“I have lost my body, but I have gained my mind.”
-Ron Kovic
“Men are often haunted. They seem to be normal, but they are not.”
-Werner Herzog, “Little Dieter Needs To Fly”
“I never met a pearl quite like you, who could shimmer and rot at the same time through."
-The Distillers
This is one of the stranger things that has happened to me on the phone sex line. I’ll never forget it.
One day, a man called me. I’m going to call him Christian. He had a nice voice, he was charming and cute and easy to talk to. I asked him to describe himself.
He said that he had black hair and dark eyes. He was white, and in his 30’s. He was in good shape, and he was 6’4.
“ You would tower over me, “ I said. “I’m only 5’4.”
“I would if I could stand up", he replied, “but I’m in a wheelchair.”
Christian had been in a car accident when he was 23. The impact broke his spine, but not totally. Doctors had to surgically sever his spinal column halfway down his back. This left him paralyzed from the chest down.
I have a weird thing with people in wheelchairs. Allow me to explain.
I have written in the past about an ex boyfriend of mine who raped, beat, and almost killed me. He is the worst person I have ever met. I truly believe he is a sociopath. He is violent, manipulative, cruel….he lives to fuck people over.
He once said to me, “you seem more alive than everyone else”. At the time, I took it as a remarkable compliment. Looking back, I see it more as an observation from someone who was dead inside. Someone who was like a destructive machine, one that seeks out the traits in others that they wish to destroy, like the game of an evil cyborg. It’s ironic, because his actions against me brought me to the literal brink of death in more ways than one, many, many times.
He is in a wheelchair. He is a celebrated wheelchair athlete. He is considered a hero. He earns a lot of money doing motivational speeches.
I have had a really difficult time openly admitting to his brutality, because, most people have had a tough time believing that a man in a wheelchair could rape me. He’s an athlete who works out 8 hours a day, and he has no conscience, spinal cord injury be damned.
It just goes to show you that you really can’t trust anyone who listens to Sublime.
Anyways, during the time I was with him, I learned a lot, to say the least. I met a lot of other people who were in wheelchairs, or otherwise similarly disabled.
It’s taken me a very long time to grasp how quickly life can change. How a moment of joy can turn into the absolute worst moment of our lives. You never, ever can guess when one chapter of your life is about to finish, and another one is coming your way.
The majority of the people I met who were disabled, had stories that began as either anecdotes of good times, or recollections of mundane events…."I was driving in a car with my friends, we were going to a party"….."I was on my motorcycle, enjoying a ride on the highway”…”I dove into the ocean”….”I was on at my grandparents farm, on a tractor”…"I went to the doctor, I had a pain”….
And then life as they knew it was over, and something else was born.
A lot of these people that I met were athletes. They often had a certain public image that they were upholding. They had to get used to non disabled people crying in front of them, weeping about how brave and inspirational they were. They would usually smile and nod and be gracious. Then in private they would mock these people and their emotional transparency. They seemed resentful. I don’t blame them.
So…back to Christian.
He told me that the second thing he asked the doctor, when he was in the hospital after his accident, was if he would ever be able to fuck again. The first question was if there was any possibility that he could walk again.
It’s a strange thing, trauma. It was a long time ago now that I experienced everything that my ex did to me. It’s taken a long, long time to process it all. I still have a hard time trusting people, especially in intimate situations. I truly believe that I have overcome a lot of what happened. I am aware that there are a lot of people who never ever overcome being sexually and physically brutalized. I consider myself lucky, very lucky, in so many ways.
But, things can really burrow into you. They can go down into your bone marrow. There are things that I feel now that are a direct result of everything I have gone through in the past. It’s a struggle to shove that shit off of me.
When Christian told me he was in a wheelchair, and I realized that I was going to be having phone sex with him….something pinged deep inside me…like the last signal from a missing person, far away and faint, and from unknown places no one can get to. The past pushed up against me, and it made me uncomfortable.
I am stubbornly determined to get through all that I have experienced. I wasn’t gonna let this guy freak me out.
Okay. It freaked me out. But, I didn’t tap out. Fuck that noise.
Christian told me that had had to completely rethink sex since he had become disabled. It wasn’t about just sticking it in anymore. It was a whole new world of sensation.
For one thing, spinal cord injuries can impede blood flow, so, erections are difficult to get, despite feelings of arousal. Most guys who are disabled rely on Viagra, or other medications for erectile dysfunction.
The neat thing about Christian was that he said he could still have an orgasm without having to get hard. He still had sensation, which was very lucky for someone with his disability.
He was a kinky guy, and his injury had only deepened his desire to explore the wild and adventurous side of sex. I suppose after you’ve survived going through a car windshield at 70 miles an hour, you become more open to new things.
He told me he wanted to strip me and tie me face down to a bench. He wheeled around the bench, and I imagined him going in and out of my limited sight. He described whipping me with a belt, pouring hot wax on my skin (one of my personal favourite things, btw), letting it dry, and peeling it off so I could feel hot trails on my body.
Then he described inserting toys into me. I faked cumming for him before he wheeled himself so that his lap was right in front of my face, he shoved his cock down my throat and then had me blow him until he came himself.
He seemed happy with his call, and I was proud of myself for getting through it.
He thanked me, told me I was very sexy, and that was that….
Except it wasn’t exactly.
Plot twist time.
I have more than one profile. I had three different ones at the time. The callers never knew that if they called one girl one week, they might be calling the same girl the next week, even through the profile name and picture might be different. So…”Stacy” could very well be the same person claiming to be “Naomi”, who could also be “Vanessa”.
So, a few weeks later, on a different profile of mine, I got a call. It was Christian. Same name, same voice, same description. I didn’t let on that I was the same person he had spoken to weeks previous.
“I’m 6’4” he said.
“You’re so tall!” I said. “You’d tower over me!”
“I would” he said.
There was no mention of the wheelchair. Okay, fair enough.
He told me he wanted to tie me face down to a bench. He described himself walking around the bench, and he described how I would be able to hear his footsteps as he circled me, and that I would hear his steps echoing as he left the room and returned again.
Um…okay. I strained to hear if I could actually hear him walking around. sometimes I can hear a callers footsteps through the phone. Nothing.
Then he described untying me from the bench, picking me up, throwing me on the bed, and fucking me.
I was…confused, to say the least.
He hung up.
Plot twist time…again.
A few weeks after that…I got a call from Christian again. He called the original profile he had first called me on.
“Hey, it’s Christian!” he said.
“The wheelchair guy?” I asked tentatively.
“Yes. One in the same,” he said.
And we went on with the call. He was disabled, this time.
One of the things I learned during the time when I was hanging around my ex boyfriends friends was that there seemed to be an unspoken rule that it was taboo for disabled people to fantasize, sexually, or otherwise, about being able bodied. I heard many a disabled person claim that becoming disabled was “the best thing” that ever happened to him.
My ex wasn’t an honest person, but, one of the few times he was honest was when he told me he hated hearing other disabled people say that. He told me he wished he could walk again, that he would give anything to not be disabled.
I saw a lot of bravado coming from people in those days. It was obviously a shield. Medical technology has come a long way…but…if you break your back or your neck and you become disabled, you aren’t gonna walk again. That’s heavy. Letting yourself indulge in dreams of something you know you will never ever have again can fuck you up, mentally. I get it. No one wants to be Lot’s wife. If you turn around and look at all that burning wreckage behind you, no matter how strong the pull is, you risk being turned into something immovable.
So, was Christian a guy in wheelchair who dreamed and fantasied sometimes about being able to walk?
Or, is he a guy who can walk who fantasized about being disabled, complete with a backstory?
I was exposed during my relationship to people known as “chair chasers”, people who fetishized the disabled. They typically had a caregiver complex, where they got off on caring for someone, and they liked being seen in public with a disabled person.
I don’t think that Christian qualifies though. He “was” the person in the wheelchair, and he was dominant in that role.
I have thought a lot about this encounter, and, I have never come up with an answer as to what I think was really going on.
Was he a person whose body was broken by circumstance, and he wanted to live in a private world of imagination where he was whole again and he could do anything his body wanted? If so, my heart aches for him. I don’t feel sorry for him, but I know that urge to imagine a limitless life. It can feel so good to know you can see yourself as anything you want to be in your own head, the place and space where no one can get in unless you invite them.
Or…was he a guy who can walk who dreamed about pretending that tragedy had struck him when it hadn’t. That of course does make me feel sorry for him. I have a much harder time understanding someone dreaming about having catastrophe strike them when it hasn’t.
Is he a guy who is so boring and ungrateful for the life he has that he needs to pretend to be someone who survived a car wreck so you can get off while lying to a stranger on a phone sex line?
I mean, I do pretend that I’m a slutty Asian girl for money, so, I should probably be a little careful when flinging stones in my lovely proverbial house made of glass.
Some things in life are serious and carry a great deal of gravitas, no questions about it. Some things in life are fucking stupid and ridiculous, no questions about it. Some things exist simultaneously in both states. These are the things that fascinate me the most, because most things fall into this category. It all just depends on your vantage point, whether or not something is sacred or profane.
That’s how I see this situation. Part of me says, “holy shit! This is some Twilight Zone bizarreness, a peek into the complexities of the human mind, its many facets so like a diamond, reflective in its prism, showing all the faces one person can make.”
And, part of me says, “It’s just a guy, fucking around.”
"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"
Edgar Allen Poe
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