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Crash | May 16 2005

We had a game we liked to play called Crash. We would play it whenever we went somewhere together. The game made use, in a sense, of Donny’s disability, which had left him with severely limited use of his arms and legs. Among other things, Donny’s disability made it difficult for him to manipulate the joy stick on his motorized wheelchair. Instead of steering with his arm or even his wrist, Donny would grasp the joy stick as firmly as he could and lean forward, or to side, with his whole torso. This is how Donny steered, by leaning.

The idea of Crash was for me to make up stupid jokes so that Donny would laugh and lose control of the wheelchair. I won when this happened; Donny won when it didn’t. I won more times than not because Donny was a sucker for stupid jokes.

Once, as we approached the door to a bank, I sensed some people walking behind us. They were keeping their distance because Donny was in a wheelchair. This happened all the time: people would tip-toe around Donny. I understood why they did this (I had done the same thing in the beginning), but it also pissed me off because Donny was limited as much by the way people treated him as by his own body.

This one time, I stopped about ten feet before the bank door and stood there a while doing nothing. Then I turned to Donny and said in a sarcastic voice loud enough for the people behind us to hear, “I suppose you expect me to get it again.”

Donny fell sideways laughing, and his wheelchair spun around in circles. He nearly hit the guy behind him.