On the One Hand

You might wonder what it’s like for someone to go through life with only one hand. You might not, too. Regardless, I’m going to tell you—hopefully without going into too much tedious detail—how that’s been for me over the past nearly 54 years.

I’ve referred to my congenital abnormality (“birth defect” sounds a little too much like I should’ve been tossed off the assembly line) only peripherally in the almost two years I’ve been writing this blog, and I don’t mean to make a huge hairy deal out of it now. But I was prompted recently to think about the pros and cons of one-handedness when I exchanged a spirited stump-bump with a street person in Alexandria—putting huge smiles on our faces and prompting a horrified mom to whisk away her transfixed little girl. I’ll get back to that later.

Make no mistake: The cons of one-handedness have far outweighed the pros. I write that not to elicit sympathy, nor to make my poor mom feel any guiltier for birthing an incomplete baby than she likely already has through the course of her 80 years. (Never mind the fact that my mom presumably never will read this account, because by design she doesn’t even know this blog—in which I discuss my agnosticism, liberal political views, etc—exists. And since my parents don’t so much as own a computer, let alone know how to conduct a Web search, it seems unlikely they’ll ever find out about Lassitude Come Home unless one of you readers turns traitorous.)

Rather, I mention the cons of my situation because I don’t want to leave the erroneous impression that I’ve coped fantastically with this situation throughout my life, made lemonade out of lemons by virtue of my inspirationally upbeat, striving, Horatio Alger-esque attitude, and all that kind of crap.

To the contrary, in kindergarten I raised my hook to club a kid who was taunting me, opening a gash on his head. Which landed me in hot water and taught me to internalize the shame and self-consciousness and anger I felt. Which, in turn, led to behaviors like wearing, well into my teens, unbearably hot long-sleeved clothing even at the height of summer. I didn’t go on my first date until I was a senior in high school, or have my first real girlfriend until I was 25. I was kind of fat and unkempt for much of that time and was by no stretch a smooth talker, so I don’t want to suggest the arm thing was entirely to blame. But it was a major factor. I’d surely have felt more comfortable talking to girls if, for example, I hadn't been preoccupied assuming from the get-go that I’d be shot down on account of my freakishness.

My attitude and comfort level with myself are light-years better now than they were in my earlier decades. There came a point at which creating my own personal sauna in summer became literally unbearable, and as the layers of clothing came off (I’d often wear a sweat-stained sport jacket—now there was a fetching look), I was inspired to reduce the girth of the revealed body. As I got in better shape, my self-confidence increased. Not to great heights, but to where my shyness and hesitance in social situations went from painfully acute to something much more manageable.

Then Lynn capped my renaissance by literally embracing my Otherness. She actually liked the feel of my stump on her skin—and said so. Sort of like black people who rob the “n word” of its awful power by using it appreciatively and sometimes ironically amongst themselves, she took my one-handedness (“disability” seems inaccurate because there’s little I’m physically incapable of doing) and made it a source of playfully mocking dialogue between us. For example, when I’d ask her to tie my shoes for me, she’d say, with exaggerated earnestness, “I think you’d feel better about yourself if you tried to tie your own shoes.” Whereupon I’d answer, “No, really, I’m good! I’m kind of in a hurry here.”

For another example, we love to skewer the dreadfully patronizing word “handicapable,” which was created by God knows which undoubtedly well-meaning person, but which seems designed to elevate and honor those who’ve heroically, even beatifically risen above their handicaps to successfully complete tasks any “normal” person can do. I’ll enlist Lynn’s help to scratch an itch I can’t quite reach, and she’ll say, “I’m sorry you’re so handicapped. It must be awful for you.” I’ll respond, “Nuh uh! Cuz I’m handicapable!” (Other times I’ll invoke Damon Wayans’ bumbling crip superhero character from the old In Living Color, proclaiming, “Nuh uh! I’m Handyman!”)

One last example. (Not to drag this out, but I really like this one.) Lynn will affect a Hungarian accent and channel my late grandmother (my dad’s stepmother). She was a very strange and, in the latter years of her life, oft-intoxicated woman who, one Christmas, saw me struggling ever so slightly to unwrap a gift and implored Lynn, in her best pitying Zsa Zsa Gabor accent, ‘Please help him, honey!” This was after she’d told my wife how, when she first learned in July 1958 that I'd been born with only half a right arm, she “cried and cried!” Lynn enjoys sometimes getting her Hungarian on and reliving that moment by emoting, “I cvied and cvied!”

Getting back to the point, thanks to Lynn, thanks to some welcome maturity on my part, thanks to great friends whose acceptance of me is total, and thanks to the natural impatience with obstacles that comes with age, having one hand sucks far less now than it did when I was younger. Sure, I still don’t much like it when little kids call attention to me in public places by loudly asking their mommies and daddies why that man has only one hand. But they are kids, after all, and I’m not something they see every day. (Although, given America’s needless wars of late, our youth have, unfortunately, gotten far more accustomed to seeing grown men with missing limbs.) I continue to almost always feel at least a little self-conscious in public—especially in short-sleeves season—even though you’d think I’d be over that by now.

Be all that as it may, now it’s time to write about the pros of stumpiness. Because there definitely are some.

I’m sure cancer survivors get tired of being told how “heroic” they are simply for doing the things they must to extend their lives. But it’s got also to feel good, sometimes, to be placed on a pedestal—however undeserved the elevation might be. In a far less dramatic way, that’s what being one-handed feels like for me at times.

I’ve always remembered the words Teddy Conklin scrawled in my junior high yearbook. He was one of the more popular kids, and thus not of my social circle, but he seized the yearbook from me and wrote in emphatic blue ink, “For one great arm, you’re the best @#!*! kid I know.” I’m not sure why he felt compelled to take a cartoon-character approach to profanity—if he was so concerned about school censorship, why even bother?—but, anyway, I was far less offended by his innocently patronizing message than I was thrilled to not only have been noticed, but to have actually been complimented by, a superior in the school pecking order.

Many, many times over the years, by an astonishing array of people—classmates, teachers, employers, people in bars, you name it—I’ve been honored, sometimes lauded even, essentially for Just Showing Up. For simply, like those cancer survivors, having chosen not to kill myself, I guess, but, rather to have gone about living my life. I had a French teacher in junior high who absurdly inflated my grades, and I sensed even then that I somehow was being rewarded for perceived spunkiness. To my teacher, it was as if I’d stood up and exclaimed, flanked by the proudly waving French and American flags, “I may be an unfortunate wretch, but, as Dieu is my witness, I will conjugate these verbs!”

Similarly, a gym coach once advanced me to the second round of the baseball team tryouts not, clearly, for my mediocre fielding skills and non-existent hitting ability, but because I was more interested in trying to play baseball than in conceding the very long odds against me.

Later, when I was a newspaper reporter, certain co-workers and even bosses seemed blown away by my ability to write stories on deadline via one-fingered, non-touch typing. (That having been the self-taught, inefficient style I employ to this day, which I surely could have improved upon had I ever sought proper instruction.) On my reporting beats, I found that my sources sometimes gave me exclusive information because they thought I deserved a break, given the cruel hand (or lack thereof) I’d been dealt in life.

Even today, I find that my line between feeling patronized and pleased, between con and pro, often is a fine one. I chafe when grocery store checkers assume I need help carrying my items, but I conversely enjoy imagining their admiring surprise as I walk away with laden bags suspended from the crook of my right elbow. When people not infrequently volunteer that I don’t seem limited in any significant way by my disability, I simultaneously think, “Well, duh! It’s not like I’m short a frontal lobe, or even a leg” and “If that impresses you, I’ll take it! Now watch me act all humble.”

Maybe the best “pro” of one-handedness, though, is that it sometimes offers me entry into a weird form of community. I say “weird” because it’s not an organized thing, like the sorority of pink-ribboned breast cancer survivors, but something impromptu and generally unstated. While I may sometimes be imagining this, when I encounter other one-handers on the streets and catch their eye, I tend to feel as if we’ve made a connection. Our exchanged glances seem to say “I/you get it.” Sometimes, depending on the mood I’m in, I fancy our exchange fairly shouts that boisterous line from a thousand mad-scientist movies, “The fools! They know nothing of our work!”

The absolute best pro of being mono-armed, though, is those rare occasions when it brings me together in a visceral way with unlikely compadres. Like the time when I was 16 and had one of the best and most frank conversations with an adult I’d had to that point in my life—with the congenitally one-handed-wife of my driver’s education instructor. More recently, when I was at Walter Reed researching a story for my current employer, an Iraq war veteran rehabbing from traumatic brain injury opened up to me in a way I don’t think he would have had he not felt he and I shared something in our respective losses. (I don’t mean in any way to equate my randomly doled inconvenience with his heroically incurred devastation, but the point is, in that case one-handedness afforded me a seat at a very special table.)

And then there was the encounter this past week to which I’d alluded at the outset of this post.

I’d just exited a jewelry store where I’d gotten a new watch battery. I was walking down King Street, Old Town Alexandria’s main drag, when suddenly a head leaned into my path and a guy exclaimed—through a dentally challenged smile and in a cheerily accusatory tone, “You didn’t see me!”

Well, I looked up and to my left, and now I did see him. He was a scruffily dressed black guy who I guessed to be around my age. His most notable feature besides his gap-toothed grin was his truncated right arm, which ended in a stump just a few inches below his armpit. With his left hand he pointed at my empty sleeve and said, “So, can you help a Brother out?”

It was a brilliant sales pitch. Any ambivalence I otherwise might have felt about giving him some cash immediately vanished. But I knew I had only a $20 bill in my wallet, so I assured him I’d be right back with change from a Starbucks across the street.

A few minutes later I slipped a five-spot in his hand during the handshake he’d insisted upon. That business completed, we exchanged names—his was Roger, he said—and I asked, “I was born this way, but what about you?”

Roger said he’d lost most of his right arm to a roadside bomb—during Army basic training. In Vietnam. In 1985. Wow, I thought to myself, which part of that makes the least sense? That there’d be live bombs in proximity to Army trainees? That the US would be conducting basic training in a foreign country? Or that the foreign country involved would be communist Vietnam 10 years after the last US soldiers cleared out?

What did check out, though, was that something had blown up Roger’s body. He supplemented his story by lifting up his T-shirt to reveal a veritable interstate system of surgery scars across his torso. He then made reference to a prosthetics specialist elsewhere in Old Town and said he’d long ago abandoned his hook as uncomfortable and largely useless.

“Me, too!” I said—relating, as Roger nodded vigorously, how hot it had been to wear in the warmer school months, and how I realized very early on that I had more dexterity, and thus could do more, without it.

“Why would I want to wear something like that?” Roger asked, knowing he was preaching to the choir.

“Exactly!” I responded.

We talked for a couple more minutes. He told me more basic-training stories that didn’t make much sense, but I nodded and commiserated as if they did. It was clear that conversation was winding down, so I started pulling up the sleeves of my sport jacket and the shirt underneath. I had something in mind, and Roger picked right up on it.

My stump uncovered, I raised it toward his as he leaned his into mine. They collided, and we laughed like old buddies clinking steins at a bar.

“Take care, Roger!”

“Good meeting you, Eric!”

It was then that I noticed a girl of maybe 5 standing nearby, dumbfounded by what she’d just witnessed. She didn’t strike me as afraid at all, but the same couldn’t have been said for her mother. Mom yanked the kid’s arm while shooting me a look that said, “My God, there are children present!” She hurried her daughter down the street, clearly hopeful the girl would not be scarred for life by the freakish double-crip, interracial, interclass spectacle that had just shattered the calm of a suburban afternoon.

I don’t think Roger noticed the mother and daughter. I was glad, although I imagined revulsion—overt or muted—was something he experienced with some regularity as a one-armed, gap-toothed, shabbily dressed panhandler.

No, the last I saw of Roger, he was smiling from ear to ear. As was I, a minute later in my car, as I pulled up my sleeves to expose my bane and joy.