Navigating With a New Set of Stars

I was sitting at the bus stop, on the corner of 26th Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, when I saw myself drive by. The guy at the wheel was about my age, wearing glasses and a baseball cap, and the car--an old green BMW, the exact same model as mine--was just as dirty as the one I drive.

Only I wasn’t driving anymore. I had to take the bus now, and even that wasn’t easy. About six months earlier, I had been in a bizarre, and bad, accident involving an umbrella stand (unseen) and a concrete walkway. Even my surgeon, after assessing the broken bones and nerve damage, had declared my injuries “horrifying.” At first I thought he was kidding; then I realized he was not.

For a time, I failed to realize that I had entered a new life. I’d passed through the looking glass, and from now on, I’d be looking at things from a completely different perspective.

The guy driving by was just one more reminder of that. How many times had I tooled by this very corner, in my own baseball hat, and never even glanced at people like me, craning their necks for the next Big Blue Bus or trying to decipher the incomprehensible schedule posted on the sign? Why should I have? Until I was forced to, I’d never once taken a bus in California. True, in New York I’d taken buses and subways everywhere, but after my wife and I had moved to Los Angeles 10 years earlier, I’d bought a used car--the first auto I’d ever owned--and I’d become used to driving everywhere.

The physical damage I sustained in the accident (to both arms and my right leg) made driving impossible, just as it made impossible a whole host of other, and even simpler, things. It wasn’t the big stuff, really, that brought me down. I accepted, however grudgingly, the loss of driving privileges, the inability to throw a ball to the dog or sleep on my side (as I had done all my life). What brought me up short, over and over again, were those little unforeseen moments, when inconsequential things suddenly stopped me in my tracks and posed insurmountable obstacles. You have no idea how many things in your life you take for granted until you can’t floss your teeth, wash your hair or get a coffee mug out of the cupboard by yourself.

Once, just to show my wife I could still pitch in around the house, I decided to run a load of laundry. I’d set the dials, wrestled the clothes into the machine, and only then discovered that the detergent, in a jumbo-sized bottle on a high shelf above the machine, was too distant, and too heavy, for me to manage. Despair in a container of Tide.

Even reading, my favorite activity, was difficult for many months. I couldn’t hold a book properly, and I had to resort to watching TV, all the time, at all hours. Did you know, for instance, that “Topper” is still on in reruns? If you stay up late enough, with nothing to do but wait for your painkillers to kick in again, you will discover that everything that has ever been committed to film or videotape is still on the air, on some obscure cable station, in the dead of night. And while we’re on the subject, will someone please explain to me why anyone watches “The O’Reilly Factor”?

Friends and family initially sent me get-well gifts such as funny stuffed animals and helium balloons, but after I’d explained to them that I had not suffered any brain damage in the accident, they got the message and stopped. “So, what would you like?” more than one of them asked, and once I’d gotten to the point where I’d regained some control in my hands, I asked for books. “New, used, I don’t care. Just send me books.”

Some of them got it immediately and gave me just the right sort of thing; my friend Margaret, for instance, checked out a library book for me, a little-known novel about an embittered young English instructor struggling to get tenure. Now that was the ticket--black humor from the groves of academe. I could relate. My friend Carol sent me “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” a literary novel narrated by the maid in the painter Vermeer’s household--another winner that took me out of myself and into another world. But what, I still have to wonder, was my friend Andy thinking when he gave me a copy, signed yet, of Warren Christopher’s memoirs? “I figured politics would take your mind off things,” he said proudly.

And though I thanked him, I had to scratch my head (well, I would have, if I could have) and try to remember an occasion, any occasion, when I had expressed the slightest interest in government or public affairs. I have long considered myself the most solipsistic, apolitical person I know, and unless this was Andy’s subtle way of at once acknowledging and addressing as much, it was a puzzle. The fact that the book was signed, too, meant that I couldn’t ask my wife to take it back to the store and exchange it. It sits, to this day, under the stack of “Sopranos” tapes where I stashed it after he left.

When I was finally able to get out a bit on my own--taking the bus to my physical therapy sessions, for instance, and assorted medical appointments--I started to understand what all those disability activists were going on about. The office building where I had to go for my MRIs had two immense glass doors that I would have had trouble opening even in my better days. The handicapped ramps were often hard to find, and wearyingly circuitous. The bus drivers roared away from the stops before you’d managed to safely take your seat.

But when it came to the people on the street, or on the bus, I’ve got to say Angelenos came through with flying colors. When you drive around, you commune with your David Sedaris tapes; when you take the bus, or hobble around, you meet people, whether you want to or not. They hold open doors for you, they patiently explain bus routes, they share a lot of their own stories with you. I’ve got to say, some of the nicest people I’ve met, with some of the most affecting tales, were folks on the bus bench. The elderly woman with terrible arthritis who told me her dream was to get a fridge with a bigger freezer unit so she could keep more food in the house (“Meals on Wheels are wonderful, but they’re not every day”). Or the guy who, like me, had suffered a weird accident (“All I did was lean back in my chair, just lean back, and then the whole thing went over, and I fractured my tailbone in two places”). Or the woman who retrieved my X-rays for me (they’d spilled out of the envelope as I crept down the bus aisle) and then volunteered to get off at my stop and help me go to my appointment (“I’ve got a transfer; I can always get back on the bus at the next corner”).

It’s no fun being an invalid. For someone who was reasonably healthy and intact all his life, it’s both mortifying and depressing, and though I felt like I recognized that guy in the baseball cap and the green Beemer driving past me, I also knew I could never be that guy again. Once you’ve been forced to step outside of your own life and into another, I don’t think you’re ever able to go back again. These days I know--not just intellectually, but in my very bones--that something as simple as a misstep over an unseen umbrella stand can change everything. I shuffle along with my eyes on the pavement. I don’t linger to look at the new bikes in the Supergo window. I take a dozen tablets every day, from calcium supplements to analgesics. My life has slowed down considerably in virtually every way.

But it hasn’t stopped. In the months since my accident, I’ve learned to keep the laundry detergent on top of the dryer within easy reach. I can flip a ball to the dog underhand. I’ve even started, with great trepidation and even greater relief, to drive again.

Sometimes my route takes me past that bus bench on Wilshire, where I’d sit with my X-rays under my arm and a coin purse clutched in my hand, and I feel as if I’m a better man now than I used to be. It’s not because I can drive again but because for a while, when I had to learn to navigate by a whole different set of stars, I couldn’t.

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Robert Masello is the visiting lecturer in journalism at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of “Writer Tells All” and 13 other books.