The Ride of Your Life

My old friend Carl Launius was one of the more unusual people I’ve met in my life, unusual because of many things, and not simply because he was a quadriplegic. His life changed in the brief second that it took for his football helmet to strike head-on into the gut of his high school opponent. From a stretcher which led him off the field, from that small Arkansas town, he then proceeded to branch out into the world through a series of both difficult and remarkable events. While his paralysis formed the person he became, it seemed to me that Carl was destined to be his authentic self no matter the circumstances. And I rather liked who he was: messy, complicated, real, continuously adapting.

The expression ‘to throw your hands up in the air’ might sometimes apply to the rest of us when the dominoes fall and we’re at wit’s end. But Carl lived with his arms proverbially pinned to stakes on either side of him, like a scarecrow, and he had no option but to take what the wind threw at him every day. This made him a rather unique fellow, Southern raised, California molded, and determined to make the best of it. If you’d met him, I’m sure your outlook would have changed forever, too. He passed many years ago in 2003, but his one life surely made a ripple in numerous directions, which, to my mind, is the best we can hope to accomplish.

I met Carl when I was living in Davis, CA and needed work to get through my studies at UC Davis. I had two jobs then; working as a nanny for a two-year-old, and helping Carl get to bed at night. I had girlhood babysitting qualifications for the nanny position, but nothing at all to prepare me for hoisting a partially enormous, paralyzed man up from the wheelchair and over into bed. The initial shock of having to tend to his groin, of lubricating the stoma on his mountainous belly, of emptying the bladder bag, brushing his teeth, of simply facing the baffling misfortune of it all as a naïve twenty-something--it was one of my lucks, as the writer Grace Paley calls them. It transformed me.

But Carl did not exude misfortune. Instead, he distributed regular good cheer to his surrounding tribe. Carl wasn’t rainbow-cheerful, no. Rather he was this evolution of petulance turned acceptance turned social amenability, a trajectory made of necessity: he was entirely dependent on the world around him. By the time I came into his life (or he mine), he’d already well softened into a jolly fellow with an edginess underneath whose impulse was to add humor to a situation. Little dopey or self-effacing jokes flew out of him like signature butterflies, and flit into the conversation to soften the grave difficulty he periodically faced, but also to connect with those on whom his life hung. Even though it was strategic of him to put on a jovial face, at its core it was generous. He was trying to make those of us whose burdens were much less by comparison feel better, of all things. You easily come to esteem a human being who does that, but you also feel indebted: the candid mirror is held in front of you if you care to look into it.

Each night that I went to his apartment to prep him for sleep was a crash course in gratitude. I remember telling him, “Duerme con los angelitos,” as I turned out the lights. It was our little ritual. One of my friends from Philadelphia taught me the phrase, sleep with the angels, and I always liked the sound of it. To my mind, it means sleep with love and peace. Carl would always chuckle. After washing up and situating his things for the morning caretaker, I usually rode my bike home in a slow, meandering line down Davis’ bike lanes. I was rapidly learning how monumental lessons in life can be.

Carl eventually hired me to buddy up with him to grade the English papers he was tasked with in his PhD program at the university. I sat next to him, folding chair to wheelchair, and the two of us read, dictated, wrote, and laughed our way through some tedious hours. Carl’s laugh was like a sputtering engine. Chug-chug-chug. I can still hear it plain as day. When he thought something was insanely funny, his round face would contort into a battle between the release of the delight and the inability to move to calibrate the process, so he bellowed while sputtering. I’ll die remembering that. Even the memory is infectious.

Sometimes we graded papers at his two-person kitchen table. Other times we met on a patio on the UCD campus and enjoyed the outdoor campus energy. It was cheerful. We’d chuckle at some of the sentiments in the student writing, people watch, feel the warm sun. I’d reach up and periodically connect a drinking straw to Carl’s lips when he got thirsty. He’d always make me feel that what we were doing together was the thing he was the most appreciative of in the world, even though I knew that he felt this way about the next helper and the next roommate, the next home aide. I knew that it was all the most important thing to him, hour by hour.

One time Carl invited me to come to a Richard Thompson concert at The Palms Playhouse, a venue in Davis. He’d pay for my ticket if I filled in for an aide who couldn’t make it. Given my destitute status at the time, this seemed an overly extravagant offer to me. Taking care of Carl had become part of my normal routine and expectation, so it was a bit of a celebration. I was a fan of Thompson’s music and was excited about the whole thing. It took time to load and unload Carl from the van, then get him all set up in the audience with good exit access if needed. The group of us settled in to watch the show: three scruffy personal care aides bunched adoringly around a guy wearing a high-flying cowboy hat and incessant grin, with a couch-cushion sized belly, and legs strapped to a colostomy bag. We might have been a sight, but Carl insisted on taking part in the world.

I’ll always remember that night. I peeked over at Carl many times. His face was aglow in the music. I was extremely happy that Carl was having fun, but he was a bull about such things. He took the life right in front of him, in whatever way it was coming at him: by luck, trauma, diligence, or sometimes through his own procrastination. Then he made it all work out somehow.

Carl pops up in my memory from time to time. The other day I was weeding through some old books and came across his memoir, It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. It was published in 1995, the year I got married and while I was in graduate school in NYC. I keep the book as a memento. I’m mentioned at one point in it, briefly and kindly. Carl passed away eight years later in Little Rock, AR, and I often wonder what his last years were like. I know his medical emergencies were slowly increasing in number, so I’m sure his passing was a relief in some sense, but a heartache for his family. What a tough hand to have played, for all of them.

There’s a Richard Thompson song I keep on my Spotify playlist called “1952 Vincent Black Lightening”. He sang it that night at The Palms, as its album had just been released. It’s a story of the thief James who bequeaths his motorcycle to his girlfriend on his deathbed. Their love for riding was what brought them together. I still think of Carl when I hear this song. It’s about the beauty of riding into life. I believe Carl rode that way, despite how challenging the ride. He will remain a study for me in how you can take this unfathomably brief time we have and bend it to the best of your ability so that it gives you a journey worthy of gratitude. The thing is, we really don’t have to bend it far from ourselves. Carl was barely able to move, and still he rode admirably. Knowing this, I can’t help but to imagine all that’s possible.