Chapter 1: June-October 1987. Part i.

I am a C-6, -7 quadriplegic, completely paralyzed below my waist and partially above. My feet and legs, scrotum and penis, everywhere from my nipples down, can be pierced, burned, or caressed without my knowing it. I was 21 when my neck was broken in a car accident in which Anne, the only woman with whom I had had intercourse, died. That was 1963; it was not until 1973 that I next made love, with Lee.
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I begin the odd and minimally fictionalized love story I am about to tell on October 3, 1987 with me riding in the cab of my friend Angus' 10-year-old pick-up truck. Angus was driving and his wife Hettie sat between us, my left hand on her thigh. I had met Angus in 1970 when I moved to Jamesville, a rural town in northern New York with a population of about 350; his family had moved a number of times in his childhood, but he'd been graduated from the regional high school and lived here since. In 1976 he had introduced me to Hettie, a 28-year-old painter and weaver from Albany who, eleven years later, was teaching junior-high-school art. She had medium-length blonde hair and green eyes, stood five feet eight, and would turn 40 in December. Angus was a year younger and, like Hettie, neither thin nor fat; he stood six feet tall, wore his graying hair to his collar, and had a neat full moustache. He was a carpenter and part-time fishing-guide, and as unconscious of his handsomeness as Hettie was of her beauty. They were intelligent, fair-minded, matter-of-fact people.

I was 46. I had an unkempt gray and white beard covering a strong chin, a scraggly untrimmed moustache, and my fine light-colored hair reached halfway down my back and was beginning to turn gray. I lived part of the time in Tucson and part at Wurts Farm outside Jamesville, Wurts Farm a commune I'd helped begin in 1970 that had devolved into my house and my land. The summer just past was the first I'd spent at the farm since 1982, and Hettie and Angus were driving me south on Route 81 to catch my flight out of Syracuse to Tucson.

Hettie held a joint for me as I toked and then toked herself. Since 1968 I'd more often than not smoked every day, rarely only once a day, but over the summer I'd usually skipped a day or two a week; Hettie smoked daily, Angus not at all. Hettie and Angus and I, with our friends Dee and Joe, had also used cocaine several nights a week this summer. I assumed we were all addicted, they assumed we weren't, and we all still liked the drug.

"She wrote about all these people she knew who had what they called open marriages, and none of them sounded happy," Hettie said. She was talking about her sister who lived in California and had recently had a love affair that hadn't made her feel good as her husband had been having one he'd liked. "I don't understand it," she said.

"Me neither," Angus said.

"It seems like kind of looking for trouble," Hettie said.

I thought of the night before, lying alone and naked on my back, legs spread, holding the head of my erect penis between my clawed left hand's index finger and thumb as I imagined Hettie and Angus sitting at the foot of my bed on one side, Joe and Dee on the other. Looking for trouble? "It's hard to do. Any relationship is," I said.

All of us had said when we'd started doing cocaine together that we liked using it for love-making, and I'd said I'd never used it much without a lover. "Why frustrate myself?" I said. Again today I didn't talk about why I'd changed my mind and indulged so frequently this summer. Nearly every night I'd used the drug I'd fantasized I soon would talk; I never had.
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I was told after I was hurt that the spinal cord is not like telephone wire, which can be spliced, but like corn-meal mush. When a telephone wire is cut and properly spliced, red to red and white to white, it works as well as ever; when the spinal cord is wounded and heals, it scars, and messages sent up to the brain from below the scarring or down from the brain to below it are blocked by the scar-tissue. One result of the brain's signal to the lower body being blocked is paralysis, and one outcome of the lower body's signal to the brain being blocked is a lack of sensation.

But lack of sensation gives a false impression; what I feel where I am paralyzed isn't an utter absence of feeling. Sitting in my wheelchair, for instance, I seem to feel my weight on my buttocks—but I'd feel no difference were I sitting on nails. I can feel my legs too, but, with my eyes closed and my body newly positioned in my wheelchair, I am only able to guess whether they are or are not bent at the knee. If, experimentally, someone unbeknownst to me were to squeeze my toe (or penis), I would not feel it. If I knew what was being done, I probably would feel it--whether it was in fact being done or not.
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Lee was my first lover after my accident. I met her in 1971 in Godwin, N.J., the village in which I had been born and grown up. I had returned to Godwin in June 1964, ten months after I was hurt, to live with my parents, whose big Victorian house had since become far more communal than they had ever imagined that it might. On a warm day in early April, Bert, one of the five near-20-year-olds in our present household, was pushing me in my chair the few blocks to the park in the center of town. I very rarely left the house but Bert and the balmy day had been persuasive. Bert and I were in the road, and his 4-month-old malamute Sugaree was trotting happily beside us on the sidewalk.

"She's a girl-magnet," he said.

He was right. Soon after we arrived at the park we were joined by Lee and her tall thin strikingly beautiful girlfriend. We chatted, discovered that the friend lived through our next-door-neighbor's yard and one street over, and the four of us left the park together an hour later. Only as we walked toward home did Bert and I discover with gleeful dismay that the girls were 13-year-olds. Lee and I became lovers two years later, on her fifteenth birthday. Her sex life was, of course, very young, but because of its 10-year suspension mine was too; we were well matched and are still close.

I wrote a poem about feeling the first year that Lee and I were lovers:

When yonder blind man thinks of colors
His imagination
Conjures what no sighted eye has seen
Your touch spreads through me
Hear me groan

The climax of which my groans were the voice was not physical but emotional. Physically (except above my nipples, where my sensation remains normal) I felt as a shadow might feel, at a remove from fleshly being, or perhaps as a deaf person feels loud music. My desire was intense, so intense I could scarcely believe that it had been markedly more so, but I knew that once upon a time, before I was hurt, it had been driven by a frenzied physicality I no longer knew.
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I wondered early on in my sexual relationship with Lee why I was so drawn to her vagina, not just with my nose and lips and tongue, unfeeling penis too, but, essentially, most particularly, my left thumb? I was always on my back or leaning on my right arm when we were in bed. When my penis was in her, I couldn't tell whether I was hard and filling her or soft and not even between her lips. If I couldn't see, I couldn't tell if my cock was in her mouth, or my balls, or whether she was licking me. With my lips and tongue I could make her come, and loved to, but it was thumbf*cking that I almost never omitted when I made love with her, and very rarely omitted with any new lover. I guessed that entering her represented to me the physical acceptance of my love by my lover, and that that excited me. I'd had surgery on each hand, and my left thumb was well placed for loving, my right not; they were beautiful hands, quite different.

My sexual focus was not my penis but my lover's vagina and clitoris, my craving not the excitation of my flesh by hers but hers by mine, and my climax, such as it was--and it was not negligible--, derived from hers; the more intense her feeling, the more intense mine. That I didn't feel was a joke between me and Lee, as it would be between me and my later lovers. We knew I felt, and we were right. There was (virtually) no AIDS then, nor did I ejaculate, and sex with me and for me was caring, infertile, loving, and fun; it tempered me, gentled me, empowered and inspired me. I didn't feel, and it didn't matter.

For years. Eventually, late 1977, early 1978, I think it did, left Lee no way to reach and reassure me arationally when we needed her to. I was, by then, emotionally unable to initiate love making, felt clumsy and, irrationally, as though she didn't want me. When she tried to make love to me, I couldn't accept her overtures or direct them toward my pleasure. A change had been necessary if we were to stay with one another; it hadn't happened and we had come uncoupled.
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My lack of sensation played no part in separating me and Jane, whom I met eight months after last sleeping with Lee. We were still in love when we were perversely separated.

Jane and I met in Tucson on Eighth Street where I was living with two women Lee's age (one the girl with whom she'd been when Bert and I had met her). Jane was with a man named Story and they knew Nadine, my second housemate, from picking fruit in Washington State that summer. Owl, their baby boy, was a month old. Story, with Jane and Owl, had come to Tucson to score pot, and on that and later visits he parked his old green panel truck (in which they three and their full-sized black dogs Cyrus and Charlie lived) on the street in front of our 3-bedroom 1-story white stucco house.

Jane was both out-going and shy. She had light hair, bright prominent blue eyes, a baby she loved, a man she didn't want or like but still respected, and a life she found deeply satisfying but also lonely. She had spent her high-school years in Cleveland doing speed and cutting class, hanging out with acquaintances in a wooded park near the projects in which she'd grown up and walking alone by the river that flowed through it. She had badly wanted to get out of Cleveland, but an art teacher to whom she was close encouraged her to get her degree and then pulled strings to make sure it was given to her in spite of her attendance record. She hitch-hiked out of town the day after graduation ceremonies with sixty-one dollars, a few clothes in a back-pack, and her sketch pad and pencils.

Story, about five ten, one seventy, with long light brown hair, was in his early thirties and thought of himself as an outlaw businessman. My paralysis, that I lived with two beautiful young women, my education (an Ivy League degree), and the quality of my cannabis all intrigued him. In his late twenties he had owned and run an expensive we-deliver sandwich shop in California and also sold the best pot to persons he thought the best people. The businesses were synergistic and successful, but then trouble had come and Story had lost his money and barely avoided jail. He hated being poor and hated driving hither and yon in his beat-up truck selling ounces to isolated potheads and fellow fruit-pickers. I’d sold pot myself but very little in the past few years, had sold none of the pound of fine golden-colored Colombian I'd brought from the east and kept under my bed (I am one of the few ever to smuggle pot from New Jersey to Tucson), and I lived frugally and comfortably on my 375-dollar-a-month Social Security check and the 100-dollars-a-month my mother gave me towards my rent. My poorness was real but, unlike Story and Jane, I had family willing and able to support me were I to need help.

Story doted on Owl; Jane, he didn't take seriously. During his glory days in Venice Beach, his girlfriend had been a glamorous aspiring starlet, and he liked to talk about her and her friends and his sandwich-shop clientele and how far his life now was from what it had been and would, he said, be again. He did not pretend Jane would be a part of the future he envisioned except, as far offstage as possible, as Owl’s mother. She, he thought, was a 20-year-old hippie chick he’d rescued from a very bad situation who had gotten herself pregnant (by him) and, despite his warning that he intended to have nothing to do with the baby, refused to listen to his advice that she get an abortion. Unfortunately, the warning had proven not to be a promise. He was at Owl’s birth, and as Owl had been taking his first breath, Story had discovered love. He hadn't had a clue.
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Story had embarrassed Jane in December by telling her that I wanted to make love to her and that he wouldn't mind if it happened. She had known I wasn't interested but been wrong, and when I had surprised her a few weeks later by suggesting it she had said yes. Her answer hadn't been determined by Story's permission but, lacking it, I think it unlikely she would have agreed; she had a deeply conservative streak of which her friends were for the most part unaware. At the time and through that winter into spring she and Story each insisted they were together only as Owl's parents, not as a couple.

One day in February we three were in the grassless-dirt front yard, Story seated on a porch chair, I beside him in my wheelchair, and Jane twenty feet away under the yard's only tree nursing Owl. The temperature in the shade was about 70 and the day, as usual, sunny and bright. Stuffy, I thought as I listened to Story tell another tale of which he was the hero; he's stuffy. I looked across the yard at Jane, with whom I was head-over-heels in-love, and thought, Daisy Mae. "Tut-tut," I said to myself. I tried on principle to avoid characterization but I seemed to be on a characterizing roll! Jane was not big-breasted like Al Capp’s comic-strip country-girl, but there was a Daisy Mae-like freshness about her that I thought astonished even Story, much as he belittled it. I thought that if I said Daisy Mae to him, he would nod appreciatively; I risked no such apparent understanding between us, knowing that on his part it would have been at Jane's expense. I knew her smart, however disinclined to intellectuality; he considered her uneducated and empty-headed, and drew conclusions I did not from her ignorance of fashion and style, costly clothes and make-up and chic--of all of which I was every bit as ignorant as she. To the extent Jane really was like Daisy Mae, she was like her because she was so vital and--I grinned ruefully--unstuffy.
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In May 1979 Jane and Story returned to the fruit trail and I flew to Wurts Farm. I thought we three had agreed that Jane would come east in September with Owl, and that then the three of us would meet Story in Tucson in late December or early January. But Story had in his opinion not agreed or else had changed his mind, and through the summer he employed stratagems, including threats, to keep Jane and Owl from coming east. When they joined me anyway, in September as we had planned, Story missed Owl too much; he also to his surprise missed Jane. Eventually, in late November, he followed them to Wurts Farm, having fallen prey to and then fed fantasies of punishing her and me for our temerity.

Jane had weaned Owl in October. When Story arrived at Wurts Farm he told her that Owl still needed her and was too young to be without his mother, but, he said, he was going to leave us all here for one last week and, when he returned, he was taking Owl. The choice would then be hers, he said, whether to leave with them or desert her child. She had not expected him to follow her, and after he had done so and delivered his ultimatum, she did not think he could be resisted or escaped. I thought her mistaken and said so but did not convince her, and when a week later he did return, he, she, and Owl left.
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I was devastated and went to Godwin the next day. During the 4-month separation that followed Jane and I talked only four times, never for more than a few minutes; she would tell me what state they were in, we would each try not to cry, and we would say we loved each other and would be all right.

I next saw her in April in Tucson. She was almost four months pregnant with Tanager and had hitch-hiked from Florida in three days; Story, of whom she was now frankly afraid, had shown up with Owl a few days later. Incredibly, we four soon rented a house together, in which we were still living when Tanager was born there at the end of August. Jane accepted Story to be allowed to be with Owl; I accepted him because Jane did; and he suffered me because Jane insisted, because he liked me and couldn’t conveniently get rid of me, and because I knew people who would front me pot and was willing to share with him. That I was physically helpless and mentally tough frustrated him and was all that made our household possible. "It's not fair," he complained that summer (to my amusement, seriously). "You know how to fight this way. I don't." He was away about two weeks a month, selling pot on the road. Jane and I ran a small in-town business, and when Story was in town she slept with him.

Just as Jane had been unconvinced by my arguments that she and Owl should not leave the farm with Story, she wouldn't in Tucson take Owl, later Owl and Tanager, and leave with me--and I refused to insist she must. She'd become surer than ever that if she did, Story would find her and take her son away forever. She knew that he would ignore the courts and that he was adept at avoiding the police, and she was also afraid that if we left he would kill us when he found us--a concern I found unpersuasive because I thought it as likely as not that he would kill us anyway.

So we lived. Always Story maintained the threat that he would leave and take Owl with him. There was no threat he would take Tanager. He explicitly treated her, from the hour she was violently conceived on the dirt floor of a Florida fruit-picker’s shack, as a counter-chip, Jane’s since Owl was his. Jane even tried to love him, and when she couldn't she succeeded to a degree I found remarkable in respecting him as Owl's father. I didn't think what she was doing would ever accomplish what she hoped--free her of his threat to take Owl from her--, but it didn't seem necessarily worthless to try.

Story and I in our way were close, more than willing as each of us would have been to do without the other. He did atrocious things in the name of love, risked Owl's and Tanager's well-being as much as he risked Jane's, and there was cruelty to Jane of which I didn't know. Story never did understand that to love requires the lover to value the loved one's well-being at the very least as much as one's own. Careful as he was sometimes to show that he was only controlling himself with difficulty, much as he liked to project his capacity to run amok with his heart-felt mad-man's stare, his self-image was neither bullying nor malign. I even sometimes understood (though never shared) his anger at Jane, however offensive I found his expression of it; he and I weren't different species, were human males. He taught me by example how not to be, what not to do.

Jane met Seth early in 1981, Tanager's first spring. He was Jane's age, not more than ten years older like Story or almost twenty like me, and with him she found a sort of pure relief I no longer offered now that our love was as tangled up as it was with Story. I knew she and Seth might be lovers but didn't ask and didn't feel I needed to know. I wanted her to be with me come summer, but she again believed that if she were Story would punish her by keeping Owl away permanently, and in late spring 1981, as in late spring 1980, when I went east to New York she went north to Washington. Seth didn't tell her that he loved her until late that summer in the orchards.

By the time I returned to Tucson at the beginning of October 1981, Jane and Tanager were already there and had a house with Seth. I'd expected to live with Jane, whoever else might be living with her, but Seth had never understood that she was in love with me; she was focused not on Tanager or Seth or me but on missing Owl, who was with Story. I was stunned but persisted in my refusal to make demands and rented a house of my own.
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To go to the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. Has your genital feeling been affected by SCI? If so, how? I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.