Logic and the Economics of Cripdom

MV-1 from Part Man Part Car

I've dealt with United Access over the years, a company that sells and services wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Good service. Great local people. 

But like everything made to import into Cripville, wheelchair vans are expensive. A 2013 Toyota Sienna XLE: $63,080. A 2013 Dodge Caravan SXT: $53,075. A 2013 Honda Odyssey EX-L: $61,730.

Of course, United Access doesn't entirely control the price of those vans. They're purchased from the manufacturer, and then they are modified by specific companies, one of which is Vantage Mobility International. In fact, I own a VMI-modified van, although it's a 2003 Ford. I purchased it this year, and I paid $14,000 for it.

In the last few years, VMI began making a purpose-built wheelchair-accessible vehicle, the MV-1. While I don't know how long and how many were manufactured—I really didn't pay close attention because I knew I couldn't afford one—I learned from a United Access news bulletin that VMI has apparently ceased manufacturing the vehicle.

I have no business training. What I know about making a product and marketing it, I've learned from ABC Television's Shark Tank. That said, what mystifies me is how the numbers were crunched to convince a pencil-pusher that this vehicle could be a viable product.

Our household has a higher than average total income. We live well. We don't go hungry. We have a nice roof over our heads. That said, there is no way to look at our income and expenses and justify the expenditure of $50,000 for a wheelchair-accessible van. 

I don't know how many people in the USA are wheelchair users who need a van. But the Department of Labor says there are about 18-million people with disabilities in our country. The department also reports 40% of men with disabilities are unemployed and nearly 50% of women with disabilities have no job. 

Given those numbers, I cannot see a significant market for a purpose-built wheelchair accessible vehicle. I assume that VMI viewed institutions and businesses and perhaps even taxi fleets as a potential market. 

What crip would be in the target market? The wealthy, I suppose, either by inheritance, other family income, or by a big bucks settlement from a court case.

I have held the opinion for years that it takes big money to live the crip lifestyle. Let's not even talk about life-sustaining items like the $14,000 ventilator. Let's not even discuss the $10,000 to $20,000 required to make a house accessible with ramps and a roll-in shower and, if we're lucky, modified sinks and cabinets. 

Let's talk about something as simple as a tire tube for a wheelchair. Buy one the exact size through a wheelchair dealer, and it's $21 for single tube. Go to the local small equipment dealer, and there's one on the shelf not quite the right size but usable and it's $7. A tire tube is a tire tube is a tire tube. Care to guess which one I bought after a recent flat tire?

It takes big money to live the crip lifestyle, and there's no reason for a person with a disability to be selected only from the upper-income classes.

And there's no real answer to the problem. A good start would be improving education certainly, and then the next step would be higher-paying employment opportunities. But that's a long-term goal for a more humane, more inclusive society, a society that produces fewer 1-percenters owning private islands, Cayman Island investment accounts, and assuaging their consciences by funding cures for AIDS and malaria in Africa.

I am sad to see VMI stop production of the MV-1 even though I couldn't afford one. The company provided jobs now lost. It means one less company attempting to focus on the needs of the last segregated element of American society. 

I am sad, but I'm not surprised.

Quitting Writing, Moving to Orlando

There's a big buzz in Cripville about a story in the New York Post.

"Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned."

I've worked as a writer for a radio station. I've worked as an insurance agent. I still piddle around working as a book reviewer. The most money I ever made writing was, oh, $50 to $100 a hour, and that was one job in 15 years or so. It ain't nothing to see writing gigs paying ten-cents a word,  or less.

I've been wasting my talent. I could be earning big bucks down in Orlando, and I'd be out of the cold weather and earning nice coin according to the Post.

"The 'black-market Disney guides' run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day."

A couple of gigs a week, and I could afford the new power-chair I want. And maybe replace my worn out Tempur-Pedic bed. Three gigs a week, and I'll be driving something newer than a 10-year old van.

The funny thing is there are a lot of folks out there getting their knickers in a knot over this. In fact, the Post reporter writes, "They are 1 percenters who are 100 percent despicable."

She needed something like this to remind her of Murphy's Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules?"

Where was she during the last presidential campaign? Or during the budget debate when there was an attempt to raise tax rates on the wealthy? Where does she stand on removing the cap on Social Security Tax?

As long as we're talking about good governance, I say this is a great employment incentive program. It may not move me up into the 1-percenter territory, but it will add more happy-happy to my lifestyle. Where can I sign up?

All this is funny and ironically coincidental. Last week we had a family dinner at a nice restaurant to celebrate Mother's Day. Among the attendees was the new semi-fiancee of my wife's nephew, a young fellow I don't see much. And we've never met the semi-fiancee.

As usual, when people encounter my wife and I, there's a bit of confused uneasiness because I'm bald, grey, and visibly older than my wife, who also happens to be an attractive woman. How'd that old crip score with the hot chick? 

People may not say, but that's what they're thinking. And that's okay. In fact, perhaps it's not that coarse, but I, sensitive self-conscious soul that I am, understand the question floats about the ether.

"Where you parked?" asked someone who'd forgotten we'd recently changed vans. The parking lot, being Mother's Day, was extraordinarily crowded.

"There by the door," I said, "in the handicapped slot."

And so I looked at the new girl, the prospective new member of our somewhat dysfunctional tribe, and said, "That's the only reason I'm married to her, you know." pointing at my wife. "How else is an ugly, cripped-up dude like me going to get a woman, especially a hot-looking woman? It's that I came free with life time access to free parking close to every door."

My wife, after twenty some years, is used to this nonsense, my desire to disturb the equilibrium of those who don't know how to interact with crips, and so she looked at the girl and said, "And the shopping cart. Don't forget the automated shopping cart that will follow me around a store and back out to the parking lot."

Considering all that, it appears I am thoroughly qualified to work as a guide at Orlando.

Also, I'm quite personable, a good companion, interested in other people. I can talk to anyone, but I never try to dominate the conversation or repeat boring stories.

I don't swear, which is important if these 1-percenters are escorting their children. In fact, I like children. For a slight increase in the hourly rate, I'd be willing to add babysitting to the contract so that the mothers could stay poolside and swim in their margaritas.

I could probably even learn to speak with a New York accent so that I would appear a valid member of the family. At the very least, I would attempt to neutralize my slight southern accent. I live on protein bars and yogurt, and so I'm cheap to keep.

Can someone provide a telephone number? I'd like to know if the hourly rate is higher because I need a ventilator? Or maybe because I'm prone to heat stroke?

And So, What Do You Think?

image from Facebook

A writer friend wrote me recently somewhat bemused -- I dare not say, "agog." 

She had read all of the I wanna take him to bed comments regarding an image of the actor Peter Dinklage.

The cynical person with a visible disability learns to be very wary of this sort of thing. I said so to her, but as I explained why, she didn't respond. 

Wary? Sure, but that's not to say people with disabilities cannot be sexually appealing, attractive, and sexually vibrant. And we should get one matter out of the way first. Peter Dinklage is handsome guy, at least as I attempt to perceive a female's idea of handsomeness, for he is man with a face that reeks of character, and a thoroughly masculine face it is.

He is, however, a little person. (I'm not sure is that's the correct terminology now.) He may be dark and handsome, but one thing he isn't is tall.

Here's what makes me antsy. And any sophisticated person with a visible disability knows out there in the world lurks wanna-be people and people with fetishes focusing on disability. Dropping "disability fetish" into the Google search box will return more than a half-million hits.

Of course, there's this to consider as well. Not all every sexual fetish is bad. I can think of some which are, and some which are not, and your list may be different, but in some instinctive way, I feel a disability fetish is more often bad than good. 

Perhaps I'm skittish because I doubt that I've ever been the object of someone with a disability fetish, or at least I've never felt so. The key word, I suspect, in that sentence is "object." 

A person with a disability no more wants to be an object of another person's sexual obsession than a woman, for example, might because of her bust size. If a woman doesn't want to be pursued by multiple admirers only because she boasts a 38DD bra size, I don't want to be pursued by multiple women (don't laugh) because my battered old wheelchair tickles some sort of kink.

And so we come to the actor Peter Dinklage and his admirers—"sexiest ever," "attractive," "this picture makes me want him," "sexy as hell," "sexy little man," and perhaps the most interesting (and to, accurate) assessment "I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things."

While most of the comments refer to sexual attraction—and that's where fetish lies, after all—the last comment broadens the discussion into an area where many people with disabilities might become uncomfortable. Dare we ask ourselves, Are we loved because of our disability?

Even to ask the question leaves the taste of irony in my mouth. I have spent most of my life thinking myself unworthy of all that is given by the male-female romantic connection because of my physical disability. I am dependent. I need tending. Were there but two of us left on this earth, I would need help from the other to survive.

However, to make it even more personal and more confusing, I am married (like Dinklage), and I am married to a beautiful woman who says she finds me attractive (also like Dinklage). Of course, I doubt anyone would marry a person they don't find attractive.

There must be something other than the twisted body, useless legs, and sardonic smile that makes me attractive to my wife, but even at that I cannot envision her, long ago before we met, seeing my photograph, shirt or not, grapes or none, and thinking me "sexy as hell." That's a convoluted way of saying, I suppose, that I suspect her of no fetishes.

So then if love is possible for a person hammered and dented by disability, I suppose sexual attraction—the pair bond, to be sexual-preference neutral—is possible as well. 

Why then I do I immediately think that there's an element of disability fetishism in the scrum of compliments appending the picture of Dinklage and grapes?

20th Century Drifter 2012 Belmont Book Award Winner

The University of Illinois Press 

My writing friend Diane Diekman tells me, "I was notified last week that Twentieth Century Drifter won the Belmont Book Award (best country music biography of 2012). The award will be presented at the annual International Conference on Country Music during a luncheon at Belmont University."

From the website of ICMC: "The International Country Music Conference (ICMC) provides scholars an opportunity to share their work in all aspects of country music. ICMC broadly defines country music to include variants which share common historical and cultural roots ranging from Americana, alt.country, Bluegrass, Cajun, Country Rock, Crossover, and Honky Tonk to the Nashville Sound, New Traditionalist, Old Time Country, and Western Swing. ICMC is truly international with scholars from Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom participating."

The Marty Robbins biography was published last year in February. Previously Diane wrote and published—also with The University of Illinois Press—a biography of Faron Young, Live Fast, Love Hard. 

Diane is a long-time member and administrator for The Internet Writing Workshop.

She's Gone

Mrs. Jumbo

I like things that last. 

I have a Swiss Army knife that's sixty years old. 

I am reluctant to throw away comfortable blue jeans or t-shirts, and once they near the stage of perfect comfort, they seem to disappear from my closet at random, and that makes me sad and frustrated. I know not whom to blame, for my lovely wife denies complicity in their theft.

I liked this ol' girl, this 1992 Ford E-350 Club Wagon we called Mrs. Jumbo, primarily because she was large and gray and tough and could even work as a truck. We gave $14,000 for her in 1993 because the dealer couldn't get her off the lot. I sold her for $850 last week, with the engine displaying signs of severe fatigue. She'd carried us nearly 200,000 miles, and survived several minor incidents. 

A truck once backed into her on a parking lot, to which my wife's response was "How in the world could you miss a giant gray van?" My response to that was "Be polite. The guy could have just driven off and not told us."

She also jumped a fence during an ice storm. It was thereafter the incidents began, little nibbles at our budget that accumulated to thousands over the last year.

I didn't want to sell her. I especially didn't want to sell her for a niggling $850, especially since she was relatively rust-free, the interior was still very nice, and she was equipped with a wheelchair lift. But it became a case of torn, faded blue jeans and washed-thin-and-soft t-shirts. If I hadn't sold her, I think the woman with whom I sleep may have caused her to disappear.

Mrs Jumbo sat outside the window of the little room where I write for the past six months, and now this friend and hard-working lady who has served us for twenty years is gone. I miss her. 

The Curious Case of the Dog that Always Barks

We had a neighbor long ago that kept a female Boxer. She was a beautiful dog, but even then I noticed she was exceptionally high-strung. I didn't give it much thought. The woman had a reputation as a party animal, and the marriage didn't seem especially happy. I thought perhaps the dog picked up on the mood of the abode.

That was my opinion until we offered Daisy a place to stay. Daisy barks. Barks. Barks Barks. I've tried discipline. I've tried lots of petting and reassurance. But Daisy barks. Daisy sometimes doesn't even bother to get off the couch to bark. She barks at the neighbors, at the UPS and FedEx people, and especially at the mail delivery person.

I've never understood the root of her neurosis. She is a nervous young girl, certainly, but she's never been mistreated or neglected here. I suppose it could be treated with anxiety medicine, but we've not pursued that. 

It's too small a sample to believe nervousness is breed-specific, especially since we've met two or three male Boxers who not hyper-alert to every noise and movement. Perhaps Boxers are hypervigilant watch dogs. But I've been around enough dogs to know that certain breeds require an owner who will allow their innate characteristics to flourish. Neither do I think it is intelligence, for Daisy seems smart enough.

It's interesting to contemplate. We have two dogs now. There's an elderly Boston terrier. And there's Daisy. I chose the Boston, and my wife chose Daisy. Now my wife is offering hints that the next dog will be a standard Poodle. I have no special quarrel with that. I like dogs, and I know Poodles are extraordinarily intelligent.

And it won't be me who will be taking the Poodle for regular grooming.

The Reckoning 
SAGA OF A CIVIL WAR BLOCKADE RUNNER

In The Reckoning, author Bob Larranaga delves into the backwaters of America’s Civil War to craft an adventure saga inspired by a pocket-sized journal his great-grandfather kept during that time.

Read the complete review here.