Thank you.
I've never felt quite so formidable, I think.
[LAUGHTER]
So I am messing with you, yes.
Sorry.
It's OK.
Let's try this.
Thank you.
It's a night for technical problems.
How's that?
We can try again.
[INAUDIBLE]
Do you need it a little bit higher or--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There it is.
All right.
Like I always say, if you can't hear me,
just throw something heavy.
That'll get my attention, and I'll try to do better.
[CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me.
Thank you guys so much for being here.
Thank you, Cybele Thank you, Matthew and everybody else
for being here.
And I'm sorry for the late delay, last-minute computer
problems.
So hurriedly typing away over there
in the library across the way, and then
just suddenly like said, "I can't wait any longer.
Let's go over."
And so my assistant Tyler is--
I mean, Tyler's going to be so nice to help me turn pages.
So anyway, I am so happy to be here.
I've never been to Arizona before,
and it's a good time to be here.
Thank you again for being here.
Ander, good to see you again.
How long has it been?
Three, four years, [INAUDIBLE]
Three, four years.
You're looking good.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE]
You're looking good.
All right.
Well, I'm going to read from the first chapter of my memoir.
"The night before I broke the third and fourth vertebrae
of my neck, I lay in bed imagining what it would be like
if that ever happened to me, if there would be pain,
if I would die.
I was twelve years old.
My mother had checked out a book called
Joni from our Methodist church's sparse library, giving it to me
when she finished.
I had ignored it for months, choosing instead
the tattered Hardy Boys mysteries that I loved,
the comic books I kept in a cardboard box,
or magazines like BMX Action.
But that night after my parents had put the newborn twins down
for sleep, after my seven-year-old brother
had gone to his own room upstairs, I turned to the book,
thumbing through it.
The story of a teenage girl who was paralyzed
in a diving accident gripped me at first, the way cheap horror
movies on late-night cable did.
The suffering seemed like fiction.
But when she woke--
when she wrote of awakening in a cold, green room, her body
naked except for a sheet that covered the body,
she could no longer feel or move,
I could barely stand to read any more.
As the sheet began to slip away from her and onto the floor,
revealing her breasts, her nipples
prickling in the cold air, shame scalded her.
And I put the book away.
I didn't sleep for a while.
The next morning I woke early and dressed, excited.
The day before I had graduated from the sixth grade,
walking across an old stage in my school's cafeteria
to receive my diploma.
I was excited because one of my teachers
had invited me to her home for a graduation party.
Her name was Jody Benson, and I had been her student
since the first grade.
Dark-haired and young, she had come
to my classroom asking for me before leading me
to a room in the oldest wing of the school.
The room smelled like old books, like binding glue and dust.
The floors were wood, and high windows
let in a light that scarcely seemed to fall
to where I stood beside a desk.
She asked me to sit and placed a book on an easel before me.
'I brought you here to test your reading skills,' she said,
smiling.
'Do you know what I mean by that?'
I nodded.
I had learned to read early, before beginning kindergarten.
As a child, I'd demanded my mother read book after book,
over and over again.
Neither of my parents had attended college,
marrying soon after graduating from high school.
My father managed a grocery store in a local chain,
having worked in the business since his early teens.
And my mother came to hate--
and my mother claimed to hate school,
to see no sense in most of it, all the while
pushing us to do our best.
I tried.
'OK, then.
We'll start off with easy words, words you won't have any
problems with, and we'll go from there.'
The book was spiral-bound across the top edge of each page,
designed to be flipped over.
We began with words, then passages of text.
They were easier for me than what I was reading at home--
books about the space shuttle, a history of the robot,
mysteries, comic books, almost anything
that I could find I opened up.
Designed to measure a child's vocabulary,
her book grew ever more dense each time
she flipped a thick, time-stained page.
After a while, Jody stopped, putting down the pen
she had been making notes with.
'We can stop there.
You've read plenty.'
I was disappointed about not finishing.
I wanted to please her, to impress her.
I knew who she was and the classes that she taught.
I wanted to be a part of them, to be recognized,
to feel special.
'I can keep going.
It hasn't been hard at all.'
Jody looked at me carefully, trying not to smile.
After a moment, she flipped the page and picked up her pen.
She motioned for me to continue reading.
I didn't stop until the book did.
At Jody's house, I found my best friend Adam waiting for me
on the back porch.
Jody was beginning to grill burgers and hot dogs.
Inside, Christina, Wendy, Missy, Lana, and Michelle,
the other members of our gifted class,
were playing with Jody's newborn baby daughter.
Adam and I were not much interested in that,
sitting stoically on the bench while Jody cooked for us.
Before long we grew bored, antsy, unwilling
to join the girls inside.
For five years, we had been the only boys in the class.
And Jody knew well how much we loved bicycles,
riding and racing.
She asked if we would like to borrow her and her husband's
bicycles until the food was ready.
We jumped up, running to the garage.
I should have been wary.
An adult would have known better than to ride those bikes.
Leaned against the wall, festooned with cobwebs,
skinned in dust, the ten-speed bikes
had not been used in quite some time.
Adam took the first and pedaled a few feet forward, stopping.
The tires were flat.
I looked down to see that mine were flat, too.
Back inside the garage, we found a pump hanging on the wall.
Adam inflated his tires quickly and then was gone.
I began pumping mine back up.
I climbed atop the bike, feeling awkward
from leaning out over the handlebars.
All my life I had ridden single-speed bikes
with 20-inch wheels, dirt bikes, BMX bikes
with lightweight steel frames.
I felt unsafe but pedaled on slowly.
Jody's house sat at the top of a long, steep driveway.
To either side, green lawns sloped down to the road.
I didn't see Adam anywhere ahead.
Already I was afraid that I would wreck.
The bike was getting away from me
as it coasted down the long incline.
I squeezed the right handbrake, but it
was only mush, a sensation I'd felt before on my own bike when
the brake cable that ran down to the wheel
had frayed or torn entirely.
It was a problem I could fix myself but not in motion,
and not then.
My fear began to grow.
I was resigned to the inevitability of crashing.
And in those few seconds I had before the bike would be
dangerously fast, I decided it was better to crash on grass
than to land on the asphalt. I steered to the right,
not into Jody's lawn, but the grass between her yard and her
neighbor's.
I tried the useless brakes once more.
Nothing.
'Maybe I can lay it down in the grass,' I thought,
though I'm not even sure I knew what that meant.
I was rolling over the smooth grass, frozen.
I never tried to do anything but ride it out.
What I did not know, what I could not see,
would be what changed the rest of my life.
At the bottom of the slope, a drainage ditch
ran beside the road.
Overgrown with weeds and thick tussocks of grass,
I hit the ditch still traveling at speed.
I was thrown from the bike, over the handlebars, catapulted,
tossed like a human lawn dart into the earth.
I don't remember flying through the air,
not because I lost consciousness,
but because my eyes were sealed shut out of fear.
I came to rest like a bag of sand, sliding to a stop
some 12 feet away, beside a thin tree.
I could feel nothing, no pain, no sensation.
Indeed there seemed to be no body any longer
below my neck, which slowly, faintly, began
to register the dullest of aches.
There is no way to describe what this felt like--
or did not feel like--
the sudden, violent abstraction of the body,
the brain left to believe all has
vanished in a terrible, surgical instant.
My head felt like a stone.
And all that my mind could conjure for me to understand
was that the rest of me seemed to float away.
Across my chest, my left arm lay crookedly, the radius snapped.
My right arm was pinned beneath me, its wrist broken as well.
My breath was labored.
Something wet seeped from my nose.
It felt like blood.
I'd later learn it was spinal fluid.
I began to guess what had happened, though I knew nothing
in detail about a broken neck, nothing besides what I had read
in the book by Joni Eareckson the night before,
though I did not think of that then.
Instinctively, I knew I'd broken my neck, that I was badly hurt,
that I wouldn't be dusting myself off, catching my breath,
wincing over scrapes that would soon grow scabs.
Adam stood over me, out of breath, scared.
'Do you need help?'
he asked, his voice high and near to flying apart.
'Yes,' I said. 'Hurry.'
And then I was alone for a minute, maybe two.
My breaths were ragged.
Above me, a low green branch blocked the blue sky
of the last day of May.
Jody quickly came to where I lay, dropping down
to her knees, her face scared.
I could see Adam and the girls standing
in a bunch of some distant--
I could see Adam and the girls standing
in a bunch some distance away.
'Are you OK?' she asked, her voice strange.
'I think I've hurt myself,' I said, scared to say any more.
By then, her next-door neighbors had
arrived, having seen the accident from their porch.
A burly, middle-aged man squatted beside me.
'You OK, buddy?
You took quite a spill there.'
His voice was better than Jody's, more calm,
pitched to comfort me.
He placed his hand on my shoulder.
I couldn't feel it.
'We're going to get you up from here, OK?
You've knocked the breath out of yourself.
We're going to get you up, OK?'
I knew enough to know that I shouldn't be moved.
I asked him not to move me, I begged him,
but he lifted me easily in his arms, carried me
a few feet back from where I'd come to rest after the wreck.
Someone else, another man, maybe his son,
helped him stand me up, one of them on each side of me.
They must have expected me to shake it off,
to get over the scare, to stand up on my own.
They withdrew some of their support.
My knees buckled.
I dropped.
My head fell over like a flower on a broken stem.
My cheek rested against my chest grotesquely.
Without saying another word, they softly
laid me on the grass again.
I have no idea, no way of knowing
if this ill-advised movement made my injury worse,
if the extent of my paralysis grew
from any additional trauma.
Before the men moved me, took me up in their arms,
that fear lit up inside me, that further harm
would happen to me if I were so much as touched.
But a child is helpless when hurt,
when no one really knows what the gravity of permanence
feels like.
And so it happened and then could not be undone.
And in that awful moment, it became no different
than the wreck itself, a terrible extension of it.
In the time to come, when therapy and surgeries loomed,
I put it out of my mind, one more event
over which I had no control, not when it happened,
and not in the drear, untouchable past.
Doctors could only speculate softly.
'No way to know,' they said.
'The damage was probably already done.'
My parents spoke of it, if they did it all,
in terms which minimized or negated any possible effect.
But I could hear in my father's voice, beneath it,
choked anger, broken-hearted and immense, inconsolable.
The paramedics carefully slipped a hard collar
around my neck, a body board beneath me,
all to stabilize whatever might be broken or injured.
They lifted me up into the ambulance and sped away.
The paramedic seated beside me, monitoring-- the paramedic
seated beside me, monitoring my vital signs,
spoke calmly, reassuringly for a few moments.
He mentioned that he had gone to high school
with my mother and her brothers, that they had played together
as children.
He radioed ahead to the hospital.
'Probable cervical injury,' I heard him quietly say.
I don't believe I knew the meaning of 'cervical' then,
but I understood it intuitively.
And fear began to take greater hold within me.
I began to feel a permanence rolling over me like a wave,
that this injury might not be something that would
heal in its own good time.
I stared up at the roof of the speeding ambulance,
listening to the clatter of things
jostling in their drawers and the siren
wailing through our passage.
The opening of ambulance doors is a curiously fraught moment.
The world outside may never again be as it was.
There is a certain staginess about it,
a level of focus from which all one wants to do is hide.
By now I wanted it all to be a dream.
My clothes had been cut away from me, yellow shorts
and a yellow shirt razored away with no regard to possession.
I had no idea this had happened, that I
lay in the rolling, swaying bay of the ambulance with nothing
on.
I could feel nothing.
And an oxygen mask hissed against my face.
I couldn't move.
The entire world was a vague sensation
of speed, a muffled siren, the practiced
calm of a paramedic's voice.
Sometime later in the hospital, while my mother
waited in the hallway, a paramedic
handed her my shredded clothes in a plastic bag."