Look, Angelo, I walk like you do now. Kick left stump. Watch to see that the knee locks before the heel gets to the ground, toe still propped up in the air. Shift weight. Topple a bit like a tight rope walker before you try the right side. Check again to see there is no difference in ground level to cause a trip. Take a breath that serves as a prayer for safe landing and pivot the right side around. Look for the next available thing to grab or lean on.
Here I am, all alone in this house, Angelo, thinking about watching you walk beside me on the day before my accident. Thinking about you as a kind of messenger to lead me into life without legs. You began the lesson that I am finally learning: life turns out to be like the way we walk, Angelo. We are metaphors for all the world to see. We take a step and we've got no control over where we will land. But we keep going. And looking for something to lean on, if only for a moment. Every step is an awkward act of faith. Yeah, we know how to walk bettern than anybody.
What a story you told me when you called on the phone and asked for help.
"This is Pastor Angelo, Mr. G. Someone told me you sometimes helped folks in trouble."
"Uh, oh," I thought, "I should never have started this. Every deadbeat in town is asking me for a handout." And I started to think of a way to say a decisive "NO."
"You see, I've been robbed."
"Yeah, I've heard that one before," I thought. "Hang up quick."
"And, well, I'm handicapped, and they even broke one of my artificial legs."
You had me then, Angelo. The one thing guaranteed to keep me interested. So I arranged to come to the flea bag hotel you were in and take you to a bank where we could cash a check for you.
I pulled up at the entrance and out you walked. You walk so slowly that I had plenty of time to look you over. Short. Very short, probably under 5 foot. Small, thin, delicately boned. Cafe au lait, not brown. Hispanic? Twenty something. Or thirty something. Shabbily dressed and disheveled looking. Shirt tail out of pants. Shirt sleeve not buttoned. Not handsome. And not pretty. Not at all. I opened the door so that you could lower yourself into the seat. The right leg didn't bend at all but it was short enough that you got it into the area under the dashboard, sticking straight out into space. Then you reached down to take the left foot and re-arrange it. Then you offered your right hand for me to shake. And I saw and felt almost simultaneously that the fingers were permanently drawn down over the palm. The thumb was drawn up over the palm trapped between the third and fourth fingers which, in turn, locked those fingers in place. Only the second and third fingers could move, stiffly, a tiny bit. What I shook were the bony knuckles you offered into my palm.
I noticed that the left hand was similar, except that the thumb was totally hidden under the other four fingers. No wonder you couldn't get dressed neatly! How in the hell did you even get your legs on?
On the way to the bank the details of the story came out. They had knocked you down in the robbery, breaking the right leg at the knee lock. "Look," you said as you pulled up your pants leg with your knuckles, "it's taped together. That's why it won't bend." And sure enough, what looked to be a whole roll of gray duct tape was wrapped around the chocolate brown plastic of the leg. "And the waist strap has come off," you added. Then you told me how you had walked the almost two miles from the hospital to the hotel - on that incomplete and broken prosthesis, held together with duct tape. Why? Because there was nothing else to do. You had nothing until the next disability check came in.
But you had plans. You were starting a ministry. Non-denominational. Hoped to do outreach particularly to crippled kids and retarded kids. Once you got this check cashed you had an appointment to look at a building to house the program. You had no money. But faith. Look faith was already working, wasn't it? I had come along with $50 to last until the disability check came, hadn't I?
Pulling into the bank parking lot, I found the disabled spaces were filled. We were going to have to walk a ways. "Is that ok? I asked, "Or should I let you off at the door?"
And I realized that you, Angelo, were the first person I had ever talked to, even indirectly, about a disability. Over the course of 60 years I had had acquaintances who were amputees or post polios or paraplegic. And I was not proud of my record with them. I had looked. Always averting my eyes if they looked back, hearing my mother's voice in my head, "Don't stare, Lee." And in conversation I had never once said a word about what was causing my head to spin with the message: "Cripple Alert." I had ridden six hours in a car with a post-polio once. Stowing and fetching his wheel chair as he requested, watching him drive with hand controls. Fighting the urge to look at his legs and pretending nothing was at all unusual. The one para I had known had once visited me from out of town. When it was time to eat, I took him to a drive-in restaurant rather than deal with issues of what I should and shouldn't do to help him. I'm not proud of this behavior, Angelo. Or the hours spent looking for and looking at pictures of crippled guys to compensate for the fact that I was not relating to guys like that in real life.
But walking to the bank with you beside me was somehow different. I was terribly conscious of how short you are. I watched your left leg kick out straight. I heard the squeak of its lock. I saw the heel of your shoe hit the ground. I saw the stiff right leg arc around to land the shoe facing 10 o'clock. And I heard myself asking about how the damage to the prosthesis had affected your walking. And you answered my question matter of factly. And you talked about how you hoped the right leg would last, taped together as it was, for the 6 or 8 months the welfare hospital had told you would be necessary to get a replacement. But in the meantime you would keep on.
I realize now, Angelo, that there was another difference from my usual behavior with folks like you. I walked beside you without getting hard. But I get hard at thought of you now, Angelo.
When we got to the bank door, I opened it for you. Mistake. You had been aiming to grab the door as a temporary assist on your walk. And you had to bob around an extra split second to gain balance. A lesson for both of us, Angelo: no step can be taken for granted.
As we said our goodbyes, you promised to keep in touch about how your ministry was going. And you offered the knuckles and stiff fingers of your hand for me to shake again.
I wonder if you tried to keep in touch.
I was the one out of touch with the world for the next six months. The day after we met, I stepped off a curb and into the path of the car which crushed my legs.
So here I am, Angelo, lonely and horny. Still in pain. Still learning to walk and hoping I'll be able to do it half as well as you do. But not unhappy. I've got some peace. It's like the time after I finally admitted I was gay. Nobody could hurt me anymore by catching me up in a secret. And I belonged. Belonged to that nebulous thing called the gay community. Now nobody can hurt me anymore by catching me up in my secret desire to belong to your community, Angelo. One look at me in my legless state in a chair - or one look at me trying to walk (or even trying to stand) tells the world I am a cripple. Stare all you want, world. This is the way I am and will be and somehow was meant to be.
But, gee, it's lonely right now, Angelo. I've tried fantasizing and I'm hard as a rock. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to put an ad on the internet and in all the local papers and on the bulletin boards of bars: "New double amp wants to meet other gay men with disabilities for friendship." I mean that about friendship. It doesn't have to be sex. I just want to meet my brothers in this fraternity I'm pledged to. I've done the initiation in fantasy for years.
Look at these two series of pictures, Angelo. They are what has gotten me so hard. The one guy has a young, serious face. Not gorgeous. But handsome. But, see, his shoulders are barely wider than his head. They end in bony proturances, and then there are hollow places down to where his rib cage begins. Obviously he has nothing at all to move, except for breathing, between his neck and his dick. Don't you just want to take him in your arms, hug those little shoulders which do him no good, Angelo?
Or there is this really gorgeous and muscular hunk who has stumps like mine but an upper body built, as we used to say, "like a brick shit house." Look at the pictures of what he can do. Headstands. Running on his hands. But there, standing in the corner, are legs like we have, Angelo, with the waist belt hanging down over them. And we know that perched in that scaffold like a caged bird, he hobbles around like we do, don't we? His stumps get raw like ours. Every step threatens to topple him over. He is helpless in front of stairs. Unless he can find something to grab on to while he contorts his real and artificial body into a right angle and pulls himself up by his arms. That hunk is part of my tribe. And I am part of his.
But tonight I don't want either one of these guys who have gotten me so hot. I want you, Angelo, to be with me. Let me just go brush my teeth and then it'll be lights out time.
Shit, what do you do when you drop the cap of the toothpaste tube on the floor, Angelo? Nothing for me to do but wait for the cleaning man to pick it up. It isn't worth me taking off these legs and crawling back in here to find it. As a matter of fact, how do you even unscrew the cap, Angelo? At least I can do that.
Lots of mysteries about you, Angelo. How do you answer questionnaires about your identity? What is your age? Is your address really that flea bag hotel? Which race do you claim? And Doe is surely not your name. Maybe you don't have a family to claim you with a name. I'll bet you secretly giggle about the sex question, too. My guess is that you've been fucked up the butt plenty - as the weak and vulnerable kid in the ghetto. And what do you list for height? I am now tempted to put 3 foot 6 inches. Are you tempted to put, let's say, 2 foot 6 inches? As a matter of fact, what do your legs look like. Have the birth defects been cut away or are they secret twistings hidden by prostheses? Only one thing sure about your identity. You are a cripple. Like me. Like that hunk.
Ok, teeth are done. Lean on the sink and turn around with little scoots of stiff legs. Grab at the door jam. Three steps to the table in the bedroom. Use it to make the turn. Three more steps to the bed. Lean on the bedside table. Lift the left leg and fall into bed.
I'm too tired to take the legs off right now, Angelo. Do you mind coming to me like this? You'll have your legs on. You'll have to have them on since I can't picture you without them.
Let's see, you'll answer my ad. You'll call me up and say. "Remember me? Angelo? I saw your ad." And I will say, "Let's get together." And you will say, "I don't have bus fare. Can you come here?" I'll walk down the hallway, reaching out to the wall for support at times like I bet you do. You'll open the door to me. And once you have awkwardly backed up and I have awkwardly come in sideways (since I make such a wide arc in my swings that I hit door jams sometimes) and you have closed the door, we will stand and look at each other. We will want to kiss. But I am too far above you. And neither one of us can support the other. We both will take the four or five steps we need to reach the bed. You lower yourself first. In my fall, our legs clank and we laugh until we can get rolled over side by on our backs. I will unzip you as you reach your arm down inside my pants. We will each feel the apparatus that keeps us upright. And feel that we have gotten each other upright. It will feel so different to have a hand like yours on me. You can't get your fingers around me. But I will work as hard as I can to get my cock between them and your palm. You will appreciate a firm yet gentle grasp all the way around your cock for a change. And you will start to moan. Things are going too fast ... so I take time out to get our pants down. You kiss and stroke with your gnarled hands whatever part of my body goes by you in the process. We will roll on the bed with more clanking of legs tangled up in pants, heaving our bellies with each breath to drive our cock against and into the other. It makes no difference whether our cock hits hand or belly or belt or prosthesis, we just want to make contact. I can sense you are almost ready. That you have been fighting off coming for about as long as you can. So I stop us to take off my legs and prop them up beside the bed as witnesses. Crawling back into position, I get you on top of me. I will guide your hands to my scars so that I feel them the knuckles tracing them while I grease us up and guide you into my butt. Your cock is small. It has been years since I have felt someone inside me so I am glad you are so small. You will prop yourself up on your arms as I lift my stumps to fit up into belly. They are so short they do not get in your way. I pull you in farther by grasping your butt. And you come. With a great cry at the first spasm. And screeching delight as it continues. Your whole body is involved in the thrusts - breath and belly and leglets pushing inside their sockets. I am so happy that you are happy that I am not even sure when I start to shoot. But I will not finish until you have collapsed on me and grabbed my cock with as much of your fingers as you can manage to get around it. Later you will lick my cum with your tongue out of the mysterious space in your hand between fingers and palms.
And you will say, "I've never been in someone before. I've just been a butt for some crack head to fuck. Thank you."
And I will say, as I doze off, "Thank you, Angelo, my guardian Angelo .....