MY HANDICAPPED BUDDY, part I

I have a friend who is an amputee, his name’s Jim. He lost his left leg, below the knee, in a motorcycle accident where some dipstick tried to get through an intersection before he got there. Well, even though Jim was just minding his own business and going the speed limit, this moron nailed him. I think about folks like Jim and I kind of wonder if I would be bitter about that, you know, life dealing him a low blow and all. But Jim isn’t bitter about anything. Well he may have gone through a phase for a couple months but he isn’t bitter now. Anyway Jim is one of the nicest guys you’d ever care to meet, a great husband to his wife and a great dad to his kids, and he’s got great taste in friends, (that’d include me).

Well, while Jim may be one of the nicest and coolest come-back cats around, I credit him as one of the cruelest jokers I’ve ever known.

After his amputation, he kind of got this attitude that he wasn’t going to be handicapped. (I know, I know, hey dude, missing leg = handicapped! He snickers about this too, now.) As a result, he refused to get a handicapped parking placard or license plates. But lo, one day he was driving around looking for a parking space at a store. It happened to be raining, and there happened to be an open handicapped parking place right in front. I think he’s normally the type that doesn’t care much about the elements, but decided he’d just go ahead and park in the handicapped spot even though he didn’t have a placard or anything. He says he figured that even if he got a ticket, he take his leg off for the judge who would immediately dismiss the case with a roll of the eyes.

Okay, you have to see Jim. He’s got a weekend’s worth of beard on his face, a Harley painter’s cap, black leather jacket, ratty jeans, Harley shirt, black boots, and a biker’s demeanor that basically says, “Don’t tread on me.” He’s got a big blue ’85 Caprice and Harley stickers in his rear window. He parks in the handicapped spot, gets out of the car and starts walking toward the store. From behind him, he hears one of those screeching fingernails-on-the-blackboard voices, “Hey, if you’re not handicapped, you shouldn’t park in a handicapped spot.” The way Jim describes it, if she had just said it in a normal tone it would have been perfectly acceptable and he would have simply offered an explanation. However, the reality was that she was just so sickeningly jeery and contemptuous, that he was immediately irritated to the point of no return, even before he turned to see who said it.

You know, Jim is a nice guy and all but he doesn’t look nice. I would have said that to some punk skateboarder kid, but not to a biker in tattered jeans and leather jacket on a rainy day. Most of us average mortals have better sense than to swagger our pith and pluck in front of someone who obviously poses a threat to our ability to breathe. He turns around and there’s this obese gal who apparently had a serious case of handicap-placard envy. I understand that obese people can get handicapped placards nowadays just because it takes so much extra energy to get around with all that extra fat hanging on them. This might not have been the case at this period of history.

At the time, Jim didn’t have one of those high-tech springy propeller-type artificial limbs. No, he had just a socket for his stump, attached to a blue aluminum pole which connected to a wooden foot with a bolt that ran right up through the heel into the pole. The funny thing is this – that bolt that held the foot onto the pole would work loose as Jim walked around. He had to tighten it up every week or so, or else his foot would start to pivot around. Once he turned his foot around and walked around with his foot facing backwards. It really got a lot of snickers around the office where he worked.

All right so Jim’s caught parking in a spot without the appropriate placard or plate, she is technically right, and you have to hand it to her – she had to have some brass clackers to talk to a biker like that in her limited physical capacity. Now I’ve known some bikers that would have just tossed a tire iron at her and been done with the situation, but that wasn’t Jim’s style (though Squatty-Body didn’t know that). So Jim got a little perturbed and he faces this lady, he picks his leg up, grabs his foot and turns in backwards right in front of her and says, “Is THAT handicapped enough for YOU?!?!” The lady’s eyes got big as saucers and she put her hands up to her mouth as she gasped. Then he straightened his foot, turned, and walked toward the store entrance. He still describes this as one of those rare pristine moments where he actually had the perfect comeback AT the moment he needed it.

He mentioned, too, that he ran into this lady a couple times here and there in the store and she made no secret of avoiding him. He admits that he later had a little remorse; he feared that he may have scarred her for life or something. But I and others are in agreement that it probably taught her a good lesson to watch her tone – that same attitude spat at the wrong person could wind her up in the ICU or worse – so we all applauded the event as a good deed done. By the way, Jim did eventually get a handicap placard. Yay Jim!

Okay, I have another hilarious one about Jim for next time. You’ll definitely want to stay tuned for this one.

J.P.T.