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Recently in Salon People

What's Your Story?
Flirting with success
Francesca Gentille holds forth on the fine art of making eye contact, mirroring, transmitting scent, heat and wavelength.
By Jenn Shreve
[07/12/99]

Nothing Personal
Faux hooters help save cojones
Robbie Williams makes a boob of himself to save your balls; doomsday cult takes a hike, vaporizes; Kubrick wanted Steve Martin instead of Cruise. Plus: Have they no shame? Sophia Loren in bed, in public, with Mohamed Al Fayed.
By Amy Reiter
[07/09/99]

People Feature
All pets go to heaven
"They laughed," she says. "But later, the same people were sitting in here crying. You don't know how you're going to feel until it happens to you."
By Kathy Dobie
[07/09/99]

Mario Puzo
His saga of a Mafia family is one of the most familiar stories in American culture, and Don Vito Corleone surely keeps company with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby as one of the most indelible icons of American fiction.
By Albert Mobilio
[07/09/99]

Nothing Personal
New, improved and ever-so-polite
Nothing Personal starts minding its manners; Greg Brady's platinum record aspirations; the toilet seat that lowers itself. Plus: Brad Pitt says, "What, me worry?"
By Amy Reiter
[07/08/99]

Complete archives for People

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It was an artful response to a difficult question, but the truth of the matter is that polio did and does affect the mind. It made Franklin D. Roosevelt think he could run the United States for four presidential terms, through depression and war, without killing himself. And it made Mark O'Brien, who died of complications from bronchitis on July 4 at age 49, think that he -- with scarcely an intact muscle in his whole body -- could live independently, on his own, and at the same time be a reporter, a baseball fan, a publisher, a journalist, a social critic and a poet.

He did all these things while living alone in an apartment in Berkeley, Calif. Not content with that, he went about town on a Stanford University-built electric gurney. That gurney, with Mark lying there on his back, enclosed in a plastic bubble, was forever and a day on the streets, O'Brien guiding the machine with his foot. He would zoom down the sidewalk, run off the curb and the whole thing would topple over -- dumping him out on the pavement. Somehow he would dragoon people around him into picking him up and sticking him back on his contraption, inside the cocoon, and then he would roar off again, ramming into walls and people, oblivious to the strange sight he was making in a city so used to strange sights.

That Mark was out on the streets and not hidden away in some nursing home was a testament to his Irish dander. Remember, this is a man who -- since age 6 -- had the use of one muscle in his right foot, one muscle in his neck and one in his jaw. That's it. He made full use of the three. He used the foot muscle to steer his monster machine; he used the other two to bang with a stick on the keys of a computer, to write, cajole, editorialize, storm, cry, laugh and rage. You tell me he wasn't a nut-case?

They educated him at home the first 20 years of his life and then stuck him away in a nursing home. He put up with that for a while, then one day he said, "I'm going to college." He did, too -- moved out on his own, at age 30, got his degree (in English, at the University of California, Berkeley) in five years, then started graduate school.

They should have applauded him -- right? Nonsense. At one point, Social Security administrators tried to take away his benefits because he wasn't keeping "appropriate records" pertaining to his attendants. They made him go through an extended hearing to keep his $400 a month. Your tax dollars at work.

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O'Brien's special gift, I suspect, was his heart-stopping honesty. He wrote an article for a book of mine about sex and disability ("CripZen: A Manual for Survival"), and I felt his personal revelations -- about masturbation -- were dandy but, well, a bit too personal. I asked if he didn't want to use a pseudonym. He wouldn't hear of it.

And when he finally, at age 36, had his first taste of love, with a sex surrogate, he wrote a long article about it that was published in several places, including the Sun magazine of North Carolina. The paragraph about looking at himself in the mirror always struck me as being one of the most poignant in all of disabled literature:

After she got off the mattress, she took a large mirror out of her tote bag. It was about two feet long and framed in wood. Holding it so that I could see myself, Cheryl asked what I thought of the man in the mirror. I said that I was surprised I looked so normal, that I wasn't the horribly twisted and cadaverous figure I had always imagined myself to be. I hadn't seen my genitals since I was six years old. That was when polio struck me, shriveling me below my diaphragm in such a way that my view of my lower body had been blocked by my chest. Since then, that part of me had seemed unreal.

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O'Brien left some fine presents for us. Not the anger, which made him write, "God damn this wall I cannot punch God damn this bat I cannot swing God damn this eucalyptus leaf I cannot pull down off a tree and hold up to my lover's nose." No, his gift for us was not rage -- for that's something that runs heavy and fast in the blood of all his disabled brethren. Nor was it something they call "courage." "Saying a disabled person is courageous," he once wrote me, "is like saying that a black person has natural rhythm."

Next page | O'Brien vs. Stephen Hawking