If at Birth You Don't Succeed (13 page)

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I can't tell you exactly where my love of women began, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with physical therapy. Some of my earliest experiences with the fairer sex were at the therapeutic preschool at the United Cerebral Palsy medical center in Buffalo at the impressionable age of two. To my parents, learning basic motor skills and being stretched daily was an important phase of my physical development. To me, it was an excuse to get to play games with the program's exclusively female staff.

With my blond curls, baby blue eyes, and sly smile, I was an undeniably adorable toddler. As the cutest cripple of the bunch, I was often used as a study subject for college students learning about CP. One time when I was four years old, I turned to my therapist during a session that was attended by a large group of eager and unsuspecting grad students and politely inquired, “Excuse me, may I kiss your breast?” As I matured, I realized I might have been setting my sights too high, so I focused my affections on someone more attainable.

I was introduced to the transcendent beauty of Cindy Crawford on a used VHS tape from Blockbuster Video. Most people at least pretended to watch the Cindy Crawford workout tape as a way to stay fit, but I unapologetically watched it while drinking root beer floats and eating Doritos, because such angelic purity deserved undivided attention and snacks. She'd instruct me to change positions, and I would respond by eating more popcorn. It didn't seem to make a difference; she'd praise me just the same.

At ten years old, I had found Destiny in a red one-piece bathing suit. My life
finally
made sense—I was born to woo and wed this woman. The early '90s were a wonderfully oblivious time before the Internet age, when supermodels and sex symbols could remain on their pedestals without drunken panty-less photos making the rounds on a thousand gossip blogs. Cindy Crawford was free to become whatever my ten-year-old mind imagined her to be. She collected comic books and baseball cards. She loved Saturday morning cartoons as much as I did. If we ever did get the chance to meet, my down-to-earth, innocent charm would be a welcome break from her supermodel lifestyle and we would form a relationship based on trust, common interests, and occasional boob-grabbing. So, over the next several months, her legend and my infatuation continued to grow.

The adults in my life didn't seem to take the unbreakable bond that Cindy and I shared seriously. But neither the twenty-year age difference nor the fact that she was a supermodel, whereas I was a small boy in a wheelchair whose mom still had to button all of his shirts, deterred me.

I met my counterpart in prepubescent perversion, a.k.a. Dave Phillips, a seventy-five-year-old Jewish man in a ten-year-old's body, in 1994. While other fourth graders were collecting pogs and Power Rangers, Dave would come over to my house, watch
Blazing Saddles
, and explain the innuendos in his George Burns joke book. Thus, sex education began.

We were beyond excited when our lunch monitor, Mrs. Frazer, who was always up on the latest tabloid gossip, informed us that Cindy was more attainable than ever.

“Heard your girlfriend just got divorced! I seen it in the paper.”

We theorized that Richard Gere's dime-a-dozen handsomeness and movie stardom had bored Cindy and, being several years older than her and a Buddhist, he had not been able to match her energy level. But we, as two vivacious bachelors, were anything but Zen at the news that Cindy was single and ready to mingle.

“We could be her rebound!” Dave exclaimed.

“Yeah!” I agreed, wondering what a rebound was.

This was it: our one chance to prove that instead of rushing back into the arms of some forty-year-old millionaire actor, she should spend the rest of her life with two ten-year-olds. It was a convincing argument, to say the least. But in order to believe it, she would need to meet us.

The only thing that was keeping Cindy apart from Dave and me was distance. We knew that our parents, who understood nothing of true love, would dismiss our resolve to find her as “foolish” and “crazy” if we confided in them. After all, we lived in Buffalo and she lived in—where did she live?

“I think they film
House of Style
in New York City,” Dave guessed.

“New. York. City. She lives in New York City!” I declared.

The next several sleepovers at my house were spent covertly plotting the perfect plan to escape under the cover of night, leaving our lives as fourth graders behind and making our way to the Big Apple.

At the time, the top speed of my electric wheelchair was four miles per hour and it could travel eight hours before it needed a ten-hour charge. At this rate, after factoring in such variables as time to stop and eat and potential inclement weather, we calculated that the trip to Manhattan would take us, give or take seven minutes, an extremely long time.

“It seems like a pretty easy walk,” I assumed.

I was optimistic that at the end of each travel day we were bound to happen upon a lovely family who would take us in, feed us a hot meal of meat loaf followed by cherries jubilee or homemade cream puffs, and invite us to stay the night. This family would be warm and welcoming, but would have a complete lack of interest as to why a couple of transient children would have shown up at their door in suits needing a place to charge a wheelchair for the night. Why, that's the American way.

When Dave brought up the very valid point that one of those families might be psychopathic murderers, the idea of couch surfing seemed slightly less appealing. In our minds, America was comprised of those who would sit down and eat with us and those who would sit down and eat
us
. Luckily, before giving up on our hopes and dreams, we saw a commercial for Greyhound advertising bus tickets to anywhere in the United States for only sixty-eight dollars, and it just so happened that New York City was part of anywhere. Our golden chariot had arrived.

With our Greyhound godsend, the travel itinerary was airtight and we knew exactly where we'd get the cash. Recently, Dave's family had ceremoniously entrusted him with a full Fisher-Price piggy bank, not to be touched until his bar mitzvah, still three years away. Dave's testicles hadn't dropped yet, but he justified using the money for the trip because Cindy Crawford would surely usher him into manhood, even if it wasn't recognized by the Jewish community.

I tried to expedite maturity not from faith, but from knowledge. I knew that Cindy Crawford was an educated woman, and if I was going to impress her I'd need to continue my academic endeavors.

“If I had to go away for a few months, could I get all my homework assignments ahead of time?” I asked my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Parsons.

“Under what circumstances would you need to go away?” she inquired.

“A medical thing,” I said, pointing to the wheelchair.

“Well, I've only got up to next week's lesson plans but I can give you some stuff.”

So, armed with a worksheet on proper verb usage and a blank map of the Middle East, we faced only one final hurdle: my mother. She'd always been a pretty good mom, but she was also capable of crushing any dream with the terrible weapons of Logic and Reason. No amount of explaining would ever convince her of our idea's brilliance, so we had only one option: we'd have to get rid of her. Unfortunately, we knew that if we locked her up in the closet, my chances of getting any video games for Christmas would be considerably lowered.

Luckily, as fate would have it, she was already planning a trip to visit her friend Tammy in Pittsburgh. I invited Dave to come sleep over the night before my mom left so that we could set our escape in motion. In order to make our final preparations, we'd need privacy and it seemed as though the stars were aligning in our favor. We knew this because we could see the celestial phenomenon as we stepped outside the tent erected in my backyard. My mother was preoccupied with her own travel preparations, and thus mom-radar was successfully disabled. As we climbed inside and zipped up the tent flap, we knew every base had been covered. Cindy Crawford was within our reach.

“So once we get to New York, how do we find Cindy?”

The look of panic on Dave's face made me realize that we'd neglected the important fact that New York City was actually, when you thought about it, quite a large place. Maybe instead of slopping gel into my hair, I should have been thinking about how to track down and contact one woman in a city of millions. Never rattled for long, Dave regained his composure and attempted to quell my fears.

“I think I know where the MTV studios are,” he reassured me. “She's probably hanging out there somewhere. And if she's not, we could just go and knock on doors and stuff. Everyone knows who she is.”

I felt entirely relieved. With our confidence restored, we were able to return to the much more important task of trying to look nice.

We enlisted my brother Brad's help in retrieving our suits from the closet because we thought that the less time we spent in the house, the less chance we had to incriminate ourselves. As Brad had no illusions that this plan was actually going to work, he had happily made our sandwiches and delivered our clothes to the tent, thinking that these items would only make our inevitable failure more hilarious.

“So do you think she'll let us stay at her house?” I wondered aloud, starting to regret that my last night before becoming a nomad would be spent over hard ground.

“Yeah, probably, as long as we're not weird about it,” Dave reassured me.

“I bet she has a hot tub,”
1
I envisioned. “You know what's really cool? I don't think any other fourth grader has ever done anything like this. No matter how much trouble we get into, after this, at least we'll know we did it.”

“Well that's good, 'cause we're going to get into a crap-load of trouble,” Dave yawned.

Sensing that the moment might be slipping away from us, I rallied.

“You can't fall asleep! We'll have plenty of time to rest on the bus. We should leave.
Now
.”

“All right, all right! Don't get your panties in a twist,” Dave said.

We unzipped the tent flap, prepared to face anything the world had in store, but as soon as we were outside something felt off.

“Wow,” I said. “It's really dark.”

“Yup,” Dave added.

“How far away is the bus station, again?”

“I don't know where the bus station is.”

“That's cool,” I said, calculating the odds that someone would come up and kill a kid in a wheelchair in the middle of the night. “You got your Swiss Army knife, right?”

“No. The Swiss Army knife is my brother's. We have a butter knife.”

And then, in an instant, every ounce of excitement that had propelled us to that moment without any regard for consequence was replaced by an overwhelming sense of fear. Sucker punched by the darkness, we had our senselessness knocked out of us and the only one left standing was our most loyal friend, Cowardice.

In five seconds we'd gone from two love-struck adventurers, excited at the prospect of heading blindly to New York City in the middle of the night, to two thumb-sucking sissies, not even brave enough to make the trek from their backyard tent to the familiar comfort of a bedroom fifty yards away. We sat in silence. Like a game of pride chicken, we each hoped the other's last shred of dignity would swerve first.

And then Dave murmured, “I'm just throwing it out there, but what if we left tomorrow morning?”

“WHAT?!” I yelled, feigning outrage. “You're really going to pussy out? No way we're leaving tomorrow morning!”

The following morning, well rested and with our fears subsided, we prepared to leave.

A daylight departure meant that we would have to face the minefield of maternal awareness head-on. Ingeniously, we made sure that my brother created an intricate web of deception to distract her. “They're running away to New York City,” he ratted. “They're just being stupid. They won't actually get anywhere.” It was the perfect cover. She wouldn't suspect a thing.

But she did suspect a thing. In fact, she suspected quite a few things and seemed far past the point of suspicion when she confronted us.

“I know exactly what you guys are doing,” she told us flatly, “and I'm not in the mood.”

“We're not doing anything,” I insisted as Dave pushed my manual wheelchair, stacked with blankets and sandwiches, past the kitchen on our escape route to the driveway.

“If you guys don't stop this right now, I'm going to be really angry.”

“Stop what?” I mumbled.

This denial was met by that look only mothers can conjure, a scowl that, if translated literally, would mean, “I'm a volcano right now and if you say one more word I will erupt and burn you alive with my smoldering hot lava of rage.”

I knew in that moment that if I said anything other than “You're right, Mom. I'm sorry. Here are some flowers and a card I made you to apologize,” I would do irreparable damage to my childhood. But the love of my life was on the line and I wasn't about to budge.