement. People are indeed controlled by inflicting pain, and imagining that you’re doing the inflicting is one of the centrifugal bumble puppies of falsified fear. So my money’s still on Orwell. 

I think Lance Mannion would agree with this. 

The reason I wish I could be Mannion has to do with his upright and decent lapsed Catholic’s faith in his neighbors. I like that. I don’t have nearly enough of it. Faith in the villagers goes a long way to dispeling fear. There are no vitamins for this. So while my money’s still on Orwell, its also on the people of Mannionville. 

    

I was shoveling snow when it came to me: my flinty neighbor, the one who rides his bicycle in sleet, is 007 long retired, living under the radar in Syracuse, New York.

He’s slender, craggy, silent, and probably a casino shark. 

He’s my idee fixe.

Which of course gets me to wondering about all my projective imaginary obsessions. How many idee fixes can one man have?

Plenty of course. When I was a child I thought little men lived inside the radio. We had an old tube model. I pictured the people living in a city of tubes.  

But childhood is too easy. What about today? What admixture of fantasy, mild paranoia, and dark amusement still occupies me? 

Well, I think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are living in my refrigerator. They’re behind a carton of dried prunes left over from a long ago, ill advised effort to bake a fruit cake. They have no friends in the fridge except for a nearly empty jar of cocktail olives. There might be three olives left in there. 

The blues singer Leadbelly sang: “I’ve got grasshoppers in my pillow, I”ve got crickets all in my milk…” 

I’ve got James Bond, Thatcher, and The Gipper, hanging around my domestic morning, and I hate to say it, but you do too. 

I was shoveling snow when it came to me: my flinty neighbor, the one who rides his bicycle in sleet, is 007 long retired, living under the radar in Syracuse, New York.

He’s slender, craggy, silent, and probably a casino shark. 

He’s my idee fixe.

Which of course gets me to wondering about all my projective imaginary obsessions. How many idee fixes can one man have?

Plenty of course. When I was a child I thought little men lived inside the radio. We had an old tube model. I pictured the people living in a city of tubes.  

But childhood is too easy. What about today? What admixture of fantasy, mild paranoia, and dark amusement still occupies me? 

Well, I think Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are living in my refrigerator. They’re behind a carton of dried prunes left over from a long ago, ill advised effort to bake a fruit cake. They have no friends in the fridge except for a nearly empty jar of cocktail olives. There might be three olives left in there. 

The blues singer Leadbelly sang: “I’ve got grasshoppers in my pillow, I”ve got crickets all in my milk…” 

I’ve got James Bond, Thatcher, and The Gipper, hanging around my domestic morning, and I hate to say it, but you do too. 

It was strange to have a language.

It did not sound like anything else. 

The Russian man talked and became familiar

though he was more peculiar each minute.

“We are like God,” said a woman from Korea

though she didn’t say precisely how.

Later I walked beside the frozen river 

hearing human wishes 

like vows under glass.

Before the Enlightenment, before scientific method, people thought everything in existence was tied to fate, gods, and Olympian caprice. Throughout history life has been like a game of “she loves me, she loves me not” and there’s not much to add about this except to say Newton saved us from many a plucking and sensible people should be grateful. Kurt Vonnegut once said something to the effect, “I’m gad I don’t have to spend time thiinking up what to give God anymore”—to which he added: “what do you give someone who already has everything?” 

I think Vonnegut knew the answer. You give God your despair. This is after all what plucking petals is all about. When someone falls in love, its the work of Cupid. When we fall out of love, well, what then? Did God steer you badly? Did God hate your wedding dress? Does God hate honeymoons in Paris? Falling out of love should be Newtonian but its always marked “return to sender, on high”. Atheists like Christopher HItchens always say religion belongs to the infancy of the race—but really, its all about broken hearts. 

Please don’t fall out of love. I urge against it. But if you have to fall out of love today. Please don’t resort to superstition. 

So when you’re with your dog all the time your imagination is changed. One afternoon in San Francisco Corky and I sat in a small park on Nob Hill watching as about a dozen people practiced Tai Chi. I couldn’t fully see them but I knew they were there. I heard the sounds of their feathers if you will. And Corky basked in the sun, stretched out at my feet. It came to me that dogs differ from humans in several crucial ways. Corky didn’t care about the number thirteen. She didn’t worry about diminishing sunlight at the end of day. No dog on earth needs “happy hour”. They don’t worry about sinister dreams or omens. “Tai Chi,” I thought, “is a beautiful, graceful analgesic, it gets us humans through the hours.” But Corky was her own analgesic. And so she did not see the need for one. 

My dogified mind was undergoing natural development. 

My dogified mind saw that the best of love is now. 

The poet Lorca wrote: “But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists.”

Men and women are carried in their shadows, like musical instruments in their cases. 

Dogs see no need for shadow or case. 

Dogs see light has no bottom. 

Dogs dream of daylight moving their feet beside you in the dark. 

Yes because of my dog my imagination was changed. 

I saw the darkness I’d worshipped in my life was just a trap.

Again in San Francisco talking happily to strangers. “You two look so happy,” said a woman in a tea shop. 

She gave me a free cup of chrysanthemum tea. She gave Corky a bowl of water. 

“Change is possible,” I said. She nodded. 

“Yesterday morning my dog and I walked straight out of a cloud.”

Dogs are against Romanticism. 

No dog believes the past is the key to the present. 

No dog believes in heroic simplicity. 

Corky was pragmatic, trusting, loyal and centered in our steps and stepping. 

How could living with such a being not change your mind’s qualities? 

Human beings have strained features, believing they’re in training for eternity. 

Not your dog. 

Maybe her optimism comes from her nose. She can smell vanished islands. 

All things scented are still present. 

Any dog’s nose is a myth preserving instrument. 

Any dog’s nose reckons happiness past and translates the past. 

**

We went to Santa Cruz, California and walked the seaside boardwalk. 

I told my friend Ken, a poet, I was coming out of a private sphere. 

“I’m learning to like the open,” I said. “It’s like Corky is turning me into the artist formerly known as agoraphobia…

 

I was checking into a Minneapolis hotel fifteen years ago. I can’t remember the year exactly, but I was checking in with my dog and suitcase and my steadfast hope dignity would attend me, for as all disabled people know, when you’re in public dignity is fickle. Maybe the doorman will grab you by the arm, believing he’s helping you. He’s sincere. But as soon as he grabs you you’re leached of 15% of your dignity. Again, all disabled people know every day is a dignity leaching measure. 

But in this case it wasn’t the doorman who de-dignified me. Nor the desk clerk. The job was reserved for two very drunken college girls who appeared beside me as I was approaching the front desk in the conditionally respectable Marriott. 

“Hey,” said girl one. “Can we touch your face?”

“No, stupid,” said girl two. “He’s supposed to touch our faces!”

Roller skate laughter. Heavy odor of gin. 

“Hey,” said girl one, “Wanna touch my face?”

“No,” I said. 

“Why not?” said girl two. “We’ve got great faces!”

“I’m not Helen Keller,” I said. “And I’m not Patty Duke either.”

“He won’t touch our faces!” said girl one. 

“Please leave me alone,” I said. 

The desk clerk was immobilized. And useless. 

“C’mon,” said girl two. “Touch my face!”

Around this time a security guard appeared. He said: “Come with me ladies. It’s time to go.”

They were compliant which surprised me. 

But as they walked away, I could hear girl one saying: “He wouldn’t  touch my face!”

You can’t make this stuff up. 

What are you going to do? I checked in. I estimated I was down 85% on the dignity scale. 

Up on the seventh floor I said aloud: “I like my life. I am full of ideas. My dog and I don’t get lost. This is a good day.”

When your disability comes to visit you often speak of lilacs as if they were customary, as if it’s always Spring. This works so well you add some birds: larkspur, titwillow, pine thrush—all song birds are beautiful and undecipherable. 

You offer disability some tea. 

How can anyone who doesn’t love tea and larkspurs expect to be loved in return? 

Disability taps out the names of things on a table, one by one, original things, words, bird skeletons, clocks with decimals. 

Remember those three way mirrors in the clothing department when you were a kid? (These mirrors still exist of course, but I want you to remember when you were little and seeing them for the first time.)
You were dragged before that mirror. Dragged on a Saturday to get good clothes maybe for a funeral. Maybe a wedding. It doesn’t matter what the occasion—you were there in that stuffy store, stooped, sweating, scowling most likely. 

And maybe your mother said: “Wipe that look off your face.” But of course you couldn’t. For not only were you there on sufferance, you were being forced to see yourself as others would see you. A childhood ego is not as fragile as its adult successor, but even a diminutive ego hates to see itself posed for others. 

That was the moment when childhood was over.When commodified staring was a fait accompli. “Sit up Huckleberry. Don’t slouch, Huckleberry.” 

If able bodied people want to know what disability is like, think about this: its a forever of that Saturday hijacking where you stood before an unrelenting mirror, salesman, and grudging elders. No end in sight.