If at Birth You Don't Succeed (7 page)

When I was six years old, my physical therapists had to teach me the simple yet—because it was me—still unachievable skill of taking off a shirt. Several scholars and scientists had been assigned to the project of coming up with a way that I could independently undress myself. It was
Apollo 13
for basic life skills. Eventually, they determined that the best shirting technique was to go over the head and involve the arms as little as possible. When you have cerebral palsy, every limb is an independent variable that could send the entire operation into chaos. But even with this new approach, I'd gotten the shirt stuck over my head. It wasn't going to come off without the help of either my therapist or Ed Harris in Mission Control. Feeling stuck and helpless in my striped Bugle Boy straightjacket, and having just seen
Sister Act
on television, I did the only thing I could think of: I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I'm a nun!”

Over the years, I've learned that a sense of humor is the only skill that allows you to turn sucking at life into a career. Even the most embarrassing mishap can be spun into comedic gold. Or, more appropriately, every pile of dog shit you roll through can be used as fertilizer for a great story at a party.

Comedy was a universal language in my family. Saturday nights at my mom's were spent dressing up like lumberjacks and singing along to Monty Python records we got at the library. And when Brad and I spent the night at my dad's house on Sundays and Mondays, he'd take us to pick up costumes at the Goodwill and encourage us to make sketches, which he'd immortalize on videotape. Those home movies were how I became comfortable on camera, and by watching myself on-screen, I eventually learned to sit up straight, speak clearly, and project my voice. When my mom first brought home my future stepdad, Greg, it was a joke he made that instantly won over two potentially antagonistic teenage boys: “Life is like a box of tampons—everything comes with a string attached.”

Growing up, comedians were the ones that gave context to struggle—not priests or psychologists or philosophers, but Jerry Seinfeld, Gilda Radner, and Steve Martin, the people who had the courage to be silly in a world that seemed to take itself too seriously. The performers I idolized didn't just give me people to mimic, they gave me a means to express sadness and frustration in a way that actually brought people joy and leveled the playing field.

One week during the competition for my OWN show, the judges were criticizing the editing work on a video segment I'd done, not knowing that I had done it. As soon as they realized that I'd been the one who'd made the poor decisions, they started backpedaling. I stopped them and said, “If the video that I made didn't connect with you as the audience, then I sucked balls this week, and that's my fault.” I don't think anyone else in the history of reality television had ever won a competition after admitting they sucked metaphorical balls. My statement immediately earned the respect of the judges and the crew alike. Rather than becoming someone who was inept, I was someone who could make a joke, while simultaneously taking accountability for his own failure. Failing with a sense of humor and pizzazz is what I do best! That was never more apparent than during filming for the New York City episode of my travel show,
Rollin' with Zach
, a few months later.

The show crisscrossed the country, with each episode highlighting a different city. Three episodes into filming, it became clear that we weren't making a show about the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of travel. We were making a show about a boy in a wheelchair who was getting the chance to see the world. The only problem was, that wasn't my story. I wanted to make an honest travel show about making the most of whatever life throws at you. But this production wasn't throwing me anything. It was delicately handing me Fabergé eggs and putting me up in five-star hotels, then occasionally showing me struggling to get up a curb and calling that “roughing it.” It seems counterintuitive that having the opportunity to ride in helicopters and stay in high-roller suites would be something I'd fight against, but I knew what network executives could never seem to grasp: I was lucky. Every disadvantage I'd ever had had tipped the scales toward a greater advantage.

A pedestal of prejudice is a hard thing to explain without sounding like a dick. But in a weird way, most of the world places such low expectations on me that there's no way I can do anything but amaze. I recently went on a museum tour of famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth's home and studio. During the tour, I did little more than look at paintings and indifferently notice a slightly narrow dining-room table. Sure, there was the occasional doorway I had to roll through without running into the frame, but it certainly wasn't like docking a shuttle to a space station. This isn't to say that the art itself wasn't beautiful and emotionally compelling to me, but it was an afternoon at a museum, and largely museums only ask their patrons to look at things without touching them. That much I can do. At the end of the experience, the jolly security guard who had escorted us through the tour patted me on the shoulder and said, “Bet you haven't had this much fun in a looong time, huh? You did really good!” I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had in fact, just the day before, been a guest in a house where I was also not allowed to touch anything. And the day before that, I'd kayaked for the first time … over a
tree
. But still, in this man's mind, my doing nothing successfully was worthy of praise. Perhaps he imagined that I spent my days looking at empty walls, wishing I had a still life oil painting of two lemons and a potato, and that I was bored to tears with my normal-size dining-room table.

Working in television can leave you feeling equally placated and pampered. So I was excited when
Rollin' with Zach
headed to the Big Apple, because that city can't be controlled by even the most anal-retentive of TV producers. On the surface, New York City seems like the perfect place to live large, but no matter how you dress it up, in order to survive there you have to cut the bullshit. Everybody is going somewhere important and if you slow down, you're gonna get knocked over or honked at. I'm pretty sure New Yorkers would have told Helen Keller to hurry it up and learn sign language already.

The show structure was a countdown of my top five things to do in each place we visited. And by My Top Five Things, we meant “whatever five things the producers could line up in time for the episode.” The climax of the New York City episode (or My Number One Top Thing) was something I was equally passionate about and terrified by—a seven-minute stand-up set at Carolines comedy club on Broadway. Eric, the black-bearded hipster comedy producer for
Rollin'
, had dreamt up the idea of me performing at the iconic venue on open mic night.

Eric is the most sarcastic, cynical, and just plain negative funny person I've ever met. His assumption in life was that everyone hated everything as much as he did and so he'd preempt every hotel stay or meal with, “It's gross, right? You hate it, right?” When we first started working together, Eric clued me in that my optimism about the show may have been misplaced. As a fierce crusader for comedy, he was sure of one thing: no matter how hard we tried, the other producers weren't going to let the show be funny, because they didn't know what funny was. While it wasn't my intention, making a show that capitalized on mishaps would have essentially highlighted producers' mistakes. What I had proposed was basically putting a boy in a wheelchair in precarious situations, stringing the worst bits together, and then sending them off to Oprah for approval. It just wasn't gonna fly.

When I met Oprah, I thought she had a great sense of humor, and she might have appreciated my freewheeling vision for the show if she'd had the chance to see it. But
Rollin' with Zach
was the first series that Pie Town, my production company, had done for OWN and, understandably, everyone was jittery and playing it safe. What was funny to me seemed cruel and inconsiderate to people who'd spent their lives believing that having a disability was the worst misfortune that could befall a living soul. I knew from experience that traveling with a wheelchair never goes according to plan. Things break, get lost, and, more often than should ever be the case, ramps lead directly to steps. Still, the best trips I'd ever taken were the ones where I'd had to wing it. How was I ever going to prove to people that the inevitable discomfort and inconveniences of travel are worth the rewards if we never showed me improvising around any real struggles on camera?

To my delight, when we arrived in New York City, despite all the meticulous planning, it looked as though we might finally capture on video the catastrophic train wreck of a travelogue I'd always hoped for. As we collected our luggage at JFK airport and walked outside, the wheelchair-accessible minivan that had been rented for the weekend pulled up alongside the curb, only this time it wasn't the pristine Chrysler Town and Country with automatic doors, heated steering wheel, and leather-ornamented everything. It was a Dodge Caravan with black smoke billowing out of the exhaust pipe, dropped off by a man in a baseball cap and shades whose frantic energy could only be interpreted as “I can't be seen at the airport and I
may
have stolen this car.” Instead of our standard rental agreement, John, our young, bestubbled, and perpetually overworked field producer, just handed this man a wad of cash. He looked down at it perplexed, perhaps disappointed that it wasn't meth. With mutters of, “The AC doesn't work and you're gonna wanna watch that door 'cause it sticks a little bit,” he left us with our chariot fit for a dump, and this alone had me brimming with optimism. Real travelers don't have rides with leather seats—they have vans with suspicious stains!

We made it into the city all right, and the next morning I awoke in my twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-night suite at the Andaz Hotel on Wall Street. While I was happily distracted by both the television in the bathroom mirror and the confirmation from Andrew that there was in fact a naked woman sauntering across her dining room in the high-rise next door, John was facing the crisis of his professional life in the lobby downstairs. Over the course of the eight hours it had spent in the parking garage overnight, the sliding door of our specially procured wheelchair-accessible van had simply fallen off.

This being John's first time out in the field as a producer, he had a lot to prove. His catchphrases throughout the production included “Aw God, I'm really fuckin' up!” and “Hurry it up, guys!” and “I don't know…” whenever he was berated with all manner of questions that should have been delegated to more than one person:

“Where can I get this shirt ironed?”

“Where's the wheelchair-access entrance to the Chicago Pedway?”

“Do we have enough money in the budget to take a picture of me as a Vegas showgirl?”

Everything that happened on the road was John's responsibility. So the rest of the crew took that as a sign that we shouldn't collectively be concerned with things like call times and meals and wardrobe … and transportation.

When I got downstairs, I was greeted by Eric, more gleeful than I'd ever seen him.

“John's about to have a heart attack. It's great!”

From the lobby, I could see John in a mortified trance, something akin to when you piss yourself in grade school and you know that everyone is going to find out—it's only a matter of time. I should have known how dire the situation was when I saw John heading outside, a roll of duct tape in each hand. With barely half an hour to get to our first location, he was actually going to try to tape the sliding door back onto our minivan. The color of the duct tape matched the shade of gray paint on the van, and the tape's sheen might've actually classed it up a bit. I wasn't in the habit of overstepping my role as a television host, but this was the one time I felt compelled to give directions to the crew. “Make sure you film this!” I said. “This is great stuff!”

To nobody's surprise, duct tape did not fix the van. It was decided that we would have to get a cab, one with all four doors intact. This was an important shoot. Our schedule had us in Brooklyn at 2:00 p.m. sharp for a root beer float tasting at an old-fashioned soda fountain, followed by a speed-dating session back in Manhattan at 6:00 p.m. But there was another problem. As the cab arrived, our director, Malachi, a short, redheaded Irish man in a fedora, noted that due to the episode order, I would actually be in a
different
outfit for the soda fountain segment than I would be for speed dating. I needed to change clothes.

The cab had already pulled up to the curb and there was no time to run back upstairs, so it seemed like the only option was to get undressed in the middle of Wall Street. I went full
Magic Mike
McConaughey, ripping my shirt off
1
as Andrew started pulling down my pants. I imagined what this feverish disrobing must have looked like to the businessmen and -women walking by with their Bluetooth headsets and briefcases. Perhaps they glanced over and thought,
I wonder if that boy in the wheelchair is about to be gang-raped?
, considered it, and then continued on their way to their job at Oldman Sacks, or wherever.

Now, I'm not complaining—I'll take advantage of any opportunity to be naked in public—but as it turned out, on this particular morning, I'd chosen to wear the one pair of novelty underwear in my entire wardrobe. They had been hand-crafted at my request by my cousins—two sweet southern ladies in their sixties—and featured bold, embroidered letters reading
WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION
, next to an orange cat, which they'd added as an embellishment for reasons I'll never understand.

When I was finally changed into the proper outfit and Andrew had re-poofed and fluffed my hair, we made it over the bridge to the Brooklyn Farmacy without a hitch. I drank something called an egg cream and learned about “jerking” soda, a process that begged for all sorts of innuendos and puns I wouldn't dare make on the Oprah Winfrey Network. The egg cream tasted like a carbonated milk shake and I would have gladly had three of them, but I didn't need any more of those to bring all the girls to the yard because there were seven lucky ladies waiting to date me in a bar across town.