Dumped.

In the spring of 1995, I was living in Tempe, Arizona. Barely. My apartment was only about eight-hundred feet across the border of the much more desirable and posh suburb of Scottsdale, so I didn’t feel too guilty about telling folks I was from there. It was only eight-hundred feet from true, after all.

And besides, I did work in Scottsdale. On the other side of it, actually. Across my side of Scottsdale all the way to the desert side of it (almost exactly nineteen miles) was the Dial Corp building where I had gotten my first real job. Back in Sacramento, where I was from, I had been a mooching college student, taking classes for as long as I could while living with my Mom, not needing to worry about a job. It wasn’t just the free rent that made that possible. I was also getting a check from the government every month, that special federal gift granted to me for the good fortune of being born with a disability. I had never really been given an option—from my family, at least—of choosing it or not. Both my parents had just instilled in me that when I turned eighteen, I would sign up and start receiving that. That’s just what handicapped people do. My father, I think, saw it as more of a way to get through college, and wanted me to go on and get a degree in something. Though I don’t think my mother ever really considered the idea of me working…or me ever moving out, for that matter. After all, the permanent boarder arrangement was all the oh-so-wise doctors had ever told her to expect from life with me, so why would she imagine otherwise? She was fine with that, and seemed quite happy with it, never making me feel as though she ever wanted me anywhere else. If my parents didn’t have greater aspirations for my life (independence, job, wife, kids, retirement), consider, in their defense, they had spent the whole of my years being told I wouldn’t live past one age (seven was the first deadline, I think), then another…only to find out when I was fifteen that I wasn’t actually terminal. They were having to readjust their views of my life on the fly, as the rules kept changing on them. I think they more than did their best.

But in 1992, a lot of things changed. I had just dropped out of college, about a year after the death of my father, not sure what I wanted to do with my life. It was around this time that a thing happened to me that—unlike today—was pretty unlikely and fairly unheard of. I met a girl on the internet. Okay, it wasn’t actually THE internet. We both had Commodore 128 computers, and were members of something called Quantum Link (more commonly “Q-Link), which was Commodore’s version of AOL (it was actually owned by AOL, I think…and keep in mind that this was before AOL completely exploded and took over the world, so not that many people even know what AOL was, either). We met in a chat room by chance, and we ended up on the phone the next night. I was living in Rocklin, California (with my mother and step-father), and she was living in Scottsdale, Arizona (with her parents). And as ridiculous as it sounded for two people who’d never met face to face (ridiculous back then. Now it’s pretty much a cliché), we fell in love almost immediately.

We spent about three months on the phone before, finally, she flew out to California to spend the holidays with me, where we met (for reals) for the first time, both of us indescribably nervous about whether things would be the same in person—and both us even more so because of my whole Dystrophy situation. Remarkably, it turned out things WERE, and the romance was cemented. Two months later, I flew to Arizona (a place I had never been…but then, I really hadn’t been to many places at all at that point in my life) to meet her family and stay with them for about a month. The trip had a bigger purpose than just us spending time together. I was being led down a whole new path in my life, one that changed everything, on so many levels. I had some big decisions to make. And this was my time to figure out if it was all really going the direction I thought it was. By the end of that month, it was clear what was happening. And it was clear that I needed to move to Arizona to be with her.

The divine hand in this seemed even clearer when, right at that time, my mother and step-father ended up with a new job that was going to force them to move back east. When the chance of this first had first sprung up, the assumption was made that I’d be moving there with them and going back to college. But then came the girl, and a choice had to be made. There was no status quo. It had now gone away. I had to choose one new path or the other. And there really was no choice at all.

So here I was, twenty-four-years old, having never had a job, having never lived away from home, and having never lived outside of California. It seemed like no one in the world expected or wanted any of these things of me. I was meant to be cared for and kept happy, and not to bother myself with things like striking out on my own. This was not what people with Muscular Dystrophy were supposed to do. It didn’t fit the paradigm. Well, it was finally my time to make the leap and prove them all wrong, and I could feel the universe pushing me right along in that direction. So, with faith, enthusiasm and a heart and head filled with romance, I moved to Tempe (Scottsdale) to begin my great adventure. My true life was finally beginning.

And what a grand adventure it was. I looked for and found my first apartment…my OWN apartment, not one I shared with roommates, as most post-college guys end up doing. It was small and simple, but it was all mine, and something I had dreamed about for years. Having no work experience and only a two-year degree, my job options were limited, but I began the search, starting with an agency that not only taught me things like resume-building (from nothing, in my case) to interview techniques, but landed me my first job. Not my first REAL job. This first brief gig was conducting telephone surveys part-time from a cramped little office filled with tiny cubicles, where my co-workers ranged from college students to ex-cons to recovering addicts…all the type of folks that a company could hire on for next to nothing and easily replace. It was a horrible job—telemarketing, essentially, where you interrupt people during dinner and get yelled at and hung up on—but it was a job, and I was grateful for it, and needed it to supplement my government income (a check which is swell when you’re living with your mom, but not a lot of good when you’re paying your own bills). I wasn’t (thankfully) there for long. I kept searching, and got a referral for another kind of call center job. This one was with the company that made Dial Soap (in addition to dozens of other products ranging from canned foods to air fresheners to detergents to floor waxes). Ever see that 800-number on your package of soap? The number you call for questions, comments and complaints? I always wondered what kind of people actually called those numbers. I was about to find out, because for some reason, Dial decided to take a chance on a newbie to the workforce like myself and offer me the job. Did that reason have anything to do with hiring someone for their company in a wheelchair? If so…I had zero problem with that. I was more than willing to be a token…if that token got PAID.

The next couple of years of my life were pretty magical, at least by my standards. I suddenly had almost everything I’d wanted. Right in the middle of the phone romance beginning, I had gotten my first set of wheels (no, the OTHER kind of wheels), and finally, after years of trying to figure out how to make it happen, had the wheelchair van that gave me my first taste of independence. And I was now living on my own, defying the world’s script for my life. I had a job, which, by my standards now, was a pretty feeble one (and only working it part-time because of the restrictions I had on earnings while keeping my government money, something I was still, at that time, convinced that I couldn’t give up), but I was still making more per hour than most people I knew back home. I had not only gotten away from home, but gotten all the way out of state, to an exciting new city that I dearly loved. And I had the girl. I had love. Our relationship was great and without the usual ups-and-downs I’d seen so many others face, and we planned for the future, looking ahead to marriage, going so far as to plan the names of our children in advance.

In April of 1995, life was wonderful.

And then I got dumped.

Like the genius my father swore to me that I was, based on an I.Q. test I had taken somewhere in my childhood (a story I’ve since decided he made up to try to get me to actually pick up a schoolbook once in a while), I never saw it coming. There were no clear warning signs. No fighting. No sudden distance. Everything seemed to be going along just fine. One day, I came home from work, and she was waiting there at my door. Nothing unusual there, as she had been expected. But thirty seconds after we got INSIDE the door, she said that we needed to talk. And thirty minutes later she, and any of her belongings that were inside my apartment, were gone. Two and a half years together, and just like that, it was over. I was left there, alone, in my kitchen, in shock, in disbelief, and, for the first time in my life, truly on my own.

There were no clear warning signs, but there was the elephant in the room that we always ended up avoiding. It was religion. She was Mormon. I was not. If you know Mormonism, you know this is a problem. Our occasional attempts to face the elephant usually ended in frustration and at a stand-still, so these attempts had become fewer and far between. But the night before the big dumping, she had left my place to go home, and somewhere during her fifteen minute drive home in the dark Scottsdale night (she lived on the good side), she decided that I was never going to become Mormon (turns out she was right) and she couldn’t wait any longer. So her decision was made, and the next day, the bomb, without preamble, was dropped. She not only declared that it was over, but also felt that I shouldn’t contact her. At least not for a few months. A few MONTHS?! That word had exploded in my ears and chest. Even while trying to cope with (and catch up with) what was happening, I had been making desperate mental plans for us to try things in friend mode, at least (until she realized what a mistake she was making and wondered how she ever could have thought she could live without me). She was, after all, my best friend. But apparently that was off the table, too. This was not a redefinition of a relationship. This was amputation. With me being the lucky gangrenous limb.

So she was gone, and I was in a shell-shocked daze. My whole life had just been yanked right out from under me. I drifted through the days that followed in a haze, zombie-like, like a hurricane victim wandering the streets of the once-familiar town, looking for the Dairy Queen that had always been there but finding only a pile of rubble. And still feeling like I should be able to just stroll in and order a Blizzard, because that was the way my reality worked, and this new existence made no sense. I did my best to deal. I got through my work days as best I could, never really focused on what I was doing, barely remembering the call I had taken before the new one came though, wondering how someone’s asinine Purex Detergent gripe could possibly be important to them when my universe was falling apart. I attempted to draw my thoughts away from my still-breaking heart and the thousand or so “what if” scenarios that went through my head daily by playing simple desktop games on my PC I had just gotten a couple of months before (finally letting the old Commodore go…with sadly ironic timing). Hours of Taipei and Tetris filled my aimless nights until sleep would come and I’d rise the next morning to man the phones at Dial again and spend my days listening to other people’s oh-so important problems (“Your soap gave me a rash!”). They knew nothing of problems. Nothing of true pain, and true loss. They sickened me. And yet, I continued to apologize and send them coupons. That was my job. Apparently, that was my life. Or all that was left of it.

I rode the roller coaster as days turned to weeks, rising and falling from weak moments of hope (“I’m okay! Really! I’m moving on! See how I’m not even THINKING about her?”) to paralyzing depths of despair and self-pity. Aside from my co-workers at Dial, whom I only saw during business hours, I had no one else in Arizona. My friends had been her friends. Her family, my family. I was cut off completely. My friends back home and family would call, but try as they might, were not much help. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to say the absolute WRONG thing to someone in a dumped state? My mother left me a voice mail one day, calling because she was worried about me and trying to cheer me up, and on it, she talked about an old friend of the family, a woman who was part of the same church (Seventh-Day Adventist) as my family, and how, after hearing what had happened to me, she wanted my mother to tell me that she was “proud of me”. I knew exactly what she meant by that. Many people in my life, in several different denominations, had been clearly against my getting involved with a Mormon girl. And some had taken some active steps (some behind my back) to try to “fix” that. The thought of that—the GALL of that, of someone trying to sabotage the happiness I’d waited my whole life to find, just to satisfy their own sense of theological reality and validate their own faith, at my expense—came back to me again and again in my moments of bitterness. And now this woman was “proud” of me, because in her view of how the world works I had somehow taken a stand on behalf of her religion (which must be, of course, the right one) and shunned Mormonism and smacked it down, scoring one for the good guys? It scares me even now—and reminds me just how far gone your brain gets when love does you wrong—how close I came to calling my mother back and demanding the phone number, and then calling this poor woman and lighting into her and venting all my pent-up wrath on her, both for my agonizing loss and for the holy war that still seemed to be going on over my soul with all these people in my life.

Had I simply had the phone number available to me, and not needed to go through the extra step of getting it from Mom (which I’m sure she never would have given me, but would have picked up on my temporary lunacy and talked me down), I really think I might have made that call. I was just about that close to snapping. The one other guy I could have gone FedEx on during that time, for more secular reasons, was an unsuspecting artist I knew only from email conversations. This was at a time when a friend of mine in the comic book business was trying to get me into writing for the medium, so I had been searching for artists “online” (still a very new word to the world in 1995) to work projects with. This one guy had shown some promise. But he also had major self-esteem (and, I think, emotional) problems, and I had recently gotten a self-flogging email from him stating that he realized he was no good and that he wouldn’t be getting into comics and wouldn’t be working with me. Obviously, with all this other stuff going on, and I hadn’t given this guy much of a thought (not any, in fact). One day, during the early days of my romantic exile, I had come home from work and checked email. Part of me, each day, hoped for some sort of contact from her. Even just an email. Each day I’d end up with the same sinking heart when there was nothing from her. But this day, one email popped up, and all I saw, at first, was the subject line. It read, simply, “Second chance?” My heart leapt, my faded hopes exploded into life, and for all of a second, it looked like everything was going to be okay after all. But, of course, it wasn’t from her. It was from him. The jackass artist, writing to tell me that he’d thought it over and felt he now WAS good and was ready to get to work on something.

Could…have…killed him.

I never wrote him back, but he felt the need to change his mind again, a couple of days later, and decide, again, that he was worthless and not ready for any projects. And then he sent another one, soon after, titled “Reconsidered”, and AGAIN, my immediate thought was that it was from the one whom I still hadn’t quite come to accept as being my ex. I think there was one more of these after that, too. And this guy had no idea how cruelly he was torturing me from afar. So, no, others in my life were not helping, but seemed to be conspiring to make things worse.

The worst part about being dumped isn’t the loss of the other that you thought had been destined to come into your life and be there with you until your teeth fall out and your prostate grows to the size of a zucchini. The worst part is how it makes you feel about yourself. This was especially true in my case. Compared to my level of self-esteem, that bi-polar artist had an ego about the size of Kevin Costner’s. I had all but considered myself unlovable most of my life. And because of that, I had built some tall and mighty walls around myself that kept everyone out. To let someone in, to let someone close enough, meant to allow them to lay the inevitable hurt on me, and I was much too smart to let THAT happen. Well, it took her a couple of years, but she had finally made me believe it. And I had let the walls down. And then that damned horse had ended up being filled with well-armed and giggling Trojans. I had done it to myself. I had broken rule number one, and reminded myself of that every day after she’d left. I had only myself to blame. I hated myself for it, and hated the unlovable person that I was, and quickly convinced myself that the whole religion thing had just been the excuse to cut me loose. The truth was, she had never really loved me (the very idea of it was laughable to mr, now that I had come back to my “senses”). She had just been being polite, and looking for the right time and place to kick me out of the speeding Chevy called love. After all, if you really loved someone, you didn’t just turn things off like a switch and refuse any further contact. That’s what you did to someone you were grateful to be, finally, away from. I could even imagine her relief, getting home that day, that she’d finally done it, and was now free. No other explanation could explain such cruelty.

Maybe a couple of months into all this, I was at work one day. I had left my headset—and my bitching soap enthusiasts—back at my desk and taken a restroom break. This happened to be one of my angry days. And I had some real “angry” going on. No thoughts (consciously) of missing her or wishing things were back to making sense again, but instead, just indignation of the most righteous variety. What was running through my head, as I sat there at the sink in my chair, vigorously washing my hands (the speed and intensity of this ritual matching the rise of the emotional cauldron I was unleashing), was the conversation I’d have with her if I ever did get the chance to speak to her again. I guess it couldn’t really be called a conversation, as it didn’t seem as though I was planning to give her much chance to speak. I had too many words to lay on her. About lying to someone and leading them on and making them feel the fool for it. About hiding behind religion as an excuse to detach and rid yourself of someone. About making decisions and executing them in something that two people were supposedly both invested in, and not giving the other party any say in the matter, no chance for debate or reasoning or so much as an opportunity to plead. About treating another human being in such a way without any regard for the basest rules of common decency. It was hell of a speech, with a fitting helping of brimstone shoveled onto it.

I was filled with purest and most satisfying kind of rage. The justified kind. There was no remorse, no shame, no guilt for it. It was owed to me. It felt like a birthright. It was righteous and true, blessed and deserved, and I let it grow unabated, without so much as a thought of regret. How could something that felt so good possibly be wrong?

I left the men’s room and wheeled myself down the long hall to the Call Center with all the strength my vengeful thoughts were giving me, using my feet to propel myself on the thin carpet, as I do, and the one arm that can reach the wheels as well. I was repeating key parts of the speech in my head, letting them echo there, where my usually weak voice bellowed forcefully as Al Pacino’s in my mind’s ear. Up on my left, a man and woman from some other department were chatting at the hall’s copy machine, but I paid them no mind. My furnace was raging, gloriously, and I was letting in consume me. I wonder if I might have been wearing a sadistic smile.

And then, my foot caught my front wheel.

As I was thrusting forward with my feet, my black Florsheim went under the hard rubber left front wheel. My fury had been driving me forward at probably the best pace I could manage. The chair slammed to an immediate stop. The laws of physics took care of the rest—the chair stopped, I did not. My weight was thrown forward and my leg muscles caught it for a moment, but if you look up Muscular Dystrophy (or even just the definition of the two words individually and figure out what putting them together means), you can imagine what a short moment it was. Gravity took care of the rest. I didn’t go flying like a stuntman or anything. I simply jerked forward, hovered there for a frozen moment in time, and then dropped to the floor with a thud.

There was no pain. Shock has a way of taking care of that, but it wasn’t a painful fall, regardless. It was just a fall, but a definitive one. And without me even thinking about it, my body took over, and I was sitting up and reaching quickly for the chair. Because what I WAS immediately thinking about were the two people at the copy machine that I had paid so little notice to just moments before. The witnesses. Looking like a complete idiot doesn’t really work without at least one of those around.

I grabbed the chair (which was thankfully in reach) and yanked it to me and started the process of getting up, all the while waiting for the humiliating moment of the pair of them rushing over to ask if I was okay and trying to assist me. This whole situation, by the way, is what we in the differently-abled set consider to be the worst-case scenario. This is when you go through your life trying to pretend you’re just like everyone else and don’t need anyone’s help like you’re some kind of invalid (when you are, in fact, one by definition), and then something like this happens and you suddenly become the lucky recipient of pity and a chance for some able-bodied stalwart to do their good deed for the day (or, in this case, maybe for the month. After a save like this, they could feel free to let old ladies cross the street alone and infant birds drop from nests for a good four to six weeks).

Interestingly, that didn’t happen. Turned as I now was, getting my legs under me and pulling myself upward as I held onto the armrests (and imagining, with each passing moment, how pathetic and ridiculous I must look), they were behind me. But instead of hearing gasps and the rush of feet, all I got was silence.

As I worked my way up, and after what seemed a very long pause, I finally heard the male of the duo speak. His voice was hesitant and quiet, and instead of being drenched with sympathy or concern, it, instead, held—oddly—a kind of awkward contempt.

“Uh…you need any help?” he asked. But his tone mouthed out another set of words, the real meaning I could feel behind them. God, what a freak. There was a resentment in them, maybe at him having to have been put in such a strange and uncomfortable situation and not knowing what to do. Regardless, they were not pleasant words.

“Oh, no,” I said, quickly and cheerfully, finishing getting myself swung back into my saddle as fast as I could, still not looking at them. I was in dignity recovery mode (been there before, just rarely in such dramatic fashion). “I’ve got it, it’s fine.” I tried to convey, with my own tone, that everything was just dandy, like this was just some kind of normal, everyday occurrence. Like I’d dropped of fork or something, instead of myself.

I got back into the seat and just wheeled right passed them, unable to make eye contact. I caught them out of the corner of my eye, both silently sliding a look at me and then turning back to their copying. Wow. Talk about being careful what you wish for. I had feared being accosted by a couple of well-meaning Samaritans. Instead I ended up with couple of…well…assholes.

I headed back into the Call Center and back to my desk, doing a lousy job at trying to convince myself that hadn’t just happened. As I sat there, the rage I had been feeling didn’t have to drain away; it had vanished the moment I’d taken the tumble. What was left was just a tired, surrendering darkness. And a thought I can still clearly remember having.

Yeah. Didn’t need for THAT to happen.

So I wasn’t even allowed to have a few minutes of internal payback for all I’d been through. Not even that. The universe, it seemed, had decided that my lot was to be rejected and scorned and cast aside, to feel worthless and alone, and any attempts to escape those feelings would be quickly punished. I could find no meaning in what had just happened that said otherwise. I had gotten this low, and was destined to sink even lower any time I was impetuous enough to try to lift myself out of it.

But, suddenly, the meaning came to me.

And I heard the voice.

No, I wasn’t actually hearing voices. I wasn’t that far gone. But words suddenly formed in my head that seemed to come from somewhere else, and in direct answer to the hopeless questions that were, just then, in my mind. They were so clear they could have been a voice, and they allowed no chance to question them. Quietly, they said:

Stop being angry.

It’s not who you are.

Don’t be angry with her.

Don’t be ANYTHING with her.

Forget her.

And move on.

And from that day forward, I did.

It didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t suddenly become an avatar of emotional health and self-respect. But it began. Finally. Small steps created distance. Distance created accomplishment, minimal but growing. I stopped thinking about her all the time. I started thinking about me. I began getting out of the apartment, out into the world, being social. I’d go out for drinks with friends from work (though I, myself, wasn’t drinking at this time (thankfully, because I’m sure I’d have been doing a LOT of it), but I had my O’Doul’s and the pleasure of their company). I went to movies with people. Even poetry readings and plays (trying new things). I started living the day instead of getting through it. I started to, slowly, consider that maybe I wasn’t such a bad person after all. And that maybe I wasn’t the only person in the world who had ever gone through such a thing, and that maybe, in the end, things just didn’t always work out. And maybe, sometimes, that was for the better.

People in my life had expected me to run home to California as soon as my break-up happened, but I didn’t. Tempe/Scottsdale was my town, and I claimed it, and the life I had built for myself there, on my own. But after a few months, a call from an old friend who was going through his own terrible break-up came, and I was surprised to realize I was able to sympathize with him not as one going through the same thing, but as one who had been through it and was on the other side. I was in a place I hadn’t even known I’d reached. But he needed more than moral support. He was in need of a roommate back in Sacramento, and wondered if I’d considered moving back. I actually hadn’t, and had no plans to in the future. His need gave me a lot to think about in the days that followed, and, in one of the harder decisions in my life, I realized that now might finally be the time. I had friends and family back there, ones that my life was quickly going on without. And if I did so now, it wouldn’t be because I was running back. It would be on my own terms. Many sleepless nights, a lot of soul-searching, an actual handwritten pros-and-cons list, and a few intrusions of fate that seemed to point toward it being the right thing to do (like another friend of ours suddenly needing roommates, and wanting to share a house with us) led to the final decision. I was going home, and leaving the Arizona part of my life, and her, behind.

My new life began, and it turned out to be a fantastic and fun one, and a whole new adventure. But I wasn’t at it for long when the phone call I’d once prayed for, but now dreaded, came. One of my roommates answered the phone, paused hesitantly, and carefully told me that it was her. She’d heard I’d moved back, and had tracked me down, and wanted to see how I was doing. I didn’t fall apart, I didn’t get angry. I mostly felt fear, I think, that those same negative feelings would come back. It was a polite and pleasant phone call, and didn’t last overly long. The next day I received an email from her. I sat down and wrote a good-sized one back, and felt that it was friendly, yet honest, and was a good start to maybe trying to get a friendship going. I didn’t hear back from her. I thought that was odd, but it didn’t bother me all that much. After a couple of months I decided to go back and re-read the email I’d written to her. Oops. Apparently, I hadn’t been quite as totally healed as I’d thought. It was a little TOO honest, more so than I remembered being when I wrote it, and I winced with some genuine embarrassment, and even managed to feel bad about it. After that I felt it was best to leave the ball in her court, and some time later, she did write another one. Which gave me the chance to write back my apology, which led to a phone call where we both laughed about it, and where I found out that she’d printed it out and stormed around her apartment reading it aloud to her roommate (she had since moved out of her parents’ place) and tore it up and swore never to speak to me again. Thankfully, that oath didn’t last very long. By this time my anger with her was all but gone, and the guy that had had such a devastating speech prepared for her actually felt concerned about being impolite, and about her feelings.

More phone calls turned into plans for her to come visit me in Sacramento, and soon, I found myself back at Sacramento Airport waiting for her plane to arrive, just as I had done back in December of 1992. It was now 1996, and just over a year since she’d walked out of my apartment, and my life, with a final kiss. I had not seen her since. Now I waited with nerves much different than the one’s I’d had the first time around. I felt certain I was over her, and that those feelings I’d had for her—that love—was all in the past, but would seeing her again bring them, and all the pain, back, despite what I believed? She got off the plane, and we hugged, and we started to talk as we headed for baggage claim. After about thirty seconds of that talking, I felt a relief that to this day I’ll never forget, like a physical weight had lifted. It was really over. Talking with her was like talking with an old friend. There was no loss, no pain, no longing. I had really made it all the way through the thing that I was sure I’d never be able to survive in those early, dark days. I had moved on. And we were friends. And friends are what we’ve been ever since.

Now, depending on your particular theological beliefs—even as simple as a suspicion of a benevolent higher power—you may be aghast at the idea of a God who would dump a guy in a wheelchair on his ass just to drive a point home and wake him up. You may deny it and shun it and cry foul that a supposed God of mercy could do such a thing that is so clearly, CLEARLY against every notion that Sunday school, Hallmark cards and ABC After-School Specials teach us about love and kindness.

Maybe that’s true in your world. But in mine, I have a God that sees me as a guy, not as a guy in a wheelchair. And one who knows that sometimes a guy’s got to take a fall to be able to pick himself up again. To hit rock bottom to be able to look back up. And for that, I’ll take being dumped—the good way—any day.