An Ode to the Boy in a Wheelchair

**Based on a true story and #5 from a collection of short stories...

I don’t remember ever meeting Junior. He was always just kind of there, like the trees growing on your block that you never really paid any attention to. As far as my little girl brain can think back, Junior was always in a wheelchair rolling around with his flipper-like legs. They kind of just laid there, were short, totally deformed, and looked like claws. One day, I noticed Junior’s blue eyes following us while we kids played, and it hit me hard in the chest when I realized Junior would never be able to run, jump, or even walk.

Sometimes, I would go and sit with him and try to make him forget all of us -Maria, Mario, George -were outside doing cartwheels and falling off our bikes. I remember trying to distract him because I could only imagine the sad feelings he must have been living.

Sometimes, some of us would do stuff like throw Junior a basketball or a frisbee. Somehow he still managed to play whenever he could. If we jumped rope, he’d turn his wheelchair to the side and swing the rope as relentlessly as any one of us could.

Laughing our heads off, we would forget about Junior’s metal chair and in those moments of greatness, we were all free. The only thing that separated us was the hours we had to be in school. This went on for years. We’d all congregate outside our two houses on those hot summer days all season long until the freezing winds of winter arrived.

As I grew up, I learned more about Junior. He was forced into a wheelchair after the doctor had delivered him incorrectly at birth. Otherwise, he would have been born a fully functional boy capable of doing anything as physical as we could. His family sued the doctor and were awarded a large amount of money. I’m not sure about the actual amount but even if the sum were a trillion dollars, I’m certain Junior would have traded in all of it to have his legs even for just one day.

His family used the settlement to buy a house, and I knew his grandmother Lupe too. She was my grandmother’s close friend, and she and my grandma spent a hefty amount of time going between our houses drinking coffee and borrowing cups of sugar when either of them ran out. It would be years later that it dawned upon me that their grandmother and not their mother raised junior and his siblings. I asked my mom why that was when I was in middle school.

“Mom, where is Junior’s mom? Lupe is their grandma, why didn’t their mom raise them?”

“Because she was a drug addict.”

And that was the end of that.

Junior didn’t have a mother. I didn’t have a father. So what. We all pretty much grew up in broken homes. On welfare. Absent parents. No hopes of going to college. But we had joy in our hearts anyway, and all of the pain of our loveless and poverty-stricken lives was left outside of our marble circles and shooting plastic bows and arrows. We played and played until we got big enough to be distracted by other things. George and his family moved away. Eventually, so did Mario and Maria.

I started making friends with girls that were interested in the same boys I was. We wanted to drive our parent’s cars and go to the movies on our own. Junior and Saul began to make new friends as well. Slowly, none of us spoke to each other anymore. On a rare occasion, we’d give each other head nods from across the street of our houses whenever we happened to catch each other’s eye at the same time.

By the time we got to high school, even the crumbs of our childhood had vanished. Saul and Junior started to hang out with the older boys that slowly made their way into our rundown neighborhood. Our street became known throughout the town as a haven for gang members and drug addicts. I was always too afraid to go and make friends with the girls that wore heavy eyeliner and got into fistfights; I wasn’t the most responsible child growing up, but hanging out with that crowd seemed like a bad idea.

At home and out of my living room window, I would see Saul walking and Junior wheeling down to the wrong side of our neighborhood. There would be guys dressed in dickie pants and wife-beater tank tops loitering around shiny old cars. They had Virgin Mary tattoos and wore things like Raider jerseys and hairnets.

Those things were not fashion to me then, it was a cry from a world full of darkness. Where the most violent man wins, and crime swallows the weak. Eventually, they all went to jail or died violently.

One day Lupe came over to my house and sat in the kitchen with my grandmother. Lupe told my grandma that Sal and Junior started doing things like cutting school, drinking, and selling meth. There was even talk amongst the grandmas on the block that they had broken into some of the neighborhood houses. This kind of activity escalated until every year, at least two kids were shot by people living on our street. We grew up riding our bicycles and skidding our knees way after dark, but now not one of us felt safe walking down our street anymore.

It got to a point where I avoided crossing paths with Junior and Saul. They had become complete villains in my coming of age years. I smoked weed, cut a few classes, and gave a few boys handjobs, but nothing I felt that was destroying my soul. I always had some kind of scale inside of me that recognized when I caused somebody else pain. If I fucked up, I said sorry. If I was wrong, I stopped doing whatever thing I was doing.

This is how the lives of the kids I grew up with tragically diverged. We weren’t kids anymore, and any choice we made started to have a real impact on us. I was part of the 2% status quo that struggles through cultural assimilation, made it to college, and rose in economic mobility. I was the only one to leave my small mindedness because I didn’t want to pay war taxes and have a piss poor perception of the outside world.

Eventually, I moved away and had forgotten everyone. I assumed, based on nothing but my imagination, that they went on to get married, have children, and then later divorced, and after that became emotionally and mentally bankrupt. Nobody that would do anything worth writing about. They would finally tap out of their dreams and get mediocre jobs, always talk small, go to church on Sunday, and ultimately be dead on the inside. Everybody would be somewhere living a bland life. But I wouldn’t expect to be so completely wrong.

With all my years living abroad, I’ve lost tabs of whom was doing what. I didn’t follow who got fired from what job or the names of their newborn children.

Last week, my mom called me and told me Junior died alone in the hospital. His mother, still nowhere to be seen. My mom told me that she had been the only one to go and visit him in the hospital over the two weeks while his organs were shutting down. When my mom told me the news, I remember Junior had once been a friendly kid that we all like playing with and talking to. I asked my mom for all of the details of the parts of his life that I had missed over the years. She told me that Junior’s grandmother Lupe had passed away many years earlier, and they lost their one family house between all of them sometime after that.

Junior and the rest of his family didn’t have the money or the knowledge to protect their assets legally. Because Junior had never worked, he had been living off the same small government check all of his life. When Junior was 12, it was a lot, but when he was 40, it was soul-crushing poverty. When she told me the story, I felt a sudden lump rise high into my throat and a sting in between my eyes. I felt terrible grief pour over me, and I fell apart inside. Out of sadness, but more out of anger, I cried for Junior.

I cried for him never having the wind blow past him mid-run. I cried for all the times he watched others win a gold medal in the Olympics. I cried for the stairs he never climbed, the skies and skateboards and roller skates and fashionable shoes he might have liked that he could never wear. I cried for all the things that were taken away from him. I cried for his dad not being there. I cried for his mom being too high to think of the emotional pain she had caused her children. I cried for the school system that tolerated his disability, his ethnicity, and his poverty. I cried for all the doors that were never opened up to him on his behalf because he wasn’t rich and didn’t come from the right family. I cried for all girls he must have loved from afar and would never kiss or even hold hands with. I cried for all of his youth spent on losers that never helped Junior plant a garden inside.

I know some people defy all of the adversity they are born into, but even they need support from a kind stranger, a concerned teacher, or even a loving friend. He didn’t have even one of them. And that is the part I cry for most, how he died alone in a bed with nobody around him. My mom was the last person to come in and comfort him.

She was the last person to tell him his eyes were beautiful and that he was not alone, that he had always been loved even if there wasn’t anyone in the room to tell him so. She set flowers next to the machine that breathed for him. She played music filled with violins and pianos to lift his soul because that is what he needed. She drove four hours a few times a week. She did all that the entire time he had been hospitalized because she didn’t want him to leave the world with whatever heartbreak had kept him company all of those years.

Looking back, I wish I would have gone over Junior’s house to encourage him over the years, but I too was barely holding on by a thread. By the grace of January’s snowflakes, I have lived a life I would live again. I have ridden bikes between palm trees in Thai jungles, hiked the jagged Himalayas, and swam in the Mediterranean Sea. But Junior? Junior never stepped foot out of his country, his state, his town, his fence, his chair.

I wrote this because Junior is one of these people society deems a burden. He is one of those poor souls that will remain invisible even when he is standing right in front of you. He’s the underdog that gets swept out of view, and people would rather not talk about, because it makes everyone uncomfortable to see the reflection of how shallow and careless they indeed are towards those that have been compromised by society.

I swore I would write about Junior, to let him run around if only in the minds of others. In the story, I wrote how Junior he was six feet tall and had the bluest eyes you had ever seen. I wrote about how he walked to the library every summer afternoon. I gave him the right to play basketball and go out on Friday nights to the bowling alley with pretty girls. We would be classmates in college and do our homework together until he graduated and became a scientist. His will took over his destiny, and eventually, he dedicated all of his free time to curing cancer and adopted a couple of dogs he jogged with every morning. Finally, he got married and had a son of his own. In this story, he was free to walk upstairs and do cartwheels with us in the park, his legs were strong and healthy, and every dream he ever had finally came true.

For my old buddy Junior

1980 - 2019